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- About
- Programs
- Resources
- Briefing Room
- Contact
In the broadest sense, a GARVEE is a type of anticipation vehicle, which are securities (debt instruments) issued when moneys are anticipated from a specific source to advance the upfront funding of a particular need. In the case of transportation finance the anticipation vehicles' revenue source is expected Federal-aid grants.
Specific to highways, a GARVEE is used as a term for a debt instrument that has a pledge of future Title 23 Federal-aid funding. Significantly, it is authorized for Federal reimbursement of debt service and related financing costs. States can thus receive Federal-aid reimbursements for a wide array of debt-related costs incurred in connection with an eligible debt financing instrument, such as a bond, note, certificate, mortgage, or lease; the proceeds of which are used to fund a project eligible for assistance under Title 23. Each of these instruments is considered a GARVEE when backed by future Federal-aid highway funding, but most frequently, a bond is the debt instrument used. Specifically, as stated in Section 122 of Title 23, debt financing instrument-related costs eligible for Federal-aid reimbursement include interest payments, retirement of principal, and any other cost incidental to the sale of an eligible debt issue. The issuer may be a state, political subdivision, or a public authority.
GARVEEs enable a state to accelerate construction timelines and spread the cost of a transportation facility over its useful life rather than just the construction period. The use of GARVEEs expands access to capital markets as an alternative or in addition to potential general obligation or revenue bonding capabilities. The upfront monetization benefit of these techniques needs to be weighed against consuming a portion of future years' receivables to pay debt service. This approach is appropriate for large, long-lived, non-revenue generating assets.
The use of advance construction and partial conversion of advance construction facilitates state issuances of GARVEEs. GARVEEs are used in conjunction with advance construction to enable using Federal-aid funds for future debt service payments. Prior to the NHS Act in 1995 that introduced GARVEEs, it would have been necessary to obligate the Federal share of debt service payments within the bounds of obligation authority available during the current authorization period. With the changes brought about by the NHS Act, it became possible to obligate Federal funds for debt service expenses over a longer period bond to fund a Federal-aid eligible project and annually convert the Federal share of the debt service payment as a reimbursable cost through the partial conversion of advance construction.
Under the general concept of anticipation vehicles, transit agencies also use similar mechanisms to borrow against future Federal-aid funds (Federal Transit Administration Title 49 grants) that are allocated by formula (Section 5307) or by project (Section 5309). These transit debt mechanisms are known as Grant Anticipation Notes (GANs), but are not officially termed GARVEEs because they utilize Federal-aid funding under Title 49, not Title 23, and do not include debt-related financing costs such as interest and issuance costs. Additional discussion of transit GANs is provided at Build America Transportation Investment Center (BATIC) Institute: An AASHTO Center for Excellence.
One additional point of clarification is that the term "note" is often used for shorter-term debt issuances. This is the reason transit GANs are referred to as such, as Federal transit formula funds can only be anticipated in the short term (one or two years) because they are subject to the annual Congressional appropriation process. Nonetheless, somewhat confusingly, some states also refer to their longer-term GARVEE bonds as "notes." For example, in Arizona, they are known as GANs, and in Colorado, as Transportation Revenue Anticipation Notes (TRANs).
An additional point of nomenclature is the difference between "Direct" and "Indirect" GARVEE bonds. Direct GARVEE bonds are those in which Federal assistance directly reimburses debt service paid to investors in a debt-financed Federal-aid project or program, as permitted under Section 122 of Title 23 and described above.
However, because many states receive substantial amounts of Federal-aid reimbursements for construction of eligible projects, they may choose to issue bonds (or other debt instruments), without Federal authorization, that are backed by the anticipated reimbursements for projects. While any project for which a reimbursement is to be received must follow Federal-aid requirements, once the project is constructed, the reimbursement for that construction is considered state funding. Bonds backed by these construction reimbursements are called Indirect GARVEEs and are not codified in Title 23 and are not considered a Federal financing tool. Rather, a state may simply pledge its Federal-aid construction reimbursements when issuing its debt. Interest and issuance costs are not covered, but reimbursements are not tied to specific projects.
Other terms used for Indirect GARVEEs include Reimbursement Vehicle (RVee) and Federal Reimbursement Anticipation Note (FRAN).
Depending on state laws, a state might be able to issue either type of vehicle. Some states might prefer to issue a Direct GARVEE bond in order to claim interest and issuance costs and to preserve a direct link between the project and the funds used to repay its debt service. Other states may forgo the additional eligibility for interest and issuance and issue an Indirect GARVEE bond because it may allow them to use construction reimbursements from a variety of projects for debt service. However, some states may find it difficult to issue Indirect GARVEE bonds because construction reimbursements become subject to appropriation by the state legislature when received, or are otherwise restricted by state law. In both cases, a state does not receive any additional Federal-aid by using either vehicle; it simply elects to use its Federal aid funds in different but equally legitimate ways.
|Eligible Project
|FHWA Approval
|Flexibility in Using Bond Proceeds
|Interest and Issuance Costs Reimbursable
|Direct GARVEE Bond
|No - Bond proceeds used for specified projects(s)
|Indirect GARVEE Bond
|Federal and State
|Yes - Bond proceeds used for any eligible project


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ENGS 134: Nanotechnology
Current papers in the field of nanotechnology will be discussed in the context of the course material. In the second half of the term, students will pick a topic of interest and have either individual or small group meetings to discuss literature and research opportunities in this area. The students will prepare a grant proposal in their area of interest.

subset: commoncrawl


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Fussbudget-Why Paul Ryan is bad for seniors
I normally don't post about politics here, but I feel so strongly that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney's election would be bad for Medicare and elder care in general, that I posting this entire New Yorker piece.
By Ryan Lizza
The New Yorker
One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President's policies and America's lurch toward a "European" style of government. Ryan's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama's newly released budget, he replied, "I don't have that much time."
Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan's older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was "miserable during the last majority" and is determined "to do everything I can to make sure I don't feel that misery again."
In 2009, Ryan was striving to reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable of reversing his party's reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama's tax and spending plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He deconstructed Obama's early health-care proposal and attacked his climate-change plan. Obama's budget "makes our tax code much less competitive," he said, as if reading from a script. "It makes it harder for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously." He added, "It just takes the poor trajectory our country's fiscal state is on and exacerbates it."
As much as he relished the battle against Obama—"European," he repeated, with some gusto—his real fight was for the ideological identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content to simply criticize the White House. "If you're going to criticize, then you should propose," he told me. A fault line divided the older and more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose faction.
"I think you're obligated to do that," he said. "People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, 'Just criticize and don't do anything and let's win by default.' That's ridiculous." He said he was "moving ahead without them. They don't want to produce alternatives? That's not going to stop me from producing an alternative."
Ryan's long-range plan was straightforward: to create a detailed alternative to Obama's budget and persuade his party to embrace it. He would start in 2009 and 2010 with House Republicans, the most conservative bloc in the Party. Then, in the months before the Presidential primaries, he would focus on the G.O.P. candidates. If the plan worked, by the fall of 2012 Obama's opponent would be running on Paul Ryan's ideas, and in 2013 a new Republican President would be signing them into law.
Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. "I'm very supportive of the Ryan budget plan," Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, "I think it'd be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan's budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President."
To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.
Janesville, Wisconsin, where Ryan was born and still lives, is a riverfront city of sixty-four thousand people in the southeast corner of the state, between Madison and Chicago. Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town, especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and today Ryan, Inc., started in 1884 by Paul's great-grandfather, is a national construction firm. The historic Courthouse section of Janesville is still thick with members of the Ryan clan. At last count, there were eight other Ryan households within a six-block radius of his house, a large Georgian Revival with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms that is on the National Register of Historic Places.
"I grew up on the block I now live on," Ryan told me recently. We were sitting in his new, more spacious Capitol Hill office, one of the spoils of being in the majority after the 2010 elections. "My aunt and uncle live across the street from me," he said. "My cousin is next door, my brother is a block away." Ryan's line of the family strayed from the construction business, which is now run by his cousin Adam. His grandfather and father became lawyers instead.
Unlike most members of Congress these days, Ryan is relatively accessible to reporters. "The key to understanding me is really simple," he said. "I am not trying to be anybody other than who I actually am." Even his ideological foes comment on his friendliness and good nature. After his sophomore year in high school, back in 1986, he worked the grill at McDonald's. "The manager didn't think I had the social skills to work the counter," he said. "And now I'm in Congress!"
But the summer of 1986 brought a life-changing event. One night in August, he came home from work well past midnight, and he slept late the following morning. His mother was in Colorado visiting his sister, and his brother, who had a summer job with the Janesville parks department, had left early. Paul answered a frantic phone call from his father's secretary. "Your dad's got clients in here," she said. "Where is he?" Paul walked into his parents' bedroom and thought his father was sleeping. "I went to wake him up," he told me, "and he was dead."
"It was just a big punch in the gut," Ryan said. "I concluded I've got to either sink or swim in life." His mother went back to school, in Madison, and studied interior design; his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer's, moved into their home, and Ryan helped care for her. "I grew up really fast," he said.
He took both schoolwork and extracurricular activities more seriously, he told me. In his junior year, he was elected class president, which made him prom king and gave him a seat representing the high school on Janesville's school board, his first political position. He played soccer and was on the ski team. He joined nearly every school club: Latin Club, History Club, the Letterman's Club, for varsity athletes, and the International Geographic Society, which was open to students who received an A in geography, and which met monthly to learn about a different country. At the end of his senior year, he was elected Biggest Brown-Noser. ("At least I didn't have a mullet," he said.)
His father's death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don't undertake until college. "I was, like, 'What is the meaning?' " he said. "I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on." Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading "Atlas Shrugged," he told me, "I said, 'Wow, I've got to check out this economics thing.' What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government." He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.
In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," he told the group. "The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism." To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand's atheism.
In 1988, Ryan went to Miami University, in Ohio, where he got to know an economics professor named William R. Hart, a fierce and outspoken libertarian in a faculty dominated by liberals. The two quickly discovered their shared fascination with Rand and Hayek. Ryan got his first introduction to movement conservatism when Hart handed him an issue of National Review. "Take this magazine—I think you'll like it," he said.
In 1991, Hart recommended Ryan for an internship in the office of Senator Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin Republican. Two years later, Ryan went to work as a speechwriter and policy analyst for Jack Kemp, who led Empower America, an organization then in the vanguard of making policy for supply-side conservatives who were pushing Republicans rightward in their views on taxes and the size of government. "Jack Kemp is what sucked me into public policy, public service, and politics," Ryan said. "He called it the battle of ideas, and I just really got into it."
Hart told me, "He thought the world of Jack Kemp. I got the impression that Jack Kemp became something of a second father."
In 1997, Mark Neumann, the congressman from Ryan's district in Wisconsin, who was running for the Senate, called Ryan, who was just twenty-seven, and suggested that he run for the House seat. Neumann knew that the popular Ryan name couldn't hurt. Ryan went back to Wisconsin, worked briefly for the family business as a "marketing consultant"—a bit of résumé padding that gave him his only private-sector experience—and decided to run. One ad showed him walking through a Janesville cemetery among the gravestones of his ancestors. He won the election, becoming the second-youngest member of the House, and he has been reëlected easily ever since.
Ryan's first significant policy fight came in 2004. As President George W. Bush campaigned for a second term, largely emphasizing counter-terrorism and national-security policies, Ryan laid the groundwork for the Republican agenda should Bush be elected. For the first time, Ryan had the chance to pursue some of the more daring libertarian ideas that had captivated him. As a thirty-four-year-old representative, he set out to privatize Social Security.
For decades, policy wonks on the Republican fringes had talked about turning Social Security, the government safety-net program for retirees, into a system of private investment accounts. The architect of the movement was Peter Ferrara, a former Harvard Law School student, who, calling it "the craziest idea in the world," sold it, in 1979, to the small-government fundamentalists at the Cato Institute. (Ferrara is now at the Heartland Institute, best known for its denial of climate change.) They evangelized on behalf of the idea for more than two decades, before pushing it into mainstream Republican politics. Bush was the first Republican Presidential nominee to embrace the idea, but it wasn't a priority in his first term, which was dominated by the response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to the plan in 2005. Under Ryan's initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan's plan was clear.
The release of the Social Security proposal was a turning point in Ryan's career. Bush could have chosen to push a bipartisan idea, such as immigration reform, as the first domestic proposal of his second term. But, during the 2004 campaign, Ryan, with such allies as Kemp and Ferrara, kept up pressure from the right to force the White House to make a decision on Social Security. Many Republicans were still wary. Two weeks after Bush's Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.
Conservative editorialists and activists cheered him on. "What Ryan and Sununu have proposed is historic," Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed piece. "They have fashioned a plan that makes the idea of a personal-account option for Social Security not only politically viable but, indeed, politically irresistible." Jack Kemp lauded his former aide: "It will be proven the most efficacious of all the reforms." For the first time, Ryan enjoyed a round of worshipful media coverage. "THAT HAIR, THOSE EYES, THAT PLAN," proclaimed the headline of a long home-state magazine profile in 2005.
But Ryan's assurances proved to be wildly optimistic. Bush, urged by Karl Rove to keep his distance from Ryan's plan, released a far more cautious proposal, with smaller accounts and less expensive transition costs. He spent months on a national tour promoting it, as Ryan had in Wisconsin. Democrats savaged the plan. Bush's poll numbers sank, and the plan was effectively dead by the fall. The following year, the Republicans lost thirty House seats and the Democrats took over Congress. Other factors contributed to Bush's failures in 2005 and 2006—Hurricane Katrina, escalating violence in Iraq—but his push for a version of the Ryan Social Security plan marked the start of the decline. Bush, in his memoir, writes that he regretted pursuing the issue when he did.
What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. "The Administration did a bad job of selling it," he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. "And . . . thud," Ryan said. "You've got to prepare the country for these things. You can't just spring it on them after you win." The lesson: "Don't let the engineers run the marketing department."
Although the ranks of House Republicans were thinner after the 2006 elections, Ryan was sent back to Washington and won the top Republican spot on the Budget Committee. Now he had a large staff of economists working for him and access to the resources of the Congressional Budget Office, which could provide detailed analyses of his proposals. Once again, he set about testing the bounds of conservative ideology within the Party. It was his job to draft an alternative to the new Democratic majority's budget. Even for the smaller, more conservative G.O.P. caucus of 2007, Ryan's draft was so extreme that forty out of two hundred and two Republicans voted against it.
He returned the following year with something more polished and more ambitious. In May, 2008, working with two other young Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, of California, and Eric Cantor, of Virginia, who had watched the immolation of the congressional wing of their party during the Bush years, Ryan remade his budget into something he called the Roadmap for America's Future. Rather than just build support inside Congress, he promoted the Roadmap through the rich network of conservative media and think tanks that helped influence Republican members. "I thought fiscal policy was on the wrong path," he told me.
Ryan had witnessed three periods when conservatism was ascendant: during the Reagan revolution of the nineteen-eighties; after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and after Bush's election in 2000. Notably, the federal government's size and responsibilities grew through all three political epochs. Ryan's Roadmap soon came to define a fourth conservative surge. Unlike the 1994 Contract with America, which in substance was not nearly as ideological as people thought, and unlike Bush's compassionate conservatism, which was sold as a rejection of anti-government philosophy, the Roadmap was a comprehensive plan to reduce the welfare state and radically curtail the government's role in protecting citizens from life's misfortunes.
Ryan recommended ending Medicare, the government health-insurance program for retirees, and replacing it with a system of direct payments to seniors, who could then buy private insurance. (The change would not affect current beneficiaries or the next decade of new ones.) He proposed ending Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, and replacing it with a lump sum for states to use as they saw fit. Ryan also called for an end to the special tax break given to employers who provide insurance; instead, that money would pay for twenty-five-hundred-dollar credits for uninsured taxpayers to buy their own plans. As for Social Security, Ryan modestly scaled back his original proposal by reducing the amount invested in private accounts, from one-half to one-third of payroll taxes. Ryan's Roadmap also promised to cut other government spending, though it didn't specify how. Likewise, it promised to lower income-tax rates and simplify the tax code, but it didn't detail which popular deductions—mortgage interest? retirement contributions?—it would eliminate.
Conservative intellectuals at National Review and the Heritage Foundation loved the Roadmap, and Ryan became an icon within the insular world of right-wing pundits. In Congress, things were different. In 2008, with midterm and Presidential elections looming, the Roadmap attracted just eight co-sponsors. Only the most astute observers of G.O.P. internal politics noticed what was happening. In a celebratory column about the Ryan plan in the Washington Post, titled "Fiscal Medicine Man," Robert Novak, the late conservative writer, predicted, "After what is expected to be another bad G.O.P. defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan, McCarthy, and Cantor could constitute the party's new House leadership."
By early 2009, when I first met Ryan in his office, he was caught between the demands of the Republican leaders, who wanted nothing to do with his Roadmap, and his own belief that the Party had to offer a sweeping alternative vision to Obama's. Ryan soon had an unlikely ally, in Obama himself. Throughout that year, the Administration struggled to defend its ambitious agenda, in part because there was no Republican alternative for the President to attack. Ryan, deferring to the Party leadership, didn't aggressively push his plan again. But in late January of 2010, a week after the victory of the Republican Scott Brown in the contest for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts—the first election fuelled by the new Tea Party movement—Ryan offered the Roadmap as an alternative to Obama's budget.
He presented it not as a dry policy plan, with just numbers and actuarial tables, but as a manifesto that drew on the canon of Western political philosophy as interpreted by conservative intellectuals. The document's introduction referred to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Hayek, Friedman, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Murray, and Niall Ferguson. Ryan himself seemed intent on entering the canon. "Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free," he wrote, "and only a free person can make responsible choices—between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking."
Obama saw an opening. Invited to speak before the House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, on January 29th, he seemed to extend an olive branch to Ryan. "I think Paul, for example, the head of the Budget Committee, has looked at the budget and has made a serious proposal," Obama said. "I've read it. I can tell you what's in it. And there's some ideas in there that I would agree with, but there's some ideas that we should have a healthy debate about, because I don't agree with them." Afterward, Obama made a point of shaking Ryan's hand and signing an autograph for his seven-year-old daughter, Liza. There was talk in Washington that the two young, wonky Midwesterners might be able to build a working relationship.
Three days later, the White House started a livelier debate with Ryan. In a press briefing, Peter Orszag, the budget director at the time, dismantled Ryan's plan, point by point. Ryan's proposal would turn Medicare "into a voucher program, so that individuals are on their own in the health-care market," he said. Over time, the program wouldn't keep pace with rising medical costs, so seniors would have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for health care. The Roadmap would revive Bush's plan to privatize Social Security and "provide large tax benefits to upper-income households . . . while shifting the burden onto middle- and lower-income households. It is a dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals." Ryan, who had always had a good relationship with Orszag, later described the briefing as the moment when "the budget director took that olive branch and hit me in the face with it."
But the confrontation enhanced Ryan's credibility among conservatives. He became the face of the opposition, someone who could attack the President's policies with facts and figures. Indeed, at the retreat, Obama had mischaracterized Ryan's Medicare plan, and Ryan politely corrected him. The two men sparred again the next month, at a summit at Blair House, over the President's health-care plan. The details of Ryan's proposals and his critiques of Obama's mattered less than the fact that he was taking on the President. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders started to feel pressure to take a position on the Ryan budget.
In July, Boehner distanced himself from the plan. But Ryan's outside-in strategy, of building support among conservatives who would pressure Republican leaders to embrace his ideas, started to pay off. An editorial in the Weekly Standard stated that "Republicans should embrace Ryan's Road Map." Dick Armey, the former congressional leader, who had become a Tea Party organizer, demanded that Republicans have the "courage" to back Ryan's plan. Boehner's position insured that most Republican candidates didn't listen to Armey's advice, and in 2010 they campaigned against Obama's alleged cuts to Medicare rather than for Ryan's plan to end the program.
Still, after the election, with the Republican Party racing rightward, Ryan provided an intellectual blueprint: there were eighty-seven Republican freshmen who wanted to starve the government but had no clear idea how to do so. In December, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Sarah Palin endorsed the Roadmap, and every potential Republican Presidential candidate knew that he or she, too, would have to take a position on it. In January, 2011, Ryan was chosen to give the official Republican response to the President's State of the Union speech. "We hold to a couple of simple convictions," he said. "Endless borrowing is not a strategy; spending cuts have to come first."
During the next four months, Ryan and McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican in the House, convened a series of listening sessions for their colleagues, placing special emphasis on the Republican freshmen. Wielding a PowerPoint presentation that included photographs of chaos in Greece, which was sliding into its debt crisis, the two led the new members of Congress through the perils of the government's fiscal trajectory, and patiently explained how Ryan's plan was both the only solution and a political winner. In April, after months of this education campaign, Ryan formally unveiled a third version of the Roadmap, renamed the Path to Prosperity.
After the listening sessions, Ryan had removed some of the most controversial ideas, including the manifesto-like introduction, and even the Social Security privatization plan. The credit for taxpayers to buy health insurance was scrapped as well, but Ryan added a new plank: to repeal Obama's health-care law and to effectively cut Medicaid by a third. (Under the plan, Medicaid would no longer keep up with rising medical costs.) Ryan conceded that he couldn't get his colleagues to go along with everything in the old plan. "I had to pass a bill—I had to get two hundred and eighteen people," he told me. His original Roadmap "was just me, unplugged," he said. "But when you're writing a budget you're representing an entire conference, and so you have to get consensus."
Conservative opinion-writers again celebrated his bravery. But there was one note of caution. The ornery Charles Krauthammer doubted that Ryan's ideas could survive a Democratic onslaught in the 2012 campaign. "House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year budget plan," he wrote. "At 37 footnotes, it might be the most annotated suicide note in history."
In mid-April of 2011, in a speech at George Washington University, Obama once again decided to make an example of Ryan. Republicans were finally about to vote on the Path to Prosperity, and the President was eager to offer his opinion. Obama, for nearly the first time in his Presidency, emphasized the ideological divide between the two parties rather than offering bromides about what they shared. The White House invited Ryan to the speech and reserved a V.I.P. seat for him. Obama had personally called Ryan after Republicans won the majority in the House the previous November, and Ryan thought the two might have a rapport. They both liked sports and, because Ryan's district runs along the Illinois border close to Chicago, knew many of the same people. "He's a cerebral guy who likes policy, and he's from my part of the country," Ryan said. "At the beginning, I did have some hope."
Ryan sat in the front row as the President shredded his plan. "I believe it paints a vision of our future that's deeply pessimistic," Obama said. "There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill."
Ryan seemed genuinely shocked. During a radio interview later in the day, he complained that Obama had called him "un-American," and he objected to the charge that he was "pitting children with autism or Down syndrome against millionaires and billionaires" and "ending America as we know it." Ryan told me, "I was expecting some counteroffer of some kind. What we got was the gauntlet of demagoguery."
Two days after the speech, despite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan's plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. "Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians," he said. "They're more cautious. They're more risk-averse. They're more focussed on just reëlection." He went on, "This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They're not here for careers—they're here for causes."
Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan's profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan's detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.
Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor's aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner's alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner's chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.
"That's what Cantor and Ryan want," Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper's recent book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do." "They see a world where it's Mitch McConnell"—as Senate Majority Leader—"Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It's not about this year. It's about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced."
One afternoon in mid-July, John Beckord, a Ryan supporter and the head of Forward Janesville, a pro-business economic-development group, took me on a tour of Ryan's home town. As the years went by, the successful small businesses of the old Irish Mafia came to be overshadowed by one employer, General Motors; at its peak, in 1978, the automaker employed seventy-one hundred people and later produced more than a thousand sport-utility vehicles a day. Janesville has often served as a backdrop for Presidents and Presidential candidates. During a campaign stop there in 2008, Obama said, "The promise of Janesville has been the promise of America." Later that year, the plant announced that it would close, causing the loss of some five thousand jobs in the area. Mitt Romney gave his standard stump speech in Janesville recently, with Ryan at his side.
Beckord drove along the perimeter of the abandoned plant, which stretched across more than two hundred acres. He pointed out a wide plain of asphalt, now sprouting weeds, that had once served as a parking lot for thousands of cars. Through 2007, Ryan regularly requested government money for special projects back home. Earmarks grew out of control during the Bush years, but most of what Ryan asked for, and got, was defensible: four hundred thousand dollars for a water-treatment plant; three hundred thousand for a technical college where G.M. workers could be retrained; seven hundred and thirty-five thousand for Janesville's bus system; and $3.3 million for highway projects throughout Wisconsin. In 2008, however, Ryan vowed not to request earmarks anymore; he later helped push through an outright ban. I asked Beckord whether Ryan's libertarianism ever clashed with the needs of his constituents. He hesitated, then said, finally, "I suppose there could have been a full-court press to just cobble together as much federal money as possible on our behalf to make it irresistible for G.M. to keep this plant open."
When we got beyond the auto plant, Beckord pointed out some of the promising initiatives in town. "We're finding a new identity," he said. Since the plant closed, Janesville, which sits almost at the center of a ring of major cities, including Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Minneapolis, has partly reinvented itself as a distribution hub for major companies. "They don't make anything here," Beckord explained. "But they distribute their products from here." We passed a John Deere facility where hundreds of lawn tractors and mowers were stacked on pallets. Janesville is a major distribution center for John Deere lawn-care products. Several other national companies, including Grainger, which sells various industrial products, and LeMans, which sells parts for motocross and snowmobiling equipment, use Janesville for the same purpose.
As Janesville increasingly becomes a base for the business of distribution logistics, its single most pressing economic concern is good roads. Beckord pointed toward Interstate 90, which runs southeast a hundred miles to Chicago. "From an economic-vitality and economic-development perspective, transportation infrastructure is huge," he said. Next year, I-90 around Janesville will begin expansion from four lanes to eight. The project, the top issue for the local business community since the G.M. plant closed, will be financed as part of a billion-dollar federal and state highway project. "Paul has been as helpful as he can be to encourage that development," Beckord said. "But, as you know, he also has a philosophical disconnect with the idea of earmarks."
We passed a warehouse-like building under construction where several men in hard hats were at work. Beckord explained that it would soon house the Janesville Innovation Center, providing entrepreneurs with commercial space in which to launch their ideas. The money came from a $1.2-million government grant through the Economic Development Administration, one of Obama's major stimulus programs.
There was one more success story that Beckord wanted to share. A few years ago, he had a melanoma that was treated with a radioactive isotope; this isotope is administered to fifty-five thousand patients a day but has a half-life of sixty-six hours after manufacture, so it must be delivered quickly. The isotope, known as a medical tracer, is made outside the United States by a complicated process requiring highly enriched uranium from nuclear reactors. The government offered twenty-five-million-dollar matching grants to companies that could devise a way to produce the material domestically, without using enriched uranium. "Two of the four companies that won that competition, incredibly, are going to build plants in our county, and one of them is going to be in Janesville," Beckord said. In May, the federal government announced that it would contribute more than ten million dollars to the new facility, which could employ some hundred and fifty people.
The current Presidential campaign centers on the debate about the government's role in the economy. Ryan, by forcing Republicans to embrace his budget plan, has helped shape this debate. Obama, on July 13th, told a crowd in Virginia, "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He added, "When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
To Ryan, Obama's words were anathema. In a conversation three days later with James Pethokoukis, a conservative blogger for the American Enterprise Institute, he had harsh criticisms for the President. "His comments seem to derive from a naïve vision," Ryan said, that is based on "an idea that the nucleus of society and the economy is government, not the people." Obama's "big-government spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth," he said, and amount to "a statist attack on free communities."
When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town's recovery, he didn't disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. "Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature," he said. "As if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy." He added, "Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports." But independent assessments make clear that Ryan's budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.
As in 2009, Republicans are divided between those who think they can win by pointing out Obama's failures and those who want to run on a Ryan-like set of ideas. Romney seems to want to be in the first camp, but during the primaries he championed the ideas in Ryan's budget. Ryan is frequently talked about as a future leader of the House Republicans and even as a long shot to be Romney's running mate. He surely would take either job, but he seems better suited to continuing what he's been doing since 2008: remaking the Republican Party in his image. You can't "run on vague platitudes and generalities," he told me earlier this month. He was speaking about Bush in 2004 and Obama four years ago. But he clearly believes that the same holds true for Romney in November.
"He's already endorsed these things," Ryan said. "I want a full-throated defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country's problems. I want to show the country that we have a solution to get us out of the ditch we're in, and to be proud about it."
Ryan seemed unconcerned that pushing his policy agenda on Romney might damage the candidate. "I think life is short," Ryan said at the end of our final conversation. "You'd better take advantage of it while you have it." ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza#ixzz23M7kaf3k


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Biometrics · Seattle, Washington
Zymeworks is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of next-generation bispecific and multifunctional biotherapeutics, initially focused on the treatment of cancer. Zymeworks' suite of complementary therapeutic platforms and its fully-integrated drug development engine provide the flexibility and compatibility to precisely engineer and develop highly-differentiated product candidates.
About the Position
Zymeworks is seeking a Senior Clinical Data Manager (CDM) to lead Data Management aspects of a clinical study with minimal support and oversight. The Sr CDM will have thorough knowledge of FDA regulations and industry standards, strong technical skills, and is capable of leading infrastructure assessment and improvement.
This position will report to the Senior Manager, Data Management or above and will be based in Seattle, WA or Vancouver, BC.
Key Responsibilities
Qualifications and Education
Why Work for Us?
At Zymeworks, we stand for innovation, integrity, collaboration and care.
Zymeworks' employees are passionate, engaged and extremely motivated to succeed. We are excited by the cutting-edge science and technology, the endless possibilities this union holds and the sheer opportunity to be a part of something big. To learn more about Zymeworks Inc. and our current openings, please visit our website at https://zymeworks.bamboohr.com/jobs/.
We offer challenging career opportunities, competitive benefits and an environment that recognizes and rewards performance.
How to Apply
If you are interested in this challenging opportunity, please apply online at https://zymeworks.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=316. Due to the high volume of applicants, only those selected for interviews will be contacted.
NOTE TO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES: Zymeworks values our relationships with our Recruitment Partners. We will only accept resumes from those partners whom have been contracted by a member of our Human Resources team to collaborate with us. Zymeworks is not responsible for any fees related to resumes that are unsolicited or are received without contract.
Zymeworks Inc.
Reference Job Code: 317
Zymeworks Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer
Submitted: 08/04/2020
IowaLifeScience.com is owned and published by Info.Resource, Inc..


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Refine your search
Wivenhoe House
Wivenhoe Park,
Wivenhoe Park,
"Our brand-new takeaway offering launching 13th July. Open for bookings
Please note due to the COVID-19 crisis we are now offering a no cancellation fee, so you can book in confidence!"
Near Colchester's oldest recorded town and at the heart of Constable Country, Wivenhoe House is an elegant 18th century Grade II listed country house hotel set in peaceful parkland and provides an ideal base for exploring the Essex and Suffolk coast and countryside. Wivenhoe House is a little over 50 miles from the 24 hour pulse of London.
Wivenhoe House is a glorious country house hotel that is the perfect setting for overnight stays as well as for meetings and functions, offering guests somewhere to dine, relax, work or rest where attentive staff pay meticulous attention to detail to exceed guest expectations.
Wivenhoe House combines all the modern comforts of an elegant country house hotel with traditional features including fireplaces, comfortable sofas and spacious, airy bedrooms. The main house boasts 16 luxury bedrooms and the contemporary garden wing has a further 24 executive bedrooms. With an abundance of lavish period detail throughout, the grand, sweeping stairs and the perfectly landscaped gardens, Wivenhoe House is ideal for a short break, a celebration with family or friends and is the most romantic of settings for a civil wedding ceremony or reception.
Home to the brasserie bar & restaurant which uses locally sourced ingredients to deliver culinary delights. Our restaurant is inspired by the concept of a classic brasserie, bringing a little taste of France to the Essex countryside and offering a winning combination of classic dishes and modern cuisine, to be enjoyed in our attractive and informal setting and delivered with attentive service.
Cycle storage available. Children welcome from any age.
By car:
Whether approaching Wivenhoe House from London and the South or Ipswich and the North via the A12, take the exit marked Colchester (A133). Follow the A133 towards Clacton, ignore the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway, continue along the A133 then take the B1028 for Wivenhoe before turning right into Boundary Road, then right again into Park Road. The entrance for Wivenhoe House is shared with the University of Essex but Park Road leads you through Wivenhoe Park and you will be able to see the glorious house from the road.
For Sat Nav please use CO7 9HT and then follow signage to Wivenhoe House. Please note, some Sat Navs may direct you to the wrong side of Wivenhoe Park so please check our PDF Map
By train:
Colchester station, Colchester Town station, Wivenhoe station and Hythe stations are all between 10-15 minutes from Wivenhoe House by car. Trains run between London (Liverpool Street) and Colchester station every 10-20 minutes. The journey takes around an hour. Also connect with Colchester from Norwich, Ipswich, Felixstowe & Harwich. Some trains from London (Liverpool Street) also stop at Wivenhoe Station. When travelling from the Clacton/Walton direction, alight at Wivenhoe or Hythe Stations.
By plane:
Stansted airport is approximately 45 minutes from Wivenhoe House by car. Helicopter pad coordinates are 603200/223900.
- Children welcome
- Telephone
- Radio
- Television
- Satellite TV
- Tea/coffee making in bedrooms
- Licenced (table or bar)
- Packed lunches provided
- Special diets available
- Lounge for residents' use
- Night porter
- Passenger lift
- Ironing facilities
- Conference facilities
- Snacks/afternoon tea
- Private parking
- Garden
- Building of historical interest
- Disabled facilities
- Central heating
- Laundry facilities
- Electric shaver points
- Television available
- Restaurant open to non-residents
- Visa/Mastercard/Switch accepted
- Dogs/pets accepted by arrangement
- Vegetarian diet available
- American Express accepted
- WiFi or internet access
- DVD player
- CD player
- Coach parties welcomed
- Single sex groups welcomed
- Evening meals
- Hairdryer
- High chairs available
- Cots available
- Real log/coal fires
Cycle storage available. Children welcome from any age.
Self-Assessed Accessibility Details
- Designated parking for guests with disabilities
- Within 50 metres approx. of entrance
- Surface of the car park and pathway leading to entrance is
- Solid ie tarmac / concrete etc
- Drop-off point for guests outside entrance
- Route from the parking area to the entrance:
- Has a ramp
Public Areas
- Level access (no steps/thresholds) or access by ramp or lift to:
- Entrance to reception
- Public toilet
- One or more bedrooms
- Lounge
- Bar
- Good contrast between the floor and wall
- Clear surfaces such as glass doors have contrast markings
- Baby changing facilities
- Guest information available in large print (14pt and over)
- Bedroom with non-allergenic bedding available
- Steps to the main entrance
- Ramp to entrance
- Handrail by ramp
- Entrance well lit
- Level access (no steps/thresholds) or access by ramp or lift
- Good contrast between the floor and walls
- Menus available in large print (14pt and over)
- Meals for guests with special dietary requirements can be provided:
- Sugar free (diabetic)
- Gluten free (coeliac)
- Lactose free (dairy free)
- Low potassium
- Low sodium
- Nut free
- Additive free
- Organic
- Vegetarian
- Proprietors/staff available 24-hours
- Emergency evacuation procedures for guests with disabilities


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NEW YORK, June 25 (UPI) -- Ariana Grande and MTV are teaming up to bring back Total Request Live.
The 20-year-old singer will headline Total Ariana Live next week, a one-day revival of the classic MTV program. Grande plans to debut her new single "Break Free" during her performance, and will also make a surprise announcement. MTV News host Sway Calloway will host the special.
"It's a huge honor to be able to bring back a show like TRL," the star says. "I used to love watching it growing up. Can't wait to celebrate with my loves in Times Square. Might have some surprises, too."
TRL was a staple MTV series that debuted in 1998. Each episode counted down the top ten most requested music videos of the day, and also featured musical guests. The program was canceled in 2008 and replaced with Friday Night MTV. FNMTV ran for two seasons before it, too, was canceled.
"Only one artist has the power to turn the lights back on at 1515 Broadway in the iconic TRL studios, and that's Ariana Grande," Republic Records executive vice president Charlie Walk lauds. "The transformation to Total Ariana Live represents her one-of-a-kind star power combined with MTV's immense multimedia platform, setting the stage for the ultimate global partnership."
Total Ariana Live airs at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 2.


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Curve is an electronic shop from Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. In GTA Liberty City Stories, a store can be found in the shopping mall at Belleville Park, Staunton Island. In GTA Vice City Stories, there are three stores located in Ocean Beach, Downtown and Little Havana. The company apparently manufactures electronics, as a billboard advertising a Curve car stereo can be seen in GTA Liberty City Stories. Also, the company's logo can be found on Yankees in Vice City Stories.
Evidently, Curve has left Vice City by 1986, as there are no Curve stores in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
The logo of Curve bears much resemblance to the computer manufacturing company IBM.
Like many accessible stores in Vice City Stories, all Curve outlets can be trashed by the player for a sum of cash.


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Netflix's 1080p Browser Streaming Isn't Quite 1080p in Most Browsers
Tricked your eyes and brains.
Tricked your eyes and brains.
A few tips that make sense of the chaos of information out there. We're in this together.
Keep it smooth.
Skype has just updated its Windows client to enable full HD video calling allowing you converse in 1080p with your mates. Now you'll be able to see every exquisite detail of their fugly beautiful faces.
The BBC's YouTube channel, which is usually little more than a collection of trailers and sample clips, is now hosting a full 1080p HD video of the London 2012 fireworks display. If you like going "Oooh!" at bright lights, 11 minutes of HD oooh-ing, with music by The Kinks and Soft Cell, is there to enjoy. [YouTube]


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Intel's Core i7-2630QM is a quad core Sandy Bridge based CPU that can handle 8 threads, delifering more performance in threaded applications. Turbo Boost can dynamically change clocks from base 2GHz to 2.6GHz (full load on all four cores), 2.8GHz (full load on two cores) or 2.9GHz (one core).
The QM moniker with Sandy Bridge series means it's a quad core CPU, whereas the seventh letter/number, which is '0' in this case (i7-2630QM), denotes TDP. Namely, '0' means 45W or 35W CPUs, '9' is 25W TDP whereas '7' stands for 17W models. The exception for now is the 2635QM, which also comes with 45W TDP.
Sandy Bridge architecture came after Arrandale and, along with many other optimizations, comes with integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000.
Turbo Boost 2.0 handles integrated graphics as well. In the case of 2630QM, graphics card can overclock from 650MHz to 1100MHz. The Core i7-2635QM is very similar in this respect, although it can boost graphics up to 1200MHz. Of course, Intel's new graphics cards' performance is much better than the HD Graphics from Arrandale.
However, the G74SX does not use Intel's integrated graphics. It comes with Nvidia's GTX 560M. Nvidia Optimus is not included, which means the GTX 560M runs all the time.
As CPUZ shows, the 2630QM is placed in rPGA socket, while the 2635QM uses BGA QC socket.
The following screenshot shows that the Core i7-2630QM has 4 cores and 8 threads. This 17 incher additionally has 12GB of DDR3 memory.
CPU Performance
We had to repeat the tests several times because results varied. Namely, Turbo Boost didn't always overclock the cores to same values. We only had the laptop for two days so we couldn't figure out why this was so, but gaming tests revealed that all four cores run at 2.6GHz so we didn't worry much about Cinebench.
HDD Performance
Asus G74SX has two 750GB HDDS, although we'd rather have seen an SSD drive running the system. That's not to say that the drives are slow and HD Tune results rate read speeds at almost 100MB/s.


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These countdowns are not listed in any particular order.
- 57 different Christmas banner themes can be found at Ult-Tex.net.
- Noella Designs offers a variety of Christmas banner themes.
- You will be satisfied with the choices of Christmas banners at Satisfaction.comSatisfaction.com.
- The variety of countdowns found here are for Halloween and Christmas.
- Magical Christmas images at FoundMyself.com act as a countdown.


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Physical and Mental Fitness for Women
Talk to any woman and you'll see how she struggles to fit all of her responsibilities into a single day. Women act as primary caregivers, juggling the needs of job and home — overlooking their needs in the process.
Stressed and short on time, women often neglect themselves, and, as a result, their health suffers. Epidemiological reports continually reveal that a high proportion of women suffer from cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis and obesity.
Fortunately, exercise and nutritional education can significantly reduce these preventable conditions. By meeting women's needs at every stage of life and providing education within a fitness environment, clubs can take a proactive role in women's health. This, in turn, empowers women to take care of themselves.
Fortunately, programming to keep women mentally and physically fit doesn't require complex strategizing. Clubs must start by providing the three Cs: comfort, confidence and camaraderie. If a club welcomes and caters to the needs of women, then women will gain confidence in the club and remain faithful patrons.
In addition to making women feel at ease, the club must provide an all-inclusive exercise program involving fitness education, cardiovascular conditioning, strength training, flexibility/balance and mind/body programming. This may seem like too much, but, as recent scientific studies have demonstrated, the amount of physical activity need not be excessive or strenuous to reduce morbidity and mortality risks, and increase longevity. All it takes is consistency!
A woman already involved in a fitness program is probably aware of the benefits of regular exercise. New members, however, will require an introduction to physical activity.
To teach female members about exercise, entice them to participate in educational seminars. Give them incentives. For example, women who participate in four consecutive monthly lectures can earn points for new workout clothes, a nutritional consultation or a massage.
Cardiovascular Training
Group fitness classes are a mainstay in fitness centers and primarily frequented by women. Great music, spontaneity and fun can generate a party-like atmosphere that makes group exercise a successful activity.
Cardiovascular workouts like hi/low impact and indoor cycling remain popular, especially when updated with trendy new music. Challenging classes such as kickboxing can appeal to elite female athletes. Adding multiple steps, circuit intervals and funky choreographed combinations reinvigorate step classes. Some of the most popular classes perfect dance routines over a five-week cycle. These challenge the mind and increase endurance while staying fun.
Strength Training
Strength training tones the body and improves mood. Published reports have demonstrated that clinically depressed individuals who received antidepressant medications and took part in a strength-training protocol had better outcomes than those who did not exercise. Furthermore, in some cases, patients responded better to exercise than to the medications. In fact, after following the weeks of exercise, they no longer met the classification for clinical depression.
Since women are more likely to suffer from depression than men, strength training should be a component of their regimen. Unfortunately, the weight room can be a daunting place for women.
Clubs can bring their female members into the weight room and increase their comfort level through group strength-training classes held during light traffic hours. Not only is it a terrific way to introduce women to strength training, it acts as an icebreaker for new members.
Body sculpting classes provide a strength-training option that continues to draw predominately female members. A challenging workout that includes fun props — such as elastic resistance bands, weighted bars, Swiss balls and balance boards — keep classes interesting.
The Mind/Body Connection
The popularity of yoga, Pilates and tai chi programs has been astounding. These classes are superior for women as they promote flexibility and balance, which establish core strength. Furthermore, these classes include deep breathing techniques that reduce stress.
Often older women who have practiced these techniques over a lifetime become positive role models for younger, less physically disciplined women.
Adrienne Stevens Zion, M.Ed., is an exercise physiologist and researcher in the department of rehabilitation medicine, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University. She is the director of ASZ Consultants in New York City. She may be reached at (212) 305-1044 or aszconsultants.com.
What Women Want
If you know what women want, you'll be able to attract them to your club. Here are some interests that clubs should target.Family-focused services


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Celebrities aren't the only ones who bury news stories late on holiday weekends. Warner Brothers did it late Friday with a piece of the news that, at any other point in the news cycle, would have dominated everything. As it is, tucking away their announcement after business on the Friday before the long MLK holiday weekend (in the US, anyway) spared WB some nerd angst over the weekend. Some, but not all.
Batman vs. Superman, ostensibly the Man of Steel sequel, is being kicked to May 2016. Moving off its original July 17, 2015 release date, the move gives WB/DC an extra year to get their sh*t together. That's the reason they're giving, anyway—that they need the extra time to "fully realize their vision". Maybe that's part of it, but it's probably not all of it.
The would-be summer 2015 showdown was between Avengers 2 and Batman vs. Superman, but WB flinched. Or perhaps it's more that they'd rather try their hand against a "weaker" Marvel movie? Their new 2016 release is in direct competition with an as-yet unnamed Marvel title. So maybe they balked at taking on the Avengers, but they're fine with trying it against just one Marvel hero at a time. Man of Steel didn't out-gross Iron Man 3 last summer, but its box office is in line with Thor 2's—it's reasonable to expect Batman vs. Superman to compete with something like Thor 3 or Guardians of the Galaxy 2, assuming that's a hit later this year.
And what about Ben Affleck? He looked pretty subdued all weekend at the various guild award shows, and now I'm wondering if this move is why. He had plans to direct a movie, Live By Night, after filming Batman vs. Superman, and WB has already given Night a December 25, 2015 release date. So far, that date hasn't changed, but I imagine it would have to; otherwise Affleck will be operating under a serious time crunch to make that release date. There's also a rumor that he hurt his leg and this is part of the setback but…RDJ blew out his ankle while filming Iron Man 3, causing production to shut down for seven weeks, but they were still able to make their release date. Affleck would have to be seriously, needs-months-of-rehab hurt, and he was walking fine down red carpets all weekend.
So either WB/DC is 1) having big time development problems (likely), 2) didn't want to compete with Avengers 2 (probably), 3) would rather take on a solo Marvel character in the hopes of actually winning that box office fight (strongly possible), or 4) Ben Affleck has a boo-boo (sounds like bullsh*t). I've said it before and I'll say it again: Nothing I learn about Batman vs. Superman inspires confidence.


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Auckland 'ER' in SL
Dr Scott Diener (Professor Noarlunga, pictured) [http://scottdiener.edublogs.org/], at the University of Auckland, has created a simulated hospital emergency room where small teams of medical and nursing students can learn to diagnose and treat patients requiring emergency treatment.
Sited on an University of Auckland island, appropriately called the Long White Cloud [ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Long%20White%20Cloud/31/39/28 ], the medical facilities are only one of several temporary and ongoing experimental developments, all aimed at using Second Life as an educational environment.
The island project has been directed, created and currently 'financed' – almost single-handedly – by Diener, Associate Director IT Services for Academic and Collaborative Technologies at the university.
Speaking recently on the Emergency Room side of the project, Diener said, "This project is just in the beginning design stages, and is contingent upon grant funds becoming available. The intent is to initially develop a hospital 'ward' for use with 3rd and 4th year medical students."
A visit to the island demonstrates just what Diener has achieved from his sometimes frustrating "labour of love" with its initial goal of developing several "experimental" medical simulations (e.g. a hospital environment), along with interactive spaces for students and staff.
The simulations already created relate to medicine, surgery, nursing, psychology, and disaster preparedness. Already instructors can assess "student" abilities in the diagnosis of instructor-determined medical scenarios in real time and it is planned to have real life actor/avatars play patient roles based on specific symptom/attitude etc scripts as a learning aid.
Diener notes that medical students/interns from distant places could be tested in this way via broadband and Second Life without the cost of either traveling to a specific campus or the cost of having to "hire" and train actor- patients to "work" on a number of university campuses.
Currently the ground floor of the Auckland University simulated medical school houses the Medical Clinic/hospital Emergency Room and related facilities (doctor offices). The Second floor houses an intensive care unit. The nursing unit being built in collaboration with Boise State University, US, will attempt to mimic the real-life nursing simulation environment at Boise. A study is currently being designed to compare the effectiveness of this environment against the Boise RL simulation.
Various medical components, monitors and instruments are being or have been designed for the simulations and PBL (problem-based learning) scenarios are being developed. The interactive Emergency Room instrumentation was built by David Bodily, a nursing educator from Wyoming University. He also is a participant in the study with Boise.<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>
Diener has invited international participation in the simulations.
Tim Shadbolt visited? Did he?
The Second Life paparazzi recently spied what they thought was Tim Shadbolt, New Zealand politician and Invercargill Mayor, enjoying a stroll around the grounds of the Southern Institute of Technology's handsome build on the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology's collaborative island sim, Koru. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/156/122/27
"The Southern Institute of Technology's (SIT) presence within Second Life was initially proposed by a team of three third-year Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) students as the subject matter for the programme's compulsory Project 701 paper," according to a mid-year announcement of the developing SIT presence on Koru. "Primarily the team is to produce an area for the promotion of SIT, in general, while subsequently promoting current students achievements in the Arts, Digital Media, Film, and Information Technology. Additional deliverables include providing a medium in which current and/or prospective students can meet, develop, and secure positive relationships. Further investigation into the educational value of Second Life will be assessed by the success or failure of this initial stage."
Now the paparazzi all know that Tim has been a major supporter of the Southern Institute but in handing us the picture above they just could not confirm whether it was him or not. But it sure looked like him. Dear reader we will leave it up to you to decide.
Business without borders
There has been considerable discussion in Second Life business and education circles about "work spaces in a box" following the Linden Lab announcement that Rivers Run Red's Immersive Workspaces 2.0, a comprehensive virtual world collaboration solution, is being made available on the Second Life Grid.
The companies have also announced a strategic partnership to sell and market each other's products, either individually or jointly, and to explore developing and deploying additional offerings for Linden Lab's growing base of enterprise customers.
Announcing the collaboration Linden Labs said that with enterprise use of the Second Life Grid on the rise, organisations were investing more in their virtual environments and moving mission critical aspects of their businesses into the virtual world such as distance learning, product prototyping and collaboration.
"This migration has created demand for a solution that enables organisations to quickly implement, configure and populate a virtual world environment suitable for their needs," Linden said. " Immersive Workspaces meets these needs by pre-configuring workspace options and wrapping the Second Life Grid solution in a web-based framework rich with familiar tools and interfaces.
"… Immersive Workspaces enables organisations to construct custom virtual work environments – including meetings rooms and design centers – that can dramatically change the way they collaborate and communicate. A set of tightly integrated web-based applications and the ability to seamlessly upload and integrate real world content – eg PowerPoint – brings enterprise-level efficiency and flexibility into a virtual world.
"In today's financial climate, every enterprise regardless of size or industry is looking for ways to increase productivity, reduce costs, and boost overall profitability," said Mark Kingdon, Chief Executive Officer, Linden Lab. "With documented benefits and use cases and enterprise-ready applications such as Immersive Workspaces from partners such as Rivers Run Red, the Second Life Grid is the ideal platform for enterprises looking to add a virtual element to their operations."
For more information about Immersive Workspaces on the Second Life Grid please visit http://www.immersivespaces.com, http://www.secondlifegrid.net or contact firstname.lastname@example.com.
Useful videos
We owe Australian SLED lister Bruce Sommerville for pointing us the five useful YouTube videos on the topic of 'Second Life Education' collected together on the SLEDevents playlist at:http://au.youtube.com/user/sledevents
He also noted that the AUSTAFE conference in early october was simulcast in Second Life
A special panel on Assessing the Student Experience in Second Life at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Orlando will be streamed into Second Life on (Second Life time) Wednesday, October 29
from 7:30am – 8:20am SLT. SL SLURL:http://slurl.com/secondlife/ClevelandPlus/191/106/25
Difficult timing for Kiwis but this panel will bring together practitioners from four institutions that have experimented with using virtual worlds such as Second Life to enhance student learning.
The speakers are:Tanya Joosten, Lecturer and Educational Technology Consultant, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; AJ Kelton, Director, Emerging Instructional Tech, College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Montclair State University;Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Director of Academic Technologies, University of Colorado at Boulder; and Wendy Shapiro, Senior Academic Technology Officer, Case Western Reserve University.
The session will be moderated by Steven J. Taylor, Director, Academic Computing Services, Vassar College, and session convener is Lloyd Onyett, Assistant Dean for Technology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Filed under: Sl Conferences, Uncategorized | Tagged: Auckland University, Diener, immersive workspaces, Kingdon, Linden Lab, Rivers Run Red, Shadbolt, SLEDevents, Southern Insitute of Technology |


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Columbia Notes
February 15, 1907
pg. 3
- The remains of Miss Mary Moore, who died in Nashville, arrived Saturday and were taken to the home of her sister, Mrs. Ella Wheatly, on East 7th street. Her funeral was conducted at Beach Grove Baptist Church, of which she was a member. She was the wife of the late Rev. George Moore, former pastor of said church. Mrs. Moore had made her home with her sister, Mrs. Wheatly, for a number of years, and although she was an invalid she was cheerful and will be missed from the family circle.
- Miss Bessie Patton, of Nashville, was visiting friends here for a few days last week.
- Mrs. Hattie Fleming is in Nashville at the bed side of her husband, who is very low.
- Miss Janie Green will go to Nashville soon to reside.
- Mr. Clifford Howard, of Chicago, who is visiting his mother, Mrs. Mary Young, on 18th street, is in very poor health.
- Dr. J. G. Johnson passed through Columbia last week en route to Pulaski.


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Globalisation and the Politics of HopeVIEW EVENT DETAILS
Join our speakers for an exploration of how the politics of hope is played out in various spheres from poverty and planning to business, to further understand how people today are actively waiting to achieve progress and creating ethos of trust and join risk-taking. Looking beyond debates about globalisation that juxtapose concerns of homogenisation with how communities redefine and assert themselves, how can we look at broader questions about how sections of society find access to growth, justice, and a part in the development story? The way that events are perceived and experienced, in a world with ever more information and connectivity, shape outcomes of events in profound ways. What new forms of cosmopolitanism and relationships have emerged among different sections of society, and how does this define our society? How can we understand globalisation through phenomena such as violence, commodification, nationalism, terror and materiality?
Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University . During his academic career, he has held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. He has served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, UNESCO, UNDP and the World Bank.
Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist who has been working independently in film and video since 2001. In 2007 she co-founded CAMP, a collaborative studio that works on interrelated concerns and possibilities of art, technology, archives and the public sphere. CAMP's artworks are technically intensive and conceptually challenging and have been exhibited at major art venues in recent years including Documenta 13 in Kassel.
Ajit Balakrishnan is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rediff.com. He is also Chairman of the Board of Governors of The Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and Chairman of the Working Group of Internet Governance set up by the Government of India. He has written a book titled The Wave Rider: A Chronicle of the Information Age and writes a column for Business Standard.
Mick Gordon is the CEO of Ipsos India, a private research think-tank in the fields of media and advertising ranked as the world's third largest research agency. He focuses on consumer, health and business focused primary research, analysis, interpretation and consultation. He was formerly Managing Director of Synovate India and Financial Director of Sample Surveys.
Zarina Mehta is the Managing Trustee of Swades Foundation. Previously known as SHARE (Society to Heal Aid Restore Educate), Swades Foundation operates to empower rural India. Mehta is also one of the three Founders-Directors of UTV, one of India's foremost media and entertainment conglomerates, which is now Disney UTV. She has been featured in Business Today's Most Powerful Women in Indian Business List for the last three years.
Sheela Patel is the Founder and Director of SPARC, an NGO that addresses the problems of women pavement dwellers in Mumbai. She was the recipient of the 2011 Padma Shri award from the government of India. She was a key figure in the building up of Mahila Milan, a decentralized network of collectives of women living on pavements and in slums in different parts of India. Under Patel's leadership, SPARC has catalyzed the construction of housing for over 8,500 families and over 500,000 toilets and latrines, with programmes in 70 cities in India.
Teesta Setalvad is an educationist, journalist and human rights activist who has been committed to an egalitarian and diverse India, at the forefront of the struggle for justice equality and non discrimination. She was the recipient of the 2007 Padma Shri award from the government of India. She co-edits Communalism Combat, heads and directs Education for a Plural India programme, and is Secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP). CJP is a Mumbai based trust committed to accountability, transparency and punishment to perpetrators of mass crimes within Indian democracy. Her other awards include the 2003 Nuernberg Human Rights Award, the 2009 FIMA Excellence Award by the Federation of Indian Muslim Associations in Kuwait and the 2000 Human Rights Award of the Dalit Liberation Education Trust.
This programme is part of our Future of Asia series, co-produced by Asia Society India Centre and Mohile Parikh Center, which brings together a diverse group of speakers from across the world to explore the future of Asia from a multidisciplinary perspective. In the inaugural edition of the series, we explored the theme of Migration. In the current edition, speakers will investigate the theme of Identity and Culture. Other speakers we have hosted under this series include Ashutosh Varshney, Director of Brown University's Brown-India Initiative, On Dealing with Regional Identity, Martin Jacques, author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World, who discussed the rise of China as a civilisation-state; Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith, who talked about the importance of bilateral relations and exchanges; and Ashis Nandy, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Developing Studies, who discussed the phenomenon of Asian cosmopolitanism.
This programme is also part of our South Asia in Focus series of events this July. Our other programmes include a behind-the-scenes discussion on Nepalese Thangka paintings with conservationist Anupam Sah, a discussion with Tufts University Professor Ayesha Jalal on Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, and a conversation on diplomacy with Ambassador Rajendra Abhyankar and Member of Parliament Mani Shankar Aiyar.
To learn more about upcoming programmes, please visit our website and Facebook and Twitter pages.
In collaboration with:
Outreach Partners:
Event Details
For event details visit https://asiasociety.org/india/events/globalisation-and-politics-hope Visitors' Centre, Auditorium, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS Museum), 159/161 MG Road, Fort, Mumbai – 400 023 TICKET PRICES: Asia Society Members: FREE, All Others: Rs 100. Full-time Students and Press: FREE with valid ID.


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Students at this school are making more academic progress given where they were last year, compared to similar students in the state.
Parent tip
Ask the school how it interprets this rating and what you can do to support the school's continued success.
Test scores at this school are about the same as the state average, though still below the top-performing schools in the state. Because test scores in some states are so low, many students at this school may not be performing at grade level.
Parent tips
Ask the school what it's doing to help students who are behind. Understand what on-track learning looks like, and ask the school what it's doing to accelerate progress for students.
Disadvantaged students at this school are performing better than other students in the state, though this school may still have achievement gaps.
Parent tip:
Schools that close the gap between different student groups are doing something right! Explore the Race/ethnicity and Low-income sections below to learn more.... More These 5 things will help you start a conversation at your school about helping all students succeed.


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When disaster strikes, in order to survive you need to be able to fend off the a-holes who are going to want to take your crap. There are obviously many ways to do this, from a whole spectrum of weaponry, to hand-to-hand combat, to barricades, to diplomacy (which is obviously for pussies). But why not learn a much more sly, deceptive and comical way to circumvent the enemy? The well-placed boobytrap designed by a skilled boobytrap artist has the potential to get you out of almost any sticky situation. From the old bucket of water above the door trick to intricate disguises for explosives, the boobytrap may be your key to survival.
Of course, we can't tell you how to rig up your desk, teakettle, couch, TV or whiskey bottle with hidden explosives (that would be foolish of us), but in a survival situation, or to prepare for one, know that these options exist. There are more rudimentary boobytraps that do not involve fuses and charges, ones that may come in handier in the event of a disaster.
Perhaps the world's most loved (or hated) boobytrap is the pit disguised as regular old ground. Imagine the unsuspecting booby strolling along, planning to take your supplies, then bam! He goes down into the pit and is there at your disposal. And remember, sharp sticks at the bottom of the pit are always a nice touch. Besides, the booby should have been warned by the noise trap you rigged as he came upon your boobytrapped territory.
Remember, boobytraps can be your best friend or worst enemy and in turbulent times others may have the same idea you do. Keeping an eye out for boobytraps and knowing how to disarm them is a key skill for any boobytrap artist. Boobytraps can be made from anything, and anything can be camouflaged, so be sure to keep an extra watchful eye. Knowing how to be a boobytrap artist and avoid being a booby just might be your salvation when all hell breaks loose. See you at the party!


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A zookeeper at the Dallas Zoo was treated in the hospital after being scratched and bitten by a female lion.
In a press release, the zoo said it happened Saturday as the lions were transferred in the off-exhibit lion house.
"One of the keepers inadvertently left a door open," said Dallas Zoo President and CEO Gregg Hudson.
U.S. & World
The lioness bit and scratched the 35-year-old male zookeeper, who used pepper spray to get away.
"Our initial look at this incident is that it was human error that left a shift door inadvertently open," Hudson said.
Additional keepers responded. The lion was sedated and moved to a secure area.
The zookeeper who was bitten was transported to a hospital where he was treated for non life-threatening injuries. His name is not being released.
The zoo said the lion will not be punished or euthanized. The big cat's name is also not being released.
"Anytime that we have humans in the mix there's a percentage that something can happen," Hudson said. "We have a lot of double checks and double standards to make sure that make sure that everything is safe but humans make errors."
"These are big animals they weight 300 plus pounds," Hudson said. "They're very powerful and so if you're ever in the same space with them it can be a very dangerous situation and we do everything we can to avoid that."


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China's growth rebounds but still vulnerable
- Last year%2C China experienced its weakest annual performance since the 1990s
- Forecasters expected a rebound in early 2012
- Chinese leaders are trying to reduce reliance on exports
BEIJING (AP) — China's economy is finally rebounding from its deepest slump since the 2008 global crisis but the shaky recovery could be vulnerable to a new downturn in global trade.
Growth rose to 7.9% in the three months ending in December, up from the previous quarter's 7.4% data showed Friday. For the year, the economy grew by 7.8%, which was China's weakest annual performance since the 1990s.
Retail spending and factory output rose, but analysts say China could suffer a setback if exports weaken or the government fails to maintain investment spending that is propping up a recovery.
"The rebound by itself looks quite shaky," said IHS Global Insight analyst Xianfang Ren in a report. "While domestic demand looks to be coming back, it looks to be a rather anemic rebound."
Forecasters expected a rebound in early 2012 but pushed that back after demand for China's exports was hurt by the sluggish U.S. recovery and Europe's debt problems.
Many expect the latest rebound to peak in coming months before settling back to deliver growth of about 8% for the year, well below double-digit rates of the past decade.
"Growth of 8% or so is about normal now for China," said Mark Williams of Capital Economics. "There's scope for a lot of people to be disappointed, because many still have an inflated sense of how fast China should be growing."
The slowdown was due largely to government controls imposed to cool a real estate boom and surging inflation fueled by Beijing's massive stimulus in response to the 2008 crisis. But it worsened as demand for Chinese exports dropped unexpectedly, raising the risk of job losses and unrest.
This week, the World Bank cut this year's growth forecast for China from 8.6% to a still-rapid 8.4%.
Growth could suffer a setback if China's high investment rates slacken or global trade weakens, the bank said. It said a 5% decline in investment could knock 1.4% off this year's growth and 6% off imports.
Chinese leaders are trying to reduce reliance on exports and investment by nurturing self-sustaining growth driven by domestic consumption but consumer spending growth is slower than they want. That forces the government to fill the gap by pumping money into the economy through higher spending on building subways and other public works.
The gradual recovery comes as new Communist Party leaders under General Secretary Xi Jinping take power in a once-a-decade political transition that began in October.
They are under pressure to keep incomes rising, which will require sweeping change to make the economy more efficient and productive. The World Bank and other advisers have urged them to curb the dominance of state industry and promote private business, changes that face opposition from politically favored companies and their allies in the ruling party.
"Implementation has been problematic but I think the government is trying to make some progress," said Barclays Capital economist Yiping Huang.
A renewed setback for China could send out global shock waves. It would hurt demand for U.S. and European technology and consumer goods, industrial components from Asian neighbors and iron ore, copper, oil and other commodities from Australia, Brazil and Africa.
Societe Generale warned this month that China still faces a small chance of a "hard landing" with growth dropping below 6% — a dangerously low level. Possible triggers: A 2008-style drop in trade or a financial shock if Beijing responds to public frustration with high housing costs by over tightening controls meant to cool surging prices.
"The room for error and the likelihood of nasty unintended consequences is not negligible," said Societe General economist Wei Yao in a report.
Stronger quarterly growth was widely expected after earlier data showed retail sales, factory output and other indicators rising.
In December, retail sales growth accelerated to 15.2% over a year earlier, up from the previous month's 14.9%, the National Bureau of Statistics reported. Factory output growth rose to 10.3% from November's 10.1%.
Manufacturing grew for a third month in December but at a slow pace, an industry group, the China Federation for Logistics and Purchasing, reported earlier. New orders overall grew but export orders dropped slightly.
Consumer inflation also has ticked up, possibly complicating moves to sustain a recovery if necessary with interest rate cuts or higher spending.
Inflation spiked to a six-month high of 2.5% in December after a freezing winter pushed up vegetable prices by nearly 50% in some areas. Officials say inflation so far is limited to vegetables but analysts say pressure for other prices to rise is increasing.
Higher inflation could hamper Beijing's ability to support a recovery with interest rate cuts or more spending for fear of fueling a politically dangerous price spiral. Consumer prices are especially sensitive in a society where the poorest families spend up to half their monthly incomes on food.


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TOLEDO, Ohio -- Continuing the argument he voiced on network morning news shows today, Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that GOP nominee Mitt Romney is vacillating between saber-rattling and dovishness on foreign policy.
"Last night you saw Gov. Romney rushing to agree with President Obama," Biden told a crowd of over a thousand at the University of Toledo, adding a "whoa!" for good measure.
J.D. Pooley / AP
Vice President Joe Biden gestures while speaking during at a campaign rally, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012, at The University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio.
The vice president said he was "stunned and pleased that Gov. Romney had disavowed so many things he's said in the past and acknowledged that the president was right on so many things."
"Some days they go out there and rattle the sabers, some days they are doves carrying olive branches," he added. "The only thing consistent ... about the way they talk about policy is that they are inconsistent."
The argument echoes his comments to NBC's TODAY that he was "surprised" to hear so much agreement from the GOP nominee.
Biden also won cheers from the friendly crowd for knocking the Republican ticket's "foreign policy out of the 80s, a social policy out of the 50s, and an economic policy out of the 20s."
The rally coincided with the Obama campaign's new push to publicize its vision for the next four years, condensed in a glossy packet that awaited the traveling press arriving at the event. Brandishing a copy, Biden conceded that it "sounds so trite to hold up a plan" but that "it's all here" in the 20-page brochure.
Biden's next event today is a joint rally with the president in Dayton.


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Yes, that means I'm still awaiting any sort of response regarding this manuscript which was submitted way back in September. For those who think I'm a bit trigger-happy to get upset about such an apparently modest time interval, note that GRL is specifically supposed to be a rapid turnover journal for short letters - a standard review request allows 2 weeks, which should give a reasonable expectation of a response in about 3 weeks including editorial handling etc.
Moreover, it's not just the rather extraordinary time delay that I'm pissed off with, but the extremely unprofessional way in which GRL seem to have handled it. Firstly, I was amazed to find out that the manuscript had been assigned to an editor who just happens to be a close colleague of Dave Frame and recent co-author with Myles Allen on a paper concerning methods for probabilistic estimation. Secondly, it's astonishing that this person didn't seem to think it was inappropriate to take on this task. And thirdly, the Chief Editor ignored my request that he should be replaced by someone without such an obvious conflict of interest. That's despite GRL actually having a box on their submission form for such editorial conflicts of interests to be mentioned - which I didn't fill in at the time of submission, as this person is nowhere listed as an editor on the GRL website (or anywhere else on the web, such as his own web-page) and I therefore had no possible reason to suspect that he, or anyone else with such an obvious relationship with those researchers who I am most directly criticising, could potentially be offered the task.
According to GRL's on-line manuscript tracking system, the reviews were all in a full 2 weeks ago and since that time have been sitting on the editor's desk waiting for him to make a decision. There has been no reply yet to the email I sent to GRL last week enquiring as to his health...
No sooner blogged than I get an email from GRL...It has eventually been passed over to the Chief Editor for the decision. I'd have been happier if this had happened in advance of the (potentially critical) choicee of referees.


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