text:
Congratulations on your Engagement.
Whether it is an barefoot beach wedding, to a chic city event or a more traditional Ceremony, as your Marriage Celebrant I will craft a beautiful and memorable Wedding Ceremony to suit you and your fiancé's unique personal style.
The words that you wrote and spoke for us were exactly what we wanted to say.
Love is a journey that many people travel and is one of the most exciting journeys that you will ever have.
With my fresh, modern approach, I will translate your ideas into beautiful and lasting memories.
From the creation of your personalized wedding ceremony, lodgment of all legal paperwork to all the little special touches, my passion, dedication and attention to detail will ensure that all your dreams are met.
I am located in Sydney's beautiful Sutherland Shire and travel all over Sydney.
Our ceremony was just as I imagined and more. It was heartfelt and fun and just perfect.


text:
Daniel joined WGXA in September 2016 as a Meteorologist/ Multimedia Journalist.
Daniel is from Gulf Breeze, Florida and joined WGXA News after spending a year at WBKO in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Daniel graduated from Florida State University in 2015 and received a degree in Meteorology with minors in Mathematics and Communications. While at FSU, he participated in the FSU weather show which is completely student-run and airs 5 days a week.
When he isn't forecasting the weather he enjoys surfing, watching the Baltimore Ravens and Florida State football teams and going to the gym.
Daniel is excited to be living in the South once again and looks forward to delivering a sunny forecast every week.
You can reach Daniel by email at email@example.com.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Dancing With The Stars
Maks Chmerkovskiy & Peta Murgatroyd Officially Debut Shai on 'GMA' (VIDEO)
After weeks of giving fans glimpses of their brand new baby Shai, Maks Chmerkovskiy and Peta Murgatroyd have finally debuted their little one on Good Morning America.
The Dancing With the Stars infant is even cuter than you expected.
The DWTS parents revealed their adorable little boy during their first-ever interview after-baby.
While fans everywhere are overjoyed to see Baby Chmerkovskiy, his parents aren't so excited.
"It's nerve-wracking because I specifically wanted to keep him very private from the beginning," Peta, 30, admits in the GMA video.
"Because we just want to keep him for ourselves."
Now that Shai's much-deserved seclusion is over, we've learned one huge fact about the 6-week-old: which of his famous parents he looks exactly like.
"I would have to say me," new mom Peta confirms.
Maks couldn't agree more — and he is not happy.
"I was hoping he would look like me and have her personality,' the older Chmerkovskiy brother, 37, jokes.
"I'm just worried a little bit now because he looks like her."
While the dancer is kidding around about his son's inevitable good looks, he and his fiancée couldn't be more serious when it comes to Shai's prospective dancing career.
When asked when the child — who has an impossible number of pros in his famous fam — will start dancing, Mirrorball champ Maks says, "I hope never."
Peta couldn't agree more, adding she'll "thank God" if their boy decides he doesn't want to go into the family business.
However, there is one job the DWTS couple is excited for their baby to pick up.
The Murgatroyd-Chmerkovskiys are already figuring out how to make Shai the star of their upcoming wedding.
"We're wondering how to get him down the aisle," Peta spills. "It's not about me anymore, it is all about Shai."
And what a shindig these nuptials will be.
"It's not just any wedding — it's a large wedding," the bride-to-be assures everyone. "It's going to be three days with 300 people. It's a lot."
We officially can't wait for Maks and Peta to say "I do."
Check out more of Wetpaint's coverage of Maks Chmerkovskiy and Peta Murgatroyd below:
Peta Murgatroyd Slays the Dance Floor Weeks After Giving Birth
15 Dancing With the Stars Pros Then and Now
Maks Chmerkovskiy Shares First Pic of Baby Chmerkovskiy
Maks Chmerkovskiy and Peta Murgatroyd's 21 Best Couple Moments


text:
One of the best reasons to attend the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference is the unprecedented gathering of top-notch presenters, leaders, and experts. You will find core developers, unique users, and visionaries who will share their knowledge with you to help you solve your computing or programming challenges. You won't find a gathering like this at any other conference.
Our speaker list is growing daily. Please check back regularly to see who we have lined up for you.Chris Adamson
Chris Adamson is the Associate Online Editor for O'Reilly's Java sites ONJava and java.net, is a community manager for java.net's Mac community, and is the author of O'Reilly's upcoming QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook. He also consults on Java Media projects, in the form of his Atlanta-based consulting company Subsequently and Furthermore, Inc.
Click here for more info.Scott Anguish
As a senior technical writer for Apple's Cocoa & Developer Tools group, Scott Anguish is responsible for creating and updating documentation for Apple's Cocoa APIs. Anguish joined Apple's Technical Publications department after co-writing Cocoa Programming, for SAMS. In 1994, he created Stepwise.com, a portal related to NeXT technologies. Today Stepwise serves as a community clearinghouse for the Mac OS X technology platform, as well as Cocoa and WebObjects development articles. Anguish started developing for the Macintosh in 1984. Upon seeing NeXTStep in 1992 he was hooked on the possibilities of a unified imaging model and a pure object-oriented system.
Click here for more info.Michael Beam
Michael Beam is the Cocoa columnist at the O'Reilly Networks's Mac DevCenter. He started programming in Cocoa with Mac OS X public betas. His columns focus on becoming productive in Cocoa, quickly and easily.
Click here for more info.Chris Bourdon
Chris Bourdon is the Senior Product Line Manager for Mac OS X at Apple Computer Inc. where he is responsible for marketing Mac OS X and its innovative technologies.
Click here for more info.Kevin Burton
Kevin Burton is a long-standing contributor within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and has concentrated on Open Source, distributed systems, Java, XML, object oriented design, performance analysis, scalability design, and security engineering. He has created a number of Open Source projects including, Reptile, Apache Jetspeed, Apache Alexandria and also co-founded the Apache Turbine project. All have been very successful, with Jetspeed attracting involvement from companies such as IBM, SAP, and NEC and Turbine now driving some of the most complex applications on the Internet. He is also involved in next generation Software Engineering, and is trying to use the distributed, evolutionary Open Source model to build quality, stable, and scalable software.
Recently, Kevin has been busy working on the OpenPrivacy project. After being co-founded in late 2000, the project has released its first Open Source project, Reptile.
Click here for more info.Stuart Cheshire, Ph.D.
Stuart Cheshire is currently a senior engineer at Apple and is the architect behind Rendezvous, Apple's revolutionary home networking technology. He previously worked on IBM Token Ring with Madge Networks in the UK and has published research papers in the areas of wireless networking and Mobile IP. Cheshire received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in California.
Click here for more info.Ivor St. John Clarke
Ivor Clarke is president of Simple Factors, a user interface design firm located in Boulder, CO. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Human Computer Interaction, he joined Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. There he worked on several versions of Office and finally guided the transition to Aqua for Office X.
Click here for more info.Brook Conner
Brook Conner is an author, freelance consultant, and faculty member at NYU. His next book is "Programming Quartz: Advanced 2D Graphics on the Macintosh," forthcoming from O'Reilly. His research papers appear in a number of venues, including ACM SIGGRAPH. In the past, he worked as Director of Product Development at Novix Media, Manager of Technology Assessment at Sony, and Assistant Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization. He also consulted with numerous companies, including Microsoft Research, IBM, Motorola, Mitre, Fraunhofer CRCG, the Providence Journal, and Dynamic Diagrams.
Click here for more info.mmalcolm Crawford
Malcolm Crawford works in Apple's Technical Publications Group. Prior to joining Apple, Malcolm was an Apple Certified Trainer, teaching WebObjects and Cocoa Development classes. He was a founder and principal in Cassini Division, a company specialising in content management systems, and in the construction of custom software solutions for small companies through to major corporations. He is also a contributing editor to the Stepwise website.
Click here for more info.Ian Darwin
Ian Darwin is the author of O'Reilly's popular Java Cookbook and the in-progress Tomcat: The Definitive Guide. He has worked with computers since the beginning of time (0x00000000L), with UNIX since 1980 (currently favoring OpenBSD), with Java since 1995, and with MacOS 7, 8, and X. He teaches regularly for Learning Tree International and has presented tutorials at UniForum, the O'Reilly OSCON, Geek Cruises' Java Jam and elsewhere.
Click here for more info.James Duncan Davidson
James Duncan Davidson is a freelance author, software developer, and consultant focusing on Mac OS X and related technologies. He is the author of Running Mac OS X Panther, the coauthor of Mac OS X Panther Hacks (with Rael Dornfest) , the coauthor of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (with Apple Computer, Inc.), and the coauthor of Cocoa in a Nutshell (with Michael Beam), all published by OReilly Media, as well as publisher of his own web site, x180
Click here for more info.Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. Presently, he serves as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
Click here for more info.Glenn Fleishman
Glenn Fleishman is a freelance journalist who writes regularly for the New York Times, Fortune, and Wired, and is the Macintosh columnist for the Seattle Times, Seattle's larger daily newspaper. He has written and worked with wireless networking since Oct. 2000, filing story after story for print and Web publications, including O'Reilly Wireless DevCenter. His Wi-Fi blog (80211b.weblogger.com) has been the No. 1 match for 802.11b for several months running.
Click here for more info.Rob Flickenger
Rob Flickenger has been writing professionally since 2002. He has written and edited several books, including Building Wireless Community Networks and Wireless Hacks, published by OReilly Media. In 2006 he founded Hacker Friendly LLC, an independent publishing company that uses wiki software and print-on-demand technology to produce books. In its first year, Hacker Friendly produced "How To Accelerate Your Internet" bwmo.net and "Wireless Networking in the Developing World" wndw.net, which have been widely distributed in Africa and South America.
Click here for more info.brian d foy
brian d foy has been a dedicated Mac user since a Quadra 650 which he still uses. Seven Macs later, most of them still in use, he deals almost exclusively with Mac OS X for his Perl development work, even if he has to use Virtual PC to cheat. He is also a Perl developer and trainer who maintains several Perl modules on CPAN and publishes The Perl Review, all from his Powerbook.
Click here for more info.Dan Frakes
Dan Frakes is a technology writer, shareware developer, consultant, and long-time Mac user. He is the author of Mac OS X Power Tools, a frequent contributor to Macworld magazine's "Mac OS X Secrets" column and the TidBITS newsletter, contributed to Mac OS X Disaster Relief by Ted Landau, and is an editor/author of the upcoming Mac Bible, 9th Edition. He is also the creator of InformINIT, the award-winning shareware guide to the Classic Mac OS, and a "ListMom" for some of the largest Mac-related mailing lists on the 'Net. Frakes has worked as a programmer/analyst supporting Macs at a major university and as an analyst at a research and consulting firm where his projects included the evaluation of educational technology policy. He is a frequent speaker at Mac-related conferences, and is a ten-time Macworld Expo Conference Faculty.
Click here for more info.Bob Fraser
Bob Fraser is the Java Product Manager, Worldwide Product Marketing for Apple. He first fell in love with rapid application development systems on his Symbolics lisp machine and continues to dabble today with WebObjects. In past lives, he has had practical experience as a software engineer, systems designer, and consultant.
Click here for more info.Mark Frauenfelder
Mark Frauenfelder (email@example.com) is a writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. He co-founded bOING bOING magazine, and was the founding editor-in-chief of Wired Online. He was also an editor at Wired magazine and Wired books from 1993-1998. He writes a monthly column for Playboy called "Living Online," about the Internet. He was the lead editor of The Happy Mutant Handbook (Putnam-Berkley, 1995), and recently wrote and illustrated Mad Professor (Chronicle Books, October 2002), a book of bizarre science experiments for children. He is the co-editor of the boingboing.net weblog, and ukulelia (boingboing.net/uke), a blog for ukulele fanatics.
Click here for more info.Landon Fuller
Landon Fuller is an engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group and one of the primary architects of the Darwin ports system.
Click here for more info.John Geleynse
As the user experience evangelist in Apple's Worldwide Developer Relations group, John Geleynse is responsible for helping developers adopt and design for Aqua, the elegant user interface of Mac OS X. Geleynse has over fourteen years of industry experience as an assembly language programmer, a C/C++ programmer, and he has also held various marketing roles. Prior to joining Apple in 1999, he worked at Corel Corporation.
Click here for more info.Tom Goguen
Tom Goguen is director of server software in Apple's Worldwide Product Marketing group. His team is responsible for the marketing and management of Apple's Mac OS X Server and Apple Remote Desktop products. In 2001, he came to Apple from Eazel, where he was director of product management and was responsible for Eazel's desktop software and Internet services. Prior to that, Goguen held various positions at Sun, most recently working on the company's initiatives in the office of the CTO and previously on Sun's Solaris operating system and related workgroup server software. Goguen holds a masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada.
Click here for more info.James Gosling
James Gosling is a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems ,and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing editor, and a text editor called "Emacs" for Unix systems.
At Sun, his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has recently been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java.
Gosling received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints."
Click here for more info.Alex Grossman
Alex Grossman is director of hardware storage in Apple's Worldwide Product Marketing group. He and his team are responsible for driving the development, marketing and management of Apple's server and storage products. Prior to joining Apple, Grossman was vice president of Sales, Marketing, and New Product Development at MicroNet Technology, Inc., a developer and manufacturer of hardware storage solutions for creative professionals and IT managers. Grossman has contributed to several patents associated with storage technology and led the team that developed the first FireWire-based Storage Area Network.
Click here for more info.Doug Hanley
Doug is a member of the Apple Consultants Network Advisory Council. He founded VMUG, the Las Vegas Macintosh Users Group. He teaches Macintosh Troubleshooting & Maintenance at the Community College of Southern Nevada and is certified as an Area Certified Technical Coordinator who has been supporting Mac users for over 13 years. He is also the Mac Corespondent on the Computer Outlook, a syndicate radio talk show.
Click here for more info.Paul Hoffman
Paul Hoffman is the Director of the Virtual Private Network Consortium, the industry trade association for VPN manufacturers and service providers. He is also the author of 20 computer books including Netscape for Dummies and Perl For Dummies. He bought his first Mac in January 1984.
Click here for more info.Jordan Hubbard
As the Manager of BSD Technologies for Apple's Core OS Engineering team, Jordan Hubbard oversees the BSD Technology Base for Darwin, the UNIX-based core of Mac OS X. Before joining Apple in 2001, Hubbard was a Principal Technologist for Wind River Systems and was responsible for the FreeBSD CD-ROM product line. Prior to that, Hubbard held various engineering and management positions at companies in the US and Europe, such as U.C. Berkeley and Digital Equipment Corporation. He began his career in software in the 1970's, working on minicomputers, and he is a frequent contributor to the Open Source community. Hubbard has been writing free software since 1982, beginning with Volume 1 of the comp.sources.unix archive and continuing with various works on MIT's X Contributed Software collection. He is also a co-founder of the FreeBSD project, which began in 1992.
Click here for more info.Brian Jepson
Brian Jepson is an O'Reilly editor, programmer, and co-author of Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks and Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther. He's also a volunteer system administrator and all-around geek for AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, Rhode Island. AS220 gives Rhode Island artists uncensored and unjuried forums for their work. These forums include galleries, performance space, and publications. Brian sees to it that technology, especially free software, supports that mission.
Click here for more info.Jessica Kahn
Jessica Kahn is the engineering team lead for Apple Help on Mac OS X.
Click here for more info.Leander Kahney
Leander Kahney is a journalist who covers Apple and the Mac community for Wired News (www.wired.com). Before joining Wired, he was a senior writer at MacWeek. He has written for numerous publications, including Scientific American and the London Guardian.
Click here for more info.Obul Kambham
Speaker biography coming soon.
Click here for more info.Boris Katok
Boris Katok is a software developer and architect with over ten years of industry experience. In 1996 he founded Dynamical Systems, Ltd., a software development and consulting company. For the past six years, he has been a consultant for a wide range of corporate clients including large investment banks, technology companies, and biotech companies. He specializes in object oriented architectures for n-tiered, distributed, high-performance, scalable, multi-threaded client-server applications and servers, and platform-independent and language-neutral implementations in Java, Perl, and Objective-C. He has been developing on the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP platforms since 1994.
Click here for more info.John Labovitz
John Labovitz is a photographer, programmer, and old-time netizen. He has been a typographer/designer and webmaster (working on O'Reilly's GNN site way back in 1993). Since 1985, he's switched back and forth between Mac and Unix. Now he's happier not having to choose between the two.
Click here for more info.Ted Landau
Ted Landau is the author of Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters and Mac OS X Disaster Relief. He is the founder and original editor of the MacFixIt website and a contributing editor for Macworld magazine. Landau has been twice listed by the MDJ as one of the twenty-five most influential people in the Mac community.
Click here for more info.J.D. Lasica
J.D. Lasica is Senior Editor of the Online Journalism Review (ojr.org), where he writes a column about new media and emerging technologies. Previously, he was Director of Content for an e-commerce startup in Sunnyvale, editor of BabyCenter.com, and a senior manager with San Francisco Sidewalk, Microsoft's online city guide. Lasica was the first new media columnist for The American Journalism Review. In a previous life he was an editor and columnist for The Sacramento Bee. He writes a popular weblog, New Media Musings, at http://jd.manilasites.com. He is currently writing a book about the clampdown on digital rights.
Click here for more info.David Mash
David Mash is Vice President for Information Technology at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, charged with strategic planning and leadership in the successful integration of technology into all college processes.
David was chosen by Apple Computer to be one of the first technology visionaries to be included in their AppleMasters program. David has collaborated on development and artistic projects with leaders in the multimedia and music industries such as Kodak, Adobe Systems, Digidesign, Opcode, and Korg and has consulted on product development for many manufacturers of music technology products. Rolling Stone magazine has called David "the industry's leading evangelist for the marriage of music and technology."
David's publications include "Musicians and Computers," Warner Bros; "Musicians and Multimedia," Warner Bros; "Musicians and the Internet," Warner Bros; Macintosh Multimedia Machine, Sybex; and "Computers and the Music Educator," Warner Bros.
Click here for more info.John McIntosh
John McIntosh took over what is now Redstone Software 20 months ago, killed their PC-based testing product, and embarked on a Mac OS X market focused development effort to build a test automation system with true ease-of-use, the ability to test any application on any system, and cost effectiveness.
Click here for more info.Gordon Meyer
Gordon Meyer is a a software engineer, ethnographer, and author. His house in Silicon Valley is fully automated and controlled by a talking computer that wakes his family in the morning, keeps an eye on the dog during the day, and alerts him to missed phone calls and package deliveries.
Click here for more info.David Morrison
David Morrison teaches mathematics at Duke University. He has used both Mac OS and various flavors of Unix in his research and his teaching for many years. He began contributing to the Fink project in July 2001, when he discovered that learning the skills needed to bring his favorite Unix tools to Mac OS X was not so hard after all! His other professional interests include bringing the scientific literature online (www.arXiv.org), and superstring theory.
Click here for more info.Christopher Nagel
Christopher Nagel has been a consultant, developer, and mentor for 12 years. Nagel has worked on object-oriented software for the Department of Defense, Blue Cross, TIAA-CREF, and Apple. Currently, Nagel is authoring O'Reilly's Cocoa Cookbook and lending a hand on some very cool software projects.
Click here for more info.Victor Nemechek
Victor Nemechek, El Gato�s Director of Marketing, manages the non-engineering portion of the energetic, cutting-edge, Macintosh-only software development company. El Gato has earned a reputation as a premier software development organization by creating award-winning products such as Roxio�s Toast 5 Titanium and SmartDisk�s FlashMedia Reader.
Nemechek joined El Gato in 2001 and got the wheels rolling on the development of EyeTV Digital Video Recorder, the first product to be released by El Gato directly to consumers. EyeTV is the first digital video recorder solution for Macintosh to allow customers to watch, record, and pause �live� TV, skip commercials, instant replay, or archive shows to VideoCDs playable in most DVD players.
Prior to joining El Gato, Nemechek was the Macintosh Product Line Manager at Roxio, where he led the development of Toast 5 Titanium, Roxio�s award winning CD and DVD recording software for the Macintosh. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado and an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Mr. Nemechek is married and has twin sons. They reside in San Jose, California.
Click here for more info.Matt Neuburg
Matt Neuburg is the author of O'Reilly's REALbasic: The Definitive Guide. He has been making computers do the work for him since 1968.
Click here for more info.Scott Nichol
Scott Nichol is an independent Mac developer and the author of the shareware application f(x). He also maintains the macmethod.com website. At his real job, Scott is a software engineer specializing in high-precision robotics and automation software for microchip assembly.
Click here for more info.Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
Click here for more info.David O'Rourke
As an engineering manager for Apple's Directory Services, David O'Rourke manages the development for directory client and server technologies in Mac OS X. The specific technologies he addresses include Open Directory, based on LDAP architecture, and Workgroup Manager. O'Rourke joined Apple in 1990 and has since held various quality assurance and engineering positions at the company. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.
Click here for more info.Ed Peterlin
Edward Peterlin is the lead Macintosh developer at BIOPAC Systems, Inc. by day and an OpenOffice.org community contributor by night. A graduate of Princeton University with an engineering degree in Computer Science, he has worked on a variety of large Unix, Macintosh, and Win32 projects, specializing in user interfaces and cross porting. He is currently helping to organize the community effort for completing the OpenOffice.org 1.0 port for MacOS X.
Click here for more info.David Pogue
David Pogue is the weekly technology columnist for the New York Times. He is also the #1 best-selling Macintosh author, having authored "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" and several other titles in the Missing Manual series, which he created.
Click here for more info.Ernest Prabhakar
As Product Line Manager for Development Platforms, Ernest Prabhakar is responsible for Open Source, Java and XML technologies at Apple. Since joining the company in 1997, Prabhakar has driven a number of new product initiatives at Apple, including the launch of Mac OS X Server and Darwin, Apple's Open Source operating system based on BSD technology. He has been developing on UNIX and Mac OS X-related technology for over fifteen years, beginning with BSD 4.2 at MIT's Project Athena.
Prabhakar received his S.B. in Physics from MIT and his Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from Caltech.
Click here for more info.George Reese
George Reese has taken an unusual path into business software development. After earning a B.A. in philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, George went off to Hollywood where he worked on television shows such as The People's Court and ESPN's Up Close. The L.A. riots convinced him to return to Maine, where he finally became involved with software development and the Internet. George has since specialized in the development of Internet-oriented Java enterprise systems. He is the author of Database Programming with JDBC and Java, Second Edition and Java Enterprise Architecture and coauthor of MySQL and mSQL. He created the world's first JDBC driver, the mSQL-JDBC (a.k.a Dasein Soul) driver for mSQL and is most recently involved with the creation of the peer-to-peer Open Source personal digital asset management system, xS. He currently works for Imaginet, LLC. in Minneapolis, MN. You can visit his home page at http://www.imaginary.com/~george.
Click here for more info.Lorene Romero
Speaker biography coming soon.
Click here for more info.Kent Salas
Kent Salas is a web producer for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and is also known as the �Webmonkey Boy.� He also holds the sought after title of �Apple Product Professional� in Apple�s Learn & Earn program. His history with Mac goes all the way back to Apple�s �Fat Mac� in 1985. When he gets the itch, and some free time, he devises ways to alter Mac and PC hardware with the help of his son.
Click here for more info.Wilfredo S�nchez Vega
Wilfredo S�nchez is a 1995 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After MIT, he co-founded an Internet publishing company, Agora Technology Group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then worked on the electronic commerce back end for the Disney Store Online at Disney Online in North Hollywood, California. S�nchez spent three years as a senior software engineer at Apple Computer in Cupertino, where he worked primarily on the BSD subsystem in Mac OS X as a member of the Core Operating System group, and as engineering lead for Apple's open source projects. He went on to join KnowNow, a startup in Mountain View, as developer community manager. S�nchez is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a contributor to various other projects.
Click here for more info.Randal L. Schwartz
Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry--skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. He has co-authored the "must-have" standards: Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules, and Effective Perl Programming, as well as writing regular columns for several magazines. His offbeat humor and technical mastery have reached legendary proportions worldwide (but he probably started some of those legends himself). Since 1985, Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.
Click here for more info.Michael Shaff
Speaker biography coming soon.
Click here for more info.Rich Siegel
Rich Siegel is the founder, president, and CEO of Bare Bones Software, Inc.
Click here for more info.Dori Smith
Dori Smith is co-author of Mac OS X Unwired and JavaScript for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide, 5th Edition, author of Java 2 for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide, and a contributor to numerous online and print magazines. She is on the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project, and is Publisher and ListMom for the Wise-Women's Web organization.
Click here for more info.Sal Soghoian
Sal Soghoian is an AppleScript Product Manager, Worldwide Product Marketing for Apple. He is widely touted as "the" AppleScript Guru and driving force behind the continued expansion and acceptance of AppleScript. He began scripting in 1992, after discovering AppleScript could automate the publishing-related tasks at his service bureau. After spending years as an early "online evangelist," Sal continued to serve the AppleScript community as the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple. Throughout his tenure, AppleScript's importance, use, and integration has grown, becoming the indispensable tool for automation and communication on the Mac.
Click here for more info.Daniel Steinberg
Daniel Steinberg is the editor-in-chief of O'Reilly Media's Java publications java.net and ONJava.com.
Click here for more info.Ted Stevko
Ted Stevko has been a network administrator, a graphic designer, a programmer, a cartoonist and an illustrator, usually all at once. Currently working as a Java developer using J2EE web services to develop high-availabilty websites, he's wrangled with graphics and programming problems for the last seven years, both from a development point of view and a technical point of view. Frequently, you can find him working on new ideas, including a frighteningly thought-out concept for object-oriented LOGO.
Click here for more info.Damien Stolarz
Damien Stolarz is an entrepreneur with fifteen years of experience making computers talk to each other. He is the CEO of both Robotarmy Corp., a software/R&D consultancy, and Carbot, Inc. an in-car computer company. He authored "Mastering Internet Video" (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Stolarz holds a B.S. in Computer Science/Engineering from UCLA.
Click here for more info.Chris Stone
Chris Stone is the Senior Macintosh Systems Administrator for O�Reilly & Associates, Inc. and has been an extremely avid Mac user, fan, and explorer for fifteen years, professionally since 1997. His own introduction to Unix was with Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server 1.0, and he knows well the challenges and rewards awaiting advanced Mac users equally curious to dive into Mac OS�s Unix.
He wrote the two Terminal chapters for David Pogue�s best-selling Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, as well as several popular articles on learning Mac OS X Unix for O�Reilly�s Mac DevCenter.
Click here for more info.Derrick Story
Derrick Story is the managing editor of O'Reilly Network. He focuses on web authoring, multimedia, and mobile computing. Pet projects include O'Reilly DevCenters for JavaScript/CSS and for the Macintosh. Derrick's experience includes more than 15 years as a photojournalist, a stint as the managing editor for Web Review, and a speaker for CMP's web conferences. In his spare time, Derrick manages his online photo business, Story Photography.
Click here for more info.Rhonda Stratton
As Apple�s Senior QuickTime Product Line Manager Rhonda Stratton is responsible for the continued development of the QuickTime platform. Having been involved with QuickTime and desktop video for over nine years, Stratton currently manages a wide variety of issues including overseeing technical developments, marketing strategy, and developer relationships for QuickTime. Stratton's previous experience at Apple also includes a role as a QuickTime Evangelist when Apple Computer hired her to evangelize and launch QuickTime 2.0. Prior to joining Apple, Stratton was employed with Radius Inc., where she held several video-related positions, most recently as Director of Marketing for the Company. While at Radius, she shipped her first QuickTime-based product, a tool for adding special effects to video, just after QuickTime 1.0 was released in 1991. Stratton is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and an IEEE member. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Toledo.
Click here for more info.Joseph Strout
Joe Strout has been an engineer at REAL Software since the turn of the century. His particular areas of interest are graphics and imaging, including text rendering and game development. Joe also serves on the editorial board of RB Developer magazine (RBD), and writes freelance articles for both RBD and MacTech. In a former life, Joe studied the biophysics and neuroscience of the visual system.
Click here for more info.Dan Sugalski
Dan Sugalski is the lead designer and alleged head of the Parrot project, tasked with designing the world's fastest and most full-featured z-code capable virtual machine. (It will also run Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, and Python code for extra flexibility in text gaming) He's been at this for near four years with no sign of land yet, though as long as he avoids the dragons he figures things can't be too bad.
He's also been a long-time contributor to Perl 5, for a while handling much of the VMS Perl port, tried very hard to get the original Perl threading model working, and has written more than a dozen XS-only Perl modules, all of which likely explain this bio.
Click here for more info.Leon Towns-von Stauber
Leon Towns-von Stauber has been using and administering Unix systems for the past twelve years. The purchase of a NeXT workstation in 1991 introduced him to the operating system lineage that he would follow to Mac OS X. He is currently writing a book on Mac OS X system administration to be published by O'Reilly.
Click here for more info.Guy (Bud) Tribble, M.D.-Ph.D.
Dr. Tribble's role at Apple is to help set the long term technical direction for the Mac OS software engineering group. Prior to his current role at Apple he was Vice President of Engineering at Eazel Inc., which developed next generation user interface software and Internet services designed to make Linux based computers easier to use.
Dr. Tribble is one of the industry's noted experts in object oriented programming and user interface design. Prior to joining Eazel he was VP and Chief Technology Officer for the Sun-Netscape Alliance, responsible for guiding Internet and e-commerce software R&D. He held several VP level positions at Sun over seven years. Dr. Tribble began his career at Apple Computer where in 1981 he was manager of the original Macintosh Software team, helping to design the MacOS and user interface. In 1985, he helped found NeXT Computer, where he was Vice President of Software Engineering and a key architect of the NextStep operating system, a groundbreaking software environment.
Dr. Tribble earned a B.A. degree in Physics at the University of California, San Diego and a M.D. and Ph.D. in Biophysics and Physiology at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Click here for more info.Kevin van Vechten
Kevin van Vechten is core team member of the Open Darwin project and a significant contributor to the Darwin ports project.
Click here for more info.David Wheeler
David E. Wheeler enjoys hacking on Stikkit, contributing articles about the PostgreSQL RDBMS for O'ReillyNet, and dabbling with an advanced object-relational mapper he has been designing and implementing for several years. He also works hard to prevent his rather dry wit from causing confusion in others.
Click here for more info.
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text:
Google Now Ranks No. 2 Behind Apple As The 2nd Most Valuable Company In America
Bloomberg.com reported today Google has moved ahead of Exxon Mobile Corp to become the second most valuable company in America following Apple.
According to Bloomberg, Google's market capitalization totals $393.5 billion, representing less than a billion more than Exxon's $392.6 billion, but $72 billion behind Apple's market value of $465.5 billion.
As the world's largest online advertiser, Bloomberg notes Google's rise is a reflection of the technology industry taking a larger role globally:
Technology companies are establishing themselves as key players worldwide as they disrupt industries from retail to finance. Google, which went public in 2004 – 84 years after Exxon – has benefited from consumers moving to online services and content, a trend that's being accelerated by the growing population of smartphones and tablets.
Bloomberg's report goes on to say Exxon has been "under pressure" since last month when the Texas-based oil company reported a 16 percent decrease of net income ($8.35 billion) and 3.3 percent ($110.86 billion) drop in sales. Google, on the other hand, reported an 11 percent rise in revenue, claims Bloomberg, topping the company's projected revenue of $13.4 billion.
"While shares of Exxon have fallen more than 11 percent this year, Google's are up 3.5 percent through yesterday," wrote Bloomberg reporter Brian Womack.
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text:
your shopping cart is empty!
If you own an electric vehicle, there is nothing like the convenience of having a charging station in your home or business. Eve Australia are electric vehicle supply equipment nstallation experts. Our electric vehicle charging station installations include:
Resource:(We could add brochures and stuff here?)


text:
The American Kennel Club,
in conjunction with the Warrenton Kennel Club,
invites you to attend:
A Seminar for Show Chairmen, Assistant Show Chairmen, and Aspiring Show Chairmen.
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2000
Time: 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.
Information: e-mail: email@example.com or call: 540-788-4150
Location: National Guard Armory, 692 Waterloo Road, Warrenton, VA. The Armory is located off of Route 211 on Waterloo Road
Fee: $20
Speakers provided by: The American Kennel Club
Facilitator: Barbara Schwartz; Director Show Operations
Learn how quality dog shows evolve from experts and peers!
Selected topics:
*Site Selection *Premium List
*Judges Selection *Breed Assignments & Ring Layouts
*AKC Paperwork Made Easy *Bench Show Committees
*Defining your customer and what it takes to make them happy
Deadline for Registration: June 7, 2000
To Register: Complete this form, and mail with payment to:
The American Kennel Club 5580 Centerview Drive, Raleigh, NC 27606
attention: Pat Fanning or call (919)-854-0182 or e-mail: email@example.com
Name: _________________________________________________
Kennel Club: _____________________________________________
Address: _______________________________________________
City: _________________________________ State: ___________
Zip: ___________________ Phone: __________________________


text:
let: binding for Knockout
Posted on Wed 18 November 2015 in Code • Tagged with Knockout, JavaScript, web frontend, data binding • Leave a comment
Knockout is a JavaScript "framework" that has always lurked in the shadows of other, more flashy ones. Even in the days of its relative novelty, the likes of Backbone or Ember had seemed to garner more widespread interest among frontend developers. Today, this hasn't changed much, the difference being mainly that the spotlight is now taken by new actors (*cough* React *cough*).
But Knockout has a loyal following, and for good reasons. Possibly the most imporant one is why I've put the word "framework" in quotes. Knockout is, first and foremost, a data binding library: it doesn't do much else besides tying DOM nodes to JavaScript objects.
This quality makes it both easy to learn and simple to integrate. In fact, it can very well live in just some small compartments of your web application, mingling easily with any server-side templating mechanism you might be using. It also interplays effortlessly with other JS libraries, and sticks very well to whatever duct tape you use to hold your frontend stack together.
Lastly, it's also quite extensible. We can, for example, create our own bindings rather easily, extending the declarative language used to describe relationship between the data and UI.
In this post, I'm going to demonstrate this by implementing a very simple
let: binding —
a kind of "assignment" of an expression to a name.
From Knockout
with: bluff
Out of box, Knockout proffers the
with: binding,
a quite similar mechanism. How it may be somewhat problematic is analogous to the
widely discouraged
with statement
in JavaScript itself. Namely, it blends several namespaces together, making it harder to determine which object
is being referred to. As a result, the code is more prone to errors.
On the other hand, freeing the developer from repeating long and complicated expressions is obviously valuable.
Perhaps reducing them to nil is not the right approach, though, so how about we just shorten them
to a more manageable length? Well, that's exactly what the
let: binding is meant to do:

,

Making it happen turns out to be pretty easy.
Binding contract
To define a Knockout binding, up to two things are needed. We have to specify what the library should do:
- when the binding is first applied to a DOM node (the
- when any of the observed values changes (the
Not every binding has to implement both methods. In our cases, only the
init is necessary, because all we have to do
is modify the binding context.
What's that? Shortly speaking, a binding context,
is an object holding all the data you can potentially bind to your DOM nodes. Think of it as a namespace, or local scope:
whatever's in there can be used directly inside
data-bind attributes.
let: it go
Therefore, all that the
let: binding has to do is to extend the context with a mapping passed to it as an argument.
Well, almost all:
ko.bindingHandlers['let'] = {
init: function(element, valueAccessor, allBindings, viewModel, bindingContext) {
var innerContext = bindingContext.extend(valueAccessor);
ko.applyBindingsToDescendants(innerContext, element);
return { controlsDescendantBindings: true };
The resulting
innerContext is a copy of the original
bindingContext, augmented with additional properties from
the argument of
let: (those are available through
valueAccessor). Once we have it, though, we need to handle it
in a little special way.
Normally, Knockout is processing all bindings recursively, pasing down the same
bindingContext (which ultimately
comes from the root
viewModel). But since we want to locally alter the context, we also need to interrupt this regular
way and take care of the lower-level DOM nodes ourselves.
This is exactly what the overly-long
ko.applyBindingsToDescendants function is doing. The only caveat is that Knockout
has to be told explicitly
about our intentions through the
return value from
init. Otherwise, it would try to apply the original
bindingContext recursively, which in our case would amount to applying it twice.
{ controlsDescendantBindings: true } prevents Knockout from doing so erroneously.


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Welcome to the world of Familial Adenomatous Polyposis. Much like navigating a foreign land, getting acquainted with FAP can feel utterly overwhelming. Though it can also lead to some interesting stories and adventures. For that reason, we compiled a FAP welcome kit for newly diagnosed FAP'ers. Think of this like that Lonely Planet Travel Guide: a good start to help provide some initial direction for your journey and save you from aimless Google searches. Along the way of course, you'll supplement this with your own advice gleaned from talking to others on the same course and hidden gems you've discovered. (Know someone who would find this kit helpful? Click the "share" button above to send it to them.)
Join community members in a discussion of this article.


text:
Forget about One Direction – Harry Styles could soon be swapping singing for acting as he is being lined up to appear in a movie version of stage show Wicked.
He headed to Harvey Weinstein's exclusive pre-Oscars bash at the weekend in Los Angeles and now the rumour that's rife in Tinseltown is that the curly-haired heartthrob made quite the impression with film bosses – including Weinstein.
But Universal Pictures, who are making Wicked, might get in there first.
'Harry is very focused on his singing career but there's a real buzz about him. Movie makers see him as a new Zac Efron and think he would be a perfect casting for a movie musical,' a source told The Sun.
'He's top of the Wicked team's wish list to play the romantic lead role of Fiyero – who becomes The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.'
And Weinstein apparently told the publication that he's keen to make Harry a Hollywood star too, adding: 'First he's got to date three of my daughters. They all think that he's extremely handsome.'
One Direction fans were left fretting for the future of the band after Liam Payne admitted they hadn't seen each other for three months while at February's Brit Awards.


text:
When it comes to menswear, ethnic clothing has its own unprecedented charm. Be it a cotton kurta, or a royal sherwani, these pieces of clothing should find their way into men's wardrobes.
Here's my pick for the top 5 ethnic wear pieces every Indian man ought to own:
1. Kurta – Thanks to e-commerce stores, there are plenty of websites to choose from to buy yourself a nice kurta. These can be either short, knee-length, or long. From striped to chicken work and from cotton to raw silk, the options are many. Worn either over jeans or a churidar, these are perfect for any formal or informal gathering.
2. Sherwani – If you wish to look staggeringly handsome and need something to adorn yourself with on more formal occasions like weddings or receptions, a sherwani is your best bet. Although priced slightly at the higher end of most budgets, it's definitely worth possessing this masterpiece.
3. Jodhpuri shoes – No look is complete without the right kind of footwear. It would be disastrous to wear plain, outdoorsy chappals with traditional clothing. Hence, the jodhpuri shoes come to your rescue. Available in a range of colours, choose a pair that will blend in with most of your kurtas. A beige one should do the trick!
4. Dhoti – Readymade dhotis are now available in the market! It doesn't get any easier than this. Some of them have intricate prints or are just plain-coloured. Get hold of a dhoti that either serves to highlight your attire, or works as a stark, yet brilliant contrast.
5. Dupattas or stoles – Crushed silk stoles look absolutely ravishing when paired with kurtas or sherwanis. They add to the overall ethnic quotient and you are sure to stand out in a crowd. For the right reasons, of course!


text:
She Decor aims to help its clients in the process of transformation and renovation of the home. In the ocean of trends and important functional and zonal tasks for solution, the specialists of She Decor give you competent advices and suggestions.
As a trademark for the EU, She Decor guarantees quality. After it has taken over all the work, you end up with a modern home that meets the requirements of modernity and your individuality, and gives you cosiness and functionality.
What is the secret of She Decor? The studio strives to offer and to direct its clients towards a design that fits their habits, and towards creation of functional zones.
She Decor closes the cycle of the services on offer with renovation, design and realisation with the help of Style Build Group. The realisation of the project is completely by own workers following preliminary schedule. This minimises the period of the realisation, giving the company the opportunity to offer exclusive conditions to its clients.
At each stage of the process the client receives compete information on the performed activities. She Decor aims to offer to its clients solutions meeting their budget, it also briefs them in details and assists all steps of the transformation of the initial project into a finished, comfortable, functional home where it is a pleasure to live.
Sofia, 4А Stoyan Chomakov St
phone: 0878 427 698


text:
This card was to be posted yesterday but because of computer problems, did go on until now. I Hate computers!!!
The inspiration for this card came from this weeks sketch aqt Splitcoast Stampers.
The Digi Image is from Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps and is called Winter Basket. I colored it with Copic Markers.
The background paper is actually made with the Holly Ribbon Cuttlebug Embossing Folder.
The Hand Stitching was done with matching Embroidery Floss.
April Paper Pumpkin
2 weeks ago


text:
Thursday Morning News
Apple's Back to School promo went live yesterday. Until March 21st, the purchase of any eligible Mac will come with a pair of Beats Solo2 wired headphones, with the option of upgrading to the wireless version if you pay the $140 difference. All Mac products besides the Mac mini and refurb machines are eligible for the promotion, and if you were in the market for a new Mac anyway, the free headphones are a pretty good deal. As always, you can support AppleTalk by shopping via our Apple Online Store affiliate link.
If the only change Apple makes to the design of the iPhone is having a rear camera that's flush with the casing, I will be happy. But that's not all they're planning, according to MacRumors, who also says Apple is removing the antenna bands across the rear.
Apple lost a court case in the UK and has since removed claims the Apple Watch display is impact resistant, with 9to5Mac pointing out that while the sapphire glass display of the Apple Watch and Edition models is more scratch-resistant than that of the Apple Watch Sport, it's just as likely to crack.
Apple has hired two security researchers who revealed a security exploit which ran on the Thunderbolt platform, in an effort to bolster security on Apple's Mac and iOS platforms.
With the Apple Watch launching in Greece, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar next week, it seems insane to think Apple would release a new model of Apple Watch next month. Possible, of course, but pretty insane.
The New York Landmarks Conservancy has recognised Apple for their work in preserving historic NYC buildings. Apple's SoHo, West 14th Street, Upper East Side, and Grand Central Terminal locations all being called out for being restored in line with their original heritage, "marrying modern technology with distinguished architecture".
Accessory manufacturing company Zagg (you probably know them for their InivisibleShield product) has acquired Mophie, better known for external battery cases. Zagg has since branched out into the world of keyboards and other accessories, and with the acquisition, will be looking to take over the third-party accessory market.
Ben Brooks isn't a fan of cute release notes, but as someone who doesn't read release notes due to doing app updates from iTunes, I can't say I agree or disagree either way.
Walt Mossberg writes Apple's own apps have lacked a little something in recent times, both on the Mac and iOS. Software quality aside, he says notable apps such as Mail, Photos, and iTunes have been more evolution than revolution.
If you're waiting for the excellent puzzler The Witness to come to the Mac or iOS, you might be waiting a little longer. Developer Jonathan Blow has put the call out for a developer who's interested in doing the majority of the work porting the title to iOS, which probably means it's about six months before we'll hear anything concrete.


text:
Patients 'still suffering at crisis hit British hospital'
Patients are still suffering unnecessarily at a hospital criticised six months ago for poor standards that contributed to hundreds of deaths, according to a new report. At least one patient has died because of similar problems since, the review suggests. Health watchdogs also found that Stafford Hospital, run by Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, was still suffering staff shortages.
In March a damning investigation found that up to 1,200 people had died because of the poor standards of care at the hospital. Regulators found overstretched nurses who turned off vital pieces of equipment because they did not know how to use them and reception staff expected to judge the seriousness of the conditions of patients arriving at A&E.
The latest report, by the Care Quality Commission, found that improvements were being made but that the changes needed to happen faster. In one case the commission found that a "serious untoward incident" on an ward where concerns had been raised about staffing levels led to a patient's death. The hospital closed the 12-bed Clinical Decision Unit (CDU) soon after the death.
But the CQC warned that there were still staff shortages across the hospital. Relying heavily on bank or agency nurses could also have a negative impact on patient care, the report states.
Too many patients are still being sent unnecessarily to casualty when they could be dealt with in other parts of the hospital, inspectors also found. In one case a patient with heart failure who was already in the outpatients department was sent to A&E instead of straight to see a specialist when he developed breathlessness.
The report also found that patients were being seen by senior doctors sooner but that there were still problems contacting consultants during night shifts.
Andrea Gordon, regional director for CQC in the West Midlands, said: "On CQC's six month follow up review we found that while some progress had been made against the trust's action plan, more still needs to be done. "Permanent staffing levels remain a concern and this must improve. "Although there had been some change, there was still a shortfall in permanent nursing staff and the trust was still using bank and agency staff to supplement numbers. "We are aware that the trust is working to address these issues but there is still some way to go."
Antony Sumara, the chief executive of Mid-Staffordshire Trust, said: "We know that there is more to do and that this needs to be delivered more quickly. Staff at our hospitals are as committed as I am, to making changes for the benefit of our patients."
Last month the CQC warned that hundreds of patients had died needlessly at another hospital, Basildon University Hospital, because of poor care.
Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: "This is a Trust under unbelievable levels of pressure to improve and it still can't get the basics right every time or ensure it has enough staff. "That should be worrying for all of us. "The local community don't want improvement over a few months or 6 months or a year, they want it straight away. "They are the ones that suffer if things aren't put right."
Lawyers growing rich on NHS negligence
It would be a lot cheaper for them to do their job properly in the first place but that doesn't enter a bureaucratic mind. It's not their money that they are wasting
The number of negligence cases being brought against the NHS is rising at 11 per cent a year. Lawyers representing patients in clinical negligence claims frequently take more money from the NHS than their clients receive in damages. The rise of no-win, no-fee actions against the health service has been blamed for a sharp increase in the proportion of payouts ending up in the pockets of the claimants' lawyers.
Law firms representing patients made more than £100 million last year from successful claims concluded against the NHS. Their costs, at rates of up to £400 an hour, were more than double those for lawyers representing the health service. "Success" fees charged by lawyers working on a no-win, no-fee basis — which cover their risk of losing some cases — can double the cost, according to the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA).
Figures released by the authority, which handles all clinical negligence claims, show that legal fees accounted for almost half the £312 million damages claims closed last year. Patients' legal costs exceeded the damages that they received in more than one in five cases. According to the authority, the number of cases being brought against the health service is rising at 11 per cent annually, with more than 6,700 cases expected for this financial year.
The cost to the NHS is accelerating at a similar rate. The authority's annual report says that payouts, including both completed cases and continuing payments, will pass £800 million this year — a 60 per cent rise on five years ago. When settlements relating to staff injuries are included, the total is even higher.
A review of civil litigation costs, which is due to report next month, is expected to address the way no-win, no-fee costs can spiral. Submissions to the review, seen by The Times, describe how this problem has grown in recent years because of success fees and insurance premiums taken out by lawyers to protect against losing the case. Since 2000, both have been recoverable from the NHS.
Christine Tomkins, chief executive of the Medical Defence Union, which provides medico-legal support to health professionals, said that analysis of their cases had shown that the average damages was just under £10,000. Claimant costs, including legal fees, success fees and insurance premiums, had been calculated at an average of more than £20,000.
Dr Tomkins said that cases and costs should be more closely managed, with a cap on fees, adding that the no-win, no-fee cases were being "cherry-picked because they were winnable". She said: "There needs to be much closer attention to costs being accrued by claimants' solicitors. We are often not aware of a case until we are contacted and we immediately think: 'We must settle.' But we can then discover that there have already been weeks of costs accrued."
Among contested claims highlighted in the NHSLA annual report was the case of six male cancer patients who had banked semen samples with a hospital trust for possible future use. The samples thawed and became unviable. In another case a child born with congenital rubella syndrome, "due to admitted NHS negligence", is receiving care costing £130,000 a year.
The Conservatives, who identified some of the disparities in legal costs and damages, said that there were cases where lawyers were getting ten times as much as patients. They calculated that over the past five years, almost £700 million in NHS funds has been spent on fees to lawyers dealing with clinical negligence claims. Mark Simmonds, the Conservative health spokesman, said: "Taxpayers will be rightly angry that hundreds of millions of pounds of their money is being paid out for mistakes in the NHS and that in many cases lawyers get their hands on more of the compensation money than the patients."
Stephen Walker, chief executive of the NHSLA, described the claimant costs as "seriously disproportionate". He said: "These law firms are not doing anything dishonest or illegal, they are just playing the system."
A Department of Health spokesman said that litigation costs were a concern across government and were the reason for the current review, adding: "The vast majority of the millions of people treated by the NHS every year experience good quality, safe and effective care. However, if patients do not receive the treatment they should and mistakes are made, it is right that they are compensated and have access to legal representation."
Less Health Care for More Money
by Ann Coulter
The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column about John Brodniak of Oregon, who developed a cavernous hemangioma, causing him great pain as blood leaks into his brain. According to Kristof, Brodniak can't get medical help because we don't have universal health care. Senators who vote against ObamaCare, Kristof said, are morally equivalent to someone who would walk past a man "writhing in pain on the sidewalk."
In another article in the Times, William Yardley wrote about Melvin Tsosies -- also of Oregon -- who ended up with $200,000 in medical bills after having a heart attack. As of March 2008, Yardley reported, Tsosies was waiting to find out if he would win the Oregon lottery for health insurance. But with 600,000 uninsured state residents and a "universal" health care program with only enough money to pay for about 24,000 of them, Tsosies is more likely to win a Powerball lottery.
How can this be happening? Oregon already has "universal health care"! (Probably just a coincidence, but isn't Oregon also the only state with physician-assisted suicide?)
Once again forgetting about the existence of the Internet, the Times neglects to mention its own erstwhile enthusiasm for Oregon's universal health care plan, introduced back in 1990. Back then, the Times published an editorial titled "Oregon's Brave Medical Experiment," hailing this technocratic monstrosity as an example of "hardheaded compassion" designed to make "health coverage available to many more families." Ron Wyden -- then a congressman from Oregon, now a U.S. senator at the forefront of pushing "universal health care" onto the nation -- said: "This is a strong dramatic step toward universal access of health care." He predicted, "[T]his is going to be copied everywhere."
No wonder Wyden is such an ardent proponent of national health care -- it will force states that didn't adopt these idiotic universal health care schemes to bail out the ones that did.
Liberals cite medical horror stories from the very states they once cheered for enacting universal health care in order to argue for a national health care plan that will wreck the entire nation's medical care the same way liberal states already wrecked their own medical care. Only Democrats could propose fixing one Bernie Madoff-style scam with an even bigger Bernie Madoff-style scam. Maybe when national universal health care fails, we'll be able to go international. Then interplanetary -- then interstellar! Why should I pay for my gall bladder surgery when some Venusian could?
Eighty-five percent of Americans are happy with their health care, but Democrats have a plan to make it worse for more money. As a bonus, national health care will add trillions of dollars to the national debt, and your insurance rates will skyrocket.
Democrats are being utterly disingenuous to say that you won't have to leave your current plan under national health care. Maybe, but it won't be your choice: Your employer will be making that decision for you. Recall that one of the big selling points of national health care is that it is supposed to reduce costs for American businesses. The only way national health care will make American companies "more competitive" is if they dump their employees into the public health care system. It's so weird! We expected X number of people to show up for health care and instead 75X showed up! Yeah, just like every other government program in the history of the world.
Ten years from now, we'll be talking about cost overruns of $6 trillion -- but by then, national health care will be an untouchable "third rail" of politics, just as Medicare is now. (Ironically, injuries sustained from actually touching the third rail won't be covered under ObamaCare.)
As with Medicare, voters will be terrified to go back to even the wisp of a free market system we have now, afraid that they'll never be able to get health insurance without the government providing it. Having been dragged unwillingly into the government plan, how will a 58-year-old be able to leave the public system and get insurance on the free market?
Speaking of which, how many of you are planning to retire on your Social Security benefits? Just you there, with the shopping cart full of cans?
The only solution will be for the government to keep running up gigantic deficits and raising taxes on "the rich," which, in turn, will stifle job creation and economic growth in a phenomenon known to economists as "the Carter years."
In addition to forcing Americans into dealing with surly government workers in order to obtain medical care, sooner or later, there's no free lunch. (And if government X-rays are anything like the photos the DMV takes for your license, count me out. I don't want my lungs looking like they had a bad hair day.)
Even if national health care puts the screws to doctors and pharmaceutical companies by reimbursing them below cost -- so all future doctors will soon resemble DMV employees and no new drugs will ever be invented -- the government is still going to have to cut services and pay for the system with massive tax hikes. Which is exactly what happened with Oregon's "Brave Medical Experiment."
New regulations will destroy the insurance market
It has been shown that the so-called "public option" for low-premium health insurance is sure to significantly crowd out, and perhaps even eliminate, the private provision of health insurance. Thanks to Senator Joseph Lieberman's courageous stand, it appears that the public option will not be a part of any bill that passes the Senate. Unfortunately, HR 3962 includes regulations that will destroy the ability of private firms to provide marketable insurance, with or without a public option.
To understand the devastation that will be wrought by this bill, one must understand how health insurance functions on a free market to transfer individuals' financial risk to large "risk pools" with less variation across time. Consumers who are risk averse pay "premiums" to insurers each month for the removal of that risk, and in turn insurers assign their clients to different pools according to their risk of large claims.
An Already-Regulated Industry
Insurance companies have already been strictly limited in their ability to assign individuals to different risk pools and charge them varying premiums. By forcing high-risk and low-risk groups into the same pool, existing regulations increase premiums for low-risk consumers and decrease premiums for high-risk consumers. This is nothing more than a coerced subsidy to the less healthy, and it drives low-risk consumers away from purchasing health insurance. This is why the majority of the uninsured are not poor and dying, but in fact healthy young people who are at almost no risk of unanticipated healthcare costs.
To cope with their inability to partition along risk levels, profit-seeking insurance companies must cut costs by excluding the highest-risk patients from insurance. In a free market, these individuals would be offered insurance at a higher premium aligned with their high risk of major claims. In human terms, this leads to the exclusion of people with preexisting conditions and those with significant claims on past insurance plans. Once again, we see how leftist economic policy harms the very class of society that its supporters desire to help.
Obamacare is a Welfare Program
Not oblivious to the exclusion of these unfortunate citizens, on page 95 of the bill, House Democrats have proposed to completely outlaw the exclusion of any customer on any of the following grounds: "health status, medical condition, claims experience, receipt of health care, medical history, genetic information, evidence of insurability, disability, or source of injury (including conditions arising out of acts of domestic violence) or any similar factors."
Thus, it will become illegal to refuse to insure any consumer on any grounds, including evidence of insurability. In addition to being unable to exclude future enrollees, insurers will be prevented by page 29 from legally dropping any consumers from their plans on any grounds other than "clear and convincing evidence of fraud."
The effect on the structure of insurance is obvious; this new law will turn health insurance into a legally-enforced entitlement program, and the new entitlement will be used by those who are too costly to be insured under the current restrictions on risk-pool partitioning. Again, it is important to remember that these patients would have the option to buy insurance on a free market, but that their plans would carry premiums that actually reflect their personal health risk.
While risk-pool separation is considerably limited by national and state regulations, the little separation that is allowed would still be able to mitigate the heavy costs of forcing insurers to cover literally every customer who wishes to buy insurance. While the high-risk individuals would not pay as much in premiums as they would on a free market, insurance companies would still be able to use slightly lower premiums to attract low-risk customers.
However, this inequality in premiums is offensive to politicians hell-bent on equality. Therefore, in the very next page of the bill, House Democrats propose to outlaw all variations in premiums except according to geographical area, age group, and whether the plan in question covers an individual or a family.
These provisions will be catastrophic to the insurance market. The bill only allows for premium variation across age by a ratio of two to one between the highest and lowest premiums. In real terms, elderly patients who cost several times as much to insure can only be charged twice as much as 20-somethings who often go entire years without claims. That this is a subsidy for the elderly hardly needs to be explicitly stated.
The bill leaves the determination of the maximum difference between individual and family plans at the discretion of the "health choices" commissioner, who is likely to find himself bombarded with visits and letters from family-centered lobbying organizations seeking subsidized health insurance paid for by singles and nonparents. This rent seeking will inevitably end up in subsidies handed out according to political objectives, whether the goal is to attract more young, single voters or more parents of children.
Turning any transaction into a subsidy both induces the subsidized class to enter the transaction and induces the subsidizing class to attempt to avoid it. In this case, it means that an even greater number of young and healthy individuals (and, most likely, nonparents) will drop their increasingly expensive insurance plans and attempt to prepare for healthcare risks on their own. This terrible result of coercive price-fixing decreases the benefit of the subsidy to high-risk consumers and decreases the ability of the insurance companies to control and reduce average payouts.
Democrats are aware of this effect of their policy, and have legislated accordingly. Pages 296–300 amend federal tax law to create a new tax on all citizens who fail to purchase health insurance. Depriving these individuals of the ability to opt out of the new, undifferentiated insurance pool is an atrocious affront to individual choice, and requires the threat of imprisonment. This new tax will help achieve the statistical goal of universal coverage, but it will do so at an incredible cost to the income and liberty of the relatively young and healthy, most of whom, ironically, voted for Obama and Democratic congressional candidates.
Soaring Costs
Not only will high-risk individuals who are now forced out of the market by regulation be legally entitled to purchase the bill's minimum standard of coverage, but both these excluded consumers and those who are now in high-risk pools will have financial incentives to buy higher levels of insurance. Facing new, subsidized prices, high-risk individuals will purchase plans with lower deductibles. Paying for a higher percentage of the price of more claims will massively increase the cost of insuring the new general pool of clients.
One of the only remaining ways for insurers to cut their costs, then, is to limit the amount that individuals are able to receive in claims. Indeed, insurance companies already use lifetime claims limits to cope with risk-partition laws and deliver lower-price packages to low-risk consumers. Predictably, page 50 of the House bill prohibits insurance companies from imposing any such limits on lifetime benefits.
Outlawing lifetime limits guarantees that all consumers will have the incentive to undergo drastically more treatments in their lifetimes, because the bill ensures that they will not be moved into a higher premium group until they enter a different age group or move to a different area. For the already-subsidized elderly, this creates incentives to undergo many more life-extending treatments in the final year of their lives. Such treatments are several times more expensive than general care for other elderly patients.
Astute readers will correctly object that while the Democrats' healthcare proposal will drastically increase the costs facing every insurance provider, the bill also requires all individuals to buy the minimum package of insurance, or to enroll in the public option. Especially because in the current discussion we are ignoring the effects of the public option, it is possible to argue that if there were no public option this bill would actually be a boon to private insurers, who are virtually guaranteed that every American will buy their plans. To survive this bill, then, insurance companies will simply increase the premiums of the packages that are forced onto every citizen.
This would indeed be true, were it not for further regulations effectively barring premium increases. Page 31 of the bill would require insurance companies to "submit a justification" for any projected future increase in premiums for any group to the secretary of Health and Human Services as well as state-level authorities.
The secretary of HHS and the state "health czars" would then annually review and approve or deny any increase in premiums. In various sections of the bill, the health choices commissioner is given power to determine the cost-accounting and other ratings methods that will determine whether a price increase is "justified" in the eyes of the DHHS Secretary.
Public officials operating under a Congressional mandate to achieve universal coverage are hardly likely to approve price increases, even though that means slowly bankrupting private insurers. Even if they are not made to "compete with" and be strangled by a public option that consumers have already funded with their tax dollars, private insurers will be absolutely ruined by restrictions on their ability to control and separate costs and to increase prices to account for their ever-rising costs.
While a public option would certainly hasten the death of the private-insurance market in America, it is not a necessary means to that end. By destroying the economic structure of insurance, House Resolution 3962 would convert an already-overregulated industry into a pseudo-private welfare program. Even without a public option, insurance companies would be kept from controlling costs or adjusting their prices. The inevitable result will be the complete dissolution of the private health-insurance market.
A Return to Slavery One Progressive Step at a Time
Let's just call it what it is, as one of my favorite economists Walter E. Williams writes in a recent Town Hall column: "There is absolutely no moral case, much less constitutional case, for Congress forcibly using one American to serve the purposes of another American, a practice that differs only in degree from slavery, which we all should find morally offensive."
If you strip the health-care debate of it's sugar coated political buzz words such as mandate and public option, aren't we really talking about just another case where the government has decided to force you to labor for the benefit of someone else? At the rate we are going, how long will it be before you'll be spending more of your time working for others rather than yourself. Isn't that so very altruistic of you!
If the Health Care Police (HCP), I assume they would be the ones in charge of enforcing the governments health care mandate, knocked on your door every other Monday morning and forced your college educated 22 year old daughter to work all day picking up trash on the side of the highway you'd be horrified. You'd want some answers! What dastardly criminal act could she have committed to deserve such a punishment, keeping her out of work all day and thereby depriving her of 10% of her income?
They don't do that in America, you say. Well, not quite yet anyway, but they will soon if the Democrats have their way with health care. She will be forced by the government to spend an equivalent amount of her earnings to purchase something she had decided not to. Is this not also a practice that differs only in degrees?
As a parent, wouldn't you want to talk to the prosecutor to know what crime your daughter had committed that merited a fine that was upwards of 10% of her income? Shouldn't there be some kind of a trial to find her guilty before punishment is meted out, even if it is only a show trial like the one KSM is entitled to? Won't you be mortified to learn she has committed the most heinous of acts imaginable in our new Progressive Society? That's right she is guilty of working for an employer who does not provide health insurance, and has failed to purchase a government approved insurance policy on her own. Oh, the shame of it!
Your representatives in Congress are spinning a yarn that goes like this: legions of hospitalized young adults without medical insurance are the cause of the explosion in health insurance premiums. This in an attempt to justify a morally bankrupt and unconstitutional taking of private property. Their remedy? Mandate (a pretty word that means to force) that all citizens must buy health insurance. That's what they would like you to believe, but that is not what the facts tell us.
The fact is that they are bullying healthy young people into to subsidizing health care premiums for those in poor health who have medical insurance, those with preexisting conditions who have been denied health insurance coverage and those who are not financially able to purchase health insurance. The Progressive bullies in Congress always pick on the politically weak in society, in this case it happens to be young people, it's not like they are reliable voters anyway, and their perennial favorites, "The Rich" who will pay the freight to provide an insurance subsidy for the politically favored classes.
Will health insurance reform really be the rallying cry Progressives use to justify re-instituting a modern day version of Slavery in America?
Saturday, December 19, 2009
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March 4, 2013 at 6:44 am #541
Charina Lee
Goodmorning! My name is pronounced like the C is an Sh….Charina. So, you are a Doctor who fan. A time traveler! Time travel intrigues me but I have to be frank and say that my first interest in time travel would most likely be considered corny because I first remember being interested in it from the movie Back to the Future! I know its a comedy, but just the thought of time travel is interesting. Especially for us ladies that are always fighting to keep our youthful appearances. LOL.
I like Jazzmark007's idea of a dirty talk contest….but the winner should get….(oh, never mind….we'll have to discuss that in person)….Have a great day!


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Queens Domain
Queens Domain is a twenty-storey apartment building located between Melbourne's Botanic Gardens precinct and Albert Park Lake. Nexus Designs was engaged by Kangoala/PDA Australia as interior design specialists to develop contemporary, highly desirable interiors for this premium project in a fiercely competitive market. Our design was inspired by the inner city lakeside and parkland environment and the modernist, curving architecture of dKO. From the initial entry, foyer, concierge services, pool and gymnasium, communal lounge and lift lobbies, through to the individual apartments; our intention was to deliver a seamless experience, consistent with the client's vision. We customised the Italian made kitchens and hotel-style bathrooms using timber and solid surface materials, along with natural stone for a timeless balance of nature and technology. Our services included liaising with the marketing team to create the sales video, liaising with the renderers to convey the design and styling the marketing suite to engage purchasers.
Click here to see the Promotional Video
Click here for more about Queens Domain Apartments
238 Apartments
Architect: DKO Architects
Developer: Kangoala/PDA Australia
- Interior Design
- Finishes & Fittings Selection
- Interior Colour Palette
- Bathroom Design
- Kitchen Design
- Liaison with Renderer
- Interior Styling for Renders
- Furniture Selection for Renders
- Interior Styling for Display Suite
- Marketing Video
- Furniture Selection for Display Suite
- Marketing Material
- Space Planning in Collaboration with dKO


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Needed U (Redondo Edit) - Unomas & Dave Sol
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Five Reasons to Use Prescription Safety Glasses Instead of Contacts
If you wear prescription glasses and dislike wearing them underneath standard safety glasses, that's certainly understandable. The arrangement is clumsy, uncomfortable, and restricts your visual field. You have a double set of lenses which doubles the amount of cleaning required.
Perhaps you may be considering eye contacts beneath your safety glasses as an alternative. However, this makes your life more complicated because of the hygienic practices required of all contact users in order to avoid eye injuries and infections. Other requirements include not sleeping with them on and limiting their use to 8 or 9 consecutive hours.
Eye contact users willingly adhere to these requirements because the "glasses-free" look is important to them. However, there are also safety reasons for avoiding eye contacts in some work situations, even when wearing safety glasses over them. A simpler and safer alternative is getting prescription safety glasses. Regular contact users should consider this as well. Here are five of these safety issues:
Your Eyes Are More Vulnerable to Dust and Abrasive Particles
In addition to keeping the corneal surface moist, tears serve to wash foreign particles and dust from the eyes. Hard contact lenses interfere with this important function because they can trap dust and other particles against the cornea of the eye. The contact floats on a film of tear fluid. This allows small movements of the contact, which abrade trapped foreign particles against the cornea. This abrasion injures the eye in the form of scratches, which allow disease-causing pathogens to enter.
In addition to abrasion, chemical burns are possible with some types of particles such as cement dust. While this problem also affects people without contacts, they are less vulnerable because their tears can wash the particles out of the eyes.
Recovery from Contact Dislodgement Is More Difficult
If your contacts are dislodged, repositioning them is difficult if not impossible in many working environments, and may require standing in front of a restroom mirror. Your hands and fingers may be covered with dirt or grease, which also prevents on-the-spot repositioning. This is especially dangerous when safety demands clear vision. On the other hand, prescription safety glasses are quickly readjusted regardless of the cleanliness of your hands.
Recovery from Chemical Splash Is More Difficult
Chemicals from a splash to the eyes can become trapped behind contacts against the eye. Washing the chemical from the eyes requires contact removal. This delays removal of the chemical and increases the injury's severity. The same is true of chemical powders that get into the eyes. This danger also exists with certain types of chemical fumes and vapors.
Contacts Limit Your Work Hours
Wearing your contacts beyond eight hours is ill-advised because the eyes require a recovery period. Working longer shifts with contacts can cause corneal neovascularization. This occurs when blood vessels grow over the cornea in an attempt to supply it with oxygen, which is normally supplied by your tears. The lack of oxygen also causes scarring, which increases the risk of infections and corneal ulcers.
Contacts Dry out Your Eyes
Finally, contacts accelerate drying of the eye in hot and dry working conditions. This problem worsens when your eyes are exposed to significant infrared radiation such as when working at foundries or when glass working.
If you aren't wearing contacts currently, there's no need to deal with the complexities covered above. It's immensely simpler and safer to go with prescription safety glasses.
If you normally wear contacts, the above considerations also apply to you. One argument to think about is that you have to give your eyes a rest from contact use every day. Why not do this at work by wearing prescription safety glasses? Your eyes are covered by safety glasses in any case, which negate the glasses-free look. Prescription safety glasses allow you to wear your contacts when socializing after work. If you have any questions about this, please contact us.


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China on 13-10-2015 operationalised the $1.5 billion Zam Hydropower Station, the largest in Tibet, built on the Brahmaputra river, which has raised concerns in India over the likelihood of disrupting water supplies.
All six of the station's units were incorporated into the power grid on Tuesday, the China Gezhouba Group, a major hydropower contractor based in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province in central China told state-run Xinhua news agency. Located in the Gyaca County, Shannan Prefecture, the Zam Hydropower Station also known as Zangmu Hydropower Station, harnesses the rich water resources of Brahmaputra known in Tibet as Yarlung Zangbo River, a major river which flows through Tibet into India and later into Bangladesh.
The Zangmu Dam is a 116 m (381 ft) tall and 389 m (1,276 ft) long concrete gravity-type. On its right bank is the spillway, plunge pool and bottom outlet (for silt). On the dam's left bank, the retaining dam section is 80 m (262 ft) tall and the power plant sits at its toe. The entire dam is 76 m (249 ft) wide at its base and 19 m (62 ft) wide at its crest. Sitting at the head of a 157,668 km2 (60,876 sq mi) catchment area, the dam's reservoir has a daily active capacity (pondage) of 86,600,000 m3 (70,208 acre·ft) and normal reservoir elevation of 3,310 m (10,860 ft). The dam's power station will contain six 85 MW Francis turbine-generators for a total installed capacity of 510 MW.
The dam considered to be the world's highest-altitude hydropower station and the largest of its kind will produce produces 2.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. "It will alleviate the electricity shortage in central Tibet and empower the development of the electricity-strapped region. It is also an important energy base in central Tibet," the company said.
Officials said when the electricity is ample in the summer season, part of the electricity will be transmitted to the neighbouring Qinghai province, Xinhua report said. Investment of the hydropower station, about 140 kilometers from Tibetan capital Lhasa, totalled 9.6 billion yuan (about USD 1.5 billion). The first unit began operations last November.
Reports in the past said besides Zangmu, China is reportedly building few more dams.
China seeks to ally Indian fears saying that they are the run-of-the-river projects which were not designed to hold water. The dams also raised concerns in India over China's ability to release water in times of conflict which could pose serious risk of flooding. An Indian Inter-Ministerial Expert Group (IMEG) on the Brahmaputra in 2013 said the dams were being built on the upper reaches and called for further monitoring considering their impact on the flow of waters to the lower reaches. The IMEG noted that the three dams, Jiexu, Zangmu and Jiacha are within 25 kms of each other and are 550 kms from the Indian border.
India has been taking up the issue with China for the past few years the two countries reached. Under the understanding reached in 2013, Chinese side agreed to provide more flood data of Brahmaputra from May to October instead of June to October in the previous agreements river water agreements in 2008 and 2010.
India is concerned that if the waters are diverted, then projects on the Brahmaputra, particularly the Upper Siang and Lower Suhansri projects in Arunachal Pradesh, may get affected.
Source- DNA


text: According to several studies cats are wreaking havoc on native wildlife. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/science/that-cuddly-kitty-of-yours-is-a-killer.html?_r=0 According to this article cats kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, but it is feral cats that pose the biggest problem. Still should pet cats be allowed to roam the neighborhood freely? As far as I know all other types of pets are required to be contained or leashed. The infrastructure is already there to pick up strays and fine their owners. This would also cut back on the number of feral cat colonies and allow us to identify feral cats easier. Some time ago there was a thread that showed two knuckleheads drop kicking a cat. I found that disturbing and I am not proposing any type of inhumane treatment. Cats will act like cats and there is nothing we can do about that. It is the level of responsiblity should we expect from pet owners. So what to you think? If someone has a pet cat should they be required to contain it?


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It may not be a game-changer as far as foreign investment in the Guyana economy is concerned but the recent announcement that coconut water imported into the United States from Guyana could be used in the manufacture of an energy drink that will target the high-end US market has already set tongues wagging in the region.
After the official disclosure last week that two investors, George Papanastasatos and Marim Kinkladze had met with President Donald Ramotar several media houses in the region including the Jamaica Observer and the Barbados Advocate Business Monday highlighted the development. While little has as yet been heard locally as to where the investment discourses go from here, the two investors have reportedly been making positive noises regarding the pros-pects for the project. The Jamaica Observer quotes Papanastasatos as saying that it was "only a matter of building the right resources for us to get the right quantities of coconut water."
Since 2009 when export earnings from coconuts jumped to $120 million from around $16 million in the previous year the Guy-ana Marketing Corporation (GMC) has been talking up the prospects for the coconut industry.
The GMC had disclosed that almost 3,000 tonnes of coconut had been exported in 2009 as against 268 tonnes in the previous year. GMC figures have indicated that in 2009, the export of coconut products including copra, water and coconut oil had netted more than $500 million.
What has been, in large measure, a neglected industry will, however, have to pull its weight if it is to meet the quality demands of the US market. The investors are reportedly seeking "organically produced coco-nuts" which are reportedly the best sellers in North America.
Papanastasatos, however, is quoted in the Jamaica Observer as saying that the arrangement to secure coconuts from Guyana "seems feasible."
Of particular interest to Guyana will be the marketing strategy to be used to sell the coconut-based energy drink which will reportedly seek to sell the country on a broader scale.
What would appear to be a breakthrough for the local coconut industry coincides with a significant increase in the demand for coconut water in the US with manufacturers already offering various types of coconut water-based products including sports drinks, fruit juices, yogurts and sorbets.
Research into the health and nutritional value of coconut water indicates that one of its main health benefits derives from its electrolyte content which is connected to its popularity as a sports drink.
The announcement regarding the foreign private investment in an energy drink utilizing coconut water from Guyana comes less than two months after the announcement by the Ministry of Agriculture here that it was working towards the creation of a brand of coconut water for which it would seek recognition by the Food and Agriculture Organization as a health drink. In June, Agriculture Minister Dr. Leslie Ramsammy announced that government was working with the FAO, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture and the governments of Brazil and Mexico to help develop the coconut industry here.


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Chinese – Art Deco
8'0″ x 10'0″
circa 1930
As seen in 'Art Deco & Modernist Carpets' by Susan Dry (page 94)
In the 1930s, the demand for handwoven rugs, which could not be made in the United States, caused a surge of industry overseas, especially in China. There were major factories opened in Beijung and Tientsin.
This particular design is the child of the Fette-Li Company of Beijing China. The Fette-Li Company was set up in 1919 by Helen Fette in Partnership with Chinese weaver Li Meng Shu.
Many of the designs, over viewed by Fette, were taken from Chinese emroidery, or inspired by traditional Chinese motifs. This pine tree design is one of their more distinctly Art Deco pieces.