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In December, 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, President Bush asked Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who was then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to draft a legislative proposal for winning the minds of young people around the Muslim world. The following month, Biden went to Kabul, where he toured a new school—one that was bitterly cold, with plastic sheeting over the windows and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, "You cannot leave. You cannot leave."
"I promise I'll come back," Biden told her.
"You cannot leave," the girl insisted. "They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay."
As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, "Don't fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now."
Biden described the encounter as "a catalytic event for me." Its lesson was one that he had already begun to absorb in the Balkans, where he had travelled extensively during the nineteen-nineties. There is a worldwide struggle, he explained, between the values of liberal democracy and the destructive ideologies that fester with dictatorship, misery, and humiliation; in this struggle, America needs to expand the conditions for democracy in the most concrete ways, with serious commitments of energy and resources, or risk greater instability. After September 11th, this insight became a matter of urgent national security. When Biden returned from Kabul, he followed up on the President's request and wrote a proposal to build, staff, and supply a thousand schools in Afghanistan, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars each. By thinking small, Biden believed, he had a better chance of success: "You could shove twenty million dollars anywhere in a two-trillion budget, and this was something specific." The schools would employ teachers, many of them women, who had been jobless and desperate under the Taliban, and they would teach a modern curriculum to children who, if they had any schooling at all, knew only the Islamist education of the madrassa. "It was something concrete we could show the Afghanis we're doing," Biden said. "It was something other than the butt of a gun."
The idea went nowhere. Biden's Democratic colleagues didn't get behind it, and very soon the Administration moved on. The most important front in the worldwide struggle largely dropped from Washington's view, and the Senator stopped receiving invitations to the White House.
By the fall of 2002, the Bush Administration had begun mobilizing for the invasion of Iraq. Biden's view was that Saddam Hussein, who had violated every international agreement he had signed but was not an immediate threat, would have to be confronted sooner or later. But he also worried that a unilateral war with Iraq would distract America from the tasks it had only just begun—stabilizing Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda—and seriously damage the alliances necessary to eliminate terrorism and other problems that freely cross borders: weapons proliferation, disease, environmental damage, ethnic conflict, impoverishment. "The burden was on Saddam," Biden said. "But I would not have prematurely forced the world's hand on whether or not to go to war, because I'd get the wrong answer."
Instead, he tried to slow the Administration's momentum without shifting the burden from Saddam. It was in his party's power to do so—Democrats still held the majority in the Senate (though they were about to lose it, in part because the public didn't trust them on the issue of national security). Together with Senator Richard Lugar, of Indiana, the committee's ranking Republican, Biden drafted an alternative to the Administration's Iraq resolution that would have placed various restraints on the President, making it harder for him to wage war unilaterally and forcing him to bolster his case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Lugar had assembled a surprisingly large number of Republicans—twenty-five or so out of the forty-nine—who were uneasy with the Administration's bellicose stance. In order to deliver their votes, Lugar needed Biden to line up at least forty Democrats; and Biden was sure of only thirty-eight.
As Biden recalled, on September 30th Lugar, who was in touch with the White House, called him. "Joe, I fear in the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, the President's going to cut a deal with Gephardt," he said.
Biden was stunned. "Gephardt? Gephardt's not going to do this."
"Joe, I'm telling you. They're working two sides here. They're working us, keeping us occupied, but they're working just as hard meeting with him. Whoever they reach an agreement with first, they're going to go with."
If Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic minority leader, came out for the Administration's resolution, it would be politically almost impossible for any Republican to support the Biden-Lugar alternative. Biden had to gather the Democratic holdouts immediately and persuade them to stand behind his resolution so that he and Lugar could move it onto the Senate floor the next day.
That evening, Biden met with half a dozen leading Democrats who were opposed to any war resolution at all. "They said, 'It's not right, you're not principled, asking us to do this,' " Biden recalled. "I said, 'Wait, wait, wait. Please spare me the lecture. I thought our job was to do as much as we could to prevent this President from going off to war half-cocked. Does anybody in here believe that we're going to get any resolution remotely approaching the constraints this resolution has?' " Biden warned his colleagues, "Guess what? Your principle is going to kill a lot of Americans." But the antiwar Democrats were intractable. At the end of the meeting, Senator Paul Wellstone, of Minnesota, and Senator Barbara Boxer, of California, left the room arm in arm, chuckling.
Two days later, with no alternative making its way through the Senate, Gephardt appeared at Bush's side in the Rose Garden and announced his support for the Administration's war resolution. Nine days later, both houses of Congress approved it, and the President had all the authority he needed to invade Iraq.
Biden told me these stories in answer to a simple question: Why hasn't the Democratic Party played a serious role in shaping the national debate about foreign policy since September 11th? Biden has been one of the few Democrats to try. His views defy Party orthodoxy. He has criticized the Administration relentlessly, not for doing too much in the war on terrorism but for doing too little, and in the wrong way—for failing to understand that this war has to be waged on many fronts, the most important of which is ideological. The fate of the schoolgirl in Kabul is as critical to ultimate victory as the next generation of unmanned aircraft.
Biden's own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.
The Democratic Party hasn't always been stymied by foreign policy. A half century ago, the Party's ideas were ascendant, transforming America's international role in the postwar years as dramatically as President Bush has since September 11th. In 1945, the United States had more relative power and prestige than it has today. Instead of seizing the occasion to strip the country of constraints and dominate the world, the ruling Democrats, most of whom were New Dealers, realized that the global fight against Communism required partners. The postwar Democratic leadership under President Truman helped bring into being institutions and alliances—the United Nations, nato, the World Bank—through which the country's goals could be met. These goals were as much economic and political as military. The thinking behind Truman's speech in March, 1947, asking Congress for economic as well as military aid to Greece and Turkey against Communist insurgents, and the speech by his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, a few months later, calling for a massive reconstruction package for a devastated Europe was the same: containing and ultimately defeating totalitarianism required an investment in countries where conditions made Communism a threat. It also required the participation of Americans at every level of society. Anti-Communist liberals in the labor movement and the Democratic Party funded social-democratic parties in Western Europe as alternatives to Communism; politicians and intellectuals organized themselves in associations like Americans for Democratic Action and around magazines like Encounter to fight the war of ideas. These liberals understood that the new war could not afford to be rigidly doctrinaire; it required a practical effort to understand realities in Europe and elsewhere, in order to know what would be necessary to prevent Communism from winning over individuals and countries. It had to be wise as well as tough. Above all, it needed the help of other democracies—there had to be alliances, reciprocity. This is what was meant by liberal internationalism.
Vietnam, of course, badly divided Democrats, turning some into Republicans and others into pacifists. And here is a remarkable fact: since the nineteen-sixties, the Democratic Party has had no foreign policy. Its leaders have continued to speak the language of liberal internationalism, but after Vietnam most Democrats haven't wanted to back up the talk with power. They continued to put their faith in institutions like the United Nations (where Saddam's Iraq was a member in good standing and Libya chaired the human-rights commission) long after it was apparent that these institutions needed repair. By the nineteen-nineties, liberal internationalism had become an atrophied muscle, with little fibre or sinew left. The Clinton Administration allowed a genocidal war to bleed away in the Balkans for two and a half years before acting to end it. In the dot-com decade, a lot of Democrats simply lost interest in the rest of the world. Clinton's foreign policy was globalization: encouraging the economic interconnectedness of the world, without developing a mechanism to prevent threats and conflicts from becoming catastrophes without borders.
The exception was Kosovo. nato's intervention in the Balkans, in the spring of 1999, was one of the successes of the Clinton years, stopping the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, preventing the Balkan wars from spreading into Macedonia and Albania, and ultimately making possible Slobodan Milosevic's removal from power and his current trial at The Hague. However flawed aspects of the military strategy were—three months of aerial bombing with no contingency for ground troops—the Kosovo war was a singular example of American power creating international coöperation on behalf of stability and human rights.
But Kosovo never became the Clinton Doctrine. Clinton himself seemed ambivalent about the war, and obstacles thrown up by a Republican Congress kept nato's first war from becoming the foundation of post-Cold War American foreign policy.
The humanitarian interventions of the nineties—Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo—and the glaring failure in Rwanda made a minority of Democrats willing, sometimes even eager, advocates of the use of American power for liberal ends abroad. But the Party's base remains instinctively uncomfortable with activism and armed force. In Biden's words, most Democrats still "worship at the shrine of multilateral institutions, and without absolute consensus there's no action."
While the Democrats held the White House, the ideological children of Ronald Reagan were thinking hard about America's place in the world after the Cold War. At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world—to discourage rivals, to pursue interests, to spread values, with or without partners. Coalitions might be temporary; force might be used unilaterally and preventively, not just as a matter of convenience but as a point of doctrine. Their view admitted no daylight between American interests and democratic ideals: our motives are good, therefore our unleashed power will have good effects. These thinkers were also skilled publicists, and they defined the difference between the two parties as the difference between strength and weakness.
Within hours of the September 11th attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were suggesting that Iraq—the unflagging obsession of the conservatives throughout the nineties—should receive the brunt of American wrath. Whether or not this was a sound analysis of the threat, the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action. The Iraq war was nothing if not a war of ideas—an elective war that came of arguments and theories about America and the world. It was exactly on this level that Democrats were ill-prepared to join the contest.
But from the start, and at its core, the Administration's idea of the war on terrorism has been flawed. This flaw, which is often discussed as a matter of tone, is so substantive that the Administration constantly undermines even its own best efforts.
President Bush has given a number of speeches in support of global democracy, and they have been some of his finest. Nine days after the attacks in New York and Washington, he went before Congress and described the war on terrorism as a continuation of the twentieth-century conflict between freedom and totalitarianism. More recently, in the wake of the Iraq war, he has championed the spread of democracy through the world's meanest precincts. "Iraqi democracy will succeed," the President said in November, "and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation."
The soaring language recalls that of Bush's hero Ronald Reagan. It gives the new conservative foreign policy its poetry. The first President Bush never made such proclamations about Iraq, or about any other benighted country, for he belonged to the Nixon-Kissinger wing of the Republican Party—"realists" who believe in a balance of power and distrust idealistic talk of "global democratic revolution." But there is a problem with the language of Bush the son: his actions rarely measure up to his rhetoric. A case in point was the President's November speech at the National Endowment for Democracy's twentieth-anniversary celebrations. After the fall of Baghdad, an institute funded by the endowment sent a team to Iraq to organize a series of focus groups so that Iraqis could talk about their collective future. The institute wanted to follow up with workshops that would train Iraqis in forming moderate civic groups and political parties, but its money soon ran out. Despite repeated requests, the funding wasn't replenished until last month.
It happens often enough to form a pattern: the President talks of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan at the Virginia Military Institute in April, 2002, and then he fails to include any dollars for Afghanistan in his 2004 budget proposal; the President gives a landmark speech at the American Enterprise Institute in February, 2003, proposing a democratic Iraq as a model for the transformation of the entire Middle East, and within two months the Pentagon's minimalist planning for postwar Iraq has that country in chaos, its state institutions gutted, its people demoralized; the State Department sets out to improve public diplomacy in the Islamic world, then puts the campaign in the hands of Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenue executive, who produces a slick video about Muslims in the United States that is widely ridiculed; the Administration vows to get tough on Saudi sources that finance terrorism and the spread of extremist ideology, then suppresses the section of a congressional report on September 11th having to do with Saudi Arabia; after the Iraq war the President vows to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only to stand aside a few months later.
In Iraq, at least, the Administration, having accepted that its initial democracy efforts were wholly inadequate, has begun to make serious commitments. In a frantic rush to educate voters and strengthen institutions before its June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty, it is about to flood the country's civic desert with almost half a billion dollars, including twelve and a half million for building political parties.
Elsewhere, the Administration remains averse to such commitments. The President and his chief advisers have long expressed disdain for the "soft" uses of American power. In the 2000 campaign, Bush ran against the nation-building efforts of the Clinton Administration. In an article in Foreign Affairs in 2000, Condoleezza Rice called for an end to such missions, asserting that the United States Army "is not a civilian police force." "Peacekeeping" is a dirty word at the Rumsfeld Pentagon: its peacekeeping division was renamed the Office of Stability Operations, and its importance was downgraded, even after war created the need for such an operation in Afghanistan and then again, on an even larger scale, in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the peacekeepers never ventured beyond Kabul and Kunduz, and the country's admirable new constitution is jeopardized by warlords and the resurgent Taliban.
The Bush Administration has always been more interested in military power than in any of the other tools that are available to advance its goals. The hostility to nation-building, the attitude that treaties and international institutions are disposable nuisances, the treatment of alliances as matters of convenience—all these reflect a belief that the country will be safer, and the world ultimately better off, if America is free to use its awesome strength.
The President speaks idealistically of spreading democracy around the world. "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time," he said in November. "It is the calling of our country." Since Bush took office, favorable views of America have plunged globally—especially in the Muslim world. The Pew Research Center found that in Turkey, our secular Muslim nato ally, favorable opinion of the United States fell from fifty-two per cent three years ago to fifteen per cent last spring. For an Administration rhetorically devoted to the calling of freedom, this trend ought to cause great concern. But Bush expresses only bewilderment, and his hard-line advisers scoff that we can't make decisions about American security based on opinion polls in foreign countries. Since September 11th, the President and his spokesmen have regarded the crisis as a test of personal will. Do you pass or not? So they've waged the war by self-assertion, guided by the assumption that American might always equates with freedom. But when promoting democracy seems in practice to mean bullying other people into doing what you want, the poetry is lost on the world, and not even the overthrow of tyrants is taken as proof of America's sincerity.
In treating the war on terrorism as a mere military struggle, the Administration's mistake begins with the name itself. "Terrorism" is a method; the terror used by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is not the enemy in this war. The enemy is an ideology—in the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's phrase, "Islamist totalitarianism"—that reaches from Karachi to London, from Riyadh to Brooklyn, and that uses terror to advance its ends. The Administration's failure to grasp the political nature of the war has led to many crucial mistakes, most notably the Pentagon's attitude that postwar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq would essentially take care of themselves, that we could have democracy on the cheap: once the dictators and terrorists were rooted out, the logic went, freedom would spontaneously grow in their place. As Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, recently told the Times, "There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee." Instead, in both countries the real struggle has just begun, and it will last a generation or more, with little international help in sight and victory not at all assured.
"They don't get it, because they don't believe this is an ideology," Ivo H. Daalder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, said of the Administration. "They believe that this is a state-based threat—that if you get rid of evil people, who are in finite supply, you will have resolved the problem. And the proof of the pudding is a very simple statement that the President keeps repeating: 'It's better to kill them there than to have them kill us here.' Which assumes there are a finite number."
Remarkably, this narrow approach has met with no systematic criticism from the Democratic Party. Democratic leaders attack the Administration for its unilateralism, but, with a few exceptions, they have been unprepared to reckon with the nature and scale of the conflict; and this has to do with the Party's own intellectual shortcomings. Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way—not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of "multiculturalism") that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples. Like the Bush Administration, the Democrats have failed to grasp the political dimensions of the struggle. They, too, have cast it narrowly, as a matter of security (preferring the notion of police action to that of war). They've pushed the Administration only for greater effort on the margins, such as upgrading communications equipment for firemen and federalizing airport security. And the Iraq war let Democrats off the hook, allowing them to say what they wouldn't do rather than what they would do.
Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party's own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn't have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren't enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq's unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.
Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalism—a struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coöperation. Daalder said, "The fundamental challenge—just as the fundamental challenge in '46 and '47 and '48 in France and Italy was to provide Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to Communism, to defeat it politically—is to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they have only despair." He pointed out that America now spends forty times more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid goes to Israel and Egypt. "This is like the new Cold War, and we've got to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest," he said.
As it happens, an increasing number of Democrats are pursuing this theme. Wesley Clark talks about a "new Atlantic Charter" that would make nato the first resort of American military power, starting in Iraq. "Uncertainties, nations looking for leadership, a multidimensional challenge on a global scale—all of that is similar" to the early Cold War, he told me. "As is the indefinite duration of the challenge." Clark argued that nato's war in Kosovo, which he conducted as Supreme Allied Commander, could become the basis for a new foreign policy. "You could call it efficient multilateralism—the recognition that if you link diplomacy, law, and force, you can achieve decisive results without using decisive force."
Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, has for some time advocated the extension of nato forces in Kabul to the whole of Afghanistan, and he recently called for expanding public diplomacy in the Muslim world and imposing international sanctions against countries and institutions that fund terrorism, a money flow that the Bush Administration has had little success in shutting off. In a recent debate, Kerry said, "Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven't embraced, because otherwise we're inviting a clash of civilizations." Senator John Edwards, of North Carolina, proposes publishing an annual list of dissidents imprisoned around the world, and forming an organization of Western democracies and Arab countries moving toward liberalization which would be modelled on efforts to reform the former Eastern Bloc. Invoking Truman and Marshall, Senator Biden talks about a Prevention Doctrine: long-term engagement in troubled regions to head off threats before they lead to war—for example, by funding programs to destroy nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. (The Bush Administration's remarkably sluggish approach to securing "loose nukes" is one consequence of a policy aimed narrowly at terrorists and their state sponsors, like cards in a deck.) All these Democrats advocate a domestic policy that would acknowledge the reality of wartime, including alternative energy, tax fairness, and greater spending on security. But Biden reminded me, "It took the Democratic Party after World War II six years to get that figured out."
If you're paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America's world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq's success than they did in opposing the Administration's reconstruction package. A broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for Democrats out of power, it's all the harder to persuade a skeptical public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared with "axis of evil," "efficient multilateralism" is a pallid phrase. Millions won't rally behind the banner of the Prevention Doctrine. Spending twenty million dollars on schools in Afghanistan is a harder sell than spending four hundred billion on defense; fear is more compelling than foresight. Biden admitted, "This is a place where the President's bragging to me, 'Mr. Chairman, I don't do nuance'—where he has an advantage."
I asked Thomas Carothers, an expert on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name one project that might help change the political culture of the Arab world. He mentioned a nonprofit group, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that is working to spread the idea among Arab business associations that transparency and the rule of law will attract foreign investment. Carothers has studied democracy-building programs for two decades, and he compared them to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. His experience has left him wary of the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days. Compared with the revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe, he said, "this is a made-in-Washington democratic transformation. It's very hard to do it when there are no democratic trends in the area." Success can come only over a period of years, mainly by finding local groups and helping them do what they already want to do. The United States achieved this in Serbia during the late nineties—funding pro-democracy student groups that helped in the overthrow of the Milosevic dictatorship. It's possible for something of the kind to occur in Muslim countries. Government agencies and nonprofit groups could fund new organizations like the Iranian dissident Ladan Boroumand's democracy foundation, whose Web site will post a library of liberal ideas for young people in Iran to read behind the privacy of their computer screens. But all this will take more time and commitment than American Administrations, including the present one, have been interested in showing.
"It's long-term, it's not flashy, it's not expensive," Carothers said. "All of our programs now are showy, expensive, big-impact. And maybe we need to do that, but we also need to do things for fifteen to twenty years down the line." When we spoke, he had just returned from the former Soviet republics, which he described as "a democratic wasteland." A decade ago, reform in those countries seemed as urgent as it now seems in the Middle East; but America's attention moved on, and the Administration has made its peace with the region's post-Soviet strongmen. The President, Carothers said, has failed to make the struggle to liberalize the Muslim world the concern of ordinary Americans—to take one small example, by creating high-school exchange programs. "He's unable to connect it to us in any way other than fear," Carothers said. "And I don't think that's going to do it."
A political struggle on the part of a democracy requires the involvement of the public, not as frightened spectators but as active participants. In recent decades, our leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—have asked very little of us as citizens, to the point where the word itself sounds quaint. The dominant theme of American politics since the nineteen-sixties has been freedom: cultural freedoms under Democrats, economic freedoms under Republicans. The pursuit of happiness became a private affair, and the sense of civic responsibility withered among liberals and conservatives alike. The political choice was between two versions of hedonism.
In the days that followed the September 11th attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a national self-mobilization. The long lines of would-be blood donors, the volunteers converging on lower Manhattan from around the country, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: the response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, "I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world, people do something for an ideal. I've been at no point in my life when I could say something I've done has affected mankind." A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.
It has been much remarked that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. Nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. "How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we're marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?" Biden said. The tax cuts haven't just left the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity has been terrible for morale. But the President's failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice followed directly on the governing spirit of the modern Republican Party. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could stand up and ask what Americans can do for their country. We haven't been asked to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. The war's burdens are borne solely by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.
Perhaps this was a shrewd political intuition on Bush's part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11th, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It's fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours is likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we can export liberal democratic values when our own version shows so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we can expect to muster for Afghanis and Iraqis when we're asked to feel so little for one another.
"Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion?" Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked in "The Vital Center," his 1949 book about totalitarianism and America's anxious postwar mood. "Why is freedom not a fighting faith?" The only hope (Schlesinger turned to Walt Whitman for the words—who else?) lay in "the exercise of Democracy." The process of struggling for freedom, accepting conflict, tolerating uncertainty, joining community—this would allow democracy to survive and not die. What if we now find ourselves, at this stage of thickening maturity, in the middle of a new crisis that requires us to act like citizens of a democracy? It's impossible to know how the public would respond to a political party that spoke about these things—because, so far, no party has. ♦


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This season was supposed to be about the Carolina Panthers taking the next step.
Instead, they've gone backward, and that's gone beyond quarterback Cam Newton and all the question marks that suddenly surround him.
The Panthers were flirting with the fork last week. After getting their guts ripped out in a one-point loss to the Chicago Bears on Sunday, we're ready to call this thing.
What went wrong
In truth, Newton's statistics aren't far off from where he was last season at this time. This is an issue of expectations, and the assumption that Newton would only get better with a full offseason under his belt.
That hasn't happened, and his body language and postgame press conferences have made him a target for media that smells blood. Case in point: On Sunday, Fox commentators buried Newton for not running over to thank Louis Murphy after the wide receiver recovered Newton's fumble in the end zone for a touchdown.
The commentators -- Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston and Tony Siragusa -- weren't exactly wrong. But it still showed the scrutiny this guy faces on a weekly basis.
The Panthers aren't 1-6 solely because of Newton. Pro Bowl center Ryan Kalil went to injured reserve three weeks ago with a foot injury. Linebacker Jon Beason soon joined him. Running back D'Angelo Williams barely plays, openly discusses his potential to be traded and represents the worst contract the team ever handed out.
Speaking of which, a series of bad decisions cost Marty Hurney his gig as general manager. This is a team without a rudder right now.
What went right
On balance, the Panthers' defense has improved, particularly since the Week 6 bye. They're allowing less points and total yardage. They're getting better pressure on the quarterback, and they're the second-least penalized unit in the NFL. They hit on their first-round draft pick in Luke Kuechly, who has played well since taking his rightful spot at middle linebacker.
The pass rush made life hell for Matt Ryan in Week 4, then sacked Jay Cutler six times in the first half alone Sunday.
This unit isn't far from being a strong point.
What still matters
Newton unquestionably remains the future of this franchise, and the season can be salvaged in a big-picture sense if the Panthers can get their quarterback to start feeling better about himself and the operation. Moving away from the zone-read attack was a good start.
This also is a team that shouldn't forget how close it was to being 5-2. With some smarter play and a dash of luck, the Panthers would have road wins at Atlanta and Chicago. This is your classic "Good Bad Team." Coach Ron Rivera has his critics -- and feel free to question his strategy -- but the Panthers play hard.
What changes are coming?
NFL Replay
will re-air the Chicago Bears' 23-22 win over the Carolina Panthers in Week 8 on Wednesday, Oct. 31
at 9 p.m. ET.
» NFL Network schedule
A bad record, combined with a new GM, usually means bad things for the head coach. Rivera needs his Panthers to finish strong, and even that might not be enough to keep him gainfully employed.
Panthers owner Jerry Richardson is 76, so don't expect a rebuilding process rooted in patience. The backfield needs a makeover, and Newton could use some more playmakers around wide receiver Steve Smith, who's not getting any younger.
The Panthers can go in one of two very different directions. Handle with care.
Follow Dan Hanzus on Twitter @danhanzus.

subset: commoncrawl


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Originally published Monday, November 26, 2012 at 4:35 AM
Bangladeshis mourn garment-fire dead, plan protest
Bangladesh held a day of mourning Tuesday for the 112 people killed in a weekend fire at a garment factory, and labor groups planned more protests to demand better worker safety in an industry notorious for operating in firetraps.
Associated Press
Bangladesh held a day of mourning Tuesday for the 112 people killed in a weekend fire at a garment factory, and labor groups planned more protests to demand better worker safety in an industry notorious for operating in firetraps.
The national flag flew at half-staff in government buildings. The country's factories were closed as a mark of respect, and prayers for the dead were held in places of worship across the Muslim-majority South Asian nation.
Relatives and colleagues gathered near the site of Saturday's blaze, many wearing black badges as a sign of mourning.
"I've lost my son and the only member to earn for the family," said Nilufar Khatoon, the mother of a worker who died. "What shall I do now?"
Some labor organizations planned rallies later Tuesday. About 15,000 workers protested Monday blocks away from the gutted factory, blocking traffic on a major highway in a suburb of Dhaka, the capital.
In a statement issued Tuesday the European Union deplored the loss of lives in the fire and urged the Bangladesh government to improve working conditions in garment factories.
"The European Union has always been very clear about the need to improve working standards and safety in this sector," said the statement. European market is a major export destination of Bangladesh textiles.
The fire was the deadliest of many to hit garment factories in Bangladesh in recent years. The industry has grown from nothing to become the country's dominant exporter in little more than three decades, but factories often ignore safety in the rush to supply major retailers in the U.S. and Europe. More than 300 people have died over the past six years in Bangladesh garment-factory fires.
Wal-Mart said Monday that the factory, owned by Tazreen Fashions Ltd., had been making clothes for the U.S. retail giant without its knowledge. Tazreen was given a "high risk" safety rating after a May 2011 audit conducted by an "ethical sourcing" assessor for Wal-Mart, according to a document posted on the website of Tazreen's parent company, the Tuba Group.
Wal-Mart said the factory was no longer authorized to produce merchandise for Wal-Mart but that a supplier subcontracted work to it "in direct violation of our policies." The retailer said it stopped doing business with the supplier Monday.
"The fact that this occurred is extremely troubling to us, and we will continue to work across the apparel industry to improve fire safety education and training in Bangladesh," Wal-Mart said in a statement.
Survivors of the weekend fire said an exit door was locked, fire extinguishers didn't work and apparently were there just to impress inspectors, and that when the fire alarm went off, bosses told workers to return to their sewing machines. Victims were trapped or jumped to their deaths from the eight-story building, which had no emergency exits.
Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, fire department operations director, said investigators suspect a short circuit caused the fire. But he added that if the building had had even one emergency exit, "the casualties would have been much lower."
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, which has offered $1,250 to each of the families of the dead, urged investigators not to rule out sabotage.
"Local and international conspirators are trying to destroy our garment industry," association President Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin said. He provided no details.
Investigator Mainuddin Sarkar said the government is "looking into all possibilities, including sabotage."
Police said Tuesday they were questioning a woman accused of trying to set fire to another factory in the area on Sunday. Local police chief Habibur Rahman said police also arrested a man who the woman says paid her to set the fire, and that police were investigating whether the two are linked at all to the Tazreen fire.
Bangladesh has some 4,000 garment factories. The country earns about $20 billion a year from exports of garments, mainly to the U.S. and Europe.
Associated Press writer Al Emrun Garjan contributed to this report.


text:
Part 2 of a six-part series.
Vancouver in early 1942 was poised on the knife edge of modernity, a crisis moment of unprecedented opportunity and danger from which the future character of the city emerged.
Opportunity abounded for Robert Hughes. Unlike many rootless youths who washed up in Vancouver after the Depression, he came from an intact, working-class family that had left Saskatchewan for the beckoning West Coast.
After leaving school at 15, Hughes — Bob to his friends — landed an apprenticeship in wire rope and soon went to work building planes for Boeing near the Vancouver International Airport on Sea Island. He seemed destined to follow his British-born tradesman father into a respectable line of work.
Yet the city at this time also exemplified what has been called the noir era — a time of gritty glamour that was "a netherworld of gangsters, hustlers, junkies, femmes fatales, drifters, political fixers, private eyes, city officials on the take, and charismatic cult leaders as its stock characters," according to the authors of Vancouver Noir, a recently published book focusing on the gritty underside of the period.
This underworld threatened the city's respectable residents, offering a very different path than they wanted for their children.
Well before the events of January 1942, Hughes was already signalling that he would choose the wrong path.
At age 18 he was caught stealing a clock, camera and flashlight, resulting in a three-month jail sentence. Before it was up he had enlisted in the Army, which found him to be both underage and underweight. At 6' 1/2" and 142 pounds, he had a poor physique — though the Army still felt he could be turned into a soldier.
Once enlisted, on one arm he got a tattoo listing his Army registration number. On the other he commissioned a heart and scroll tattoo reading Bob & Jackie — a reference to his fiancée.
Despite having volunteered, his Army record shows Hughes was a reluctant soldier.
From the time he did basic training in Vernon, he frequently deserted for short periods and then began feigning illnesses that got him into the Army hospital.
He went absent without leave (AWOL) five times in 12 months, the last time for nine days before Christmas 1941. That time, upon returning to military custody on Dec. 28, he was sentenced to 6 days' detention and forfeited $22.10 in pay. But he defied the order and left barracks to be with his friends.
December 1941 was also when, despite his marriage plans with Jackie Doidge, a pretty Kitsilano girl, Hughes met and soon was living with Rosella Gorovenko, a streetwise prostitute who talked like a movie gangster's moll.
Gorovenko, aged 16 and a mother, had been doing business out of the fancy Hotel Georgia. For some reason — possibly she had contracted venereal disease — this was no longer an option and she had moved down-market to the Balmoral Hotel on Hastings.
Hughes moved into her room not long after. Soon Gorovenko slipped down another rung, relocating with Hughes to the third-rate Piccadilly Hotel at Seymour and Pender, also home base for one of the city's most vicious criminal gangs — with which she allegedly had ties.
The Piccadilly was a classic noir setting — a dive where not one of the women's toilets worked on the floors upstairs and owners never bothered sweeping the cigarette-butt-carpeted floor of the hotel's dank, stinking beer parlour.
Nineteen city beer parlours were red-flagged as direct threats to the Canadian war effort because of prostitution and venereal disease.
It was such a problem by April 1942 that B.C. officials ordered walls to be built in beer parlours to separate the sexes and discourage prostitution — a development that had the effect of driving sex-trade workers into the street.
Sexually transmitted disease was so prevalent that a Vancouver child molester attempted to defend preying upon juvenile delinquent boys because he feared catching VD from women.
As manpower poured into the burgeoning city from the Interior, the Prairies and the East, attracted by the highest per capita income of any Canadian province, the resulting housing crisis had many residents living in appalling conditions.
Above one fashionable shop on Hastings, housing crusaders exposed a filthy warren of 50 sleeping rooms served by just two toilets.
Wealthy residents of Shaughnessy, many of whom kept their children safe from city vice by sending them to Vancouver Island boarding schools, fought a futile last-ditch battle to stop mansions from being cut up into boarding houses.
Historian Margaret Ormsby saw 1942 as a watershed year between formative and modern B.C. — the moment the province's hinterland rose up and an old political order was shaken apart.
The streets around the Piccadilly were populated by the kind of down-and-out men who in the 1930s had risen up against North American materialism, and then were crushed by it.
Downtown Vancouver was a bare-knuckle boom town where taxi drivers doubled as bootleggers, homosexuals could expect to be charged with buggery, and stealing a suit from The Bay was worth two years' hard labour.
As tens of thousands of workers were hired, streetcars ran full to capacity and jam-packed ferries crossed Burrard Inlet bringing workers to the shipyards.
Bosses pushed for, and in March 1942 received, the ability to run factories around the clock.
The city's strategic location had long been recognized for its geopolitical significance. Now that was magnified.
Construction of the Alaska Highway — North America's biggest project since the Panama Canal — was launched in northern B.C. in the spring of 1942 to create a supply line for American airbases.
Men and equipment streamed through Vancouver, which saw more industrial development than any other Canadian city.
Vancouver had long been a hotbed of radicalism and intrigue. Now the stakes grew.
A downtown Communist bookstore was shut down and its inventory seized under federal regulations. Stalin's spies secretly got word back to Moscow revealing how American and White Russian agents plotted to dynamite a Soviet ship that was on the Vancouver waterfront.
On Jan. 14, 1942, rising anti-Japanese rhetoric finally turned into action when federal cabinet bowed to B.C. pressure by ruling that all male "enemy aliens" would have to leave the coast for work camps.
The news was so troubling that even decades later, some thought of this as the moment the clock stopped, not to be restarted for four years.
Canada's Pacific coast at this moment remained badly shaken by the Japanese military's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
People were obsessed with two questions.
Could it happen here? And could B.C.'s 22,500 ethnic Japanese residents be trusted?
An official delegation of determined white men had gone to Ottawa to make the case for serious measures.
"The B.C. delegates spoke of the Japanese-Canadians in a way that the Nazis would have spoken of Jewish Germans," Maurice Pope, a top Canadian general, wrote many years later of the successful lobbying effort. "Their rage was a sight to see."
Another observer felt "the physical presence of evil" as the angry west coasters made their case.
Meanwhile, an intense debate was playing out on the pages of Vancouver newspapers.
According to one editorial, B.C. had dealt "very patiently" with ethnic Japanese for four decades since the time that Ottawa had allowed immigration from Japan for British Imperial strategic reasons, tolerating their presence and carrying "the Japanese burden" for all of Canada.
On Jan. 8, the Sun's lead editorial, under the authority of legendary political columnist Bruce Hutchison, bore an unsettling headline: "Will Our Japanese Folk Take A Friendly Hint?" Removing themselves from the coast was a step the Japanese needed to take "for their own protection," the editorial stated.
Some in the mainstream press attacked the anti-Japanese campaign as "simple racial blindness as invidious as that which Hitler has invoked."
Now, with Japanese confectionary stores just like the Uno shop being attacked and robbed, Vancouver alderman Halford Wilson was campaigning to pull business licences of Japanese-run enterprises.
Among the city's Japanese population, a parallel psychology was taking hold as they began to realize what was happening around them.
In a helpless panic, kept largely in the dark, subject to wild rumours, the Japanese-language newspapers now shut down, they relied on their Canadian-born children to explain what was going on.
B.C.'s harshest critics got much of what they wanted in the Jan. 14 federal cabinet decision bowing to B.C. pressure by ruling that all male "enemy aliens" would have to leave the coast for work camps.
It was a crushing blow for many families — even though the worst was still to come. In another six weeks, the wholesale internment order would be issued, affecting all ethnic Japanese in British Columbia. But the precedent of January's step crushed overnight any hope among the Japanese that they would be treated fairly.
The Uno men were all Canadians, but now many of their immigrant neighbours in the Kawamuko enclave were about to lose their breadwinners and see their families torn apart.
Young ethnic Japanese men who thought of themselves as thoroughly Canadian were pleading to be allowed to join the Canadian Army — as had been allowed in the U.S. — but were coldly refused.
While most Vancouver residents were preoccupied with war, Gorovenko and Hughes hatched a plan to enrich themselves. They would get a gun, form a gang, and rob some confectionary stores in Fairview very close to where Hughes' family lived. It was later said they wanted money to rent a car.
By Friday, Jan. 16 they had everything required. It was time to execute the plan.
Meanwhile, Yoshi Uno went through the developing war situation with his family after dinner in the living room behind the corner store at 4th and Alberta, as his sister Yaeko read the evening Sun beside him. Yoshi knew that one way or another, his family faced trouble ahead.
It was 8:20 p.m. when the store bell rang and their mother ran out front. They heard her cry out "They came back!" in Japanese.
"My mother recognized them, so she knew something was wrong," eldest daughter Haruko (Uno) Funamoto recalled in a recent interview with The Vancouver Sun. "It seems that a couple of weeks before this happened, I guess these three fellows came in to case the joint."
A moment later Yoshi was shot twice by the tall white man peering through the curtain into the living room. Despite his wounds, he got up and raced out front, followed by his athletic brother Yuki.
Yoshi got to Hughes first. Hughes' two male accomplices fled the store — Yuki tripped one, who lost a shoe — while the two men struggled. Yoshi tried to push the long-barrelled Colt revolver toward the ceiling. Weakened by the gunshots and standing only 5'5", he was no match for Hughes.
What happened in the next few seconds to cause a third bullet to be discharged from the gun is at the heart of an enduring mystery.
Conflicting eyewitness accounts by two Uno family members portray two very different scenes. Either Yoshi was shot during the close struggle, perhaps unintentionally, or Hughes deliberately fired at him from across the room as he was about to flee the store.
Haruko Funamoto saw only part of the incident. She heard her mother scream and ran to the doorway into the store.
"My brother fell forward because he was hit beside the eye," she recalled. "He hit the floor and the blood spurted out."
To Yuki, it looked like Hughes fought off Uno and made for the door before turning around. His mother thought differently — it seemed to her that the gun went off during the struggle.
The bullet struck Uno in the head, entering his skull and passing horizontally across his brain.
He fell to the floor, the counter scale crashing down with him.
"I looked to see it and then I ran back into the family room to get the telephone to phone the police," said Haruko Funamoto. "They came so fast!"
Oiyo Uno chased the robbers out the door. They got away, but she returned with a prize piece of evidence — the broken shoe that one of Hughes' accomplices lost after being tripped up by Yuki in a panicked dash to the back lane.
Haruko took over the phone from her sister. "She was crying and screaming and jumping up and down and I had to tell her to quiet down," she recalled.
Within several minutes, police flooded into the store and the ambulance Haruko had called was arriving.
By 8:30, as Vancouver tuned in to the popular radio show When Crime Strikes, Yoshi, accompanied by Haruko, was bound for Vancouver General Hospital. There, the emergency doctor noted his pupils were widely dilated and fixed, not reacting to light.
With blood flowing from his ears and nose, his death was inevitable. It came shortly after 9 p.m.
A hunt for killers was now on.
Over at Kitsilano Beach, the men responsible for Yoshi's death were about to make a series of bad decisions.
"It was terrible that evening," recalls Haruko Funamoto, now 94. "I can still remember like it was yesterday."
Seventy-one years later, a re-examination of the evidence has resulted in a surprising conclusion.


text:
We are excited to share that Damon Sicore will be joining Edmodo as Vice President of Engineering. Damon comes to Edmodo from Mozilla where he led a team of over 300 open source software engineers, technical leads, managers and directors.
Damon will lead all aspects of development for Edmodo's platform, helping all learners to reach their full potential. He will help build an engineering culture that celebrates solving hard problems, impacting how students learn, advancing K12 technology, and doing good for the world.
Edmodo has been hard at work, building a powerful network to connect teachers with their students, administrators, and parents. This network surfaces the world's best resources and tools, providing the building blocks of a high quality education for more than 15 million users worldwide.
We look forward to welcoming Damon into the Edmodo family!
1 comment. Leave new
Anyone with experience from Mozilla will make a great contribution!


text:
DOVER –The Dover Chamber was pleased to welcome the McDonough-Grimes Dance Studio with a traditional ribbon cutting ceremony.
John Grimes was born in Dover, and began Irish dancing at age 11, when his sisters came home practicing their first steps. John was intrigued and began dancing at home before being registered for lessons. After watching a clip of "Riverdance - The Show" on the PBS Television program, "Out of Ireland", dancing became his passion which led to John competing at the World Championship level. John was a three-time New England Regional Champion, two-time Eastern Canadian Regional Champion, and a four-time top 10 medalist in the North American Irish Dance Championships earning a 4th place and 5th place, in addition to a recall at the All-Ireland Championships held in Killarney, Ireland. John was also a member of several top level ceili teams which won many regional titles and a 3rd place finish at the North American Championships.
However John's biggest dance achievement was being asked to join, "Riverdance - The Show" in 2009 after auditioning at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. After multiple tours with Riverdance, including a NBC Television Special: "Riverdance On Ice", he is looking forward to the next chapter of his Irish dancing journey: teaching the next generation of dance champions in his home state of New Hampshire.
In 2010, John passed his Irish dance teaching certificate, the T.C.R.G., and he is a certified teacher with The Irish Dancing Commission in Dublin, An Coimisiun Le Rince Gaelecha. This year he opened the McDonough-Grimes Irish Dance School and he cannot wait to get started.
"Riverdance was a great place to broaden dance horizons, from the show's choreography to bouncing ideas off other dancers backstage. It's that type of environment McDonough-Grimes Irish Dance embodies, a spirit of learning and experimentation, seeing what's possible for each dancer. McDonough-Grimes's focus on the competitive experience, coupled with an emphasis on performance, will benefit our dancers tremendously, states Grimes."
For more information on the McDonough-Grimes Irish Dance Studio you can reach John Grimes at www.nhirishdance.com or via telephone at 603-923-5011. A full listing of classes being offered is online. Registration forms are also available online at www.nhirishdance.com.
The Greater Dover Chamber of Commerce is a not-for-profit association of businesses, professionals, individuals, and organizations working together to advance the economic well-being of its members and the community. For details on Dover Chamber membership and other programs or for a schedule of activities, please call the Greater Dover Chamber of Commerce at 603-742-2218, e-mail email@example.com, or visit www.dovernh.org.


text:
At VMworld 2007 today, VMware announced the Open Virtual Machine Tools project—an open source implementation of the VMware Tools software. VMware Tools consists of a set of kernel modules used by guest operating systems running inside of a VMware virtual machine. The modules facilitate interaction between the guest operating system and the host operating system and provide features like dynamic resolution adjustment and drag-and-drop file transfer. The source code, which is tri-licensed under the BSD, GPL, and LGPL licenses, is available for download from Sourceforge.
"With the launch of the Open Virtual Machine Tools project, we are expanding our commitment to open technology initiatives and fostering additional innovation and collaboration," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, vice president of technology development at VMware in a statement.
VMware's decision to open the source code is highly advantageous for the open source software community. Distributions will now be able to provide VMware Tools packages through standard package management systems, which means that users will no longer have to manually compile the kernel modules during installation. The company is in the process of communicating with major vendors and distributions to make sure that VMware Tools packages will be included in standard repositories. VMware also seems interested in working with the open source software community to bring VMware Tools support to other operating systems besides Linux.


text:
Students may live in on-campus housing, provided that they are taking six credit hours per semester. Students must fill out a residence hall application or an on-campus apartment application. There is no deadline for submitting an application, but as the current semester progresses, it is increasingly difficult to get an on-campus apartment for the following semester.
When choosing the right apartment, it's important to consider variables such as travel distance, price, size, amenities and parking. Whether you want to be close to campus or don't mind a drive, the Marquette area offers a variety of housing options. The Dean of Students Office maintains a list of off-campus housing opportunities.


text: Steven Burns enjoyed a fabulous four-year football career at UMass Boston, playing his first two seasons on the club level team in the New England Collegiate Football Conference (NECFC) and his final two years (1988-89) at the varsity level. In 1986 during his freshman year, Burns saw significant playing time as a rookie and worked his way into a starting role as a Defensive Back. He recorded 25 tackles, 13 assists, two interceptions, and two fumble recoveries in his first season of varsity football. Burns' sophomore campaign in 1987 was sensational, as he was often called "Mr. Offense" because of his blazing speed and instinctive ball hawking skills as a starting Cornerback. That year he returned several kickoffs, punt returns, and interceptions for touchdowns which resulted in him being awarded NECFC Player of the Week honors on three occasions. His exploits on the field allowed him to be a part of the 12- 0 New England Collegiate Football Conference Champions team where he earned the squad's Defensive MVP honors after recording 51 solo tackles, 22 assisted tackles, nine interceptions, seven returns for TD's (three kickoff returns, two punt returns and two interception returns) while also recovering one fumble. As a member of the 1988 NCAA varsity team, Burns had an equally impressive year finishing the season with 39 solo tackles, 35 assisted tackles, three interceptions, one sack, and one fumble recovery. In his final season in 1989, Burns finished his career with a terrific campaign in the UMass Boston backfield as the Roxbury native recorded 45 tackles, 11 assists, two interceptions and one fumble recovery. Known mainly for his return skills and speed, Burns returned 23 kicks for 520 yards, including a record setting 104-yard touchdown return against Curry College in 1989. He was named to the 1989 New England Football Conference All-Star team and also enjoyed two semi-professional stints playing for the Hyde Park Cowboys in the Eastern Football League. Following his UMass Boston playing days, Burns participated in several professional tryout sessions including one for the New England Patriots in 1994, the Professional Spring Football League in 1992 which resulted in him being drafted by the New England Blitz, the Albany Firebirds & Tampa Bay Storm of the Arena Football League in 1991 as well as a World League tryout for the Orlando Thunder in 1990.


text:
Said Bob Dylan.
Is the loss of real life the loss of liberty? Are we not free... here?
A theme for the last day of school (which it is for me, the professor):
A self-ordained professor's tongueWe don't have crimson flames tied through our ears anymore. Just white buds stuck in them.
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now
I'm the worst offender. When I walk around outside alone, not only do I have the earbuds in nearly all the time, but I am not even listening to music. I'm listening to podcasts and audiobooks. Do I really understand the cost?


text:
Developing DLNA App for iOS, and Android devices
Budget $3000-5000 USD
Play2TV app using DLNA and UPNP technology
Writing an application for smartphones (iOS,Android) that let users to cast our video directly from their smartphones to Smart TVs without using any middle wear means NOT USING ANY (Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV or etc). The app similar to this has been already designed by ZAPPO TV , Video For DLNA cast, Tubio, iMediashare and etc. for example:
" iTunes:[url removed, login to view] "
1. The app will cast media including Audio and Video from iOS and Android Devices to Smart TV.
-All Audio and Video formats should be covered specially "Live Streaming formats: .M3U8 & .RTMP"
2. The App will have dynamic styles to create different categories for VIDEO AND AUDIO same as Flipps and NetFlix and GEM TV app but with more details: Like Animation, Music, Series and ETC.
-App should be designed for two language Persian & English
3. The Front end and Back end will be coded by using PHP, and there should be some feature to track videos and user ips like statistic feature in Admin Panel
4. The App will cast directly from Smartphones to Smart TV directly without using any middle ware devices like chrome cast, roku and etc
5. The payment method for users should have these three options for admin in admin panel:
1-Free contents using trial and counting time like Zappo tv app which will increase the counting time for watching video on tv for better understanding please check this app:Video Browser for Samsung Smart TV by ZappoTV, Inc. [url removed, login to view]
2- have subscription plan for users cause for some videos we want our users to pay once and to watch bulk of videos per period of time
3- pay per view: for some videos we are allowed only to sell them.
6. The casting and the technology is DLNA UPNP and should cover 7 devices:
[url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view] [url removed, login to view]
If no advance happened in project particularly in first step and if developer got failed in first step as both sides agreed all of the payment should be refunded to Employer.
Developers agreed to sign NDA to not share any details or information of this app and process to anyone else.
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text:
Talk to Your Heart's Content — New Study Reveals Cell Phones Can't Harm You
For years, mankind has worried about the effects of constant cell phone. It turns out, though, the only thing that cell phones have inflicted on us is stress from constantly worrying about it.
One of the most serious concerns was that the non-ionizing radiation that cell phones can release could cause brain tumors and even cancer. However, the UK's independent Health Protection Agency (HPA) released the results of a scientific study that shows that isn't the case.
The agency said the study found "no convincing evidence that radiofrequency field exposure below internationally agreed guideline levels…causes health effects in adults or children."
Not only did the HPA find no evidence of a connection between cell phones and cancer, but the results produced similar results for other maladies and disorders, such as "cardiovascular morbidity and reproductive function."
The report also concluded that cell phones have only been in widespread use for the last 15 years, but they still should be monitored, even though the current evidence shows there are no evidence of risk so far. Therefore, the subject still requires close scientific study over time.
Dr. John Cooper, the HPA's director of the Center for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards, said the lack of medical effects doesn't mean that everyone should glue their cell phone to the side of the head, particularly children.
As this is a relatively new technology, the HPA will continue to advise a precautionary approach and keep the science under close review. The HPA recommends that excessive use of mobile phones by children should be discouraged and mobile phone Specific Energy Absorption Rates (SAR) values should be clearly marked in the phone sales literature."


text:
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Featured in "Southern Living" Magazine
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text:
Farmers, field agronomists and weed scientists across the United States increasingly are concluding that populations of important weeds have adapted to glyphosate herbicide to the point that its days as a standalone broad-spectrum weed killer are numbered.
As a result, controlling weeds in agricultural crops is becoming more complicated. But growing awareness of the challenge and adoption of more sophisticated control strategies are helping growers tame the new tougher-to-control weed variants.
"Glyphosate will continue to be an important component of weed control programs," says Bill Johnson, a weed scientist at Purdue University. "As far as being the sole herbicide applied on a field, those days are numbered."
The severity of the challenge and the weed species that are no longer adequately controlled by glyphosate vary by geography. But the result is the same.
Take Arkansas, for example. A massive — and largely uncontrolled — outbreak of Palmer pigweed in the state in 2010 has convinced Extension Weed Specialist Bob Scott that virtually all Palmer pigweed (also known as Palmer amaranth) now should be considered glyphosate-resistant.
"The days of using glyphosate alone are over in Arkansas," Scott says. "Glyphosate is still an effective herbicide on many weeds, but not Palmer pigweed. In the future, it will be part of a programmed approach, much like before the days of glyphosate-tolerant crops."
Southwestern Minnesota agronomist Dorian Gatchell has reached the same conclusion. As control of lambsquarters and other broadleaf weeds with glyphosate-only programs worsened in recent years, his customers gradually began including herbicides with alternative modes of action into weed management programs.
"We went from a one-pass program to a two-pass and then to a three pass at high rates," says Gatchell, agronomy manager for Equity Elevator and Trading Co., Wood Lake, Minn. "It still didn't control the lambsquarters. That should tell you something. Glyphosate alone is gone."
Other weeds to watch in various geographies include giant ragweed and waterhemp, Johnson says. "Issues with giant ragweed and waterhemp are growing very rapidly," he adds.
From difficult to control to resistance
The evolution of weed populations from easy to control to harder — or impossible — to control isn't a mystery. Weed scientists have documented the process with a range of herbicides. For some weeds, such as ragweed, the difficult-to-control or resistance process begins with a naturally occurring variant in a weed population that is resistant to the herbicide. This one-in-a-million variant (or a billion, or a trillion or less, depending on the weed species and herbicide) then pollinates — potentially passing herbicide resistance to susceptible types. Then it and its cross-fertilized neighbors produce seed. Assuming the same herbicide is applied repeatedly, the population of uncontrolled variants gradually builds until it makes up a large percentage of that weed species in a field.
"Gradually, the weeds get harder to control," Johnson says. "At first you might notice patches where you are not effectively controlling the weeds. And the patches grow. And then (through continued selection for more resistant types), they become resistant."
There's no set timeline for this to occur. It depends on the herbicide, the weed species and how selection pressure is applied over time. But there is a rule of thumb for glyphosate, Johnson says.
"Once a field has had 30 continuous applications of glyphosate, you really have to be on the lookout for problems," he says. "Typically, the situation is not recognized in production settings until you are in the second or third year past it being a significant problem."
Weeds to watch scorecard
To date, 12 weed species have been formally identified as being resistant to glyphosate in the United States. That includes the latest addition, annual bluegrass, which was identified as resistant at a single site in Missouri, according to weedscience.org, a site that tracks resistant weeds.
Most glyphosate-resistant weeds in the United States are broadleaf weeds, plus a handful of grasses. The resistant weeds list includes Palmer amaranth, tall waterhemp, common ragweed, giant ragweed, hairy fleabane, marestail (horseweed) and kochia. Resistant grasses include goosegrass, Italian ryegrass, rigid ryegrass, annual bluegrass and Johnsongrass.
But Johnson says lambsquarters, morningglory and velvetleaf also could be considered to be resistant, although they don't meet the strict scientific definition for resistance. These hard-to-control weeds are widespread in the U.S. corn, soybean and cotton markets.
"These weeds have always been difficult for glyphosate to control, but we haven't been able to prove it in the greenhouse," he says. "With weeds resistant to other herbicides, you could pour a jug on them and they would survive. With glyphosate, you seem to get injury symptoms, but the weeds don't necessarily die."
The hot spot
Tommy Young, who farms near Tuckerman, Ark., experienced the resistant Palmer pigweed outbreak firsthand in 2010. But, luckily, it only affected the corners of irrigated fields, since he rotates herbicide chemistries on crops grown under pivot.
"What really floored me is that I did my initial spraying when the beans were 6 inches tall. It was almost like I forgot to put the chemical in the sprayer," says Young, who chairs the Arkansas Corn and Grain Sorghum Board. He followed with another glyphosate application before switching to a herbicide with an alternative mode of action, which resulted in acceptable control.
It would be hard to construct a better field experiment comparing a sophisticated resistance management strategy with continuous glyphosate use than in Young's irrigated fields.
While Young grows both glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybeans under pivot, the weed control program in his corn relies primarily on herbicides other than glyphosate. The double-cropped winter wheat/soybean half of the rotation receives a complement of wheat herbicides, plus multiple glyphosate applications on soybeans. Meanwhile, field corners are in a close rotation of glyphosate-tolerant soybeans and winter wheat.
Unlike the resistant pigweed-infested field corners, weed control in irrigated portions was normal, with no signs of resistant weeds. Young says his "frightening" experience with resistant weeds underscores the importance of his decision to use alternative chemistries in irrigated glyphosate-tolerant corn.
"Years ago, it was preached that resistance was coming, and I believed it," he says. "With our corn, which is our money crop, we could afford to spend $18 to $20 more per acre. We thought it was worth it."
While Young appears to have staved off glyphosate-resistant Palmer pigweed on most of his acres, Scott, the Arkansas Extension specialist, says that beginning in 2011, most farmers across the state should assume Palmer pigweed in their fields is resistant to glyphosate.
"Arkansas now has the dubious honor of having the most glyphosate resistant weeds per capita in the nation," Scott says. "We all knew that the system we were on was not sustainable. Five or six years ago, we had essentially eliminated Palmer pigweed as a problem weed. Now, if you have Palmer pigweed in a field, you have to assume it is resistant at some level. After a year like 2010, I expect it to be everywhere in 2011."
The seriousness of the situation may have been reflected in attendance at a November 2010 Extension-sponsored session on controlling resistant pigweed. It attracted 700 to 800 attendees, compared with about 50 in recent years.
To join the discussion and find out more about the current state of weed management, visit talkweeds.com.


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With the loss of Ed Dickson (sprained right shoulder) and Dennis Pitta (broken right hand) for the remainder of the preseason, the thought was that the Ravens would scour the free-agent market to fortify the tight end position.
But that's not necessarily the case, according to coach John Harbaugh.
"I don't know. We'll just have to see," he said after Saturday's practice at the team's training facility in Owings Mills. "It's not just needing a guy, it's also guys being available that you think can play, and if they can stay healthy. There is no point in bringing a guy in and he gets hurt. Then we just have one more hurt guy to deal with, and then it can affect your salary cap. So it's a little bit of a balancing act, and you have to make really good, wise decisions. It's always good to bring in a player if he is right guy. It's not good if he is not the right guy."
The market for tight ends is not bursting at the seams. Age and injury concerns surround candidates like Jeremy Shockey (formerly of the Carolina Panthers), Bo Scaife (Cincinnati Bengals) and Daniel Graham (Tennessee Titans). One intriguing option is bringing back Kris Wilson, who caught just one pass (a one-yard touchdown in the AFC Divisional win against the Houston Texans) last season with the Ravens.
The team does have four tight ends on the roster, but Davon Drew has yet to catch a pass in four seasons with the team, Billy Bajema was signed Aug. 1, and Matt Balasavage and Bruce Figgins are rookies.
Bajema did finish with two receptions for 12 yards, including a four-yard touchdown catch, in Thursday night's 31-17 win against the Atlanta Falcons. Balasavage caught one pass for 12 yards, Drew was targeted twice but failed to post a reception, and Figgins was not targeted.


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A dream I have. I originally worded that the other way around, but didn't want to trivialize the brave vision of Dr. King, who, as I was explaining to the kids the other day, should be represented right next to Lincoln on Mount Rushmore, which purports to be a place to "learn about the birth, growth, development and preservation of the country" and "[from] the first inhabitants to the diversity of America today … brings visitors face to face with the rich heritage we all share."
But I digress. My dream is slightly more humble.
One of the things that makes South Florida so unique is the authenticity that we bring to the retro, the nostalgic shtick that bubbles up in other cities in ways that seem more calculated, less genuine. And many of our historical bona fides are earned by virtue of being surrounded by such a wealth of real, old stuff: the thrift-store clothes, the vinyl and, yes, the people. You know, the ones with stories from times they actually lived through?
When Thomas Lauderdale's hipster (in a good way) ensemble Pink Martini sings the enchanting "Sympathique," with its echoes of Edith Piaf, at the Fillmore Saturday night (as they must), does it not energize them a little to know that the crowd may include folks who have real, albeit secondhand, familiarity with Piaf's heyday? I like to think so.
But back to my dream: Burlesque is a now-ubiquitous throwback art form that, happily, has a home with multiple tassel-twirling troupes in South Florida. For the most part, the local dancers traffic in a brand of burlesque that celebrates leather-jacketed, '50s rock 'n' roll menace.
On Saturday, the Shimmy Shake Revue, led by Morgan La Rue, of Fort Lauderdale, will do their thing at Mickey's Bar (350 SW 12th Ave., Pompano Beach; 954-941-1611), featuring the distinct talents of Val Vampyre, Jenna Beth Smith from Cupcake Burlesque and Kissa Von Addams from Orlando's Big Bang Boom Cabaret. The invitation to the no-cover "cruise night" party urges guests to "bring out your hot rods, rat rods and custom cars … Motorcycles are always welcome and us ladies love them." (Info: Facebook.com/TheShimmyShakeRevue)
La Rue (pictured above), a founding member of Miami-based Shameless Burlesque, says her "American Graffiti"-meets-Bettie-Page look has been with her even before she started performing eight years ago. Shimmy Shake nights at Mickey's have a definite vintage-rock vibe, she says.
"There's a big rockabilly crowd, mostly the crowd that would come to my shows at the Monterey," she says of the Fort Lauderdale club that preceded the Five Points Lounge. "Cruise nights have been doing really well, with the rockabilly crowd, vintage cars and vintage motorcycles."
And the leather is not limited to the dancers.
"Mickey's is a biker bar. We love them, and they love the show. They look scary sometimes, but they're teddy bears," La Rue says.
The ladies will be accompanied by the twangy Americana of the Darling Sweets and the muscular pop of the Howling Winds. Good bands, good times. But … What if your saucy burlesque troupe were backed by a band exuding authentic '50s-era rock 'n' roll swagger because they actually lived it?
About the time that La Rue and friends take the stage at Mickey's on Saturday, the debonair Jimmy Cavallo will do the same at 9 p.m. at Blue Jean Blues (3320 NE 33rd St., Fort Lauderdale; 954-306-6330). The set will likely include high-energy songs from the days when R&B was just ripening into rock 'n' roll, and Cavallo's House Rockers were the first all-white band to play Harlem's famed Apollo Theater for the premiere of "Rock, Rock, Rock."
For pure style, swagger and stage presence, Pompano Beach resident Cavallo and his gleaming tenor sax may be unmatched in these parts. And, yes, he's nearly 86, but that's the point.
"I was 'rock' before rock 'n' roll was even invented," Cavallo reminded me between sets at Nick's in Fort Lauderdale last year. As a pal of Nat King Cole and Bobby Darin, "He's got stories that would burn your eyebrows off," Cavallo's longtime drummer Val Colombo said.
Imagine going to New York, L.A. or Chicago and seeing the local burlesque troupe accompanied by a band led by a riveting octogenarian who's also the coolest guy in the room. "Hey, that's just New York for you," your buddies would say on your return. But he's not there, he's here.
A guy can dream, can't he?
Saturday's daylong Sunshine Blues Festival at Mizner Park in Boca Raton is the show this weekend, with Dr. John (onstage 6:30-7:30 p.m., we're told) and the Tedeschi Trucks Band (8:30-11 p.m.) the big acts you'll get for your $62.50. Info: SunshineBluesFestival.com. Nearby on Saturday night, Derek Trucks' younger brother Duane performs with his band, Flannel Church, and "special guests" at the Funky Biscuit (303 SE Mizner Blvd.). In Fort Lauderdale, the inaugural Las Olas Blues Fest brings 17 bands, including local favorites Iko Iko and Joel DaSilva, to downtown Friday-Sunday on the Riverside Hotel lawn, created when Las Olas' favorite blues and jazz venue, O'Hara's, was torn down. Poetic something, for sure. Tickets: $10, $35 for weekend pass. Info: LasOlasBluesFest.com. One of the best reasons to go to O'Hara's back when was the soulful Juanita Dixon, who returns with the Jeff Prine Band Tuesday night at Blue Jean Blues (3320 NE 33rd St., Fort Lauderdale; 954-306-6330).
Yes. Fort Lauderdale-based Cupcake Burlesque rested up for the holidays (well earned) but returns on Jan. 26 with a show at Five Points Lounge, when Jenna Beth and the ladies will be backed by beer-friendly rockers Audio Heist (below). The night includes an opening set by Brooklyn's jaunty Les Raquet and the auditions for three new Cupcakes. Doors at 9 p.m., show at 10 p.m. and free domestics for the first 20 paying customers. Here is more info.
Kevin Bacon
's much-anticipated Fox drama "The Following" debuts Monday. So it may be a good idea to get your tickets this weekend for his band's Feb. 23 show at
Seminole Casino Coconut Creek
(5550 NW 40th St.). Tickets for
Baconfest 2013
, featuring the
Bacon Brothers
and the
Dan Band
, cost $25 via
outlets. Info:
, 954-977-6700.
Leonard Cohen, somewhere between Cavallo and Bacon on the cool meter, this week added a second North American leg to his "Old Ideas World Tour," including a performance March 20 at the James L. Knight Center in Miami. The AEG Live tour celebrates Cohen's 12th studio album, "Old Ideas," which debuted at No. 1 across the globe and is the highest-charting album of his career. Tickets cost $28.50-$248 and go on sale 10 a.m. Friday at the Knight Center box office (400 SE Second Ave., Miami; 305-416-5970), Ticketmaster.com and charge-by-phone at 800-745-3000.
The 14-time Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer Alicia Keys will perform at AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami on March 23, a stop on the 24-city North American leg of her "Set the World on Fire Tour." Opening is R&B star Miguel. Tickets cost $58-$100 and go on sale 10 a.m. Friday at all Ticketmaster outlets.
When Tim Smith, artistic director of Cirque du Soleil's "Totem," told my colleague Rod Stafford Hagwood that the show features "beautiful ladies from Inner China on these 9-foot unicycles doing these amazing stunts," my reaction was probably a lot like yours: Does Charlie Sheen know about this? "Totem" returns to the tent at Sun Life Stadium (NW 199th St., Miami Gardens) for performances continuing through Feb. 24. You may be on the fence about this, but our focus group, conducted over beers at Tap 42 recently, came down firmly on the side of yes, worth your while. Since you probably don't trust such imprecise judgment, check the video below. Tickets: $58-$143.50. Info: 800-450-1480, CirqueDuSoleil.com/Totem.
The rolling pub crawl known as the Fort Lauderdale Bus Loop will make its popular Himmarshee-beach circuit on Saturday night, with admission $30 advance (by noon Saturday), $35 at check-in at Yolo (333 E. Las Olas Blvd.) or the Office Pub (201 SW Second St.). Designated drivers free. Proceeds benefit Covenant House Florida, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Jessica June Childrens Cancer Foundation, Jack and Jill Children's Center, Riverwalk Trust, and the Broward County Gator Club Scholarship Fund. Info: BusLoop.org, 954-574-6000.
New this year at the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival is Saturday's "sports night," an eclectic triple feature that includes a depiction of the life of boxer Max Schmeling; a documentary, "Beyond the Boundaries," which follows four severely injured Israeli soldiers who take part in an annual ski program called Golshim L'Chaim ("Ski to Live") put on by the Jewish community in Aspen, Colo.; and a 9-minute short, "Evan Kaufman: Fathers' Land," about the former University of Minnesota hockey star who gets an offer to become the first Jew to play professional hockey in Germany, where many in his family died in the Holocaust.
PBJFF director Larry Ferber says "Max Schmeling" was a revelation: Its subject was reviled in the U.S. for defeating Joe Louis, but a loss in a rematch with Louis did not sit well with the Nazi regime, who made Schmeling's life miserable. Later, Schmeling would hide Jews during the 1938 Kristallnacht, and support an aging Louis financially until he died. "He was an extraordinary person," Ferber says.
The three sports films begin at 7 p.m. at the Cobb theater in Palm Beach Gardens (561-253-0819) and the Regal Delray Beach 18 (561-272-2900). The PBJFF continues through Jan. 27 at a half-dozen locations in Palm Beach County. Tickets: $10, $5 children. Reel Pass, with entry to all screenings: $125, $100 members. Call 561-736-7527 or go to PBJFF.org.
On Friday, the New World Symphony offers its innovative annual shout-out to that young arty crowd that's also not afraid of DJ music. PULSE 2.0: Late Night at the New World Symphony turns NWS's Frank Gehry-designed campus (500 17th St., Miami Beach) into a high-energy lounge with sounds by DJ Sean Drake and acclaimed Miami- native soprano Elaine Alvarez. The party, which runs from 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. is free for NWS members, $25 for the rabble. Info: NWS.edu, 305-673-3331.
The relationship between Miami City Ballet and innovative young British choreographer Liam Scarlett is one that has brought special excitement to the world of dance. Scarlett, a relative unknown before MCB's former artistic director Edward Villella saw a rehearsal of his work in London a couple of years ago, quickly "has achieved the status of an important classical-ballet choreographer," in the words of The New York Times' dance critic, Alastair Macaulay. So when Scarlett has a world-premiere of a new work, "Euphotic," and MCB puts that piece right in your lap, with performances this weekend at the Broward Center, how can you resist? Performances are 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Tickets: $25-$175. Info: BrowardCenter.org, 954-462-0222. MCB will bring "Euphotic" and the rest of Program II to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach Jan. 25-27. Info: MiamiCityBallet.org.
South Florida's adventurous young choral ensemble
Seraphic Fire
continues its season with
Gregorian Chant: Ave Maria
," performed Thursday at
St. Gregory's Episcopal Church
in Boca Raton, Friday at
First United Methodist Church
in Coral Gables, Saturday at
All Saints Episcopal Church
in Fort Lauderdale and Sunday at
Miami Beach Community Church
. Tickets, which go fast, are $35-$50. Info:
, 888-544-3473.
Get daily updates on South Florida entertainment and things to do at SouthFlorida.com and on Twitter at @BenCrandell.


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The Human Face of Big Data
Photo credit: ©Catherine Balet "Strangers in the light" (Steidl) 2012 / from The Human Face of Big Data
While the trendy term "big data" is a bit nebulous and undefined, there's simply no question that individuals, businesses, and society as a whole are creating and using data at a rate that is magnitudes beyond that of just a few years ago.
Still, it's often very hard to get a handle on what all of that data really represents. That's what Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt are trying to illustrate, though, in The Human Face of Big Data, a new book that attempts to capture what it all looks like through a series of wonderful photographs and short essays that each examine a part of the big data phenomenon.
Smolan talked about the book at the recent Techonomy conference, saying that big data will impact our lives more than the Internet has.
That's certainly the feel you get from the book, which features a series of vignettes, usually showing one main picture with a prominent caption that explains how data has been used in the past, and how it is being used now. For instance, it includes photos of Bills of Mortality, a book that recorded deaths during the plague in London in 1664, and of IBM Watson becoming a Jeopardy! champion last year.
It's not surprising that Smolan, creator of the "Day in the Life" books, would create a book that looks great, and the photos often tell important stories. I like the juxtaposition of a photo of the FBI's records department in 1943 next to one of the WikiLeaks data facilities in Stockholm today.
But most of the stories are smaller and discuss very specific instances ranging from weather monitoring impacting farm insurance to GPS-enabled smartphones tracking the spread of smallpox. The book covers a range of topics within the big data concept including sensors, health and fitness monitoring, crowdsourcing, advertising, and data-driven art.
As you might expect with a project that was sponsored by EMC, VMware, Cisco, FedEx, Originate, and Tableau, it's all a bit promotional. Many of the individual stories have a "gee whiz" feel without much room for real analysis or skepticism. The larger essays—still typically only the size of a good op-ed piece and generally reprinted from other places—bring a bit more perspective to the endeavor. Michael Malone perhaps sums it up best:
"Ultimately, Big Data offers the potential for a kind of Copernican Revolution in knowledge. It won't come easily; it may cost us much of the privacy we now hold dear. And it won't come soon…. But the upside is so staggering that few will refuse it. After all, we now have the chance to become the center of our own knowledge universe."
In addition, the book has a number of interesting infographics that show how data is being used. There's also a companion viewer app made by HP's Aurasma that is supposed to load videos to accompany some of the pictures. (This did not work for me, however; all I ever got was an indication that the video was loading.)
If a $50 coffee table book seems a bit much, there's a $2.99 iPhone and iPad application that includes about half the content. In some ways, it does a better job of showing off the content because it starts with a home page that breaks out the book into 68 individual sections. (In the book version, these little sections are grouped into about a dozen larger sections.) There are also some nice extras; for instance, in a spread on the "life-logging" project of Microsoft's Gordon Bell, you can press a button to see some more pictures from his life. At this price, it's a particularly good deal and an inexpensive way to get a great overview of the big data phenomenon.
In general, The Human Face of Big Data interestingly details how data is being used in a variety of industries, projects, and fields. It's more of a broad overview than a deep dive, but it's an effective way to learn about the wide array of areas where big data is now being used.


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Redman: Ground Combat Survival
A demonstration video of how RedMan Training Gear provides superb protection, durable wear, and excellent mobility for use in dynamic law enforcement training scenarios like ground combat survival.
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Richmond, CA 94806
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Citigroup to Pay $7 Billion in Mortgage Probe
Settlement Includes $4 Billion Civil Penalty, $2.5 Billion in 'Consumer Relief'
WASHINGTON—As the seeds of the financial crisis were being sown, a Citigroup Inc. trader sent an internal email warning about the poor quality of mortgages the bank was packaging into securities and selling to investors.
"We should start praying," the trader wrote in the email.
On Monday, the bank agreed to pay $7 billion, including...