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I am a relative newcomer but I would like to think that I've done at least one or two good things for the community
(other than provide a good laugh or two), such as FloatingX M1A1, and I occasionally tried to keep the pep going in the multiplayer
(with the help from my squad of Coresoldier, meep, Kampfer, and anyone else who i befriended of course) and when the Pfhorums went down for what we feared may have been forever, I even tried to keep the community together, via a skype group (granted only Atilla, Red Fox, and Dis joined...)
and kept something of a small backup of historical stuff I saved over time. But I know I bother some people here.
In my short time here I have already:
-Started a campaign against Ray
-Argued with Treellama
-Argued with $lave
-Became the focus of a joke plugin focusing on my complaints
-Got temporarily suspended for quoting a spammer (granted it was a joke, one that Irons didn't like)
-Got in more trouble for arguing with Irons about the aforementioned charge
-Became an astronaut
-Refused to hate Moppy or Gmanyo
-Begun a habit of ensuring my name is on the front page at least 3 times by posting a lot.
-In fact i just did it again, damn.
-Created a username in all caps with a number in it, not knowing it was a bad idea
-Made a few LOLWUT Physics models.
All that aside, what do you guys think of me?


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Originally founded in 1919, AKG has gone on to become a world leader in cooling and heating exchange systems. This family company employs over 2,600 people and manufactures its high performance cooling systems at 13 locations spread over 8 countries.
AKG wanted to ensure a rapid and efficient implementation of SAP across its global sites as well as to permanently optimize SAP system operation and simplify administration.
Fujitsu was chosen to implement FlexFrame for SAP, using PRIMERGY blade servers as the basic hardware and NetApp filers for storage. This has led to a significant reduction in downtime, greater efficiency and cost savings.

subset: commoncrawl


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Q: With the recent cold temperatures, I've noticed there are areas of my house that feel drafty. Do you have any tips for minimizing drafts?
A: Feeling a chill in the air is obviously common this time of year. If you do have a drafty house, it's likely your home is losing a lot of energy and you're losing a lot of money. A drafty house can certainly make your family feel uncomfortable throughout a New England winter, but not all hope is lost.
Find below the biggest culprits for a drafty house and ways you can combat these drafts to make for a warmer and more energy efficient home.
Drafty windows
Got drafty windows? This one tops the list of reasons a house is drafty. Old, inefficient windows can cause considerable heat loss during the winter. Not sure if you have drafty windows? Here is a quick test. Light an incense stick (or you can light a match and blow it out) and hold it next to your windows. If the smoke stream travels horizontally, you have located an air leak that may need sealing or weatherstripping.
Wondering how to fix drafty windows? Consider installing new energy-efficient weatherstripping to help keep drafts at bay. This will help keep some drafts at bay, but will not fix your air infiltration (mycoastalwindows.com/air-infiltration-windows) problem altogether, as old windows are much more inefficient than the newest technology available on the market.
Industry leading windows can minimize air leakage down to 0.01 cfm (cubic feet per minute) compared to industry average windows with air leakage that ranges from 0.12 to 0.3 cfm. To put this into perspective, industry-leading windows can minimize air leakage down to 0.8 soda cans of air per minute, while average windows will leak 24 soda cans of air per minute. Big difference.
Drafty doors
Drafty doors are yet another area where air often escapes. If you're wondering how to fix drafty doors, the approach is similar to windows. In addition, you can use the same draft test that we discussed for windows. If you do have drafts, you can install weatherstripping to help cut down on energy loss, but again, this is only a temporary fix and will likely not solve the problem completely. Signs you may need replacement? If your door or frame has any rot, you can see gaps (or daylight coming in from the outside), or if your door is just plain old, unsightly or was made with an inferior material. The most energy-efficient doors today are made of fiberglass and achieve a realistic wood grain appearance for those homeowners who prefer wood.
Basement air leaks
A common air leak that many homeowners might not notice is in the basement at the top of the cement foundation (where the cement comes in contact with the wood frame above). If your basement is unfinished, this air leak is easy to fix with foam insulation or caulk. While you're inspecting your basement, also look for any areas where pipes or vents pass through your basement walls to the outside. You may be surprised to find gaps as wide as 2 inches in some areas. Low-expansion polyurethane foam can be a good option to fill gaps from a quarter-inch to 2 inches around pipes.
Leaks in your attic
Did you know that your attic is one of the biggest sources of energy loss in the home? Ideally, your attic should be the same temperature as the outdoors (this is imperative to prevent ice dams on your roof). With that said, you want to make sure that the warm air in your home is not leaking up into your attic. All of your recessed lights and fixtures in the ceiling below your attic are areas where warm air can be potentially leaking into the attic.
Take note of where these fixtures and lights are located in your home and then look for them up in your attic (you'll need to pull back the insulation). Important note -- if there is a possibility that you have vermiculite insulation in your attic, do not touch it until you've had it checked for asbestos. If you do find gaps around your fixtures and lights, you can easily seal these gaps with caulk or low-expansion polyurethane foam depending on the size of the gap. A sure sign of an air leak around fixtures is the presence of dust or dirt around the fixture on the attic side.
If you're concerned about the type or energy efficiency of the insulation you currently have in your attic (or home), review your options with a professional. There are all different types of insulation on the market from traditional batts and blankets to loose-fill types. You'll also want to discuss insulating your attic hatch as this can be a trickier DIY project.
While these aren't the only places where drafts are found in your home, they are some of the biggest culprits. Other sources of air leaks include fireplaces, electrical outlets, exhaust fans, etc. If you have questions about your drafty house and how to save more energy this winter, contact me at Coastal Windows & Exteriors (mycoastalwindows.com) at email@example.com or by calling 978-304- 0495.
-- Stephanie Vanderbilt is owner of Coastal Windows & Exteriors (mycoastalwindows.com). With a passion for education and helping others love the home they live in, Vanderbilt would love to answer any questions that will help you make your home beautiful, warm, safe and energy-efficient. Do you have other home improvement questions? Ask her at email@example.com or call at 978-304- 0495.


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Our other niece Holly, her mom (Aunt Patty), and Joe, who was taking the opportunity to catch a few winks.
Our brother-in-law Mac, and Alex, who is giving me a "look" about who knows what.
After dinner Alex passed out various copies of his college newspaper so that we could all read some of the articles he has written. What a way to entertain guests! Fortunately, he's a good writer, so it was okay.
...celebrated Thanksgiving with my family,My Aunt Dolores, cousin Davene, and her husband Rick, getting everything ready on the table.
My cousin Damon, his fiancee Cathy, and Davene, watching my mom take another drink of her wine.
Davene, Rick, and Alex...we're all too STUFFED to move!
My dad, my mom (telling another story), and Damon.
put up the tree and decorated it (but now the lights don't work and I'm in the midst of a Plan B, but wish I had a little more time to implement it),
made some holiday candy,
went to our school Christmas program (which was held at our high school gym and there were LOTS of people there!),
finished Christmas shopping,
Gift bags for my Reading Mastery students, in front of the pink tree they decorated AND the static cling they put up.
did a snowman craft with my Reading Mastery students,
Believe me, this was a "fly by the seat of your pants" type project. Even though I had it all thought out in my head, I'd never done it before and learned a LOT if I ever do it again!
attended Ted's work Christmas party (and had a very nice time),
got our annual Christmas letter written, cards addressed, and sent,
began baking,
and wrapped almost all of the gifts (just about 5 things to go!).
Later today I'll finish baking and wrapping, then maybe even clean the house a little. I've been letting that go, as I just haven't had the time to take care of it. Joe and Alex are both home from college and although I just LOVE having them home, I've gone from cleaning the kitchen a couple times a week, to cleaning it about twice a day.
I understand that Christmas is coming in two days, whether I'm ready or not.
I'm really looking forward to spending time with the family....that's all I need to make Christmas special.
Merry Christmas everyone!


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Yeah, i had those, I remember trying to repair the broken wings with elmer's glue and toothpicks (FAIL)..
This profile is no longer active.
Here's a picture,i found today.It's actually Christmas Eve 1969.I'am going to have to look at my Mom's house for some from the 70's.It's pretty entertaining,especially that dorky little kid in the cowboy hat.
hello there, I am new to this site, but here is my awesome wonder woman mego xmas 1978, I was mesmerized and in complete heaven as I gaze @ the Lynda Carter Mego doll!! how can I post my pic? please help. i want everyone to see..
man, this is a great idea. Iwill have to look thru some old photos and scan them....
These are some Christmas pics of My Dad and I from the 70's.
I am holding up a couple Star Trek items and my Dad is holding up a Radio Shack calculator:
I did't have a scanner handy so I took a picture of these photos with my digi camera so they are a bit washed out and show a few spots on the pics thanks to the flash.
I don't have any pics of a Mego x-mas but here I am in 1978 with a classic 70's toy
Looking for Infinite Heroes Robin and Catwoman
And Super Powers Batman
Sadly, I do not have any of my 70's or 80's X-mas photos due to petty family squabbles. So here's a picture of my wife, Meghan, Christmas 1979. It's her standing with one of her all time favorite childhood toys GODZILLA from the Shogun Warriors line. She used to sleep with him like a teddy bear. Her brothers got the rest of the Shogun Warriors that year. This is one of my wife's favorite pictures and Christmas memories.
I'm ashamed to say that, even tho this thread is over a year old, I have completely missed it till now
I'll check at my parent's house if they have any pics of my brother and me at Christmas
"...The agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair..." - Edgar Allan Poe


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On November 18, 2002 the South Dakota Department of Transportation and the South Dakota Highway Patrol began providing travelers a new statewide, toll-free phone number for information about weather and road conditions. By dialing "511", users of cellular and land-based phones receive up-to-date, location-specific road and weather information on any Interstate, U.S., or state highway in South Dakota and several adjoining states.
Callers can request road and weather conditions for any route on the South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota state highway systems. Callers may ask for conditions along a general highway segment-for example, Interstate 90 from Rapid City to Wall-or at a specific milepost or exit number-for example, U.S. 14 at Milepost 301 (a location near the city of Miller). Mileposts are located at one-mile intervals along all state highways.
South Dakota's 511 initiative is part of a program to establish 511 as the universal Traveler Information Number throughout the nation. The work represents a partnership between the Department of Transportation, the Highway Patrol, and the state's local telephone and cellular service providers, who have programmed their phone systems to recognize 511. You can also obtain this information by dialing 866-MYSD511.
Travelers should not confuse 511 with 911, the nationwide emergency response number. Any situation requiring police, fire department, ambulance, or other emergency services must still be reported to 911, which is manned by trained public safety dispatchers.
For further information contact David Huft, Intelligent Transportation Systems Coordinator, South Dakota Department of Transportation, 700 East Broadway, Pierre, SD 57501-2586, 605.773.3358, firstname.lastname@example.com.
Get the app for iPhone or iPad
Get the app for Android


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Healthy skin care is around a lot more than splendor and it is a problem for men and women of all ages. In fact, your skin may be the greatest and a lot subjected organ in your body. Caring for it can be about over looking good. Good skincare has important health advantages. This post features many ways for keeping skin wholesome and desirable. Additional benefits for the skin can bring choleslo probiotics, such as for example thekissups.com/choleslo-reviews.html.
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In order to lessen the volume of germs internally, beverage pomegranate juice once you awaken. This fruit juice features a delicious style and is also helpful for the vitamin antioxidants that it supplies. Also can be used instead of juice additives such as http://chillipear.com/prevagen-reviews.html. Rather than possessing carbonated drinks or fruits beverages, that are filled with sugars, drink pomegranate fruit juice for incredibly healthful skin.
If you want to implement healthy skin care items, make sure to make use of them constantly. The impact in the product or service greatly boosts if it is employed commonly. When you are the type of person who is likely to ignore your skin layer care schedule, try out keeping your skin layer goods inside a place where by you will realize them. When you apply your products or services at sleeping, you can try retaining the items on your nightstand.
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Use mitts in your fingers during the cold months to guard the skin. Your skin on your own fingers is thin than on other regions of the body and there are a lot less oil glands. It is rather feasible for both your hands to dry in the winter conditions. Putting on safety gloves might help protect against cracking and itching.
Attempt to get rid of caffeine intake through your diet regime or, at a minimum, make an effort to take in a smaller amount of it. Caffeinated drinks works as a diuretic in your body. It hurts the moisture from the skin area, triggering it to search less healthy. With time, it can even reduce your skin's normal elasticity.
Emphasis your skin treatment regiment on your legs. Reductions and scrapes on your lower legs take time to mend and they are generally prone to disease. Utilizing a cream will help prevent little availabilities from developing and shaving using a razor which has moisture strips, can even be valuable.
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You should be sure to rinse your skin at least 2 times a day. Rinse your facial skin every morning the instant you awaken. Dirt, old skin debris and dirt acquire on your skin right away. This may cause the face to get rid of out and cause problems along with your epidermis like scarring.
If one lifestyles in a dried up location or has epidermis that dries out out throughout the drier occasions of the year including winter season in might be important for them to make use of a cream. Employing a lotion or moisturizing lotion can keep ones pores and skin from distressing cracking as a result of simply being also free of moisture. Working out using Protein diet & winidrol, for example, winidrol to balance the metabolism.
For guys, it can be particularly crucial that you wash the face everyday and utilize an in-depth cleanser consistently. When facials and skin treatment look like a girly course of action, men actually need it far more, because the skin on men's encounter is generally considerably oilier. Men also have greater pores, significance there may be far more chance for soil and oils to clog them up and cause difficulties.
Offering your manicure in your house is as easy as gonna your home to grab the required items. Basically blend sugars with oils and rub around the hands and wrists. Carry on and rub fingers jointly up until the sweets is dissolved. Later on, rinse your hands with warm water and dried up. You will instantly see that both hands are better, softer and easier in the finances.
For exceptional skin treatment it is best to hydrate skin area immediately using a shave. Shaving irritates and abrades the outer tiers on the skin, which could dry up the underlying levels making them at risk of contamination. An easy remedy having an appropriate hydrating product will nip this probable problem in the bud.
Protection from direct sunlight can be accomplished in a number of approaches. The sun's rays are most potent among 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Steer clear of your time outdoors through these hrs. Always employ a minimum of an SPF 15 sunscreen lotion and put it on no less than a half-hour well before coverage. A cap is always an added bonus.
1 significant component of healthy skin care is to recognize your skin's lifestage, and address it accordingly. Do you have extremely younger skin? It will probably be much oilier and a lot more elastic, replying to oils-totally free treatments. In case your epidermis has finished 40, you should take a gentler approach. In the event you identify you need to take care of each oiliness and dry skin, use a combination of mild soaps and cream.
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Contracting Economy? What to Watch in Thursday's Report on U.S. GDP
The Commerce Department on Thursday is expected to confirm what many private forecasters have been saying for weeks: The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter of 2014.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of just 0.1% in the first three months of the year, the agency said April 30. A revised estimate will be released Thursday at 8:30 a.m. EDT, incorporating a slew of economic data released over the past month. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal forecast it will show GDP contracted at a 0.6% annual rate in the first three months of the year.
Here's what to watch in the report:
In the Red, Briefly
Since the recession ended in June 2009, U.S. GDP growth has dipped into the red only once: the first quarter of 2011, when economic output contracted at a 1.3% rate.
It appears likely to happen again. But economists aren't worried about a prolonged downturn. Most have chalked up the weak first quarter to transitory factors like the brutal winter weather, and expect to see a significant rebound this spring.
"Although real GDP growth is currently estimated to have paused in the first quarter of this year, I see that pause as mostly reflecting transitory factors, including the effects of the unusually cold and snowy winter weather," Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said earlier this month. "With the harsh winter behind us, many recent indicators suggest that a rebound in spending and production is already under way, putting the overall economy on track for solid growth in the current quarter."
Trading Down
International-trade data for March wasn't available when the Commerce Department released its first estimate for GDP. That came out a week later, showing U.S. exports and imports both rose in March and the trade gap narrowed. But the government had assumed an even bigger fall in the trade deficit in its GDP calculations. The initial GDP report said net exports subtracted 0.83 percentage point from the GDP growth rate in the first quarter. It may be a bigger drag on growth in Thursday's update.
On the Shelf
A big buildup of private inventories boosted economic growth in the third quarter of 2013 -- and created a hangover that weighed on growth in the first quarter of 2014. Inventories subtracted 0.57 percentage point from GDP growth, according to the first estimate, and that could grow with this week's revision. Similar to trade, the Commerce Department assumed business inventories would grow more in March than they actually did.
What Worries the Fed
The Fed, in its April 30 policy statement, flagged some worries about the economy, including a decline in business fixed investment and a slow recovery in the housing market. A prolonged slowdown in the housing market also appeared in the Fed's minutes from April as one of a handful of "possible sources of downside risk to growth." Both were drags on growth in the initial GDP estimate for the first quarter: Fixed nonresidential investment declined at a 2.1% annual rate and fixed residential investment fell at a 5.7% annual rate. Those numbers could shift with Thursday's revision.
Going Corporate
Corporate profits hit record highs in 2013: $1.9 trillion in the fourth quarter, 11.1% of total GDP. Thursday's GDP report will provide the first look at profits in the first quarter, and show how Corporate America fared as the economy at large hit the brakes. There are many ways to slice and dice the numbers. (For what it's worth, our news pages typically use profits after tax, without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments.)
(Still) Penciling It In
Even when Thursday's report is in hand, don't close the book on first-quarter GDP. The Commerce Department will release another revised estimate on June 25 -- just as the second quarter is coming to an end.


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About Dreadspullen
"Dreadspullen" is Dutch for dread stuff. The webstore Dreadpullen.nl was started in the autumn of 2005 by Linda, proud owner of 53 real locks.
" From the moment I had dreads, I had this idea of starting a web shop. It was pretty hard to get all to dread stuff I wanted. An afro store does not always have nice beads, and bead stores always have a few beads with big holes to fit dreads. Good products for maintaining dreads were also hard to come by. Wax from Lets Dred was pretty easy to find, but other products like felting needles, Dread Head HQ products and Knotty Boy were all for sale in different shops.
The product offer on Dreadspullen.nl has been very much extended; you will find piercing jewelry, hats, head bands and much more types of fashion accessories. Linda gets help from Roland and Sacha to offer the best service possible.
Dreadspullen tries to meet the specific needs that people with real dreadlocks experience. Dreadspullen does this by carefully selecting and selling of dread related products. Environmental and animal friendly products are always prefered.
Dreadspullen would like to be kept informed about the wishes of dreadies to serve it's customers in the best way possible. If you have a request or an idea for a product, please contact us.
Agnietenstraat 42
Email: info [at] dreadspullen.nl
Company information
Company registration number: 58543457 (Arnhem)Company name: Dreadcat
Link to Dreadspullen
If you would like to put a link to Dreadspullen on your website, you can use one of the banners on this page. If you think you might have an interesting website for our visitors, you can email us for a link exchange on the About dreadlocks page.
|Contact | Guest book | Newsletter | Terms of purchase | Privacy policy | About Dreadspullen © 2006-2018 Dreadspullen (powered by Dre@dcat)


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Mitchell P. Marcus
RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Office Address:
Dept. of Computer & Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
3330 Walnut Street
503 Levine Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389
Email: email@example.com
Tel: (215) 898-2538
I'm the RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I'm also Professor of Linguistics. I received my Ph.D. in 1978 from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories before coming to Penn in 1987. I served as chair of Penn's Computer and Information Science Department, as chair of the Penn Faculty Senate, as well as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. I currently serve as chair of the Advisory Committee of the Center of Excellence in Human Language Technology at John Hopkins University. I was named a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in 1992.
I created and ran the Penn Treebank Project through the mid-1990s which developed the primary training corpus that led to a breakthrough in the accuracy of natural language parsers for unrestricted text. I and my collaborators continue to develop hand-annotated corpora for use world-wide as training materials for statistical natural language systems. I am currently the principal investigator for an ARO-funded MURI project to investigate natural language understanding for human-robot interaction with co-PIs at Stanford, Cornell, UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell and George Mason. My research interests include: statistical natural language processing, human-robot communication, and cognitively plausible models for automatic acquisition of linguistic structure.
My past PhD students have gone on to teach at such schools as MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of Arizona, Queens College and the Navy Postgraduate School, and such industrial research labs as IBM Research, BBN Technologies, and Microsoft Research.
Situation Understanding Bot Through Language And Environment (SUBTLE)
Vasumathi Raman, Constantine Lignos, Cameron Finucane, Kenton CT Lee, Mitchell P. Marcus, and Hadas Kress-Gazit Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that: Explaining unachievable robot tasks using natural language, Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems IX, 2013
Daniel J. Brooks, Constantine Lignos, Cameron Finucane, Mikhail S. Medvedev, Ian Perera, Vasumathi Raman, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Mitchell P. Marcus, Holly A Yanco, Make it so: Continuous, flexible natural language interaction with an autonomous robot, Proccedings of the Grounding Language for Physical Systems Workshop at the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2012
Qiuye Zhao and Mitch Marcus. Long tail distributions and Unsupervised learning of Morphology, Coling 2012.
Qiuye Zhao and Mitch Marcus. Exploring Deterministic Constraints: from a Constrained English POS Tagger to an Efficient ILP Solution to Chinese Word Segmentation, Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 1054--1062, 2012
Constantine Lignos, Erwin Chan, Charles Yang, and Mitchell P. Marcus, Evidence for a morphological acquisition model from development data, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2, 269-280. 2010
Constantine Lignos, Erwin Chan, Mitchell P. Marcus, and Charles Yang, A rule-based acquisition model adapted for morphological analysis, Multilingual Information Access Evaluation I. Text Retrieval Experiments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6241, 658-665. 2010
Q. Zhao, M. Marcus, A simple unsupervised learner for POS disambiguation rules given only a minimal lexicon, Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, p 688-697, 2009.
S. Pradhan, E. Hovy, M. Marcus, M. Palmer, L. Ramshaw, and R. Weischedel, OntoNotes: A Unified Relational Semantic Representation, International Journal of Semantic Computing, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2007.
R. Gabbard, S. Kulick, M. Marcus, Fully Parsing the Penn Treebank, HLT-NAACL 2006, New York, New York.
M. Marcus, B. Santorini, and M. Marcinkiewicz, Building a large annotated corpus of English: the Penn Treebank, Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline, G. Sampson and D. McCarthy (eds.), Continuum, 2004. Also in Using Large Corpora, S. Armstrong (ed.), MIT Press, 1994. (reprinted from Computational Linguistics, 19(2), 1993)
M. Marcus (ed.), HLT 2002: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Human Language Technology Research, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002.
L. Ramshaw, M. Marcus, Text Chunking using Transformation-Based Learning, Natural Language Processing Using Very Large Corpora, Armstrong et al. (eds.), Kluwer, 1998.
E. Brill, D. Magerman, M. Marcus, and B. Santorini, Deducing linguistic structure from the statistics of large corpora, Proceedings of DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, June, 1990, Morgan-Kaufmann.
D. Magerman, M. Marcus, Parsing a natural language using mutual information statistics, Proceedings of AAAI 90.
M. Marcus, D. Hindle, and M. Fleck, D-Theory: Talking about talking about trees, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the ACL, 1983.
M. Marcus, A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language, MIT Press, 1980.(Please note: Under many circumstances, I don't put my name on my students' papers. Please see my students' web sites for other current work.)


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The Vermont Supreme Court has been asked to rule on the constitutionality of a 2009 law allowing the state to take DNA samples from people charged with but not yet convicted of crimes.
The Vermont Supreme Court has been asked to rule on the constitutionality of a 2009 law allowing the state to take DNA samples from people charged with but not yet convicted of crimes.
Lower court rulings effectively have blocked the state from carrying out the law, says a lawyer who has been following the issue. The law was enacted after the 2008 rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Randolph.
''Effectively it's a statewide stay,'' Defender General Matt Valerio said of the current state of the law. That means it is blocking investigators from taking DNA samples from those who have been charged with felonies and certain misdemeanors unless and until the court gives the state the green light to do so.
Until passage of the law, the state was permitted to take DNA samples for storage in a database only from those who had been convicted of felonies. The samples are taken with a swab that collects saliva from the inside of the cheek and become part of both the state database and a national one maintained by the FBI.
The Vermont law requires that if the defendant is acquitted or if the charge is dismissed or reduced to one not covered by the DNA sampling requirement, the record must be expunged from the database.
Lawmakers debated vigorously during the 2009 legislative session whether it was permissible under the US and Vermont constitutions to require someone not convicted of a crime to provide a DNA sample.
Senator Richard Sears, a Democrat from Bennington and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was satisfied that the law would pass constitutional muster by the fact that under it, samples are taken not at arrest but after arraignment, when a judge has found probable cause to charge someone with a crime.
Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that in his organization's view, that's not sufficient.
''DNA collection unless consented to is considered a search and seizure,'' Gilbert said. ''Generally, if you've been arraigned, that doesn't give the police the authority to go into your house and search for something without a warrant.''
Both John Treadwell, the assistant attorney general defending the state's law, and Jayann Sepich, cofounder of a national group, DNA Saves, that has pushed for expanded DNA testing, said sampling a broader population of people who come into contact with the criminal justice system has helped and will continue to help solve and prevent crimes.
When someone is charged with a crime, ''society has an interest in them and their identity,'' Treadwell said. ''We already do a number of things. We take their photos, we take fingerprints. Often there are stringent conditions of release, or the person may be held on bail.''
Having a record in the database creates the possibility of matches with unsolved crimes, essentially allowing the database to help police cast a wider net.
''It can be used in the future to link a newly occurring offense to people who have been charged or convicted in the past,'' Treadwell said.
Vermont's law is more protective of defendants than those in the majority of states that allow pre-conviction DNA testing, said Sepich, a Carlsbad, N.M., resident who took up the cause after her 22-year-old daughter, Katie, was raped and murdered in 2003.
The majority of the 26 states that have such testing do it at arrest and booking, rather than waiting until a finding of probable cause, she said.
Dave Gram, Boston Globe
Tags: council for responsible genetics, arrest, dna testing, forensic dna, vermont, probable cause
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Going to Work for Wind Power
This is not your grandfather's windmill
Think of the Netherlands, and what may come to mind is a quaint countryside of historic canal houses, fields of tulips, and-of course-those ubiquitous windmills. Though the Netherlands today is a highly urban and technologically sophisticated nation, that image of the "old" country still plays a large role in the country's economy-as a lure to millions of tourists. It's fascinating to consider that these windmills were, for centuries, the main sources of mechanical energy before the dawn of the fossil fuel age-that such silent, pleasant-looking contraptions could have provided the power needed to pump water, grind grain, saw timber, and do a wide range of other tasks now done by loud, polluting machines. To the tourists, the relation between these quaint windmills and the modern diesel turbines or giant coal-burning power plants that have replaced them may seem as distant as that of schooners to speedboats.
Enter the new high-tech wind generators of today, which began appearing two decades ago and have proliferated in the Netherlands and in some 40 other countries so far. Unlike their predecessors, the modern wind turbines do not directly operate pumps, sluice-gates, or grindstones, but generate the basic commodity-electricity-needed to run any modern industrial economy. These new wind turbines are as different from the old windmills in their use of wind as a telephone wire is different from a 19th-century church bell in its use of copper.
While providing a means of reducing global-warming gases and other air pollution in a way that is now becoming competitive with coal and oil in sheer cost per kilowatt-hour, the new wind-power also offers an advantage that has been largely ignored during the last few years of booming stock markets-but that will prove enormously important as the 21st century unfolds: it is not only a clean, competitive energy source but is a rich source of new employment. Whereas some defenders of the entrenched oil and coal interests predict that major efforts to stabilize climate change will spell economic doom, the evident capacity of wind power to deliver cost-effective power and new employment makes a compelling case that good environmental policy can also be good economic policy.
As far back as 200 b.c., windmills were used to pump water in China and to grind grain in Persia and the Middle East. In medieval Europe, merchants and crusaders returning from the Holy Land introduced this technology to their homelands, and windmills were erected in numerous places on the continent. By the early 15th century, in England alone, the use of animal power to grind grain-cattle pulling large stones in circles-had been supplanted by some 10,000 windmills. But it was in the Netherlands that windmill design evolved most over the ensuing centuries, producing incremental improvements in aerodynamic lift, rotor efficiency, and rotor speed. The Dutch relied on wind power to help drain the numerous lakes and marshes that made the Rhine river delta barely habitable and to hold their own against frequent and devastating floods. From the Netherlands, England, and elsewhere in Europe, wind technology reached the New World with the waves of settlers crossing the Atlantic. In the late 19th century, windmills were used on a massive scale to pump water for farms and ranches in the American West. Between 1850 and 1970, over 6 million mostly small units were installed in the United States.
Predictably, when it became apparent that electricity would be the elixir of the new industrial economy, efforts were made to put wind energy to use in generating it. Wind-electric machines first appeared in Denmark and the United States around 1890. The development of a utility-scale system was first undertaken in Russia in 1931 with the 100 kilowatt Balaclava wind generator on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Operating for about two years, it generated a cumulative 200,000 kWh of electricity. During the next few decades, experimental wind-power machines were built in the United States, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain.
Despite these efforts to "modernize" wind energy use, wind mills were eventually retired from active service and preserved only as tourist sites. A principal reason for their demise was the invention of the steam engine, which had to be powered by heat-and which thus created a huge new market for coal. The steam engine was soon joined by a plethora of other coal- and oil-driven machines. Wind-powered machines went into a gradual decline, first in Europe and then in North America. In 1895, there were still some 30,000 windmills operating in Germany, providing the equivalent of 87 megawatts of power, but this amounted to only 1.8 percent of the country's total power requirements-compared with 78 percent provided by steam engines.
Moving into the 20th century, the world's industrial economies developed appetites for growing amounts of coal, oil, natural gas and, later, nuclear power. By then, it was clear that fossil fuels were simply too convenient to compete with; whereas wind could only be used on site-and only when the wind was blowing-coal or oil could be transported anywhere and used anytime. It took another half-century for the environmental costs of coal and oil to become a serious issue, but by then there was a new competitor on the horizon-nuclear power, which was initially expected to prove "too cheap to meter." Substantial subsidies cemented these energy sources' advantage.
It was only with the advent of the modern environmental movement that some economists began to reassess the economics of the prevailing energy system, and to recognize that the sizable environmental and health costs-the burdens of air pollution, acid rain, climate change, toxic mining and radioactive wastes, "black lung," and respiratory diseases-were not being accounted for by conventional measures of cost per kilowatt-hour. Instead, they were "externalized"-not accounted for on any balance sheet. But at the same time that environmentalists were making this argument, defenders of the status quo were making a counter-argument: that industrial reforms made for environmental reasons would have prohibitively damaging impacts on the economy because they would take away jobs. Restricting clearcutting of forests, for example, would take jobs away from loggers; restricting fishing of depleted species would take jobs away from fishermen; and so on. In the energy sector, it was said, cutting back on coal and oil would take jobs away from miners and refiners.
Since that argument was first promulgated, however, an ironic shift has occurred. In the coal and oil businesses, massive job losses-counted in the hundreds of thousands-have occurred in the past decade without their having been driven by environmental regulation and despite the continuing preferential subsidies they have received. Meanwhile, wind power is beginning to benefit from technological advances that will diminish its historic disadvantages of not being subject to transport and storage. Wind is now poised to compete economically with coal and oil on even terms in many places-and to do so not only with the advantage of being environmentally benign, but with the important added advantage of providing more jobs per unit of cost than the fossil-fuel industries it now challenges.
Wanted, To Run With the Wind
It was only in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s that interest in wind turbines revived after more than half a century of dormancy, setting the stage for the emergence of a whole new, futuristic tech wind energy sector. It took a decade or so to take hold, but since the beginning of the 1990s, the new sector has been growing at a breathtaking rate. Worldwide installed generating capacity grew from about 2,000 megawatts in 1990 to 15,000 megawatts by mid-2000, an average growth rate of 24 percent per year. That's still tiny in absolute terms, but it's comparable to the position automobiles were in a century ago. And the prospects for continued expansion are good. Electricity from the wind is now rapidly closing the price gap with conventional power plants. In October 1999, the European Wind Energy Association, the Forum for Energy and Development, and Greenpeace International jointly released a study, Windforce 10, that contends that wind energy could meet 10 percent of the world's electricity demand by the year 2020. Under their scenario, installed capacity would grow to 1,200 gigawatts (1.2 million megawatts).
Windforce 10, in its assessment of the number of jobs that might be generated over the next two decades, concludes that 17 job-years of employment are being created for every megawatt of wind energy capacity manufactured and an additional five job-years for every megawatt installed, or a total of 22 job-years per megawatt. As labor productivity rises, the per-megawatt job figures are expected to gradually decrease to 15.5 by 2010 and 12.3 by 2020.
Assuming these ratios hold, the study projected that total wind power employment will climb from something under 100,000 jobs today to almost 2 million over the next two decades, with most of the growth occurring in Europe, North America, and China.
This growth includes the "direct" jobs of manufacturing and installing wind turbines, as well as the "indirect" jobs in supplier industries. It does not include any jobs that may be produced by the still embryonic off-shore wind industry. Nor, significantly, does it include the work of maintaining wind installations once they are built.
Offshore installations, which would be placed in relatively shallow waters somewhat like offshore oil rigs, were not included in the Windforce study. But they are expected to play a growing role in coming years, particularly in Europe. A study released by the German Wind Energy Institute and Greenpeace in October 2000 ("North Sea Offshore Wind-A European Powerhouse") concludes that five North Sea countries-Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark-have the potential to generate almost 2,000 terawatt hours of electricity per year from offshore wind, an amount that is more than triple their current combined demand for power. Tapping just one percent of this wind source in a year would provide electricity for 6.5 million homes and could employ 160,000 persons, according to Greenpeace.
Additional employment is generated through operating and maintaining wind turbines, though reliable numbers are unavailable. The European Wind Energy Association estimates that between 100 and 450 people are employed per year for every _terawatt-hour of electricity produced, depending on the age and type of turbine used. In 1999, when about 29 terawatt-hours were generated, that would have meant anywhere from 3,000 to 13,000 _additional jobs worldwide. As wind power capacity expands, obviously so will these numbers. Even at the lower end of this range, there may be some 3 million jobs in running and maintaining the world's wind energy turbines by the year 2020, if the Windforce 10 projections hold up.
What Kinds of Jobs?
Wind power development opens up employment opportunities in a variety of fields. It requires meteorologists and surveyors to rate appropriate sites (to ensure that the areas with the greatest wind potential are selected); people trained in anemometry (measuring the force, speed, and direction of the wind); structural, electrical, and mechanical engineers to design turbines, generators, and other equipment and to supervise their assembly; workers to form advanced composite and metal parts; quality control personnel to monitor machining, casting, and forging processes; computer operators and software specialists to monitor the system, and mechanics and technicians to keep it in good working order. Many of these are highly skilled positions with good pay.
The lion's share of the world's wind power-generating capacity has been installed in Western Europe, and European companies are the leading manufacturers of wind turbines (accounting for about 90 percent of worldwide sales in 1997), so most of the world's wind power-related jobs are being generated there. In the United States, now the second-leading force in wind power, capacity is expected to almost double by the end of 2001.
As other regions with high wind power potential gear up, the picture will gradually change. India and China, especially, have the meteorological potential to greatly increase wind power production and employment. With roughly 1,000 megawatts of capacity, India is already among the five leading wind power nations. It currently has 14 domestic turbine manufacturers, and spare parts production and turbine maintenance are helping some of its regions and villages to generate needed income and employment.
Other developing countries, too, are showing rising interest. Although they currently have little wind generating capacity installed, wind companies in Argentina hope to create 15,000 permanent jobs over the next decade. Latin American and East European nations are able to manufacture nearly all needed components within their own regions. Imports will be needed for at least a portion of new installations in Asia, and for the bulk of installations in the Middle East and Africa.
Fossil Fuel Jobs-A Disappearing Act
The traditional energy sector, with its many millions of jobs once providing a large part of the industrial world's employment, is now a shrinking source of employment, even though the overall production of fossil fuels is still creeping upward. World coal output began stagnating in the mid-1980s, and the industry has become one of bigger and fewer companies, larger equipment, and less and less need for labor. In Europe, employment in this field has dropped particularly fast, since production is being driven down both by coal imports and by a shift to other sources of energy. During the past two decades, British coal employment has collapsed from 224,000 to just 10,000 miners, the result of mine closures and aggressive automation at remaining sites. About 50,000 jobs were lost in Germany during the 1990s. Even though the German coal industry continues to receive massive subsidies-with some $20 billion allocated for the 2000-2005 period alone-its cuts in employment are expected to continue.
China, which produces more coal than any other nation, has undertaken to deliberately cut its coal output by 20 percent over the next several years, in order to bring production more in line with declining demand, reduce pollution, and bring down the human toll of mining. (At least 10,000 people die in Chinese coal mines each year-80 percent of the global number of victims-and increasingly, these jobs are scorned by all but the most desperate workers.) To this end, China has reduced its subsidies to coal production, with the result that some 870,000 coal industry jobs have been cut since 1994 and another 400,000 workers are expected to be laid off.
In the United States, coal production increased 32 percent between 1980 and 1999, but coal-mining employment nevertheless declined 66 percent, from 242,000 to 83,000 workers. One reason is that production has shifted from more labor-intensive underground mines in the eastern United States to surface mines in the West. Ton for ton, strip-mining employs only about one-third to one-half the number of workers required in underground mines. Environmental considerations played a role in this shift, insofar as efforts to combat acid rain have led to a greater preference for lower-sulfur coal, and western coal is lower in sulfur content than eastern coal. Employment is expected to fall by another 36,000 workers between 1995 and 2020, even in the absence of any measures to address the threat of climate change.
Similar trends can be seen in other parts of the energy and utility industries, as increasing mechanization and automation have cut jobs even as output rises. In the United States, more than half of all oil and gas production jobs were lost between 1980 and 1999; during the same period of time, almost 40 percent of oil-refining jobs were cut. Today, petroleum refining and wholesale distribution accounts only for 0.3 percent of all U.S. employment. In EU countries, more than 150,000 utility and gas industry jobs have disappeared since the mid-1990s and another 200,000 jobs-one in five-are likely to be lost by 2004, as the new market liberalization program proceeds. In Germany alone, 60,000 utility sector jobs-one quarter of the total-were eliminated between 1990 and 1998.
The Labor Productivity Issue
Wind power is more labor-intensive than either coal- or nuclear-generated electricity. In Germany, currently the world leader with roughly 5,000 megawatts (roughly one-third of global capacity) installed, wind still contributes just 2 to 3 percent of the country's total electricity generation, while supporting about 35,000 jobs in manufacturing, installing, and operating wind machines. In comparison, nuclear power commands 33 percent of the electricity market, but supports a relatively meager 38,000 jobs; coal-fired power plants have a 26 percent market share and account for some 80,000 jobs.
Judging by the way the business press routinely describes companies that employ fewer people for a given level of output as "lean" or "efficient," the high number of jobs in wind energy may seem to suggest that wind is a less economically efficient way of producing electricity. In today's globalizing economy, companies seem ever more intent on boosting labor productivity-the amount of goods and services produced per worker-and slashing labor costs as a means to stay competitive. Because wages and benefits are a major part of the cost of most businesses, the pursuit of greater labor productivity is an omnipresent concern.
In principle, however, a given industry-such as wind power-can become profitable while still remaining relatively more labor-intensive, by achieving superior efficiency in other major categories of cost-in its requirements for capital, materials, and energy. Unfortunately, in the calculus of most business executives, improving energy or materials productivity is given short shrift compared with improving labor productivity (or laying off employees). A key reason for this is that energy and materials appear to be cheaper than they really are, and therefore offer less incentive for pursuing increased efficiencies, because their production and use are subsidized and their environmental costs are "externalized"-meaning that those costs are not accounted for on a company's balance sheet. One of the costs of coal power, for example, is the acid rain that drifts over the eastern United States from Midwestern power plants and kills countless trees along the Appalachian Mountains. Because the power plants don't have to pay to restore those damaged forests, they have less incentive (than would be the case if the costs of restoration were included) to improve the efficiency of their fuel use than to cut the cost of their labor.
As industrial societies that pervasively allow such damage, not only to ecosystems but to human health and climate stability, we are deluding ourselves not only by not including the cost of such damage in assessing the overall productivity of a business, but also in thinking that by simply running the business with fewer workers we are truly being efficient in our ways. A society that widely exploits such accounting is not much different than those societies that wage repressive campaigns against workers and labor unions in order to keep wages low and the country's products "competitive."
The real news about wind-generated electricity is that it can be competitive-and can generate income that is not ill-gotten through overlooking human or environmental costs-even though it employs a comparatively larger number of people than a coal-fired plant. Unlike a conventional power plant, a wind turbine does not have to purchase fuel inputs, whether they be coal, oil, natural gas, or enriched uranium. At a wind power plant, the energy input comes for free. Wind power plants are less capital-intensive, as well: they require less investment in buildings and machinery than conventional power plants do. And, there are no worries about toxic mine tailings, radioactive wastes, and other problems or costs associated with fossil and nuclear energy.
The Wider Picture
Some widely quoted critics of the Kyoto climate treaty-some of them working for think tanks quietly funded by fossil fuel industries (see "Matters of Scale," page 21)-have declared that actions taken to substantially reduce carbon emissions would be terribly disruptive to the industrial economy. Their rhetoric echoes that of certain critics of U.S. policies aimed at saving Northwest rainforests, a decade ago, who displayed bumper stickers reading "Save a logger-kill an owl." Yet, just as environmental protection in Oregon and Washington have not brought the feared ravages of unemployment, it is now clear that environmental policies pose little threat to jobs in general-and that, in fact, the wind industry is far from alone in demonstrating that moving toward _a more sustainable economy will bring abundant new jobs to replace the old. Wind power has been the fastest growing among alternative sources of energy, but others, such as solar photovoltaics and solar thermal energy, also have the potential to engage a growing portion of the public in meaningful and remunerative work. Additional opportunities will be found in the pursuit of such energy efficiency measures as retrofitting buildings to boost their thermal insulation.
The benefits to be gained by such shifts-the "double dividend" of a more protected environment and more jobs-will not just be one-to-one substitutions of beneficial investment dollars for destructive ones. The energy sector is a small employer relative to the size of the overall economy, yet it exerts enormous leverage because such large quantities of capital-much of it in the form of public subsidies for nuclear, oil, and coal-are bound up in it. Withdrawing some of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been propping up these obsolescent industries could free up capital to invest in a wide range of more sustainable industries-not only the wind industry discussed here, but a phalanx of new enterprises aimed at achieving greater materials/energy efficiency and pollution prevention. These enterprises might include greatly ramped-up recycling and remanufacturing, as well as designing and redesigning of products (and of buildings, communities, and whole economies) to put greater emphasis on durability, repairability, and reusability. Like wind power, many of these new industries are still quite small, but with the right kinds of subsidy, tax, and research policies-they can be scaled up significantly. It is becoming clear that making it possible for people to work productively does not have to depend on destabilizing the natural world.
Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and author of Worldwatch Paper 152, Working for the Environment: A Growing Source of Jobs.


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New Research Shows Permanent Gene Changes
Photo credit: Maria Teijeiro/OJO Images/Getty Images
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a report that outlines the effects a woman's diet has on her baby. And we're not talking about her pregnancy diet, as you might expect. No, we're talking about her pre-pregnancy diet. Apparently what a mother eats (or lacks nutritionally) before she conceives a baby can permanently alter her child's genes.
Nutrition during conception
Once you find out you're expecting, your diet usually changes. Sometimes it's due to aversions and cravings, but most pregnant moms try to eat a healthier diet. However, it turns out that what your nutrition status is like right around conception can play a big part in your baby's genetic makeup.
The team studied six genes and what can cause them to turn on or off, focusing on specific nutritional components, such as B vitamins, and what their effects are on those genes. The switch for turning genes on or off is controlled by methylation, and they discovered that in women whose blood levels of these particular nutrients were low, these genes had less methylation.
Even more notable, they found that the levels weren't out of normal range — they were just lower than the cases where there was more methylation on the genes. They also found that the higher a woman's BMI at the time of conception, the less methylation was present, and again, the women's weights weren't out of range.
In essence, they found that there were just a few subtle differences that make permanent changes in genes. The team did not study how this affected fetal development, nor the child's health as he grew up.
Translating into the real world
This research is fascinating. We all know that experts suggest getting to your optimal weight before pregnancy, and beginning a quality diet way before you are told to at your first appointment is a sound idea. However, pregnancy doesn't always happen when we expect it to. The point to take away, then, is to eat a healthy, balanced diet and strive for your ideal weight whether pregnancy is on the horizon or not.
More on pregnancy health
8 Expert tips for healthy pregnancy nutrition
Want a fit pregnancy? Try Prenatal Dance
How to quit smoking while pregnant


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You will receive your files in a digital download. No physical product will be shipped to you. Due to the nature of this product, no refunds will be given.
Pricing includes a Small Business Commercial Use license. You may use this set to create physical products that you make with your hands (shirts, cups, decals using HTV, Permanent Vinyl, or other crafting material you can cut with your Silhouette Cameo or Cricut Die Cutting machines) or use the PNG extension as clip art in digital designs like invitations. If you have any questions on what kinds of physical products or digital products you could use these on please feel free to send me an email firstname.lastname@example.com
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Health Benefits
Home Healthcare
Home Health Care includes VA's Skilled Home Health Care Services (SHHC) and Homemaker and Home Health Aide Services (H/HHA).
Skilled Home Health Care (SHHC) Services
SHHC is short-term health care services that can be provided to Veterans if they are homebound or live far away from VA. The care is delivered by a community-based home health agency that has a contract with VA. SHHC is for Veterans who need skilled services, case management, and assistance with activities of daily living (e.g., bathing and getting dressed) or instrumental activities of daily living (e.g., fixing meals and taking medicines); are isolated or their caregiver is experiencing burden.
Homemaker/Home Health Aide (H/HHA) Services
The services of a Homemaker or Home Health Aide can help Veterans remain living in their own home and can serve Veterans of any age. A Homemaker or Home Health Aide can be used as a part of an alternative to nursing home care, and as a way to get Respite Care at home for Veterans and their family caregiver.
VA's Family Caregivers Program provides support and assistance to caregivers of post 9/11 Veterans and Service Members being medically discharged. Eligible primary Family Caregivers can receive a stipend, training, mental health services, travel and lodging reimbursement, and access to health insurance if they are not already under a health care plan. For more information, contact your local VA medical facility and speak with a Caregiver Support Coordinator, visit www.caregiver.va.gov or dial toll-free 1-877-222-VETS (8387).
Home Telehealth
Home Telehealth, also known as Care Coordination/Home Telehealth, is a service that allows the Veteran's physician or nurse to monitor the Veteran's medical condition remotely using home monitoring equipment.
Veterans can be referred to a care coordinator for Home Telehealth services by any member of their care team.
When approved for Home Telehealth, specialized equipment in the Veteran's home will provide the care coordinator with the Veteran's health information. The care coordinator will check in with the Veteran by phone, if needed. If any of the Veteran's health measurements do not seem normal, the care coordinator talks with their physician or nurse and then gets back to the Veteran with next steps.


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Are Your Customers (and Prospects) Talking About You? (Part 2)
Yesterday, I shared information on how to get started with social media listening, what to listen for, and the types of information you can gain from listening. Now that you have an idea of what your customers and prospects are saying, what are you going to do with all of that information?
Well, that's when the good stuff happens! The insights you'll get from social listening will help you:
- Build your social media marketing strategy – you'll have more insights about your audience, who exactly is participating in social media, in which social channels the conversations are happening, how frequently and actively are they posting, and what they are talking about.
- Have a dialogue with customers and prospects – you want to do this carefully, thoughtfully, person-to-person, and with a customer-service mentality, but participating in social media conversations gives you the chance to thank fans, find prospects, help those with problems or questions, discover problem areas you might otherwise have missed, and build better relationships with your community.
- Share what you learn with the rest of your organization – product feedback will be useful to your support and development teams, lead opportunities will get sales excited, your executives will want to hear about emerging trends and what kinds of business problems customers are looking for technology to solve, and marketing can see the traction that offers and marketing campaigns are getting.
As an example, here's a situation where we were getting feedback via social listening from customers about challenges with firmware downloads. We responded to this disgruntled person (who clearly was appreciative of our efforts), but it also led us to put a temporary fix in place to make the experience easier while we worked on the longer-term solution.
Here at Cisco, we have a central Social Media Listening Center where we are continually tracking mentions of the company, key technology areas and events. It functions as a command center to route questions, issues or even potential leads to various teams across Cisco (many of whom are also doing their own 'deep-live' listening work for their specific area of expertise). We also can launch listening centers for special events, including our recent listening center in London for the 2012 Olympics.
We're also eager to share some of our social listening highlights with you, our partners! Each month, we'll be posting a summary of what we are hearing from our Social Media Listening Center in our partner community (requires CCO login) so that you can see what Cisco technologies are being talked about the most, where in the world the mentions are originating from, if the conversations are positive or negative, and what key messages are resonating the most on the social web for that month. We hope it's useful to you as you are doing marketing planning, watching for key trends, and building your own social listening strategy!
Are you doing social listening? We'd love to hear more about what you are hearing on the social web. And tell us if these Cisco social media listening reports are useful to your business!
In an effort to keep conversations fresh, Cisco Blogs closes comments after 60 days. Please visit the Cisco Blogs hub page for the latest content.
1 Comments
Prasad Pingali
You can also try out veooz.com . You get to see not only the buzz, sentiment trends, but also who are the influential people talking about you.


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I have long frequented Hudson, my most favorite home shop in Boston, not only for myself and my clients. Jill Goldberg, the shop's owner and interior designer, has THE most impeccable taste. Her store installations, changed seasonally, are always so perfectly spot on I end up leaving a visit to the shop with lots of ideas and desires for my own space. So when they asked to become an EOS sponsor I was super thrilled, a more natural fit than this I cannot think of! Here are some shot of the store's spring look…
And here are some of my current favorites in the shop (you can shop online as well, but if and when you are in Boston's South End you NEED to go!)
1. // 2. // 3. // 4. // 5. // 6. // 7. // 8. // 9. // 10. // 11. // 12. // 13.
I also saw these new pillows on their Instagram and LOOOOOOOVE them. The gold zipper detail is perfection, no?


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If there were one word to encapsulate the life of George Frost Kennan, it would be "conflicted." Starting with his youth in Milwaukee in the first decades of the 20th century, and throughout a career that stretched from a foreign service position with the Coolidge administration, on through to the latter years of the Reagan presidency (when the president, as biographer John Lewis Gaddis laments, "had little need of Kennan"), Kennan was often conflicted in his world view, though indeed ahead of his time – in his thoughts, actions, and policy positions.
Gaddis, a Cold War scholar at Yale University and prize-winning author of several books on the subject, has provided an important, if not indispensable biography of Kennan in George F. Kennan: An American Life. Kennan was a figure alternately admired and reviled, but he was nonetheless an influential foreign serviceman, ambassador to both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and a foreign policy strategist. In this context, it is not an overstatement to say that Kennan – through the formulation of his Cold War "Containment" strategy, his role as an architect of the post-World War II "Marshall Plan", and his passionate opposition to "McCarthyism" – was a central figure of the 20th century who alternately mirrored and molded our modern American way of life.
Gaddis's account is refreshing in the sense that his interpretation of Kennan, his personality and beliefs, and his writings, is seemingly free of the ideological taint, sophistry, and hagiography that has so invaded political discussion in this early part of the new millennium. It is a very frank and open account. Gaddis undertook this project 30 years ago at the request of Kennan himself, with the provision that it not be published until after his passing. Within this tome's nearly 1,000 pages, Gaddis has provided an extraordinary portrait of Kennan, which includes not only a wide range of Kennan's views on political topics, but also throws light on his internal struggles and confessions about such deeply personal topics as morality and mortality, sex, loneliness, depression, and many others. Kennan does not hold back and Gaddis is both very faithful and fair to his subject.
In the earlier pages, Gaddis speaks about his methodology and his own philosophy about writing biography. In one instance, Gaddis discusses views of Kennan that could be viewed today as anti-Semitic. "Biographers have an obligation … to place their subjects within the period in which they lived: it is unfair to condemn them for not knowing what no one at the time could have known." That sense of obligation extends to other characterizations of Kennan as well. Although Gaddis notes instances of solipsism and self-indulgence – seasoned with occasional histrionics – in Kennan's writing, Gaddis also makes clear that Kennan was likewise possessed of a powerful intellect, disciplined rectitude, and a remarkable prescience that produced, among other documents, the so-called "Long Telegram" – a dispatch Kennan sent to soon-to-be US Atomic Energy Chairman David E. Lilienthal from Moscow in March of 1946. This was the single most important document that formulated America's post-war Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union.
Born in 1904, Kennan, the son of Kossuth Kent Kennan, a successful Wisconsin tax attorney (his mother, Florence James Kennan, died when George was an infant), the young boy grew up in comparative privilege. He spent endless hours in his father's library, "preferring the company of books to those of grown-ups." And though there were many happy times spent with his mother's families, the Frosts and the James, the Kennans, George believed, shared a certain darker temperament. He later wrote they lacked the capacity for "gaiety, phantasy, humor, the courage to be honest with yourself, and the self-discipline to learn to sin gracefully and with dignity, rather than to try unsuccessfully not to sin at all." He added that they passed along neuroses "like the family Bible."
Having "scraped by" his college entrance examinations, Kennan enrolled at Princeton in 1921. By all accounts, he was "healthy, handsome and clever." But he later described his initial experience there in terms worthy of Dickens: "I knew not a soul in college or town. I was given the last furnished room in the most remote of those gloomy rooming houses far off campus to which, at the time, late-coming freshmen were relegated.… Princeton was for me not exactly the sort of experience reflected in 'This Side of Paradise.' " He says he lived in penury, but eventually managed to have fun – enjoying relatively innocent pranks, going to proms, visiting his sister in New York City, and joining the Key and Seal, one of the school's numerous and distinctive "eating clubs." In June, 1924, he and a Princeton classmate traveled on a shoestring to Europe, and some of the more stressful moments of the trip prompted a habit Kennan would carry with him throughout his life: writing poems.
After Princeton, Kennan went to work as a Foreign Service officer in the State Department. He traveled widely in Eastern Europe, and in 1929 was ordered to move to Berlin, where he was to commence Russian language and history studies. By 1931, these studies led him to adopt a hard-edged ideology: Communists, he asserted, combined "innate cowardice" and "intellectual insolence." He then took aim at American liberals, "who now find the Soviets so pleasant, [but] will be the first ones to be crushed in the clash." That same year, Kennan met and married Anna Elisabeth "Annalise" Sørensen, who had come to Berlin from Norway "ostensibly to learn German."
Gaddis attempts to explain, in diction reminiscent of a geometry lecture, how Kennan's character exuded a "triangular" nature – with its three points comprising "professionalism" (as one of the best young Russian specialists), "cultural pessimism" (a doubt whether Western civilization could survive challenges from external adversaries), and "personal anguish" (how would a man tormented by self-doubt fit into all of this?) Gaddis's separate contention that Kennan often contradicted himself would seem to bolster this analysis. Kennan managed to chronicle some those self-doubts and other melancholy observations in diary entries that Gaddis meticulously recounts.
During 1933, Kennan was asked to set up the American Embassy Moscow, an experience which cemented a lifelong interest in Russia, where Kennan's own ancestor, also named George Kennan, had lived and written half a century earlier. His return to the US in 1936 left him with doubts about his country and the merits of capitalism which would remain with him his entire life.
These doubts led him to write his sister Jeanette, "I hate the rough and tumble of our political life.… I hate democracy; I hate the press.…; I hate the 'peepul;' I have clearly become un-American." In this sense, he despised the way that unbridled capitalism eroded communities and degraded the environment, and how politics bowed to the pressures of private interests. This was compounded by his "striking lack of faith" in the health and durability of democratic institutions. It was a startling about-face from his post-Princeton period and represented one of a number of instances where he would match his "obtuseness regarding America and his astuteness with respect to the world." Kennan would exhibit the same tendency in 1938 while at the embassy in Czechoslovakia. In his "Perquisites" essay, he had expressed a "simpleminded" view that a dictatorship might be good for the United States. As Gaddis notes, "he understood how it had happened in Germany and refused to rule out the possibility that American reserves of decency and good nature were not inexhaustible."
On the rise of Hitler and on Kennan's inability to anticipate the rise of the Nazis, he said that "perhaps those of us who served in Moscow were not quick enough to understand the whole Nazi phenomenon, because we couldn't imagine that there could be any regime as nasty as the one with which we were confronted." For instance, he wrote Annelise in October, 1941, about the Nazi requirement that Jews wear yellow stars: "That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts – nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them."
Appointed by President Truman as the Director of the State Department's US Policy Planning Staff in May of 1947, Kennan oversaw the drafting of policy proposals that materially altered US international relations on a number of fronts. In 1948, he successfully counseled against the advice of Dean Rusk, then Director of the State Department's Office of United Nations Affairs, who had advocated "partitioning" in the case of Palestine, for which the British government had recently ceded authority. Next, Kennan worked closely with Secretary of State George Marshall in the development and implementation of the European Recovery Program – more commonly known as the "Marshall Plan," which was instrumental in aiding Europe to heal from the ravages of World War II.
But arguably the central contribution Kennan made to statecraft was the formulation of what was to become known as the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Kennan appreciated Carl von Clauswitz's belief that "War is the continuation of policy by other means" – that you can, in fact, have a war without bloodshed. Greece and Turkey were deemed as likely to fall to Soviet hegemony if they did not receive sufficient levels of American financial and military aid. Kennan's analysis and President Truman's endorsement of this strategy reflected a seismic shift in US-Soviet relations. Where previously a strategy of "détente", or a loosening of tensions, was the prevailing orthodoxy, the Truman Doctrine established a policy of "containment"; that is, the restricting of Soviet expansion wherever it occurred in the world. It was the beginning of the Cold War.
In the process of developing this strategy, Kennan composed two seminal documents that have achieved nothing less than mythical status in the annals of diplomacy. The "Long Telegram" of 1946 was critical because it outlined concisely the expansionist intent of Soviet leader Josef Stalin and that the influence of the Soviet Union needed to be "contained". Secondly, in July of 1947, an article entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine under the pseudonym "X." That article expanded upon the central points of the "Long Telegram" and postulated that Stalin was determined to use Marxist-Leninist ideology to basically "encircle" capitalism on a global scale. Eventually, Kennan was identified as the author of the article, and though Kennan would always insist that it was not to be considered boilerplate administration policy, the immediate and passionate reactions it elicited gave it that aura.
In 1948, Kennan asserted that Japan was the "anchor" of the East Asian component of his containment strategy. But one of the main impediments to activating it would lie with the Allied Supreme Commander in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Gaddis writes amusingly of MacArthur's "shogun-like remoteness" that compounded his alternate lack of interest in and ignorance of Europe, the Soviet Union, or for deferring to Washington generally. Kennan viewed him as "a major impediment to success" by establishing policies "designed for the purpose of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to … a communist takeover." The secretiveness of MacArthur's regime made it seem like Kennan was negotiating with "a suspicious foreign government" and added to Kennan's view that "the general was a universalist in need of tethering."
Kennan successfully managed to diffuse MacArthur by suggesting that the Far Eastern Commission, the international body that oversaw the occupation (and which inconveniently included the Soviet Union), would have to have its responsibilities curtailed, if not eventually eliminated – and that MacArthur would "remain in charge." Eventually, the Marshall Plan-like package of reforms recommended by Kennan (and approved by Truman) became known as "Reverse Course" (with MacArthur's authority sustaining much of the reversal).
During the last years of the Truman administration, Kennan, who had since relinquished his position as Policy Planning Staff Director to Paul Nitze, was asked, along with Nitze, to prepare a report on Secretary of State Dean Acheson's proposal of a "super" moratorium on atomic weapons. A special NSC committee had been formed, including Acheson, David Lilienthal, and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, to advise President Truman on the matter. Kennan's paper, entitled "The International Control of Atomic Energy" was, in Kennan's view, "one of the most important, if not the most important of all the documents I ever wrote in government." But Kennan's "prophetic" paper – 30 times the length of Nitze's "crisp," two-minute read – wasn't considered relevant, though it would inform strategic debates on nuclear weapons for much of the 1970s and 80s.
In 1950, at the behest of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who had been recently appointed head of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Kennan was asked to join the Institute. Kennan spent several happy and productive decades there, but joining it was, if nothing else, fortuitous. On January 16, 1953, as President Eisenhower's ambassador for Moscow, Kennan had angered secretary of state John Foster Dulles while speaking before the Pennsylvania State Bar Association, in which he openly criticized Dulles' foreign policy positions as "dangerous." Kennan later received word that Charles E. Bohlen was replacing him in Moscow and that no future appointment was coming. It was one of many instances where Kennan's bombastic rhetoric would get him into trouble. Afterward, Kennan, still smarting from that episode, was living with Annalise in Adams County, Pennsylvania (near Gettysburg, where President Eisenhower had his own home), and briefly but seriously considered running for congress.
But another unfortunate mark on Kennan's reputation occurred during the hearings of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. The country was awash in the so-called "Red Scare," and McCarthy's witch hunt had already taken a devastating toll on two of Kennan's former colleagues: Robert Oppenheimer and former Foreign Service officer John Paton Davies. Though Kennan himself escaped inquiry, he confessed that while being interviewed by Oppenheimer investigators, he reported on others on "one or two occasions," but only in the case of "minor employees."
In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Kennan ambassador to Yugoslavia, which pleased Kennan. He was familiar with the people, and found the Yugoslavian leader, Josip Broz (Marshal) Tito extraordinarily accessible. Kennan showed his deftness at this post, navigating among the president, who read Kennan's report with interest; secretary of state Dean Rusk who was doing his best to undermine Kennan's standing with the Yugoslavs; Congressman Wilbur Mills, who with Senator William Proxmire sought to end Yugoslavia's "Most Favored Nation" status because of Tito's leftward lurch, and the Yugoslav people themselves. It was quite a delicate negotiation, which Kennan eventually lost, and he found himself "totally discouraged, feeling defeated as I have not felt since 1953." He resigned his ambassadorship on May 17, 1963, but he and President Kennedy enjoyed a warm and mutual admiration. After Kennan's last official duty – paving the way for Tito's visit to the United States – was accomplished, Kennedy said to him, "George, I hope you'll keep on talking."
By the time Lyndon Johnson's first full term as president began in 1965, US involvement in Vietnam was deepening, and Kennan's misgivings about it were growing. During the Kennedy years, Kennan had supported the so-called "Domino Theory" concerning the spread of communism in the region. But by March of 1965, he was expressing anguish "about what our people are doing in southeast Asia. It seems to me that they [the Johnson administration] have taken leave of their senses." Writing to friend and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Kennan painted a darker vision of the US's folly – particularly as it distracted from the importance of exploiting the Sino-Soviet differences – stating his fear that Washington had lost "almost all flexibility of choice not only in that particular area but in our approach to the communist world generally."
Kennan's open criticism of Johnson's strategy appeared in the Washington Post on December 12, 1965, and resulted in his appearing before hearings Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright had convened on Johnson's decision to continue bombing North Vietnam. In the weeks following Kennan's testimony, one poll showed Johnson's approval rating on Vietnam falling from 65 to 49%. Once again, Kennan presciently understood and articulated the implications of a prolonged incursion.
With the advent of the Nixon administration, George Kennan struck up a friendship with Henry Kissinger who initially served as Nixon's National Security Adviser, but by 1973 was appointed Secretary of State. Kennan took a harder line on Moscow, praising Solzhenitsyn's novel "Gulag Archipelago" as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times." Gaddis believes that this more confrontational shift in Kennan's thinking was due in part to Kennan's regard for Kissinger. And by the time Gerald Ford had become president – following Richard Nixon's resignation in August of 1974 – Kennan was openly defending Kissinger against antagonists like Washington senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who Kennan rightly understood as wanting to "dismantle détente": "Henry's [Kissinger] is a fine person, and I think very highly of him ... [but] with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment."
In September of 1976, just prior to the election of President Jimmy Carter, Kennan gave a controversial interview – spanning 33 pages – to Encounter magazine. It was as startling, curious, fatalistic, and contradictory as anything he'd said before or since. First, he said that the United States "is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic or enormous in their scope" – arising from industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, secularization and environmental degradation. And by saying that these problems would necessitate a downscaling of American foreign policy, he made himself sound like an isolationist. The magazine asked, "Wouldn't that consign European allies to Soviet domination?" Kennan replied that perhaps they deserved it, becoming too self-indulgent under American protection. Quite remarkably, he asserted that compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of nuclear war, Soviet domination of Western Europe would only be a "minor catastrophe."
Kennan then suggested capriciously that since there could be no recovery from nuclear war, the US should seek to eliminate nuclear weapons – if necessary, unilaterally. Gaddis writes, without compunction, that "This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense ... given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again." All of this caused Nitze to declare, "He's on their side." This wasn't an unusual reaction for Nitze; as Gaddis writes, both he and Kennan were convinced "that the other's desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe." After all, their personal friendship and professional animus was well known.
After Carter's election, Nitze formed a bipartisan "Committee on the Present Danger" to consolidate antagonism toward detente. Kennan, in turn, criticized the Committee "at length and with care"; but, as Gaddis notes, Kennan's "Memoirs" had shown that Kennan had serious inner conflicts "about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture ... which has brought him perilously close to preaching that we don't really need a foreign and defense policy at all." Not only this, but his suggestion about unilateral disarmament caused even the Kremlin to laugh at "your political wizards" – a lightly veiled jab at Kennan.
In this context, Gaddis notes tellingly that one of the more striking of Kennan's characteristics as a diplomat, strategist, and policy planner was his inability to separate his professional duties from his moods. "I have the habit … of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself so that I appear to be inconsistent." But the opening of the Cold War archive after the fall of the Soviet Union, in Gaddis's words, showed that "Kennan's impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze's calculation of a purposefully rising hegemon."
During heightened tensions between America and the Soviets in the second year of the Reagan presidency, Kennan wondered how Reagan, an "apparent lightweight" with regard to Soviet and nuclear weapons strategies could embrace views that had once mirrored his own: that one could not reconcile Christianity with US/USSR politics of "moral equivalency," and also that nuclear weapons could be rendered "impotent and obsolete." The explanation, Gaddis states, was that Kennan "allowed sensitivity to style and susceptibility to emotion to cloud his judgment."
Kennan, in a May 1982 address, referred to the administration's Soviet stance, including adherence to MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) as well as Reagan's capricious statement that the Soviet Union was "the focus of evil in the modern world," as "simply childish, needlessly childish, unworthy of people charged with the responsibility of conducting the affairs of a great power in an endangered world." Kennan trusted Soviet leader Yuri Andropov more than he did Reagan. But just a year later, and interestingly, if not ironically, Reagan sent to Kennan what amounted to an apology for the hard line he'd adopted earlier against the Soviets. And Secretary of State (and fellow Princetonian) George Shultz later sought Kennan's counsel on the continuing negotiations.
In later years, though he occasionally and dourly opined that he was being used as a "human monument" for political ends, Kennan appreciated the fact that President Bill Clinton, who had read and admired his texts, wanted to approach him. Clinton requested that Kennan to come with him to Moscow in 1995 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II; but Kennan's health, along with an increasing self-consciousness about inconveniencing others, caused him to decline. It was to be the last time he would have such an opportunity. He passed away, at 101, in 2005.
Gaddis's monumental achievement in "George F. Kennan: An American Life" is the way he brings out not only the scholar in Kennan, but also the human being behind the scholarship – complete with all the frailties that informed it. Gaddis's biography offers perspective and context in which to understand the complex being that was Kennan, a man who struggled all his life with bouts of inner conflict.
But it's also heartening to know that this humane and decent man of conscience was at the forefront of US foreign policy for as long as he was.
Christopher Hartman is the author of "Advance Man: The Life and Times of Harry Hoagland."