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Will online learning spell the end of universities?by Kevin Charles Redmon / June 28, 2012 / Leave a comment
Stanford University: students from Bakersfield to Bangalore can now take its computer science courses online
Primm, Nevada, is a three-casino, one-rollercoaster town in the Mojave Desert, just across the California state line and 40 minutes south of Las Vegas's shimmering neon. Road-weary truckers can choose between Whiskey Pete's, Terrible's Lotto, and Starbucks. The centre of town is a discount fashion megamall.
In spring 2005, preparing for that autumn's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor of robotics, and David Stavens, his undergraduate protégé, arrived in the desert for several months of off-road testing. In tow was their Volkswagen Touareg, "Stanley," a vehicle that can drive itself.
The Grand Challenge called on American university students to build robotic cars and race them, unassisted, across 131 miles of unforgiving desert scrub, over salt flats and down the treacherous Beer Bottle Pass. The contest was sponsored by the US department of defence, which hopes one day to send driverless vehicles into battle. Thrun and Stavens were counting on Stanley, more than a year in the making, to take home the $2m cash prize. But Stanley—its trunk packed with computers, sprouting radar and GPS antennae from its roof rack—needed a careful debugging.
"We happened to be in the car a lot, doing nothing else but waiting," Thrun said recently. "Then something would go wrong and one of us would code like crazy. And during those times often there was really nothing to do, so we chatted a lot."
Bouncing around the desert with their $150,000 toy, Stavens recalls, privilege was a frequent topic of conversation. "It would come up at night, in the hotel rooms of these very small towns we were staying in. 'This has been a great system for us, higher education, but it's kind of broken. What can we do?'"
After four months of teaching Stanley to steer clear of the tall cacti and sand pits, Thrun and Stavens had so far failed to solve academia's privilege problem. Stanley performed like a champ though, and in October, the robo-car cruised to victory in Primm in just under seven hours, earning Stanford some serious geek accolades. They had updated the car, a technology of the 20th century, for the 21st.
In the years that followed, Thrun—something of a celebrity in the computer science world—accepted a fellowship at Google, where he co-developed Street View, which lets users click on a map of, say, the West End and take a virtual stroll through Leicester Square, and founded Google X, the company's secret lab where futuristic technologies are incubated and born. As the lab's director, Thrun developed "enhanced reality" glasses worthy of a dystopian sci-fi novel and built a second generation of robotic cars that have since logged thousands of miles on California roads.
Stavens continued to work in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and, in 2011, received his doctorate. All the while, a 2007 PowerPoint presentation of ways radically to disrupt higher education languished on Thrun's laptop.
He didn't open the presentation again until seeing Salman Khan speak at TED, the international ideas festival, in 2011. Khan is an erstwhile hedge fund analyst who found his calling remaking education for the digital generation; his online Khan Academy offers 3,000 free video tutorials on everything from Cézanne to stoichiometry, many of them taught by Khan himself.
"I was actually sort of embarrassed, to be honest," Thrun told me. "Thinking that I would teach 200 students at Stanford while a former investment banker was teaching 200,000."
And so, in August 2011, Thrun, along with Stanford colleagues Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, made three of the university's computer science courses available on the internet. Students taking the class via laptop, sitting in internet cafés in Budapest, Bangalore, and Bakersfield, would be given all the same lectures and exams as undergraduates sitting in Stanford's lecture halls. They'd be graded just as mercilessly, too.
Hoping to drum up a little interest in his class, Thrun dashed off a short email to a handful of colleagues. When he woke up the next morning, 5,000 people had enrolled. "We scrambled," Thrun said, during a talk this winter at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. "We put together a small technology team. We built a really ugly website. And we started recording ourselves day and night. And just to show you how primitive our technology was, it was literally a camera, a pen, and a napkin."
Lecturing to a camera was worlds apart from lecturing to an auditorium. Weaving together drawings, voiceovers and head shots was a perfectionist's nightmare. A single class often took ten or 15 hours to record, "to the detriment of my marriage and my family life and my sleep." Thrun asked Stavens to help design the course's software, and the team began working, some without pay, out of Thrun's tiny guesthouse in Los Altos Hills, five miles south of Stanford's campus.
By the time classes began, enrolment had swelled to 158,000, with students from every country in the world except North Korea. Then, on campus, something bizarre happened. "On day one, we had this full class of 200 students. And just two or three weeks in, the class was empty. There were only 30 students showing up." He asked around. "And they all said, they actually preferred me on video. They can rewind me on video."
The internet programme also allowed students to be quizzed and marked automatically, on a scale never before possible. Twenty-three thousand students eventually "graduated" from Thrun's computer science course. Just over one per cent of them got perfect scores. None of those were Stanford students.
At the end of his Digital Life Design talk in January, Thrun confirmed that he had resigned his tenure at Stanford. Instead, he was throwing his energy into a new venture, going live that day, called Udacity. The site would offer "massive online open courses" (MOOCs) free of charge to the global 99 per cent, to the tech-savvy and web-illiterate alike. With student debt at $1 trillion in the United States alone—greater than credit card debt—the current education system, with its barriers, privileges, and vast inequalities, was no longer defensible, he said.
"I always felt, I was at Stanford, the world's best university, and I was a great teacher," he said. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again. It's impossible. I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to the classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill. And I've seen wonderland."
* * *
Not long ago, on a rainy Saturday morning, Professor Dave Evans and I hung out in bed while he tried to explain recursive functions (for the fourth time) and I worked on my homework. Or rather, I hung out in bed, and Evans, a computer science professor at the University of Virginia, hung out on my laptop screen, where I could—click—pause him midsentence and pour myself another cup of coffee.
"Computer Science 101: Building a Search Engine" was one of Udacity's first offerings, and for seven weeks this spring, Evans was teaching me and 30,000 others to write enough Python—a basic programming language—to create a mini Google. We started with basics, including the difference between a computer and a toaster, and "bits" versus "bytes." Then we went back in time for a little nerd history, from Augusta Ada King, Lord Byron's daughter and the world's first "programmer," to PageRank, the search algorithm that powers Google.
Evans is the kind of nerdy savant whose gap-tooth smile and Monty Python humour attract a cult following on campus. (As an academic, he's also a world-class cryptographer.) Thrun and Stavens found him in November 2011, flew him to Palo Alto in December, and by January he was crammed in a makeshift recording studio—still in Thrun's guesthouse—rejigging his standard university curriculum into a Udacity one.
Instead of three 50-minute lectures a week, Evans needed a series of five to ten-minute video clips, each tackling a different concept, such as variables, loops, and "hash tables." Tests had to be converted to online modules, whose multiple-choice answers could be marked automatically. So, too, did the weekly homework assignments, many of which required students to write complex lines of computer code; "standard questions" would cover the fundamentals, while "gold-star problems" would allow top students to set themselves apart. For every hour of finished lectures, Evans estimates, he and an assistant taped five or six hours of raw footage, then trimmed and spliced the material into bite-size clips.
"Building a Search Engine" began in late February, and at first I had no trouble keeping up. I attended a decent American university, and I'd like to think my brain has a little zip left in it. Whatever I lack in intellect I probably make up for in obstinacy, and I was going to be the best damn programmer if it killed me.
Homework was due every Tuesday evening, and going into the third week, my personalised Progress tab informed me, I had a solid B+. Then I started to get lazy. I'd fool around on Facebook all weekend and wake up on Tuesday morning in a panic. I'd binge on lectures, skip through quizzes, and scramble to finish the assignments on time while the morons sitting behind me in Starbucks would not shut up. Couldn't these people see that I was trying to learn?
I mentioned this to Evans when we spoke in April. "One way to keep more students in the class is to reduce the effort required and water things down more," he said. "We didn't want to do that." Indeed, of the more than 100,000 students who first signed up for CS101, just 30,000 completed the first lesson, and even fewer, 10,000, hacked their way through the final exam. A 90 per cent drop-out rate doesn't look great on paper, but then, Udacity's only admission requirement is an email address.
Evans was sympathetic. "Just keeping up with the course requires a tremendous amount of effort. Lots of people are excited by the idea and happy to provide their email address, but once it comes time to actually spend ten hours a week to keep up with the course, it's pretty hard for people with real jobs and families and commitments and other things to do."
So who is Udacity for, exactly? Basement-dwelling teenagers and unemployed bachelors? I logged on to the discussion forum to find out. There, I met Azzam, from Saudi Arabia; Paveoliu, from Romania; Kerbaï, from Cameroon; Hafiz, from Pakistan; and Svyatoslav, from Moscow, who invited any Russian speakers to join his study group.
"It turns out that two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States," Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. "It's about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford's campus."
And that's just it: Stavens and his co-founders aren't evangelists out to convert the unwashed masses. They simply minister to those who show up, looking to be saved. "Learning is a process a lot like exercise. It has great results, but takes a lot of effort. And maintaining that effort is really hard." If you don't want to learn Python, or how the smartphone game Angry Birds works, fine. There are 500 Latvians who do.
Not that you have to go so far as Riga. My CS101 classmates included system analysts from Albany, stay-at-home mums from Utah, and 17 year olds waiting to get the hell out of Oregon. "I'm a research nurse from Oklahoma City," posted Jodie. "I wanted to go to Stanford when I graduated high school, but stuff happened and that didn't work out. Forty years later, here I am."
By the time the final exam for "Building a Search Engine" approached, I'd fallen a full week behind. I begged off dinner dates with friends and locked myself in my bedroom, trying to catch up. Anxieties and neuroses I hadn't heard from since university dropped by to say hi. Before long, my fingernails were gone and tiny eyebrow hairs littered my keyboard.
The exam consisted of eight regular questions and three gold-starred ones. I made quick work of the first nine, but the tenth required a program to morph a misspelled word—say, "Prspoect"—into its correct form, "Prospect." (This is the same magic underlying Google's obliging "Did you mean… ?" function.) The Friday before it was due, I spent seven hours in a café armchair, trying to "hack," or write, a solution, downing mug after mug of sour coffee. Slowly, my left brain began to unravel. By supper time, I was ready to hurl my laptop out the window in frustration. I had 60 lines of sloppy code and a program that worked only sporadically. Finally, on Sunday night, I capitulated and hit Submit.
While I waited for the Udacity-bots to grade my answers, I emailed the gold-star question to my younger brother, Joe, who majored in computer science and is, as they say in the corner of the country where we went to university, "wicked smaht." He spent six minutes hacking the problem and sent back 13 lines of code. "It's actually a really beautiful solution, too," he wrote.
But then, Joe's degree cost $200,000, plus library fines. For $2.73, plus tax, I can haunt the neighbourhood coffee shop and stream all the Udacity lectures I want.
* * *
This is a MOOC moment in Silicon Valley. While Thrun decided to break with Stanford in launching Udacity—"I really wanted to go radical," he says—his colleagues Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng opted to partner with the university to develop their own site, Coursera. Like Udacity, its first offerings are computer science courses—on "Compilers" and "Automata"—in part because that's what Koller and Ng know how to teach. Unlike Udacity, though, Coursera is sourcing lectures from a consortium of Ivy League schools, including Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. June's catalogue includes introductions to sociology, pharmacology, and behavioural neurology. Poetry is slated for September, as is Greek and Roman mythology. And lest they be seen as late adopters, Harvard and MIT recently announced their own e-university, edX, endowing it with $60m in seed funding.
Universities were once wary of giving away their courses online. At best, the videos took up server space and ate into a professor's office hours; at worst, they diluted the Ivy League brand. Today, the calculus has changed. Enterprising academics are anxious to show off their research or take the stage in front of 10,000 students. Administrators, in turn, recognise that embracing the web doesn't mar a university's stature—instead, it shows visionary leadership, which translates into better fundraising. And honestly, when Harvard decides to play spades, what choice do you have but to follow suit?
In the United Kingdom, MOOCs have been somewhat less fêted. (One computer scientist, at York, told me he hadn't the faintest idea what I was talking about.) Michael Arthur, vice-chancellor of Leeds, said, "We've had lots of conversations about, should we do this as a public good?" The technology is relatively cheap, after all, and the curricula already exist. "So why am I slightly reticent? I suppose because, although I think you can do a lot online, I don't think you can do the full experience." Then, the rock-and-roller in him came out. "I'm a Rolling Stones fan," he said. "You can download lots of Rolling Stones online. But there's nothing quite like going to the concert."
Educators of a certain age will remember Fathom, Columbia University's for-profit online learning portal that counted the London School of Economics, Cambridge University Press, and the British Museum among its partners. After burning through $25m and enrolling just 65,000 students in three years, the venture went belly-up in 2003.
Open University, of course, has been massively successful at offering paid online instruction. How it may fare against a competitor like Udacity, which gives away courses for free, remains to be seen. "No one's 100 per cent sure what's going to happen to them in the new world," said Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie, in Australia, who often blogs about the marriage of education and technology. "I don't think they know either." With no entry requirements, MOOCs are targeting many of the same students that Open University has served for decades. "It's the ultimate in equity, isn't it? Everybody gets a chance. You're not guaranteed success, but you're guaranteed a chance."
For traditional universities, Schwartz mused, MOOCs may be a clever new way to recruit non-traditional students. Schwartz was calling me from London where, just days before, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, had spoken about social mobility and educational opportunity. ("We can't ignore it," he said in a talk to the Sutton Trust. "Class still matters.") One way to reach more disadvantaged students is to lower standards. But what if selective universities also allowed applicants—particularly those with poor secondary-school marks—to prove their smarts through MOOCs? "Let's say you do a course [online] and you do well in it," Schwartz offered. "We might say, 'Well that's proof enough, in you go!'"
For now, though, the Oxfords and Cambridges of the world are only wading in the surf. Moral imperatives aside, the simple fact is that American-style lectures lend themselves to web videos; Oxbridge-style tutorials do not. David White, co-manager of Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning at Oxford, pointed out that "the physical university has spent 1,000 years refining itself to create a kind of perfect ecology for students to interact—college dinners, the quad, the clubs and societies, the pubs, all of the rest of it." Whatever Udacity's virtues, pubs are not among them. Anomic learning may be fine for learning Python, but in the humanities, the discussion is the course. The intimacy of the tutor-student relationship at Oxford is the raison d'être of the university. "That's kind of what we're all about," White said. "There's a tension between that and the M of MOOC"—the "massive" part.
Talk of teaching Sophocles and Shakespeare to 100,000 students is sure to knit a few eyebrows and ruffle a few gowns. On Sand Hill Road, though, the centre of California's venture-capital scene, it opens chequebooks. Udacity's latest round of funding netted the company $5m; Coursera took in more than triple that. Which invites a fair question: are MOOCs just the latest vanity among techno-idealists? It's hard not to wonder just how quickly the wellsprings of optimism and cash will run dry. Start-ups are notoriously coy about their profitability, and new web ventures often take years to break even, if indeed they ever do.
Solving the "double bottom line" dilemma—in which profits are as important as the public good—won't be simple. Udacity hopes to use a "recruiter fee model," earning a commission for every Latvian Mark Zuckerberg it discovers and connects with, say, Twitter or Amazon. There's a voracious appetite for talent in the Valley these days, and Udacity has an enormous pool to fish from. A traditional recruiter often receives 20 per cent of a programmer's first year salary, but Udacity could ask for half that and still make enough money to keep its investors happy. Meanwhile, the content, including lectures, quizzes and certificates, remains free.
Skimming recruiter fees is only one way of bringing in cash. Anant Agarwal, president of edX, has said that his site will charge for an official "certificate" of completion: anyone can take a course, but if you want your accomplishment in writing, you'll have to pay. Alternatively, Coursera might be able to license its Ivy League content to smaller second-tier schools or state universities.
"Massive online courses provide disruptive competition to the status quo," Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Centre on Education Policy at Brookings, said. "Would you rather listen to a lecture about Shakespeare from not only the world's best Shakespeare scholar but one of the world's best teachers and do it online, or, you know, listen to the third-rate person that's provided by your community college?"
For now, Udacity and Coursera can buy time with venture capital dollars, and edX with funds from its parent universities. None are profitable, and investors don't expect them to be—yet. But the technology costs will quickly add up. If Thrun wants to remake education, he'll have to first make enough money to pay his employees. And if that proves impossible? He'll either have to strike a Faustian bargain and begin charging students, fund Udacity out of his own pocket, or kill the very thing he's created.
Thrun allows that there are obstacles, financial and otherwise. "For example, I won't be able to teach you how to play tennis anytime soon. Physical exercise, playing a musical instrument—that's going to be harder. Poetry is probably harder than history. History is fact-based, while poetry is more subjective." Then again, this is a man who taught his car to drive itself down the Pacific Coast Highway. How hard can it be to set up a worldwide network of crackerjack teaching assistants who will volunteer to mark essays about Richard III and the French Revolution?
We'll know soon enough, as Coursera will have to solve the riddle this autumn when its first humanities classes go online. Ng imagines a "peer grading" scheme in which qualified students mark one another's work; the task could be distributed widely, so that no one assistant determines any given grade. And in time, who knows? Natural language processing, a computer's ability to parse written English, may get so good that a machine can catch dangling participles, limp prose, even stale ideas.
"Online education right now is where air travel was a hundred years ago," says Stavens. "No one has built the Concorde yet."
On 6th April, I graduated from Udacity's CS101 "with high distinction" and received a PDF diploma with my name and a nifty little robot on it. When the second term began a week later, I could have taken my newfound Python skills and enrolled in a course like "Design of Computer Programs" or "Web Application Engineering." Instead, I wandered over to Codecademy, a New York-based start-up that offers MOOCs on how to write languages used to build web sites. But for all my enthusiasm, it was a lesson in the limits of online learning.
Codecademy aims to make learning JavaScript as easy as possible, teaching it like a foreign language, with grammar and syntax. When it launched in late 2011, technophiles and the Twitterati went bonkers. Coding for kindergarteners! Even New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his intention to enrol. By early January, more than a million people had signed up.
I wanted to like my new JavaScript classes, I really did. They were intuitive and fast-paced, and pretty soon I'd collected 369 "points" and six "achievements," whatever those were. But after spending seven weeks building a search engine with Udacity's Dave Evans, Codecademy felt a little cold. There were no video lectures, no corny jokes, no virtual field trips to particle accelerators, and—most problematic of all—no deadlines. Where Udacity motivated students by stoking long-repressed grade school anxieties—turn this in by Tuesday night or get a big fat zero—Codecademy relied on intermittent positive reinforcement: "You will feel like a boss when you make your first app and webpage!" their weekly emails reminded me.
After a while, I started flagging the emails as spam.
* * *
No one claims that MOOCs will take a wrecking ball to the ivory tower—Stanford accepts only 7 per cent of those who apply, and there's no shortage of families willing to pay the $53,298 annual sticker price—but it wouldn't hurt to shake it up a little. As Thrun observed in his Digital Life Design talk, the world's first university appeared in Bologna in 1088. "At the time, 350 years before Gutenberg, the lecture was the most effective way to convey information." Then came the printing press, industrialisation, celluloid, the web. "And miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago! The university has been, surprisingly, the least innovative of all places in society."
Thrun seems willing to court failure, however costly, if it means the chance to disrupt a sclerotic system in a spectacular way. He wants a university built of 1s and 0s where the world-class roboticist in Palo Alto can teach the pensioner in Leeds and the nurse in Caracas and the lawyer in Beirut and the pencil pusher in Mumbai and the kids hanging around the drive-thru window at the Carl's Jr in Primm, just across the California state line, 40 minutes south of Vegas, and about a million miles from anywhere.


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I decided this category because this is new to me.I chose this assignment, Fan Fiction Picture, which requires to "Take the name or title of your favorite band, song, movie, or tv show and display it in the form of photography. You can take as many pictures as you want, but have your photos capture the band, song, movie, or tv show you pick. Be creative and have fun!"
I used the picture from google, and I attached it. I copied the code of the YouTube and I attached it on this page, then the movie is appeared. Before I do this assignment, I do not know how to attach the YouTube on this page, but I remembered what we did on flicker section. We copied the code of picture and paste on the HTML. As a result, the photographic appeared. I used the way for doing this assignment.
The story is that I like the movie. I think most of the people can learn something from this movie. When I watched the movie, I though this is for "Rich" people, but a short time later, I thought we all know this situation would have to happen someday. We just feel unrealistic. After I watched, I must enjoy my life because life is one-time-only, and I do not want to have regret for my life. I strongly recommend this movie to think about LIFE.

subset: commoncrawl


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While at TechEd IT Pro North America 2008, I also had the opportunity to attend Brent Alinger's session on Exchange Server 2007 and Hyper-V. Brent is a Senior Test Lead on the Exchange Team at Microsoft, and he's leading our testing efforts around Hyper-V.
Brent described a number of terms, such as the Hyper-V root (which is the parent or the host machine), Hyper-V guest (which is the child or virtual machine), virtual hard disks (VHD), passthrough disks, fixed and dynamic disks, and virtual machine state files. Some of the more noteworthy bits of info from the session are:
- Within 60 days of Hyper-V's RTM, the Exchange team will publish a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices. I'm part of the Exchange Virtualization Working Group and will be helping to deliver some of this content.
- Customers should not deploy Exchange on Hyper-V until our support guidance is available.
- Early results show that performance of Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V is quite good, and that it scales very well from 1-4 processors per VM.
In terms of best practices and requirements, Brent shared the following:
- We're only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
- We're only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
- Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
- Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
- All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
- For backup, hardware VSS should be used.
- There's a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.
Brent also mentioned that Hyper-V is a good fit when Exchange servers in branch offices cannot be consolidated to a central datacenter (for example, because of bandwidth or connectivity issues).
In terms of workload, not every workload is a candidate for virtualization. For example, server roles such as Client Access and Hub Transport can be good candidates, but a more heavy hitter like the Mailbox role (which often uses all available resources on a physical server) might not be the best candidate for virtualizing.
It was a great session, and you can expect to hear a lot more about Exchange 2007 and Hyper-V over the coming months.
Source: Scott Schnoll


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Pentax Optio SV
Pentax's newest ultracompact digital camera is a 5-MP camera with a 5.8- to 29-mm (36- to 180-mm, 35-mm equivalent) f/2.8 to f/4.7 5X optical zoom lensa fairly high zoom ratio for such a small camera. It has a list of features worthy of a full-sized camera, such as variety of scene modes, digital filters, program AE shooting, exposure compensation (+/-2 EV in 1/3 EV steps) and more. The camera has an aluminum alloy body and accepts SD cards.


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Bermuda Sands "Sands"
Sands is a 15.1 hand roan quarter horse gelding. He is perfect for anyone who is learning to ride and is a great teacher for our new students. Sands is owned by Morgan L. '18.
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Wally is a 1999 Thuringer gelding who stands at 16 hands. He is a fancy mover but goes easily in any hunter or equitation ring. He's super sweet and very lovable.
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Shorty is a 16 hand chestnut quarter horse gelding. He has a super sweet personality and loves attention. He loves to jump and is great for the more advanced rider.


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Moby Starts LA Architecture Blog
Recording artist Moby recently started a blog about Los Angeles architecture, documenting the "strange, beautiful, ugly, banal, sublime, baffling buildings" he discovers on on his travels throughout the city. In other news, South Korea may be home to the first invisible skyscraper and there's a mushroom in the Amazon that will eat plastic.
Check out the headlines after the jump.
• Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog
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• Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic | Co.Exist
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My Pirate Costume
How did I do it?
I was going to sew the underbust vest, but time did not permit this. Instead I used a waist cincher that I already owned. It still looked fabulous! I made my sash using a meter long rectangle of blue satin. I serged the edges using a contrasting red thread. I also made a sash for my fiancé's costume, which I'll talk about shortly.
My hat was based off of a hat that my brother owns. I purchased thick brown felt from the fabric store. I combined a variety of tricorn patterns that I found online. I tweaked their design flaws and adjusted the pattern until it was perfect. After a few drafts I was ready to sew my hat. I used a leather needle because the felt was so thick it would have broken my other needles. It was easier to sew than I thought it would be, although I had to struggle when attaching the brim. After sewing the hat I stitched a gold braided trim along the edge of the brim. I also created a sash using the meter of blue satin, which I stitched onto the edge of the inside of the hat. I then made double bows to attach onto the sides of the tricorn. I seriously love my hat, it looks better than anything store bought and I would totally make it again!
After pairing all of this with my plastic sword and a bunch of temporary tattoos, it really came together! I love this pirate costume and I hope to wear it again in the future. Here's a photo of me wearing it!


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About Us
About us
The Antrobus Arms is a family run pub/restaurant near the historic Cheshire village of Antrobus. The Barnes' (Martin, Chris, and Steve) acquired the pub in January 2018, repositioning the Antrobus Arms as a destination dining venue.
We offer contemporary British menus with traditional hospitality from helpful, friendly staff. Great food, wines, and beers are available every day in our relaxed bar, dining room or, if the weather allows, in our beer garden.
Our location between Warrington and Northwich, with close proximity to the M56, makes us the ideal place to meet up for lunch, a relaxing drink, or to dine with friends and family.
- Antrobus Arms first licenced in 1700's and was originally known as the Wheatsheaf.
- 1800's the inn was a staging post on the Warrington Road.
- c 1930 Wheatsheaf was renamed the Antrobus Arms.
- Greenall Whitley acquired the site.
- 2004 pub owned by Punch – Sandra and Trevor Collins were the tenants.
- 2006 Sandra and Trevor Collins bought the freehold from Punch.
- 2018 MJB Hospitality Ltd bought the pub.
The old English custom of souling or soulcaking dates back to the 10th Century.
A traditional Cheshire Souling play performed on All Soul's Eve and the following 2 weekends.
The Antrobus Gang are well established with continuity a distinguishing feature. They are thought to have performed continuously for hundreds of years.
Soulcakers would go from house to house singing a begging song or a plea for prayers for the dead. They would put on a play for residents.
The plays were performed out of necessity when farm work was in short supply. Plays usually consist of a fight between St George and his adversaries resulting in one of the characters being killed and brought back to life by a 'quack' doctor. The Hooden Horse accompanies the soulcakers with its groom and a whip.
The Hooden Horse is a man covered with a blanket holding a horses head.
Soulcakes were small spiced fruit cakes similar to Hot Cross Buns and were given to performers as well as drink or money, helping to keep their families fed during lean times. It could be quite lucrative as 3 nights of mumming (acting out the play) often raised as much as month's wages.
The tradition continues at the Antrobus Arms where money raised now goes to charity.


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I have a little bit of a problem when it comes to identifying songs because of one very obvious reason: I don't listen to the radio- ever. I listen to songs almost solely on my iPhone. Now, I do pick up new music from TV shows and movies a lot, which accounts for my eclectic playlists (it's rare for me to like a lot of music from one artist), but identifying Top 40 hits? Not my best skill.
So when Glee did their rendition of Somebody I Used to Know (see above), I was completely unaware that this was already a popular song by something called "Gotye" (a.k.a. Wally….yeah, I laughed, too). The song didn't make too much of an impression and I forgot about it for a little while. Then it came up again in my shows because Gotye was the musical guest on SNL. I kept thinking when the song came on…WHERE IS THIS FROM??? Oh, Glee. This time I found the song more memorable, and was intrigued at what the video looked like based on the SNL sketch below.
My Gotye journey continued on and I watched the original music video. I downloaded the song shortly after, and have listened to it often since then. The song puzzles me, though, because I've found in talking with friends and reading about the song that it is interpreted in different ways (specifically who the girl that sings is meant to be). Here are the four groups of thought I've found regarding who Kimbra plays, but I'm sure there are more opinions (maybe even you make a new group?).
Group 1: She's the Mistreated Ex
People in this group (including Entertainment Weekly who say "it's about a guy who screwed over his ex-girlfriend") believe Gotye was mean to his ex until she left and is now complaining that she didn't have to make such a clean cut from him in the end. Kimbra is singing from the ex's point of view insisting that she's the victim of Gotye's actions, and not the other way around. I could see this, but she recalls that he said he "could let it go, and I wouldn't catch you hung up on somebody that you used to know." Isn't he singing about that somebody now? How could that be her?
Group 2: She's the Extension of His Voice
My sister feels that Kimbra is simply just another voice in the song, not really talking to Gotye, but continuing his sentiment. I think this is discredited by the music video because she is looking at Gotye when she sings and he shows small sings of distress like looking down, sighing, and closing his eyes, which indicate to me he is affected by what she is saying.
Group 3: She's the New Girlfriend (My Group!)
I have always thought that Gotye is talking about an old relationship which he tried to make work, but in the end it was probably better that they weren't together. However, he hasn't really gotten over the fact that this girl pretends like she doesn't even know him now. Kimbra is his new girlfriend who is being mistreated by Gotye now and complaining that he is still hung up on this ex that cut him out of her life. This to me explains the body language in the video, and the specific lyrics of Kimbra's part.
Group 4: I Don't Care
This group likes the song, but doesn't really care to piece a story out of it. They just want to listen to it when it comes on the radio and move on. This group also has those that are over the song and don't care about the story as they switch radio stations to avoid it. To each his own.
I've always been one that hates when things are open for interpretation. I'd rather know what the artist or director was thinking when they created it (ex. Did Sarah remember at the end of the Chuck series? Did Rose die at the end of Titanic?). These questions don't keep me up at night, but will definitely be on my mind should I run into these famous people by chance someday (because that's likely).
By the way, if you are a Gotye fan, tickets just went on sale for his North American tour throughout the rest of the year. You might want to snag them now if you plan on going. You can view the concert information here.


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Come along to the FREE Edinburgh Tourism Showcase at the Assembly Rooms, 54 George Street and learn more about Pacari Chocolates. We will be there from 8.30 a.m to 2.30 p.m and will be delighted to see you there to answer all the questions you might have about our company.
The Edinburgh Tourism Showcase is a fun and informal event which gives the opportunity for everyone in the tourism sector to get together, network, exchange information and learn more about what the latest tourism products and offers are.
The event is a great occasion to learn about existing businesses and their products. Therefore, Pacari Chocolates will be presenting some of our best products while sharing with you our passion for high quality chocolate from Ecuador.
If you are on the hunt for a unique, luxurious and organic chocolate to introduce to your clientele, this will be your best chance!
For more information visit ETAK 2016
Pacari Organic Chocolates exhibiting at Edinburgh Tourism Showcase, 19 May
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the city has finished.
March 24, 2009
Although I am not a fan of girly, semi-reality TV in general, The City is actually, a bit of soft spot for me. Franny will be heartbroken that the series has come to abrupt stop just thirteen episodes in, and frankly, I'm a (very) tiny bit disappointed too.
Hurry up with season two then!


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Most of us were not raised by wolves. We were in fact raised by gracious mothers who taught us to excuse ourselves for transgressions as minor as sneezing and to always say "please" and "thank you."
However with the daily grind of work, kids, traffic jams, contractors that don't show up, and in-laws that do, it has become all too easy to let our manners slip. Heartfelt "Thank You" cards have been replaced by "Thank You" e-mails, or maybe even just "THX" texted during a red light. Even the ubiquitous nicety "please" has been subtly edged-out by the extremely insincere "puh-leeze."
While random acts of kindness are a step in the right direction, specific acts of goodwill towards friends, family and coworkers are perhaps the best way to bring courtesy and civility back into our day-to-day lives, and with a little organization and few items from See Jane Work you can help put the "nice" back into "Have a Nice Day."
Remember To Send A Card
With everything you've got to get done in a day, is it any wonder you forget birthdays and anniversaries, and are caught completely off-guard when, after only three years of dating and an 18-month engagement, your cousin's wedding is suddenly this Saturday?
- Start each week with a plan and you're less likely to overlook the details. The 8 Days-A-Week Planner has week view pages and is un-dated.
- The Emergency Box of Cards includes 15 assorted cards with envelopes covering occasions from Happy Birthday to a simple, Thanks a bunch.
- The petite, leather-bound birthday book fits in your handbag or desk drawer and has spaces for every single day of the year.
- The Greeting Card Organizer has card-holder pages and index dividers that you can label by occasion or by month. So you can buy the perfect card for your sister-in-law in January and then remember to send it to her on her birthday in March.
Say It Like You Mean It
It's not that you don't feel appreciative, but after eight hours in the office and 45 minutes in rush-hour traffic, sometimes by the end of the day the only thing you're feeling truly thankful for is that the day has finally ended.
- Keep Thank You Notes from Jack and Lulu on hand. Each set includes 10 notes and envelopes that are pretty enough for personal use, and professional enough for business. Toss them in a Jane Marvel Pouch with a pen, postage stamps and your address book and you'll have everything you need all in one place.
- Reward excellent service at home and on the road with the Itty Bitty Guide to Tipping. This pocket-sized paperback gives you guidelines for gratuities locally and abroad.
Studies have shown that doing nice things for other people actually releases "feel good" chemicals in the brain. So instead of that 3 o'clock sugar rush, consider spending your afternoon break calling staff members to thank them for their hard work, or writing a complimentary letter to your sales rep's manager.
- Tell your son's teacher she's earned an A+ in your book, or let the soccer coach know you support her goal by giving a gift certificate for anything from a cup of coffee to a shopping spree at the mall.
- Skip the plate of cookies and welcome a new family to the neighborhood with a completed Where I Live Journal. With color-coded pages to fill in the best restaurants, shops and parks in the area, this little directory can help a new neighbor find her way around.
- Help a friend hammer out a remodeling project by filling a Business Card Holder with contact info for a reliable plumber, electrician, and house painter.
It's Nice To Receive Too
Yes, of course it's the thought that counts. But receiving a gift that you don't want, even with a gift receipt attached, is kind of like being given another errand to run. Make it fun for you and easy for them by requesting a Gift Certificate from See Jane Work. We carry products ranging in price from "I enjoy working with you" to "I enjoy being married to you" so it's a great way to get the stuff you really want.
If one of our ideas or products works for you, or if you have a solution you'd like to share, please let us know at email@example.com.


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SEATTLE — US judge partially lifts Trump administration's ban on certain refugees.
Top Stories
'Death by donation': Why some doctors say organs should be removed from some patients before they die
Under so-called 'euthanasia by organ donation,' the act of organ donation itself — not a lethal injection or a doctor-prescribed, life-ending dose of barbiturates — would be the mode of death
Watch'The fight of your life': In a Postmedia exclusive, Mark Norman tells his side of the story
Norman was in his kitchen in April 2017 when his wife Bev, astonished, called out to him. 'I think the prime minister was just talking about you'
How do we prove Keanu Reeves is the greatest action star in Hollywood history?
Richard Warnica: You will come to realize that Keanu Reeves defies detail. He simply exists.
Conrad Black: The President of the United States called. I was being pardoned, at last
When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said 'Hello' and started to ask if this was a prank
Postmedia is pleased to bring you a new commenting experience. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. Visit our community guidelines for more information.


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I want to start a blog because I've seen multiple other kids my age start their own blogs, and I think it's pretty cocky. I suppose the premise is this: Whenever the blogger has a thought that they consider interesting, they type it out into their blog so that they may share the idea with the world wide web. Okay. But I don't really care about any of their ideas, let alone an online collection of them. So I'm a hypocrite, right?
I don't expect this to go on very long… I'll probably create one or two posts total, and then never revisit this random Google account app for as long as I live. I used to be afraid of starting things without finishing them. Very afraid. Not sure why. *shrugs*
We'll see how this goes. I don't have a perspective on the world any more unique than every other basic teenage girl out there, nor any less unique than the President of the United States. (A mon avi.)
Gotta go. I have a meeting for a job for money for stuff. Que dios les bendiga.


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Life's true purpose –
We are born as human beings in this world and to run greedily after the positions and the materials is not the only aim of our life. The inner world also exists like another side of the coin which is more marvelous more vast more beautiful that is the true ecstasy. The difference between in both this world is that one is true and the other is false. Where most of us are awakened is the false place by putting innumerable efforts for the perishable pleasures leading atlas for disappointment, discontent and unhappiness. The place where we most of us sleep is the only contented and happiest place filled with love, peace and silence.
Soul or Atma or Sadhguru –
The SOUL is the creator and the controller of each and every living and non-living thin, even a single movement is not made in this world without its permission. But we have forgotten its place of residence. Only a Sadhguru can show us the correct path. Sadhguru Atma Malik has given the message that god of all gods is soul. Soul resides in every heart and the art of loving soul is called meditation and meditation on it leads to self-realization. Atma Malik Dhyanpeeth gives such tremendous knowledge in so simple way; people come here from different parts of world to learn the art of loving self.


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Starwood Magazine Spreads
Skills:Magazines, Print Design
Date:May 2013
Client:N2 Publishing - Starwood Living
These are sample spreads from the Starwood Magazine. Neighborhood photos and content are provided, but layout, colors and stock images are left open. I was in charge of prepping all provided and stock images and designing the magazine from start to finish, including ad placement.


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Congressional Moments Activities
The Congressional Moments activity examines key legislation throughout our country's history that impacts our lives today. View primary source materials from the Library of Congress that illuminate these significant decisions in our nation's history.
This activity is available as:
- an iPad App (iPad 2 and above, running iOS 6.0 or greater.)
- a web-based Online Activity.


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Engvall is in the park flying a kite with his son.
Passerby: Y'all flyin' a kite?
Engvall: Nope, fishin' for birds! Here's your sign.-Bill Engvall
It's mid August and I'm starting to think forward to October. I want to have a big costume party, and I'm hoping to completely deck out our house for Halloween. I've been looking online for all kinds of decorating ideas. I stumbled across Signs on the Cheap, who have all kinds of cheap signs for anything you can dream up.
I got this adorable sign that I reviewed a few months ago over on the Red Carpet Ladies.
I'd love to do a Halloween sign for the party. I'm thinking something like this:
I can think of all sorts of reasons I'd like a cute yard sign. Can you?


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Online Giving
Make a Donation
NOTE: We are in the process of migrating our online giving from Clover Donations to PushPay. If you need to cancel any recurring donation in Clover, please visit this link, log in to your account, and cancel the donation(s). Please do not hesitate in contacting our finance team if you need assistance.
We are very serious about being a community of generosity, love, and justice. If you want to participate in giving to this vision, we encourage you to do so online through the link at the bottom.
State Street Community Church is an official 510c3 non-profit. If you donate, you will get a year-end statement after January 1st of the following year.
You have the option to set up recurring donations if you so choose.
If you have any questions about online giving, please contact us by emailing our finance team here.


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Diagnose the issues preventing sales excellence before deciding on a course of improvement.
Use a blend of live training and coaching with customized online reinforcement material to maximize results.
Learn how to upgrade your sales team through proven recruitment and hiring practices to eliminate the high cost of making poor hiring decisions.
We eliminate the burden of sales management when an interim solution is necessary.


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Midwest Anti-trafficking Group inc. are privileged to be hosting BRIANNA LEE PHD candidate, Murdoch University School of Law.
Brianna will be educating and informing the effects of human trafficking in our region. Please come and support our community by attending this forum.
When: 04 Nov 2014 07:30 PM
Where: St George's Hall Bluff Point
Contact: Marie Tester 0438986194


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Making home improvements increases your home's value and makes it feel more comfortable to live in. There are many things to consider when making the choice to alter your home. This article will provide a number of tips to help you make the best home improvement choices for you and your family.
Before you buy your home, have a licensed professional do a thorough home inspection. This way, you'll be clear on what repairs or replacements need to be made. A third party professional who offers a completely objective view will ensure that everything that needs to be fixed is found.
Think small with your next home project and start with just one room. It is not necessary to transform the entire house all at one time, and it may make sense to make renovations gradually to spread out your expenses. Plan out your approach and watch for deals on construction materials and furnishings. Planning ahead is an excellent way to keep money in your pocket.
Use a nail and poke holes in the paint can rim. This will prevent paint from filling the channels of the metal paint cans, and as a result they will not spill when you replace the cover. Using a nail you can add holes around the can's perimeter of the channel and this will fix the issue.
Don't buy expensive supplies. Instead, shop around and look for the best deals on home improvement materials. New flooring is very expensive if you do not shop around for good deals. There are discount supply stores out there, as well as bargain hunting places that can help.
It is important that any home improvement task you start takes into account your budget, skill level and functionality before you begin. As one of your most valuable assets, your home can be a comfortable abode for you, your family and future generations if you perform the necessary upkeep and improvements.


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I am so very grateful to love the work I do. I don't just say that casually. I really love the work that I do. And so it always surprises me when I am asked, as I have been many times in my career, if I ever get tired of listening to people's problems. My response is always the same: ''I don't listen to people's problems; I listen to their stories.'' Throughout my professional career as both a minister and a psychotherapist, I have had the honor of being invited into thousands of people's stories. It is a humbling experience every time I am allowed to walk with someone on part of their life journey, as together we discover new possibilities for them. Problems are always temporary, and only arise to let us know there is some important part of our unfolding life story that we haven't quite figured out yet.
Each of us have been shaped by many stories throughout our lives--the stories of our families, our community, our culture, and our faith. When we are young, we simply take in these stories without question. As we mature, we increasingly become the authors of the narratives of our lives, deepening and adding more complexity to the stories that have formed us. All forms of counseling are a way of helping people reflect upon and expand the narratives of their lives, and in the process forming and reforming one's self, one's family, or one's spirituality.
Speaking of the stories of our lives, allow me to tell you a few about my life. I grew up on the East coast until my family moved to the suburbs of Milwaukee when I was twelve. I went to UW-Madison, where I fell in love with my wife Holly. We have now been married thirty-two years, and have three young adult children: a married son and two daughters who are launching their professional careers.
Holly works full-time with me at Samaritan, and we have so much fun doing programs on marriage and family wellness together. We always begin the same way - by telling people we are both in our third marriages. After the room gets very quiet, we explain what we mean: our first marriage was the five years before we had children; our second marriage was the next twenty-two years of raising children; and our third marriage is the last five years of recreating our lives post-children. All of this is a way of saying the stories of our lives are constantly being written and re-written. In fact, problems tend to come up when we forget to author and edit our personal stories!
One more story - this one from my professional life. In May, 2008, I was offered the chance to become the founding Director of the Samaritan Family Wellness Center. This opportunity has been a chance to weave together all of the important aspects of my thirty-year career. Like the story of the Good Samaritan, we are here to offer a hand to anyone who has been beat up by life, and just as importantly we are also out in the community providing 'upstream', prevention-based programs to proactively strengthen individuals, families and organizations. The story of the Samaritan Family Wellness Center is still just beginning. Perhaps you feel the desire to be part of our story in some way, either as a person seeking help or as a person seeking to provide help. If so, I hope you will be in touch with us. We would love to hear your story.


text: > Right. Everything you could do synchronously, you can do asynchronously > (and a bit more too). It just /looks/ really weird. At some point I realized that it helps to realize that code that looks synchronous really isn't at all. Probably all the programming that almost all of us will ever do is not synchronous. You type x = y + 3 and you get into the habit of thinking that x just got assigned the value of y + 3. But there's a whole set of levels of operations, all invisible to you, that are frantically rearranging atoms behind the scenes to pull off this tiny miracle. Instead of trying to wrap your head around the so-called "weird" asynchronous operation of Twisted, it's easier to let fall the comforting illusion that you're in the synchronous world to begin with - whatever that's supposed to mean (it's more like a fairy tale IMO). You're not. It's more accurate to think that that line of code arranges for x to *eventually* hold the value of y + 3. Then it's a small step to thinking that x = y + 3 z = f(x) is just another slightly bigger part of the same illusion. Those lines of code aren't executed one after another at all. You're just brought up with the fairy tale that they are - or at least you study computer science and spend so much time with high-level languages that you start to take it for granted that they are done one after the other. But the second line is *eventually* executed after the first, assuming nothing went wrong (e.g., y could be None). At that point - everything is asynchronous - you have the right mindset to think perfectly clearly about Twisted code. And there's no jump to make at all. The only things you have to get your head around are 1) the fact that Twisted code doesn't give you the comforting linear illusion of so-called synchronous code as you type it in your editor (inlineCallbacks helps a lot with improving that), and 2) that Twisted's deferreds are the way of maintaining the flow of results (both correct and incorrect) through time as your program executes. I.e., you've lost the step-at-a-time line-by-line results computed on line N are available on line N+1 flow of code you can so easily read in your editor, and in exchange you have deferreds. I could go on, obviously :-) But I just wanted to point out that the shift from thinking "synchronously" to "asynchronously" is much easier to make if you realize the former is a convenient illusion and in fact you've always been doing things asynchronously. Terry


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ISM: Manufacturing Sector Expands in October
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in October for the second consecutive month following three months of slight contraction, and the overall economy grew for the 41st consecutive month, according to the latest Manufacturing ISM Report on Business.
The PMI registered 51.7%, an increase of 0.2 percentage point from September's reading of 51.5%, indicating growth in manufacturing at a slightly faster rate, said Bradley J. Holcomb, chair of the Institute for Supply Management Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.
A reading above 50% indicates that the manufacturing economy is generally expanding; below 50% indicates that it is generally contracting.
The New Orders Index registered 54.2%, an increase of 1.9 percentage points from September, indicating growth in new orders for the second consecutive month. The Production Index registered 52.4%, an increase of 2.9 percentage points, indicating growth in production following two months of contraction. The Employment Index registered 52.1%, a decrease of 2.6 percentage points, and the Prices Index registered 55%, reflecting a decrease of 3 percentage points.
Comments from the panel this month reflect continued concern over a fragile global economy and soft orders across several manufacturing sectors.
Of the 18 manufacturing industries, eight are reporting growth in October in the following order: Petroleum & Coal Products; Furniture & Related Products; Apparel, Leather & Allied Products; Paper Products; Miscellaneous Manufacturing; Food, Beverage & Tobacco Products; Plastics & Rubber Products; and Chemical Products.
The eight industries reporting contraction in October


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A fifth suspect was arrested in connection with a high-speed chase that started in the Sacramento area and ended in Martinez on Wednesday, a California Highway Patrol officer said today.
Officers arrested Anthony Dewayne Domino, 21, and Anthony James Tyree, 23, both of San Francisco, Sharde Shenay Suwannabart-Smith, 24, and Sean Donyell McCullough II, 23, both of Oakland, and Summer Pavielle Sawyer, 30, of San Mateo, following the early morning chase, CHP Officer John Fransen said.
The chase exceeded speeds of 100 mph with suspects considered armed and dangerous. Officers later found a "considerable amount of jewelry" and weapons associated with the pursuit, Fransen said.
He declined to say what kind of weapons were inside the car, saying the matter was under investigation and that it could turn into a federal case.
Fransen said the Contra Costa County CHP office is coordinating the investigation into the potentially stolen items with the Denver Police Department out of Colorado, as well as the Folsom and Chico police departments.
Contra Costa County CHP officers started following a Cadillac SRX around 2:55 a.m. Wednesday after CHP officers had been trailing the car from the Sacramento area, Fransen said.
CHP officers deployed a spike strip on southbound Interstate Highway 680 near Bayshore Road in Benicia before the bridge, according to the CHP.
The Cadillac hit the spike strip and then continued across the bridge before exiting on Arthur Road in an unincorporated area near Martinez, Fransen said.
Officers initially said they were searching for two men and two women who had fled on foot after the car veered off of the roadway and crashed into a fence, Fransen said.
Fransen said a fifth suspect, a man, was later located as a result of the pursuit.
One of the two women suffered injuries related to being bitten by a police dog, Fransen said. She was treated at a hospital and later cleared for booking, he said.
The five suspects were booked into county jail in Martinez, Fransen said.
A Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office spokeswoman said no charges had been filed because prosecutors had not yet received any information from law enforcement agencies investigating the case.
RELATED STORY: Vehicle Pursuit Starts in Sacramento, Ends in Martinez After Spike Strips Deployed


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You can play baseball, tag and golf at one time.
One soft air filled ball (any size), 1 plastic bat, and hula hoops (2 hoops for less than 6 players and 4 hoops for every 6 players)
You will need to start the game by spacing out the hoops behind the pitcher. You will need a pitcher and batter and the rest of the people stand in the field. The batter hits the ball with the bat when thrown. The batter runs to the ball and tries to hit it into a hoop with the bat while the others in the field will be running around to keep the ball from going into the hoop. When the batters gets the ball into the hoop, s/he is "It" and everyone runs to get away. When the "It" person tags someone, they are now the batter. The batter/ tagger is now the pitcher and after the pitch, s/he is out of the game. (This does not apply to the very first person who pitched and then batted because they were never tagged.) Play continues until one is left standing. Remove a hoop for every two people out.


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Hi there and welcome to this week's CYCI#94! Now that Halloween is behind us and we are moving onto Thanksgiving and Christmas I started pulling out winter and Christmas stamps, embellies, and paper to start working on Christmas cards and anything that has to do with paper crafting!
Here is my card for this week's sketch...
So now I have been bitten by the "Christmas Card Bug" and will be making more of these!
Thanks for stopping by and I can't wait to see what you come up with!
~Happy Stamping~


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UTA French Airlines is offering a 50% discount for children on its round-trip flights from Los Angeles to Tahiti during June, July and August. Children under the age of 19 traveling with an adult paying the $699 weekend fare can fly for $350 round trip.
"Great Adventures: African Safari and the Galapagos Islands" will be presented by the Bon Voyage Travel Club Friday at 7:45 p.m. in the Community Room, 9696 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Cost of the slide-discussion is $5. Call (213) 472-5726 for details.
Sierra Writing Camp will offer two one-week travel writing courses the weeks of June 28 and July 19 in the Sierra Nevada near Placerville, Calif. A fee of $380 includes room and board. Call (916) 272-8047 for details.
Pan American World Airways has begun nonstop service between New York and Madrid four times weekly. Connecting flights are available to and from Los Angeles.


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Olon Industries carries a complete range of traditional and contemporary crown, light and accent mouldings stocked in:
- White paintable
- Red Oak veneer
- Maple veneer
In addition, we also maintain an inventory of raw MDF stock profiles which can be processed into relatively small quantities of custom paper or veneer wrapped versions, previously only available in much larger production volumes. As there is a processing factor versus that of an in-stock version, please confirm delivery with your Olon Representative. Our in stock program is available from our US and Canadian facilities. Please contact your Olon representative for details.
Wrapped Profile Stock Program
|White Paintable
|Red Oak
|Maple Veneer
|Smooth Lightshield or Crown
|Traditional Mid-sized Crown
|European Large Crown/Indent
|Traditional Full-sized Crown
|Concave Crown Moulding
(Available in 9' lengths / packaged in cartons)
Product Offering
- Olon veneer wrapped MDF profiles are stocked in lengths of 107" (2.7 m) in Georgetown, ON and 96" (2.4 m) in Jeffersonville, IN in White Paintable, Red Oak and Maple veneer.
- Custom offerings for veneer wrapped MDF profiles are available on a special order basis in varying lengths with minimum order quantities and lead times based on production runs.
- Offerings include: Cherry / Euro Steamed Beech / Figured Quartered Anigre / Hickory / Mahogany (African - Khaya) / Makore / Maple (Other Cuts) / Machine Figured Anigre / Red Alder / Red Oak (Other Cuts) / Rosewood / Sycamore (English) / Teak / Walnut / Wenge / White Ash / White Oak / White Pine / Zebrawood Reconstituted veneer species may also be available.
Notable Features
- Olon uses only premium MDF for a better quality product. While solid wood profiles tend to warp and twist, MDF profiles remain straight.
- There are minimal knots and mineral streaks in our wrapping grade veneer. High quality veneer with uniform coloration is used for profile wrapping.
- Wrapping grade veneer is pre-sanded. No grain filling or heavy sanding required.
- Profiles of up to 12' (3.7 m) in length are available for an excellent yield.
- Our stringent manufacturing tolerance guarantees profile uniformity and consistency.


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Tee Off for a Cause!. 2012 Charity Golf Outing. Friday, October 12, 2012 Hershey Country Club, West Course 1000 East Derry Rd • Hershey, PA 17033. Registration: 9:00 a.m. • Golf: 10:00 a.m. • Luncheon: 2:45 p.m. Scramble Format.
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Tee Off for a Cause! 2012 Charity Golf Outing Friday, October 12, 2012 Hershey Country Club, West Course 1000 East Derry Rd • Hershey, PA 17033 Registration: 9:00 a.m. • Golf: 10:00 a.m. • Luncheon: 2:45 p.m. Scramble Format The Central Penn Risk Insurance Management Society invites you to participate in our 2012 Annual Golf Outing to benefit Kids' Chance of Pennsylvania, Inc. and the Spencer Educational Foundation, Inc.. Proceeds benefit promising students in the pursuit and achievement of their goals for post-secondary education. Kids' Chance of Pennsylvania, Inc. provides financial support through scholarship grants to children of Pennsylvania workers who have been killed or seriously injured in a work–related accident resulting in financial need. Kids' Chance makes a significant difference in the lives of affected Pennsylvania families by helping eligible students. Spencer Educational Foundation, Inc. provides scholarships to students and educational grants to individuals pursuing careers in insurance and risk management. The foundation has awarded more than $4.5 million in scholarships since being established in 1979
Participation Packages (please select) _ Platinum (1 available)$1,500 Company logo on scorecard, Meal Sponsorship, (1) Foursomes Golf & Lunch, (1) Tee Sponsorship _ Gold $1,250 Meal Sponsorship, (1) Foursome Golf & Lunch, (1) Tee Sponsorship _ Silver $950 (1) Foursome Golf & Lunch, (1) Tee Sponsorship _ Bronze $500 (1) Golf & Lunch, (1) Tee Sponsorship _ Individual Golfer & Lunch $150 _ Tee Sponsorship $350 _ Beverage Sponsorship (2 available) $250 Company logo on beverage cart _ Lunch Only $35 Contests Lowest Scores Putting Longest/ Straightest Drives Post-event Raffle Closest to the Pin Registration Form Deadline: Friday, September 28, 2012 Golfers • Captain______________________________ • ____________________________________ • ____________________________________ • ____________________________________ Additional sponsorships opportunities are available and we welcome prize donations for the raffle. Please contact Megan Marshall (email@example.com) for more information. Proper golf attire required: collared shirts, non-penetrating spikes and no denim. ** Copy brochure for additional foursomes ____ I will not be able to attend, but please accept my cash donation of $______ in support of Kids' Chance of Pennsylvania, Inc. Thank you for your support. Please send your check, made payable to Central Penn RIMS, to: Ryan McGuinness, M.E.D., ARM, Rite Aid Corporation, P. O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105 You may also email (firstname.lastname@example.com) or fax (717-975-3761) your registration forms with payment to follow in the mail. Name/Title: ___________________________ Title: ___________________________ Company: Address: _____________________________________________________________________________ City: ______________________________________ ST___________ Zip: _____________________ Phone: (_ __)__________________________Email: _________________________________________ Central Penn RIMS is a registered, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and therefore all contributions are tax deductible.


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Weiler, R., van Mechelen, W., Fuller, C., Ahmed, O. and Verhagen, E., 2018. Do Neurocognitive SCAT3 Baseline Test Scores Differ Between Footballers (Soccer) Living With and Without Disability? A Cross-Sectional Study. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 28 (1), pp. 43-50.
Full text available as:
CJSM-16-281_Proof Check RW (2).pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.
Objective: To determine if baseline Sport Concussion Assessment Tool, third Edition (SCAT3) scores differ between athletes with and without disability. Design: Cross-sectional comparison of preseason baseline SCAT3 scores for a range of England international footballers. Setting: Team doctors and physiotherapists supporting England football teams recorded players' SCAT 3 baseline tests from August 1, 2013 to July 31, 2014. Participants: A convenience sample of 249 England footballers, of whom 185 were players without disability (male: 119; female: 66) and 64 were players with disability (male learning disability: 17; male cerebral palsy: 28; male blind: 10; female deaf: 9). Assessment and Outcome Measures: Between-group comparisons of median SCAT3 total and section scores were made using nonparametric Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon ranked-sum test. Main Results: All footballers with disability scored higher symptom severity scores compared with male players without disability. Male footballers with learning disability demonstrated no significant difference in the total number of symptoms, but recorded significantly lower scores on immediate memory and delayed recall compared with male players without disability. Male blind footballers' scored significantly higher for total concentration and delayed recall, and male footballers with cerebral palsy scored significantly higher on balance testing and immediate memory, when compared with male players without disability. Female footballers with deafness scored significantly higher for total concentration and balance testing than female footballers without disability. Conclusions: This study suggests that significant differences exist between SCAT3 baseline section scores for footballers with and without disability. Concussion consensus guidelines should recognize these differences and produce guidelines that are specific for the growing number of athletes living with disability.
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Smiling Is Contagious - Infect Others
A Smile Makes Everyone Happy
Do you believe that smiling increases happiness both in yourself and those around you?
When someone you don't know smiles at you, and you smile back... you feel good! The pleasant disposition you received improved your mood. Finding it easy and comfortable giving back the gesture (whether you know the person or not) makes you a healthy infection.
The overall effect tells you that you're feeling happy on the inside. It's simple and, in most cases, totally spontaneous enough to brighten up everyone's mood. Smiling can even affect the way one person is received by another over the phone. That's how magical a smile can make you attractive.
The Pleasantly Contagious Smile
A smiling person is a joy to others. Imagine yourself in a room full of smiling people and you will find yourself smiling... Grinning is contagious. When you smile, it causes others to smile too. There seems like a power that when you see others grinning it creates you want to smile as well.
Smiling Makes You More Attractive
When you smile, it lights up your face and it makes you look STUNNING!
Even if you don't talk, your little smiles mean a positive communication. It is the essence of something beautiful within you. It is an expression of how you appreciate those around you. The most beautiful smile is one that comes out naturally. The normal feeling of cheerfulness radiating from within makes you look gracefully attractive inside and out.
People who naturally wear a good smile also feel good about themselves boosting up positive energy which in turn promotes self-confidence. There actually is no reason for you to hide those smiles. So give them away.
How to Make That Perfect Smile
Smile doesn't need rules and practice. So long as you do it, then there's the smile. Start by thinking beautiful... now smile.
Do it as wide enough so your side teeth will show. Don't worry, you always look good when you smile.
Just SMILE!
Some Thoughts About Smiling
I love to smile and love making others smile. It is definitely contagious! Loved this hub! Smiles to you! :)
There is nothing more awesome then seeing the genuine smile on a baby's face. Whenever I see my baby smile it reminds me of the importance of just letting go and allowing ourselves to feel true inner happiness. That smile on a baby's face is just that - true happiness. Great Hub.
Great photos. Great hub. Voted up.
A smile is free and the effect it has on others is priceless. The pictures made me smile. Voted up!
I'm smiling as I read this because it is all so true. A smile is a definite mood lifter and is contagious. This hub (and many smiles) should be shared! It is a great way to start one's day and also end it. Up votes as well. :))
Hi Tonipet! Smiling is a wonderful thing. And it really is contagious. I try and smile at everyone I meet. Just that simple act can sometimes change a persons day for the better. Voted up, up and away! Great hub!
What i love about smiling is that the more you give it, the more you keep getting it back and just like you said, when you smile, you bring enthusiasm to others. Great hub. Voted up, interesting and awesome
I'm smiling so much now! Thanks!! :):)
Smiling is an amzing mood booster, people who smile a lot do lite up the room, makes you want to be around them. They look so approachable. Great HUb, Voted Up and awesome!
:) this hub made me smile
That last pic probably made me smile the most :-D
Lovely hub..
I looove it. Very uplifting:-) Pretty picture and sunny hub!
I thoroughly enjoy giving free smiles and getting them back in return. It's the best mood lifter aside from walking. Loved this hub and the delightful photos which are sure to put a smile on the face of all who view them. Voted up across the board.
I agree with you one hundred percent!
Great hub. And I always pass on a smile. On some days, during my lunch break, I walk around town to see how many strangers I can get to smile back at me. Typically, about 99% of the people will return a smile. It's awesome!


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Blog archive: August 2009
Normaliser v2 in production
Wednesday 26 August 2009
After months of neglect, we've finally got round to working on an update to our last.fm normaliser application. We've decided to build the whole thing from the ground up using Python/Django, our new favourite toys. Version two will hopefully include the following improvements:
- Proper unicode support.
- The ability to find artists & albums that have a blank Musicbrainz ID in last.fm. This will involve users doing an additional search for each artist, but it should vastly improve most people's charts. We will try to make the search process as easy as possible (see screenshots below).
- A whizzy new design using gig photos from Flickr.
- Updated XML format to mirror v2 of last.fm's data feeds (we will keep the older XML versions available on the same URL).
- Hopefully, some form of export code that will allow charts to be shown on user blogs, etc.
- We're still scratching our heads trying to think of ways we can make a few quid out of all the work we're putting into this...
Anyway, some work in progress screenshots below.


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FOOLISH MORTALS!! WHY HAVE YOU NOT BOUGHT THIS!?… oh… oh you did?…. oh… oh good then!
I have not watched this anime series because I have been told that it is sad and I just was not in the mood to be bawling over dead lolis at the time. However, I still have seen many many clips of my wife watching this and THIS character… HHHHNNNNNNGGGGGHHHH. Yes! I can't believe Max Factory did a figurine of her, I'm pretty damn happy about this.
So as you can assume this is Menma from ummm… that anime with the long name 😉 (Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day in English). I am very excited to have this figurine as she is super cute and sexy and yes I loves her. As I am sure anyone that reads my reviews knows, this is pretty much right up my alley, bikini loli girl with a cute look on her face, yes… yes this will do perfectly… yes….
There is a lot of things I like about this figurine, I realize its a bikini figurine and you really cannot do A LOT with them but for some reason this figurine is just so cute and sexy. I think its the frilly bikini, I've kinda had a thing for them since Haruhi from host club was supposed to be wearing one. When I saw that scene of them imagining her running towards them on the beach something in my brain snapped and I was like "omfg that is adorable".
There is a few things about the figurine that fall a bit short in my opinion, which is rare for me to say to any Max Factory figurine that I own at least. I wish they would of done something with her hair to hide her hair seam a bit and I don't really like the red flower in her hair. It almost looks like its sprouting from her head if you take a close look at it. Her eyes are also JUST a bit too big… just a bit..
Of course what I love about her greatly outweighs the negatives, first of all she is a loli in a swimsuit so I mean like… hi. I like that they decided to take what would normal be a more boring bikini figurine and give it a little bit of … life I guess. She is eating her popsicle in an adorable fashion with the expression on her face as if you snapped a picture of her and she wasn't prepared. Holding the inflatable ring is a nice touch as well I suppose, I do prefer that to the balls that you see some holding.
I guess the best part is just Menma, I like how she is tall and skinny and frankly quite sexy in this. I am definitely a bikini guy, when Dani and I were in Japan we got her a super sexy bikini as well, sadly no frills but it does have cherries all over it =D. If I would of saw this bikini in Japan, we would of bought it in a heartbeat. I love the display of mid drift as that is exceptionally sexy. The base is surprisingly nice as well for a beach figurine, there is flowers on top of it and under it which gives a bit of depth to the base.
While this figurine is not a favorite of mine in our collection, I do love it a lot, it is one that I find myself walking past my display case and just stopping to look at it. It IS my favorite beach figurine we have and it does almost make me want to give the anime a shot. All in all however, for a Max Factory figurine, this does seem to be lacking when I look at it objectively. I'll have to give this one a lower ranking of 88% mainly because I dislike the way the flower is done.
As Always, thanks for reading and visiting guys, we love to hear from you if you got suggestions as well… now for random AMV.


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Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Cyberlink Offers a PhotoDirector 2011 Beta Special
Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Software" @ 11:30 AM
Cyberlink is having an offer on Photodirector 2011, their latest photo worflow and editing software, as shown in the above image. The interesting thing about is that Cyberlink claims to match the look derived from Nikon and Canon RAW processing software, which is a reason why I still use Nikon Capture NX2, despite its general slowness and crash-happy temperament. I have downloaded it and my first impressions are that it seems to be a little slow in browsing a library of 12,000 images, but it could well still be indexing the thumbnails. Anyone care to give it a spin and see if the image quality lives up to its promise?


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Kuban Cossack Voisko Abroad Cheesefair week celebration
On February 8th, 2015 the Kuban Cossack Voisko Abroad held celebrations for the Cheese-fair week. Cossacks attended divine liturgy at Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and then proceeded to the Cossack Hall in Howell, along with a number of parishioners to continue their celebrations. Ataman of the Kuban Cossack Voisko Abroad Alexander Pevnev participated in the celebration, and thanked all who engaged in the making of this day. Later in the day, the Cossack museum was opened for visitation.


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About Reference Design Library
Instead of searching many manufacturer sites or calling on companies to find and compare designs, now you can search for designs based on the circuit's performance using Digi-Key's Reference Design Library.
The Reference Design Library was created in order to:
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- Sift through designs based on performance
- Provide designs conveniently accompanied by their schematics
Visit often as new designs are being added weekly and improvements will be made based on your constructive feedback.
Newest Designs
MTO-EV010FTAG(TB67S213FTAG): 2.5A, 10 ~ 47Vin, DC Stepper Motor DriverManufacturer: Marutsuelec Co., Ltd.
The TB67S213 is a two-phase bipolar stepping motor driver using a PWM chopper. PHASE control system and BiCD process are adopted. Maximum ratings of 47V and 2.5A are possible for stepper motor applications. This evaluation board mounts all necessary components to evaluate the IC.View Design
A000073: Arduino Uno SMD R3Manufacturer: Arduino
The Arduino Uno SMD R3 is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.View Design
ESP32-PICO-KIT: Intergrated Bluetooth and WiFi MicrocontrollerManufacturer: Espressif Systems
ESP32-PICO-KIT is an ESP32-based mini development board produced by Espressif. The core of this board is ESP32-PICO-D4 - a System-in-Package (SiP) module with complete Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionalities. Compared to other ESP32 modules, ESP32-PICO-D4 integrates peripheral components in one single package, which otherwise would need to be installed separately.View Design


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Create something everyday
For about 3 months I did #everydays. That means that for exactly 100 days, I made an entire render in 3D from scratch to product every day.
If you want to know more about my journey with the #everydays, you can read about it here, here and here. You can see all of them and get the source files right here. Enjoy!