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The Resource
Colorado contains several different types of forests. Conifer forests of spruce and fir are found in high elevations, while pinyon pines and junipers inhabit dryer sites. Ponderosa pines are abundant along the Front Range, and lodgepole pines and Douglas-fir trees are common in mid-elevation mountain sites. Deciduous forests of aspens, cottonwoods, gambel oaks and other hardwoods are also found throughout Colorado.
This variety of forests results from the contrasting landscape features in Colorado. The extensive plains in the east graduate into the central foothills and climb higher into steep, western mountain peaks with deep canyons. Colorado soils and micro-climates are greatly influenced by this vast topography and create the diverse forest resources.
|The USDA Forest Service and other federal agencies
manage nearly 68% of Colorado's forested lands. Colorado's other forests are
managed by over 200,000 private landowners and State, County, and municipal
Special Issues
2002 Wildfire Season
"All of Colorado is on fire," said Gov. Bill Owens in June 2002 as he summed up the current wildfire season in the state. Indeed, much of Colorado was covered in smoke and haze from wildfires throughout the year as Colorado experienced its worst fire season in recorded history. Four years of drought, strong winds, and heavy fuel loads created ample opportunities for fires in Colorado forests. The wildfire suppression work started on Jan. 1, 2002 and the tiring fire-season finally ended in late September. Colorado experienced 1400 wildfires of which 98% of these were quickly contained. However, the 2% escaping wildfires burned 379,287 acres of Colorado.
| Largest
Started - Ended
|# of
|June 8 - Aug.11
|Missionary Ridge
|June 9 - July 27
|Trinidad Complex
|June 2 - June 16
|Burn Canyon
|July 9 - July 28
|Mt. Zirkel Complex
|Steamboat Springs
|Aug.12 - Sep.26
|Big Fish
|July 19 - Dec.10
|Spring Creek Complex
|June 22 - Dec.13
|Coal Seam Fire
|Crested Butte
|June 8 - Dec.13
Links to other websites about wildfires -
To see greater detail or more of the above fire map visit this website:
www.fs.fed.us/eng/rsac/fire_maps.html (then click on "Active Fire Maps")
|Bark Beetle
Mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, attacks lodgepole, ponderosa, limber, and bristlecone pines in Colorado forests. This beetle has increased nearly 2-fold in population size each year in Colorado since the mid 1990's. Listed below are the counties with current outbreak problems of mountain pine beetles:
|Grand County has the largest amount of lodgepole pines dying due to mountain pine beetle. The areas around Lake Granby continue to have increased tree mortality. Other sites in Grand County are diminishing in population due to depletion of the host material for this insect.
|Chaffee and Saguach Counties contains the second largest area of mountain pine beetle activity in Colorado, most notably between Salida and Granite along the eastern foothills of the Saguatch Range. This area of the Upper Arkasas Valley has ongoing damage primarily in ponderosa pines and cause concern on private lands from Nathrop and Poncha Springs to Cochetopa Hills near the Continental Divide. In some cases ponderosa pine firewood brought into town areas with ornamental pinyons appears to be a "source" of reinfestations.
|Eagle County with Vail Valley and Eagle River Valley continue to experience heavy losses from mountain pine beetle in lodgepole pine.
|In Jackson County contains a large outbreak of beetle activity near Rand and along the eastern slope of the Park Range mountains.
|Larimer County lodges another hotspot of increasing mountain pine beetle activity from Rustic to Pingree Park in limber and lodgepole pines.
Spruce beetle, Dendroctonus rufipennis, occurs in Englemann and blue spruce trees in Colorado. In 2002, tree mortality from spruce beetle increased significantly. Large numbers of spruce were killed in Routt County as the spruce beetle outbreak continues to expand in the area of the Routt Divide Blowdown. Spruce beetle is also increasing in the Routt area in western Jackson County. Particularly impacted are the various drainages of these two counties for the Elk River north of Steamboat Springs.
Nearby in the Flat Tops of Rio Blanco, Garfield, and Moffat counties, CO, numbers of spruce beetle killed trees are increasing. Spruce beetle caused mortality from aerial survey estimates about 3,500 spruce trees destroyed.
Aerial surveys also detected dying spruce in the Eagle's Nest Wilderness Area, on the Uncompahgre Plateau, and in the southern San Juan Mountains. The mortality in Conejos County, CO on the Rio Grande National Forest declined somewhat in 2002. Preventive spraying appears to be an increasingly wise option for live, high-value trees on private (and public) land in the near future.
Pine and Spruce engraver beetles, Ips spp., are found in ponderrosa pine, pinyon pine, lodgepole pine, and Englemann spruce. The 2002 fire situation greatly increased public willingness and demand for mitigation work and we are seeing Ips responding to the great amounts of greenwood cutting at these sites. Greater than normal incidence of Ips beetles in lodgepole has been reported from a number of locations near Fraser, Monarch Pass, and Boulder County.
Major pinyon mortality is occurring in the southwest corner of the state around Mancos in Montezuma County. Usually the primary organism in these trees is Pinyon Ips (Ips confusus). In some trees, signs of blackstain root disease are found, but this situation appears to be mostly drought and Ips. Pinyon mortality in the southwestern part of the state now extends from Pagosa Springs west to Four Corners area and north to Norwood. The counts of faders is close to a million trees and roughly 50% of the pinyon forest is red. No doubt much of the green material is also infested and not yet discolored. Other major areas of pinyon Ips mortality occur in the southern Front Range and extend from Pueblo south to Trinidad. "Interior" hotspots of pinyon Ips mortality continue in the San Luis Valley near Crestone, and on the east flanks of the Uncompahgre Plateau south of Montrose. Current mortality totals at least 5000 trees.
Ips caused tree mortality continues to skyrocket, in combination with dwarf mistletoe infection and drought. It is very difficult to discern faders that result from such complexes from that of mountain pine beetle and other Dendroctonus bark beetles. In particular, this increased Ips - dwarf mistletoe - drought mortality greatly complicates aerial surveys. Such "complex-caused" mortality is particularly evident in southern and southwestern Colorado.
Ips attacks on urban Colorado blue spruces (Ips hunteri) continue in Greeley, Denver, and Colorado Springs and grew considerably in 2002. About 40 large Colorado blur spruce were removed because of I. hunteri in Fort Collins. A total of 295 trees have been condemned in the City of Denver, with neighboring suburbs such as Wheat Ridge and Aurora reporting similar, serious losses. Colorado Springs and Greeley have also lost over a hundred large spruce. If the drought continues, this Ips beetle problem could be a major epidemic since spruce is one of the first species affected by water shortages.
Douglas-fir bark beetle, Dendroctonus pseudotsugae, activity was low along the Front Range of Colorado and in the previous outbreak of the 1996 Buffalo Creek wildfire area. Forest Health workers anticipate increases of Douglas-fir beetle activity in 2003 in many areas of the Arapaho-Roosevelt, Pike-San Isabel, San Juan, and White River National Forests from the 2002 wildfires that burned in Douglas-fir forest type.
|Other Insects, Diseases, and Damaging Agents of Concern in Colorado
|Western spruce budworm -
Choristoneura occidentalis (2)
Host (s): Douglas-fir, White fir, Sub-alpine fir, Engelmann spruce, Blue spruce
|The southern portion of the Uncompahgre Plateau has seen significant levels of western spruce budworm defoliation in Englemann spruce. In 2002 defoliation was light in the Wet and Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There was heavy defoliation in Larimer Countay near Cherokee Park. Acreages of Douglas-fir with light and moderate defoliation are increasing in the Front Range of El Paso and Douglas Counties.
|Gypsy moth - Lymantria dispar
Host (s): Hardwoods
|Over 1000 detection traps and 250 delimitation traps were deployed throughout Colorado in 2002. No moths have been found in any of the traps this year. This negative result is of interest in the Arvada area multiple moths were caught there in 2000 and 2001.
|Elm leaf beetle
Xanthogaleruca luteola
Hosts: American elm, Siberian elm
|Elm Leaf Beetle was moderate to locally severe in eastern CO in 2002
|Pinyon Needle Scale
Matsucoccus acalyptus
Host: pinyon pine
|Affecting pinyons and causing problems in areas near Nathrop, Buean Vista, Aguilar, and Trinidad in 2002.
|Red turpentine beetle
Dendroctonus valens
Hosts: ponderosa pine
|Populations of red turpentine beetle have increased dramatically due to large fires. Many of the heavily fire scorched trees were infested in 2002, particularly in the Black Forest in central Colorado. At this time, there has been little movement from fire scorched trees out into green trees.
|Zimmerman pine tip moth
Dioryctria ponderosae
D. zimmermani
Hosts: Austrian pine, Scots pine, ponderosa pine
|Zimmerman Pine Moth (Dioryctria zimmermani) and relatives continue to increase in impact to ornamental ponderosa, Scots and particularly Austrian pines along the Front Range and eastern plains. This is an increasingly important problem in the state, particularly on transplants near Denver and other growth centers along the Front Range. The drought may greatly reduce the amount of planting we see in 2003.
|Dwarf mistletoes,
Arceuthobium spp.
Hosts lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, limber pine, pinyon pine, Douglas-fir,
|Dwarf mistletoes cause the greatest amounts of disease losses in the Rocky Mountain Region. Program emphasis continues for landscape-scale surveys and resulting suppression projects in developed recreation sites and wood fiber production areas. Dwarf mistletoe presence along with expanding mountain pine beetle populations complicate efforts to meet certain resource management goals. In conjunction with mild winter conditions and a period of drought years, these parasitic plants are contributing to mortality in many areas of the Front Range, including the Red Feather Lakes area; Estes Park; much of the higher elevation portions of Boulder, Clear Creek and Gilpin Counties; the Jarre Canyon area of Douglas County; Park County including South Park; and the foothills west of Colorado Springs in El Paso County. DM is also a continuing problem in the Black Forest northeast of Colorado Springs in ponderosa pine.
|Root Diseases - Armillaria
ostoyae, Heterobasidion annosum, Leptographium wageneri (1)
Host (s): Engelmann spruce, Colorado blue spruce, Lodgepole pine, Ponderosa pine, Pinyon pine, Douglas-fir, Sub-alpine fir, White fir, Apspen, and Hardwoods
|Armillaria, the most common root
disease in the Region, was evident in the mixed conifer and spruce-fir cover
types. This root-rotting fungus was among the key causal agents of subalpine
fir decline, which accounts for the most tree mortality in spruce-fir cover
type in the Rocky Mountain Region. Armillaria incidence in developed recreation
sites in Colorado resulted in past tree failures and numerous tree removal
Annosus root disease has scattered distribution within white fir in the mixed conifer type throughout southern Colorado. In campgrounds, the disease creates hazardous conditions by increasing the probability of tree failure.
Black stain root disease, in combination with other factors, caused widespread pinyon mortality in southwestern Colorado. This area experienced unprecedented urban development pressure that may be compounding the problem. Black stain has not been identified east of the Continental Divide in Colorado pinyon forests.
|White pine blister rust disease Cronartium ribicola (non-native) Hosts: Limber and Bristlecone pines, Ribes spp. plants of currants and gooseberries
|White pine blister rust occurs at low infection levels in limber pine stands of northern Colorado. Its intensity and spread on the limber pine is closely monitored. Bristlecone pines, which are not infected, yet, are also evaluated since these trees could also be a host of this fungus. Efforts are underway to collect a variety of data on white pines in CO, the distribution of Ribes plants, the alternate host for blister rust, and to hazard rate limber pine stands for the disease.
|Dutch elm disease -
Ophiostoma ulmi (Non-native)
Host: American elm
|Dutch Elm Disease occurs in low numbers in eastern Colorado and continues to be a problem in riparian areas and cities throughout the state. The City of Colorado Springs reports heavier than normal trunk attacks on American elms by Smaller European Elm Bark Beetle and that 33 trees were confirmed with DED and removed. This is a little higher than normal for that metro area. Losses also increased at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs.
|Ponderosa Pine Needlecast
Davisomycella ponderosae
Host: ponderosa pine
|In 2001 and 2002, ponderosa pines across the San Juan, Grand Mesa, Uncompahgree, and Gunnison National Forests showed foliage discoloration caused by this needle cast fungus. Trees of all sizes were discolored and the needles eventually lost, leading to an appearance of thin crowns. Needle casts seldom cause mortality, but when present for several years in a row, will cause reductions in growth. Although it appears likely that the needlecast plays a major role in the damage, forest health specialists are also analyzing climatic and other data to evaluate the potential role of additional factors.
|Pinyon pine decline
Host: Pinyon pine
|Areas of widespread decline and death of pinyon include the southeastern plains east of Walsenburg, the west side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, south of Montrose, Mesa Verde, and Buena Vista. Many of these sites seemed to have worsening effects of pinyon pine decline in 2002. The widespread nature of these occurrences would seem to indicate a weather-induced cause. Most of these areas now show widespread involvement of Ips confuses.
|Sub-alpine fir decline Host: sub-alpine fir
|The most widespread damages detected in Colorado were sub-alpine fir decline. Forest Health specialists believe that most of this decline is caused by the western balsam bark beetle, Dryocoetes confusus and Armillaria root disease. Since little is known about this decline, it is not possible to determine how much of the damage occurred this past year. Dead sub-alpine fir holds its red needles longer than most other conifer species, and so it is possible that these totals may be cumulative from the last 2 to 4 years.
|Animal Damages various species
|Related to the drought and the reduced amount of food present in the forest, we saw more animal damage to trees than normal, particularly porcupine feeding on ponderosa pine phloem in the Black Forest area. Fox squirrel damages to cottonwoods and other deciduous trees in the riparian forests (Trinidad along the Purgatoire River, for example) and tree browsing by deer were more apparent. Black bears were reported in foothills residential backyards feeding on tree fruits and other non-traditional food sources in lieu of natural food shortages in the mountains. Excessive elk feeding on aspen bark was noted in Larimer County.
|A major issue in 2002 and it looks like this will continue in 2003. Currently, Colorado reservoirs are only 40% of normal levels. Plantings in urban area of Colorado blue spruce, lindens, and maples seemed to be very susceptible to drought. Forest health specialists report seeing a halo effect caused by drought in aspen stands surrounded by meadows, where the trees on the edge of the aspen clone show the moisture stress first.
|Ice and dust-control materials utilizing magnesium chloride are being increasingly applied in the mountain road systems in Colorado, with corresponding increases in tree damage throughout the state. The Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs reports moving 150 trees damaged/killed by salts on their land. Serious problems reported from other areas including Aspen and the Black Forest.
|For Forest Health Assistance in Colorado:
|Colorado State Forest
Fort Collins, CO
Ph: 970-491-6303
Dave Leathermann
Mike Schomaker
|US Forest Service -
Forest Health Management
Frank Cross
(Regional Office in Denver)
Ph: 303-275-5061 email@example.com
Jeff Witcosky
(Lakewood Office)
303-236-9541 email@example.com
Roy Mask (Gunnison Office)
970-641-0471 firstname.lastname@example.com
Updated: February 2003
|Forest Health Highlights home page | General Regional Highlights
|Forest Health Monitoring home page


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Image yoinked from Chantecaille.com.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you: this is a $75 product. I'd love to pretend that I'm rolling in spare cash from a major lottery win and I totally bought a full tub, but no, I'm still a broke adjunct professor. I was actually given a super-generous sample by a friendly MUAer. Regardless of your own personal makeup budget, or how much a product costs, I highly recommend getting a sample to try out first. That goes double for a luxury product like Future Skin. (PS: I promise that I'm reviewing some more affordable products soon!)
I'm not going to read off the big list of claims from Chantecaille.com, because I think that's crazy boring and you can do it yourself. I will, however, summarize some relevant points: this is an oil-free cream foundation sans SPF. It comes in a jar without any sort of spatula or spoon (I double checked on that), which icks me out; the average consumer isn't going to think about how contaminated their foundation may become if they keep sticking their fingers in to the pot. Chantecaille claims that this product has "medium to full...adjustable coverage" and that it "transfer[s] water into the skin without the use of any oil." Interesting claims. Shall we test them, my friends?
I decided to test Future Skin after a minor chemical burn on the bottom half of my face had healed. My skin is normally combination dry; because of that chemical burn, I was also left with some beautiful chin zits and extra-dry patches. One zit stayed around long enough that I decided to give him a name. Folks, meet Percival! Percival was kind enough to act as a "coverage ruler" for this foundation review, so go you, Percival! You're okay by me.
Now, the Chantecaille website recommends applying this foundation with a brush. I did a quick test on the back of my hand to see how this might look when applied with a brush, plus I surveyed the lovely people at MakeupAlley, and yeah, that's a big pile of NOPE. Even after plenty of buffing, you're going to get quite a streaky finish. I was told to apply the product with my fingers, so that's what I did for this initial test.
I applied one layer to my entire face, working in sections, and immediately noticed two things. First, this foundation has a really interesting feel to it, like a liquid-powder mixture under my fingers. Very high-tech and cool! Second, there is no way you could get full coverage with this product, at least not by my definition of full coverage. One layer is, as these photos show, effective but sheer; it'll even out the skintone and soften up blemishes, but it won't completely cover them. I patted a little more on the my chin and in between my brows, and this brought the coverage up to about a medium level. No shame in that, but it's not a medium-to-full coverage foundation.
The foundation clung horribly to the dryer parts of my face, as shown in this macro shot, and it was somewhat obvious in natural light. It did soften up after about 15-20 minutes, as foundations are wont to do, but it still wasn't very flattering on my dry areas. Not surprising: when a foundation is labeled as "oil-free" and is used by a lot of combination and oily skinned people, you get the picture that it's not exactly for you
Suffice to say that there was zero water being "transferred in to my skin." It didn't parch my skin, but it didn't help it, either. Still, I was hoping to be impressed by how well this worked on my oily nose.
As the text shows, the photo on the left is Future Skin applied with my fingers, then I added some concealer. The photo on the right shows Future Skin applied with a damp beauty blender, with concealer over my blemishes and a bit of my trusty D&G powder foundation brushed over my t-zone. (Both of these products were taken roughly 30 minutes after the initial application.)
I was inspired to try the Beauty Blender by Holliday Grainger's Bonnie and Clyde makeup, which I love love LOVE, and it's definitely a better option for dry skin. It gives you a more sheer coverage and it sucks up some of your precious product, yes, but it doesn't cling quite as much to dry patches. I mean, there's still some clinging, but it's not as noticeable.
Also, despite the powder-ish feel of it, I found that liquid and cream blushes apply on top of the foundation without issue.
But again, I skipped setting powder during my first test because I wanted to see how the foundation held up on oily skin. Thanks to the advertising and the way the foundation sat on my dry patches, I was expecting miracles. In reality, it was...okay. The foundation didn't exactly fade or separate, but I definitely got super-shiny on my nose; when I touched it, I picked up a bit of grease. My mother wanted me to accompany her to the grocery store right after I took this picture, so I had to blot to feel comfortable with it.
With that in mind, I would recommend this formulation to people with normal, combination, or slightly oily skin. You'll want to dust powder over, or use a mattifying primer on, any parts of your face that produce a decent amount of oil. People with slightly dry skin could get away with this if they applied it over moisturizer or used a damp beauty blender, but I think there are better products out there for our skin type. If your skin is super-dry or super-oily, I'd guess that this isn't The One for you.
So Future Skin is a workable product on me, and in an ideal world I'd finish this truly generous sample. Unfortunately, the Porcelain shade is too dark and too pink for me. I'd peg it at about NW15 once it has fully dried--not workable for my face and neck. Still, Chantecaille Future Skin has a decent shade range, with 16 shades ranging from light to medium-dark. It's not the most impressive or inclusive range I've ever seen, but it's a sight better than what most brands offer.
In the end, this is a nice luxury foundation that didn't work for me. But it is not, as advertised, medium-to-full coverage, and the packaging could use some work. Throw a spatula in to the box and temper your claims that it's going to "reduce sebum production" (ie, will work miracles on very oily skin), and you'll earn a 5 out of 5 from me.
RATING: 4 out of 5.

subset: commoncrawl


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Transferring data between systems can be a real pain in the behind, especially if you have data on one and need it on the other. Scythe's Kama Connect is a device that make this transition a little easier. It connects two different drives, including IDE/ATA and SATA hard drives as well as optical drives, to facilitate the data transfer. When hooked up to IDE/ATA drives, the Kama connect doesn't need an external power supply, but when connected to power-hungry SATA drives, you'll need to use the supplied AC adapter. Additionally, it can be connected to a USB port for transfer data to another drive, if you swing that way.
It's pretty clear that something like this would make a great addition to any PC repair center, where customers often come in saying that their "computer is broke." Alternatively, for people who enjoy building their own PCs, it could be a bit of a time saver. At only $29.90, it's probably worth looking into if you do a lot of transferring between drives.
Product Page [Scythe via Fareastgizmos.comm]


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Formula 1. Lotus insists on the introduction of the limit on spending
Co-owner of the team Gerard Lopez is confident that the delay threatens the very existence of the series.
Co-owner of Lotus Gerard Lopez expressed his opinion that all the teams in Formula 1 is an urgent need to agree with the proposal of Max Mosley and impose restrictions on the expenditure of $ 100 million for the season.
"We must insist on the version that will make the future of the teams in Formula 1 viable. The more groups will support this plan, the faster it will be. Further delay could be dangerous for the sport," – says Lopez.
We note that in recent years, financial problems experienced half the teams in Formula 1 – in particular, Lotus, Sauber and Force India. There is a probability that they will arise and McLaren, not so long ago have lost investors from Bahrain.


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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Things I Love from Anthropologie
Truly a random shmattering of finds, and I hope you'll forgive the tiny sizes of these photos but that's the biggest they are on the website! It's always better in person, anyway.
Posted by Jeanie Nelson at 4:28 PM 1 comment:
Labels: Anthropologie, fabric, Fashion, jewelry
Monday, September 29, 2008
Jewell's Picks & Pics: Baby Geared
In just 8 months on this earth I have already come across more fantastic design than I can possibly take in (or afford!). And that's just in the baby and kids categories. My latest discovery is an amazing online shop called Baby Geared, a central location for the best baby design being produced today, by all the big-name designers, studios, and artists. Check out my favorites (and if you'd like to send me a generous 8-month birthday present, feel free).
Dwell Studio
Jonathan Adler
Maria Carluccio
Jill Mcdonald
Sophie Demenge
Kay Bojesen
Kalon Studios
Julie Klear + Moulay Essakalli for Zid Zid Kids
Alexander Girard
Wolfgang Dufhues
Simon Maidment
Phililppe Starck
Steven Savage
Wee Gallery + Blik
Kristin Loffer Theiss
Posted by Jewell Nelson at 3:50 PM 2 comments:
Labels: Alexander Girard, baby bedding, Baby Gear, childrens fashion, Jonathan Adler, Toys
Saturday, September 20, 2008
My Latest Poster
A little sample of some of my latest work. If you're in Utah next weekend, head to Provo and see the Sego Arts Festival. My friend's band, Somber Party, is the kick-off show.
Posted by Jeanie Nelson at 9:43 AM 2 comments:
Labels: Illustration, personal work, Somber Party
Friday, September 19, 2008
Beautiful Scripts
Posted by Jeanie Nelson at 9:55 AM No comments:
Labels: Bibliodyssey, calligraphy, paper, type
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[Story/Images via London Fashion Week; Also via Style]
fashion + beauty + insider interviews + est 2006
Sunday, September 20, 2009
New York Fashion Week ended on Thursday but runway shows and presentations are still happening across the pond.
London - London Fashion Week is celebrating its 25th anniversary, which kicked off on Friday. Many British designers are showing this week--from Daneille Scutt to Caroline Charles and Mark Fast to Margaret Howell. And designers have also expressed their thoughts on why London Fashion Week "has built a reputation for outstandingly original fashion." Caroline Charles said, "London fashion supports a wider and younger group of designers than other cities." And Bora Aksu added, "This is the only city where non-cliché talent can feel at home. London is not about trends or big cooperations. It's about individual designers who have their own voice and have their own design language." With that said, here's a quick look at few shows from Saturday.
Mark Fast
Mark Fast described the "Mark Fast woman" as someone "who knows exactly what she wants" and who takes risk. It also appeared that the designer was taking risks too as he added three plus-size models in his runway show. "A lot of people think it's not appropriate to use plus-size models," he said. "But I met these girls and I loved their charisma. They're just jewels, you know?" (Not everyone agreed with Fast as his show's stylist quit over the designer's insistence to add plus-size models.) I have to say the ladies, who I wouldn't even consider "plus sizes", were pretty hot in their tight fitting mini-dresses, showing the waif-like models that there's room for different physiques on the runway.
Osman Yousefzada
It was nothing but love for the color white at Osman Yousefzada's spring/summer 2010 show as every model walking down the runway wore white pieces with gold accents included in some of the designs. Osman admitted he has always wanted to do an all-white collection saying, "White leaves you nothing to hide behind." There really wasn't anything remarkable with the collection, and even worse there was only one piece I could see Cate Blanchett, who is Osman's ideal customer, wearing and it's the design pictured on the bottom right. That is if she had nothing else to wear on the red carpet.
Danielle Scutt
Danielle Scutt included "prints, fabrics and cut" as her inspirations for her spring/summer 2010 collection and she lived up to it on her runway show. Every piece had either all or two of her inspirations but it was the prints in polka dots and black squiggles that are suggestive of the work of artist Zandra Rhodes that stole the show. Models wore swirly hairpieces on top of their heads, which made the colorful show even that more deliciously fun.
Margaret Howell
Margaret Howell wasn't playing around when she said her inspiration for her spring/summer 2010 collection was "rolled-up sleeves and trouser bottoms, linen socks, red and khaki." Khaki was definitely the main color used throughout her show, from blazers to socks and trench coats to trousers. The color palette and the details Howell went for gave her collection a nautical theme, which is perfect for the gloomy weather London normally experiences year round. There was also subtlety to her designs that made her collection stand out from the other shows on Saturday.
Kristina Bustos
Posted by ZANDILE BLAY at 6:48 PM
3 comments:
- KissMyBlackAds said...
I love the use of plus size models. smart move.
- Kim @ The HLMN said...
This is the first year that I've really payed attention to London Fashion Week, and I'm kicking myself for all the great style I've missed.
- b. whitaker said...
agree with kissmyblackads. it's amazing to see hips and thighs on the runway!!
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Managing Change with DevOps
Managing Change with DevOps
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Written byUrbanCode.for
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post titled "The Many Layers of DevOps." At the time, I wanted the post to speak to all of the different aspects of managing change through a DevOps delivery process. It was important from my perspective to acknowledge that there was more to DevOps than simply infrastructure as code. I went on to explain that we still need to manage the application layer. Application deployments, database updates, static content deployments, application configuration all play a vital part in DevOps. Lately I have been asked to revise this post and expand upon other areas of change.
Today, enterprises are focusing on managing "full stack deployments" in an effort to reduce the complications of managing large sets of configuration. A full stack deployment, when done correctly, encompasses all aspects of an application and its surrounding environment. Most people are familiar with virtual machines and understand their importance in the enterprise. Virtual machines save companies a ton of time by easily allowing them to stand up a new server with the exact operating system and tools already installed. This same VM technology is being leveraged in combination with configuration/infrastructure as code products to provision servers that are ready to receive an application deployment as soon as they are available. Even more companies are taking this one step further and provisioning entire environments (many servers) with database servers, application servers, and more, with the push of a single button.
I'd like to take a quick look at the various parts of the full stack deployment model, and the tools I see most often used in enterprises that support each layer. Each layer plays a specific role in updating and managing change into your environments.
The Foundation
Like the integrity of a house, a full stack deployment model is nothing without a solid foundation. The foundation layer consists of networking, storage, virtualization/servers, and the operating system. With the popularity of public and private clouds, the foundation layer has been flooded with tooling to support getting networked servers, on demand, in any type of cloud that fits your companies needs. Amazon (EC2 + S3), Microsoft (Azure), IBM (Softlayer/Openstack), Rackspace, and other IaaS providers have offerings for provisioning and managing servers in their public clouds. These are excellent for development teams that want to efficiently, and cost effectively, have access to servers on demand for building, deploying, and testing applications in a cloud environment.
The cloud conversation at large enterprises always sparks a heated discussion. Most are hesitant to put all of their eggs in one cloud basket, so to speak. Others are concerned about security issues, and having their proprietary code sitting on a public cloud. For these reasons, many customers are working to build their own internal private cloud. Many are using some form of VMWare, and lately we have seen a strong adoption of the OpenStack framework.
The OpenStack framework is intriguing on many levels, because it allows companies to easily manage their "foundation" as code (Heat templates). This code can then be checked into source control and versioned, further beating the DevOps drum of bringing development practices into the operations departments.
IBM offers many tools in this space. Softlayer is a great IaaS provider, and also allows for private cloud hosting. IBM Cloud Orchestrator helps companies provision servers to cloud environments, and can also assist in applying the middleware stack.
UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns (UCDP) is a full stack management solution, which allows teams to define a "pattern" of their foundation, and provision the pattern into many different cloud offerings. It also allows enterprises to easily stand up the middleware and application components once the foundation is in place.
The Middleware
Once servers have been provisioned; regardless if its in a private cloud, public cloud, or some sort of hybrid cloud, the next step is to seed those servers with the infrastructure and tools needed to support our application. This is where the configuration/infrastructure as code tools bring the greatest value. Tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Salt, allow companies to consistently install and configure application servers, databases, and OS patches, to name a few. Some companies will also leverage configuration as code tools to deploy the application layer as well. While this can be done, it typically involves more scripting to get the orchestration of specific application components deployed correctly. Other companies will skip on the infrastructure as code components, and build this architecture into their Application Release Automation tools.
The Application
The application layer has the highest frequency of change. Once the Foundation, and middleware are in place, the application layer may change several times a day. Configuration changes to the middle ware, Application updates, rollbacks, continuos delivery into lower environments are all reasons why enterprises seek out Application Release Automation tools. IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) is the flagship product that not only handles deployment automation and configuration management, but also integrates with products throughout the rest of the full stack deployment model. It allows for complete orchestration of all components of an application to multiple environments ensuring that teams can consistently promote code from one environment to the next. IBM UrbanCode Release (UCR) allows companies to manage hundreds of applications as part of a large release process, providing visibility into the current state of a release. It allows release managers to understand if they are ahead or behind on a particular release, and what features are currently on track for the release. During the actual release, UCR provides a visual representation of your release plans, so that any person involved with the release knows exactly what part of the release is currently being executed.
The Full Stack
Today, many companies are piecing together products from the above sections to help produce a full stack framework. IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns works directly with the OpenStack framework (and AWS) to provision your foundation (compute, network, and storage layers) and integrates tightly with all of the Infrastructure as Code tooling. These features, combined with the deployment capability in UrbanCode Deploy have been able to adequately provide the entire full stack framework for customers, and help them tackle the challenges of a hybrid cloud.
BlueMix is a complete PaaS offering from IBM that enables companies to develop, build, deploy, and run applications in the cloud. This full stack framework is based on Cloud Foundry open technology and runs on SoftLayer infrastructure.
Published at DZone with permission of Eric Minick , DZone MVB. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.


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this light-hearted sex comedy was the film chosen to become the first Jess Franco Blu-ray disc. I think it was a fortuitous choice. Its very character is bright; it is that rare Franco film which whistles a happy tune and ventures down no dark corridors of the soul. Scripted by Franco's first wife and longtime script girl Nicole Guettard (who wrote quite a few of his best films of this period, including LORNA THE EXORCIST), it's a spicy co-option of the principal character of Octave Mirbeau's THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID, twice filmed previously, once in 1964 by Franco's fellow Spanish expatriat Luís Buñuel, who worked from a moderately darker script by Jean-Claude Carrière, subsequently Franco's co-writer on THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z and ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS (both 1965).
The slender story opens with Celestine (Lina Romay) eluding arrest with a friend as the police raid a brothel. While hiding out in the hayloft of the Count de la Braquette's estate, she meets the hayseed handyman Sébastien (Ramón Ardid, billed as Raymond Hardy) and the butler Malou (Bigottini, aka Rick De Conninck - a fine comic actor also seen in Louis Malle's ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO), who reward her favors with the offer of employment. In a manner recalling Terence Stamp's effect on the household in TEOREMA, Celestine's open and relaxed attitude toward sexuality has a transformative effect on the isolated, moribund inhabitants of the mansion, imbuing them with gift of renewed life for the men and women alike, that remains even after a third act twist that forces her to betray them.
This is Franco's most successful comedy, merrily buoyed by a lively score by Paul de Senneville and Olivier Toussaint, and it features what is very likely Lina Romay's warmest, funniest and most accessible performance. Anyone who sticks to an intensive study of Franco's work develops an intimate relationship with his repertory players and, after decades of seeing this and other films primarily via dupey VHS cassettes, I felt a bit overwhelmed to see the likes of Lina Romay, Pamela Stanford, Monica Swinn, Nadine Pascal and the lesser-known but formidably appealing Anne Garrec standing before me with such supernatural clarity and youth. I should equally congratulate the male cast members -- which includes Howard Vernon (as an impotent old roué to whom Celestine reads salacious passages from Sade) and Olivier Mathot -- all of whom prove themselves wonderfully adept at playing comedy; it's the only time I've seen Ramón Ardid called upon to give a real performance, and he's wonderful. Lina's final closeup in the film, in which she blows a solitary kiss to the sleeping inhabitants of the mansion before sneaking away to new adventures, is now formidably poignant in the wake of her death.
Viewed via Edition Tonfilm import DVD (French and German audio only, no English subtitles).


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I decided to take a hiatus from teaching the weekly Saturday morning Goddess Hoop Dance classes for some much needed time to rest, regroup and revitalize. I've been teaching almost every Saturday since April 2010 and feel that stepping away for a few weeks will help me restructure the classes in ways that I haven't yet had the time and energy to do.
I plan to resume teaching on Saturday, March 23, 2013 and will be posting about it here.
If you'd like to keep up with more of the day-to-day happenings and inspiration around Goddess Hoop Dance, please join the Facebook Page.


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This is a guest post by Anne Lim. If you'd like to guest post on this blog, click here.
With the economy still recovering from the recession, many people find themselves with low credit scores. While it will take time to rebuild your credit, there are many proactive steps you can take to get your credit back on track. Below are five easy-to-follow tips to help you fix your credit.
1. Get an Annual Credit Report
Start by getting a copy of your credit report each year. All three credit bureaus will offer you a free report once per year, but keep in mind you will have to pay if you would like your credit score too. By getting your credit report you can check for any inaccuracies and see the progress you are making each year. If you find an error, contact the credit bureaus individually to file a claim.
2. Pay Off Smaller Debts First
If you have a mountain of credit card and loan debts and are struggling to find a way to pay them off, focus on eliminating the smallest debts first. Focusing on your larger debts or the debts with higher interest rates might be tempting, but you can pay down your debt faster by paying the minimum amount due on all cards and loans. For example, take your smallest credit card or loan and pay as much as you can each month until it is paid off. This will free up more money for you to move onto your next smallest bill until it is paid off. This process will give you more open lines of credit with zero or low balances faster than paying off a little bit extra on each card every month.
3. Ask For Lower Interest Rates
To help ease some of the pressure, call each of your credit cards and ask them if they can offer you a lower interest rate. They may not be able to, but you never know until you ask. While you are calling, ask if your credit cards offer debt transfer.
If you are able to transfer your debt to another credit card with a lower interest rate you can pay you debts faster. You can also pay your debts faster by making one larger payment instead of two small ones.
4. Get a New Credit Card
Even if your credit is bad and the only credit card offers you receive are for cards that require you to pay costly annual fees or signup fees, bite the bullet and apply for a new card—of course only do this if you can afford the new card. Then use this new line of credit only as a credit builder. Pay the card's balance down to $0 every month or two. This will show you have good credit history because you are able to leave the majority of your credit line open.
5. Pay Your Credit Cards on Time
All of your credit cards and loans need to be paid on time each and every month. If you have ever looked closely at your credit report you can see that it will show each time you make a late payment. If it helps, put as many of your credit cards and loans on automatic payment as you can manage.
It will take time to rebuild your credit, and your interest rates will be high until you do. However, by following the steps above and closely monitoring your credit reports, you will see your credit score begin to improve.
This guest article was written by banker and credit counselor Anne Lim. She also recommends protecting your identity with Protect Your Bubble ID Theft services.
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So it was a welcome return to the big city, first stop, the district of Ikebukuro. All department stores and bustling crowds. This time it was more of a pass through than a serious stopover, our intentions lay elsewhere. Still it was nice to get acclimatised to the never ending stream of passers by and the jostling amongst the crowds. Our destination was Ueno and the Tokyo National Museum, somewhere I have never visited, so a short review is to follow.
The Tokyo National Museum Review
Set on the edge of Ueno park, amongst other notable museums and the zoo, you are greeted by a large concrete building with traditional flowing edges. For ¥650 (about £4) you have entry to a number of exhibitions; normally! Most however were closed when we came. Still the main building which houses the majority of treasures was open and we spent the next couple of hours happily looking through the exhibits. These included lacquer ware, swords, calligraphy, paintings, armour and masks (some shown below). It should be noted that many of the artefacts cannot be photographed, only admired. The layout was well structured and easy to follow with English templates of each exhibit and section for those unable to read Japanese or Korean. All set in a peaceful atmosphere, without it being overcrowded. So overall a pleasant experience that will give you a little of the background to Japan's past. It's certainly worth a visit and a nice change from the hustle and bustle of other districts of Tokyo.
1) The stunning swords. It states they were created by artists and it's hard to not agree with the craftsmanship.
2) The artwork, it's precision and colour is always to be marvelled at.
Afterwards we headed into the park and the final picture although rather uninspiring at first glance. However look closely and it can actually give you a little insight into Japan's modern day culture. In one corner you have a now familiar sight in any major city across the globe; Starbucks! Love them or hate them, they are popular, everywhere and very convenient. And in the other corner people being able to express themselves without a care of what the people watching them may think; 50's style rockers setting up base in the middle of the park and swing and jiving to their hearts content. To many it will seem bizarre and slightly surreal. At the end of the day it's just people who perhaps have nowhere else to do it, expressing their passion in a rather public place. And why not?
So Tokyo, once again you delight and inspire and provide us with another glimpse into your mixed up heart. But it's always one that never fails to impress, however often its looked upon.
Coming soon: Take the fast train; riding the Skinkansen
* This may be the last post before Christmas so may I wish everyone who has read these travel sketches a very merry Christmas. Thank you for reading and I hope that you will enjoy the posts that are to follow in the future. Please comment as they are always welcome.


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- Research article
- Open Access
Argument-predicate distance as a filter for enhancing precision in extracting predications on the genetic etiology of disease
- Marco Masseroli1Email author,
- Halil Kilicoglu2,
- François-Michel Lang2 and
- Thomas C Rindflesch2
© Masseroli et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2006
- Received: 11 November 2005
- Accepted: 08 June 2006
- Published: 08 June 2006
Genomic functional information is valuable for biomedical research. However, such information frequently needs to be extracted from the scientific literature and structured in order to be exploited by automatic systems. Natural language processing is increasingly used for this purpose although it inherently involves errors. A postprocessing strategy that selects relations most likely to be correct is proposed and evaluated on the output of SemGen, a system that extracts semantic predications on the etiology of genetic diseases. Based on the number of intervening phrases between an argument and its predicate, we defined a heuristic strategy to filter the extracted semantic relations according to their likelihood of being correct. We also applied this strategy to relations identified with co-occurrence processing. Finally, we exploited postprocessed SemGen predications to investigate the genetic basis of Parkinson's disease.
The filtering procedure for increased precision is based on the intuition that arguments which occur close to their predicate are easier to identify than those at a distance. For example, if gene-gene relations are filtered for arguments at a distance of 1 phrase from the predicate, precision increases from 41.95% (baseline) to 70.75%. Since this proximity filtering is based on syntactic structure, applying it to the results of co-occurrence processing is useful, but not as effective as when applied to the output of natural language processing.
In an effort to exploit SemGen predications on the etiology of disease after increasing precision with postprocessing, a gene list was derived from extracted information enhanced with postprocessing filtering and was automatically annotated with GFINDer, a Web application that dynamically retrieves functional and phenotypic information from structured biomolecular resources. Two of the genes in this list are likely relevant to Parkinson's disease but are not associated with this disease in several important databases on genetic disorders.
Information based on the proximity postprocessing method we suggest is of sufficient quality to be profitably used for subsequent applications aimed at uncovering new biomedical knowledge. Although proximity filtering is only marginally effective for enhancing the precision of relations extracted with co-occurrence processing, it is likely to benefit methods based, even partially, on syntactic structure, regardless of the relation.
- Noun Phrase
- Semantic Relation
- Genetic Phenomenon
- Official Gene Symbol
- Medline Citation
In an effort to minimize errors due to natural language processing (NLP), we developed and evaluated a procedure for postprocessing extracted genetic information. This processing is applied to the output of SemGen (Semantics for Genetics), an NLP system for extracting semantic predications (or relations) from the text of Medline citations [1, 2].
SemGen applies in the domain of molecular genetics and has several components: Journal Descriptor Indexing (JDI) [3], the MedPost tagger [4], the SPECIALIST Lexicon [5], the UMLS Metathesaurus [6], MetaMap [7], and ABGene [8]. These components interact to first identify genetic phenomena and disorders and subsequently construct semantic relations among these entities: gene-gene interactions (STIMULATE, INHIBIT, INTERACT_WITH, and their negations) as well as gene-disease associations (ASSOCIATED_WITH, PREDISPOSE, CAUSE, and their negations).
- (1)
We now show that apoA-II promotes insulin resistance and has diverse effects on fat homeostasis
- (2)
pron(we) adv(now) verb(show) compl(that) noun(apoA-II) verb(promotes) noun(insulin) noun(resistance) conj(and) aux(has) adj(diverse) noun(effects) prep(on) noun(fat) noun(homeostasis)
- (3)
[[pron(we)] [adv(now)] [verb(show)] [compl(that)] [head(apoA-II)]NP [verb(promotes)] [mod(insulin) head(resistance)]NP [conj(and)] [aux(has)] [mod(diverse) head(effects)]NP [prep(on) mod(fat) head(homeostasis)]NP]
The syntactic structure in (3) serves as the basis for the next phase, identification of noun phrases expressing relevant semantic concepts: genetic phenomena and disorders. Genetic phenomena are defined broadly as those concepts that may have a bearing on molecular genetics and include genes, proteins, nucleotide sequences, mutations, polymorphisms, and chromosomes. In this study we concentrated exclusively on genes. For each gene name identified, SemGen attempts to provide the corresponding official symbol and Entrez Gene ID, although this is not always possible. Gene symbol resolution is a challenging NLP task, currently under active investigation (for example Morgan et al. 2004 [9], Hou and Chen 2004 [10], Yu et al. 2002 [11]). For disorders, SemGen considers a concept having one of the following UMLS semantic types to be relevant: 'Pathologic Function', 'Disease or Syndrome', 'Neoplastic Process', and 'Congenital Abnormality'.
During processing to identify relevant semantic concepts, SemGen examines each noun phrase in structures such as (3) to determine whether it qualifies as a genetic phenomenon or as a disorder. For disorder names, MetaMap is used exclusively to determine whether the phrase maps to a concept in the UMLS Metathesaurus having a relevant semantic type. In considering genetic phenomena, SemGen first calls on MetaMap and the UMLS Metathesaurus; however, since the Metathesaurus is not complete for gene names, the output from ABGene is also consulted.
- (4)
"NURR1 gene", "RARs", "RAR/RXR", "Retinoid receptors", "retinoid receptor genes", "RXRgamma", "RXR genes"
In processing input from this citation that contains the phrase NURR1 gene, SemGen determines from MetaMap that NURR1 does not occur in the Metathesaurus. The ABGene list (4) for the citation containing the current input sentence is then consulted, and NURR1 is successfully identified as a genetic phenomenon in the sentence containing this phrase.
- (5)
[[pron(we)] [adv(now)] [verb(show)] [compl(that)] [genphenom(336|APOA2|apoa-ii|noun(apoA-II)]NP [verb(promotes)] [disorder(mod(insulin) head(resistance)|Insulin Resistance)]NP [conj(and)] [aux(has)] [mod(diverse) head(effects)]NP [prep(on) mod(fat) head(homeostasis)]NP]
- (6)
There appear to be multiple mechanisms through which JNK might promote diabetes.
Other examples of verbs that indicate semantic relations between a gene and a disorder include "predispose" (for PREDISPOSE) and "influence" and "implicate" (for ASSOCIATED_WITH). Similarly, verbs indicating a relation between two genes are "stimulate" and "upregulate" (for STIMULATE), "block" and "inhibit" (for INHIBIT), and "mediate" (for INTERACT_WITH).
- (7)
A clinic-based study of the LRRK2 gene in Parkinson disease yields new mutations.
- (8)
Saitohin represents a candidate gene for Parkinson's disease.
It should be noted that in both (7) and (8) the preposition is the only syntactic cue that there is a semantic relation between the gene and the disorder. In the molecular genetics domain, we have encountered prepositions as indicators only for the semantic predicate ASSOCIATED_WITH.
- (9)
PARP-1 and nuclear factor kappa B have both been suggested to play a crucial role in inflammatory disorders.
- (10)
However, Tag, which inactivates the key tumour suppressor p53, is not known to be involved in the pathogenesis of human insulinoma.
- (11)
We and others have demonstrated that human obesity syndrome is caused by mutations in the gene MKKS.
In order to exploit extracted semantic predications, we used the GFINDer (Genome Function INtegrated Discoverer) application [12–15]. This is a Web application that enriches lists of gene IDs with controlled functional annotations dynamically retrieved from several biomolecular databanks, including Entrez Gene [16], Gene Ontology [17], KEGG [18], Swiss-Prot [19], Pfam [20], and OMIM [21]. Moreover, GFINDer allows computational and statistical analyses on the functional and phenotypic annotations of user-selected groups of genes, aimed at highlighting those annotation categories that are significant in the genes selected.
After establishing a baseline for SemGen processing on the basis of a corpus of Medline citations on diabetes, we evaluated the results of postprocessing this SemGen output with a distance filtering procedure we developed. We also compared these results to those obtained from applying our filtering method to genetic (gene-gene) and etiologic (gene-disease) relations obtained with co-occurrence processing applied to the same corpus on diabetes. Finally, we tested the usefulness of the filtered information obtained from SemGen by looking at genes extracted from text on Parkinson's disease and enhanced with annotations using GFINDer.
In order to test this hypothesis, we implemented a procedure that first kept track of indicator category and argument distance in SemGen output, and then devised a parametric filtering procedure based on these phenomena. Argument distance was computed as the number of phrases intervening between an argument and its indicator.
SemGen precision for 2,042 genetic (gene-gene) and etiologic (gene-disease) semantic relations
Semantic relations
Syntactic indicator
Official symbol
Total relations
Correct relations
Incorrect relations
Standard error
The use of this filtering procedure implies an inverse relationship between precision and amount of information retained (recall): as precision increases, more information is lost. In all cases, argument distance correlates with this trade-off. For example, if gene-gene relations from verb indicators are filtered for arguments at distance 1 from the indicator, precision increases from 41.95% (95% confidence intervals 37.17% to 46.73%) (baseline) to 70.75% (95% confidence intervals 62.09% to 79.41%) (Figure 4, Graph A); however, information retained (recall) drops to 43.60% (95% confidence intervals 36.19% to 51.02%).
Results demonstrate that proximity to verb indicator has a positive effect on accuracy. In addition, semantic class of predicate (gene-gene or gene-disease) appears to influence reliability. With regard to type of indicator, precision is higher for gene-disease relations with verb indicator (B) than for the same relations with preposition indicator (C). Although we did not conduct a formal error analysis to explicate this difference, it is likely dependent on the fact that "in" as an indicator is ambiguous, and hence prone to generating SemGen errors. Another observation is that for verb indicators, precision is higher for gene-disease relations (B) than for gene-gene relations (A). Again, we can only provide an impressionistic explanation. This result is probably due to the tendency for disorder names to be easier to identify than gene names.
Proximity in co-occurrence processing
Results show that precision varies with distance, reaching best values for moderate to -intermediate distances for gene-gene co-occurrences and low distances for gene-disorder co-occurrence pairs. Filtering at such distances improves results when compared to no filtering. For gene-disease co-occurrences, precision improved by 30.46% when considering only co-occurrences with no more than 1 intervening content word: 37.50% vs. 28.74% precision (95% confidence intervals 23.80% to 51.20% vs. 23.10% to 34.39%). Whereas, for gene-gene co-occurrences improvement when considering only co-occurrences with up to 6 intervening content words was 32.62%: 13.75% vs. 10.37% precision (95% confidence intervals 8.41% to 19.09% vs. 6.91% to 13.82%). When the number of intervening content words is low (up to 4), precision is decreased for gene-gene co-occurrences.
The effect of proximity filtering on overall precision of co-occurrence processing is not dramatic. In addition, the improved precision results have a wide margin that partially overlaps with the unfiltered results, suggesting that in some cases the improvement could be due to variation. However, these results do not limit the benefits of such filtering for semantic interpretation. As noted above, the effectiveness of proximity processing with semantic interpretation is ultimately determined by the structure of English sentences. Co-occurrence processing is applied without reference to that structure, and hence subsequent proximity processing either has minimal effect or depresses precision (with fewest intervening content words).
Exploiting extracted relations
NLP to support research in molecular biology
SemGen is one of several systems currently being developed to provide access to information in text (entities and relations between them) for molecular biology research (see [28] for an overview). Of the systems that identify relations, various approaches (both statistical and rule based) are being pursued. Due to the complexity of the content involved, most systems focus on a particular molecular biology phenomenon. Several applications address protein-protein interactions: Bunescu et al. [29], for example, use machine learning techniques, while Corney et al. [30] employ syntactic patterns for such relations. Blaschke et al. [31] and Blaschke & Valencia [32] also use syntactic templates, enhanced with proximity processing between arguments, to identify protein interactions. Huang et al. [33] also call on syntactic patterns, which they discover with automatic methods, and Temkin and Gilder [34] use a context free grammar to extract protein interactions from text. Hu et al. [35] concentrate on protein phosphorylation using a system similar to SemGen. Regarding function and structure, Gaizauskas et al. [36] employ both syntactic parsing and semantic templates to identify information about protein structure in text. Koike et al. [37] exploit syntactic patterns for gene function, and Daraselia et al. [38] take advantage of a full parse for protein function. Friedman et al. [39] use a semantic grammar to identify molecular pathways, while Santos et al. [40] combine statistical methods with partial and full parsing and concentrate on the Wnt pathway. Blaschke et al. [41] mine gene expression information from Medline citations using a method similar to [31, 32]. Finally, Leroy et al. [42] exploit a shallow parser to identify various relations in molecular biology. Proximity between arguments is also used in their method.
The postprocessing technique we developed selects the extracted semantic relations that are most likely to be correct based on distance of the arguments from the syntactic predicate (indicator). Other methods [31, 32, 41, 42] have employed a related notion, namely distance between arguments participating in a relation, where the relations are identified with templates or shallow parsing. Previous work has not discussed incremental improvements dependent on degree of proximity, nor discussed the recall-precision trade-off, nor compared proximity filtering to unfiltered results.
Although we based our work on SemGen, our filtering process could be applied to relations produced by other NLP methods. The semantic content of the relations is not relevant. The postprocessing technique could be transferred most straightforwardly to those systems that retrieve arguments using rules or patterns, since a verb or preposition (an indicator) is available to interact with argument distance as a predictor of extraction accuracy. When an indicator is not used, as in statistical systems, the technique could be slightly modified to use distance between arguments as the sole predictor of correctness. However, in this case it is not likely to be dramatically effective, as suggested by our experiment with co-occurrence processing.
Argument distance thresholds while postprocessing extracted relations
Effectively exploiting extracted genetic and etiologic relations for subsequent applications depends on maintaining a balance between the highest possible precision and a sufficient level of retained information (Figure 4) for useful applications. For gene-gene relations derived from verbs, for example, this can be obtained by allowing an argument distance of no more than 2 phrases from the indicator (55.88% (95% confidence intervals 49.07% to 62.70%) precision, and 66.28% (95% confidence intervals 59.21% to 73.34%) recall). However, when filtered relations are used for automatic processing, high precision should take precedence over high recall (retained information): for verb indicators, an argument distance of 1 for genetic relations and 2 or 3 for etiologic relations. For supervised applications less strict threshold values can be used.
Considering all extracted relations, whether they include an official gene symbol or not, would increase precision for any distance threshold (Table 1). Such relations could be useful for subsequent supervised applications; however, we limited this study to official gene symbols (and the corresponding Entrez Gene ID) because this allows automatic linking to structured biological data. Subsequent automatic processing based on this information could then unveil hidden biological knowledge [43–45].
Exploiting extracted information
The application example discussed above illustrates that the procedure we propose for filtering the results of automatically extracted gene-gene and gene-disease relations effectively selects useful information. Many of the genes identified, including CYP2D6, LRRK2, MAPT, NR4A2, PARK2, PARK3, PARK7, PINK1, UCHL1 (Figure 6), are associated with Parkinson's disorders in genetic disorder reference databases, such as OMIM, GHR, GAD, and MutPD. Furthermore, the process identified five genes not associated with Parkinson's disease in those databases (APLP2, EN2, IREB2, NGFB, and SLC18A2). By uploading these genes into GFINDer, we were able to highlight their biological process categories in the Gene Ontology (Figure 7). Three of these genes (EN2, IREB2, and NGFB) are currently associated only with high level or general biological process categories that might or might not be related to Parkinson's disease. However, two of these genes (APLP2 and SLC18A2) are associated with low level biological process categories clearly related to Parkinson' disease: "G-protein coupled receptor protein signaling pathway" and "monoamine transport", respectively. Alterations in the biological processes of these categories, which are parent and sibling categories of "dopamine receptor signaling pathway" and "dopamine transport" respectively, may well be involved in Parkinson's disease and suggest interesting avenues for further analysis. In fact, motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease are generally thought to result from deficiency or dysfunction of dopamine or dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra [22].
Future work
Although current filtering usefully supports subsequent automatic analysis, there is room for improvement. As a further measure of sentence complexity, an extended multi-parametric filtering could be implemented, which takes into account the total number of arguments on both the left and the right of an indicator. It would also be possible to improve results by exploiting domain knowledge about genes and diseases to support statistical methods for constructing resources expressing functional characteristics such as involvement in biological processes, biochemical pathways, molecular functions, and co-occurring expression in similar tissues. This information could then be consulted to exclude improbable semantic relations.
The genetic and etiologic relations extracted by SemGen from the research literature are normalized semantic descriptions of complex genetic interactions. The filtering method we implemented increases the precision of error-prone NLP by selecting the semantic relations most likely to be correct. This information can then be used for further applications aimed at uncovering new biomedical knowledge.
Establishing a baseline
To establish a baseline, we first evaluated the precision of SemGen in extracting genetic (gene-gene) and etiologic (gene-disease) relations from 5,525 Medline citations on the genetic basis of diabetes retrieved with the PubMed query "diabetes AND (gene OR genes OR genetic)." From these citations SemGen extracted a total of 8,956 genetic and etiologic relations. 2,042 (22.80%) of them were selected from 1,934 sentences and were compared to the original sentences by a genetics domain expert, who classified them as correct or not. The primary consideration in selecting the relations to evaluate was whether all gene names in the relation had been matched to the official gene symbol (in Entrez Gene). The official symbol is required by GFINDer to connect information extracted by SemGen to online resources. 1,372 (of the 8,956 total relations) had gene names matched to Entrez Gene and all such relations were evaluated. Of these, 410 referred to gene-gene relations and 962 to gene-disease predications. 817 relations with an official gene symbol had been derived from a verb indicator by SemGen, and 555 from a preposition. In addition, 670 extracted relations without an official gene symbol and Entrez Gene ID were also randomly selected and assessed (617 gene-gene and 53 gene-disease relations; 643 with verb indicator and 27 with preposition indicator). The results of the evaluation for the 2,042 total semantic relations assessed (1,027 gene-gene and 1,015 gene-disease relations; 1,460 with verb indicator and 582 with preposition indicator) are reported in Table 1.
Filtering SemGen output
As a gold standard for evaluating the filtering strategy to retain the relations most likely to be correct, we used the same 2,042 semantic relations about diabetes on which the baseline was determined. We filtered the gold standard relations at various thresholds of argument distance from the relation indicator by keeping all relations with both argument distances lower or equal to the considered threshold. After each filtering, we grouped the selected relations according to relation type (gene-gene or gene-disease), syntactic category of indicator (preposition or verb), and official gene symbol content (relations with official gene symbol for all extracted genes or not for all). For each group we calculated number of correct and incorrect relations, precision (P) (the percent of semantic relations retained after filtering that are correct), recall (R) or retained information (the percent of the initially correct semantic relations retained after filtering), and F score (F) (the harmonic mean of precision and recall) as follows: P = rc/(rc+ri), R = rc/(rc+dc), F = 2*P*R/(P+R) with rc the retained correct relations, ri the retained incorrect relations, and dc the discarded correct relations. 95% confidence intervals were also computed for each calculated value of P, R, and F.
Co-occurrence processing
- (12)
Mutations in the DJ-1 gene cause early-onset autosomal recessive Parkinson's disease
In evaluating the co-occurrence processing, a sample of 200 sentences (10.34%) was randomly selected from the same 1,934 sentences in the Medline citations on diabetes used to evaluate proximity filtering based on SemGen processing. Then, a domain expert assessed 546 co-occurrences (299 gene-gene and 247 gene-disease) within these 200 sentences and classified them as correct or not.
We subsequently evaluated the effectiveness of distance filtering postprocessing to improve precision of extracted co-occurrences. We first filtered the assessed co-occurrences at incremental distance thresholds of intervening content words between co-occurrences of gene-gene or gene-disorder concepts. Then, as was done for evaluating SemGen output filtering, for each threshold value we calculated the number of correct and incorrect relations, and precision, recall, F score and 95% confidence intervals.
Processing for exploiting extracted relations
A PubMed query on the genetics of Parkinson's disease retrieved 3,871 Medline citations. Initial SemGen processing extracted 1,454 semantic relations from 899 citations. Of these, 365 were gene-gene relations (all with verb indicator; 40 with an official gene symbol and 325 without), and 1,089 were gene-disease relations (454 with verb indicator, 635 with preposition indicator; 233 with an official gene symbol and 856 without). For further processing, we limited the extracted relations to the 85 etiologic relations which included an official gene symbol and Entrez Gene ID and which involved one of the following disorders: Parkinson Disease (74 relations), Parkinsonian Disorders (9), and Autosomal Recessive Parkinsonism (2). One of these relations was subsequently eliminated because it negated a gene-disease association. We then evaluated the performance of distance filtering on these 84 semantic relations comparing them against the sentences that generated them, filtering them at increasing distance thresholds, and calculating precisions, recalls, F scores and their 95% confidence intervals.
We are grateful to Bisharah Libbus for his domain expertise supporting this project. The first author was supported by an appointment to the National Library of Medicine Research Participation Program administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an inter-agency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Library of Medicine. This project was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Library of Medicine.
Authors' Affiliations
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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I've decided to permanently close Some'n Unique Magazine LLC. Its time to move ahead to new endeavors. I will be deleting the Some'n Unique Magazine Facebook page shortly, and will remove all posts, etc… from this site, which may serve as new site in the near future. Again, I sincerely thank everyone who has ever been a part of S.U.M, our sponsors & everyone that has supported it, but as mentioned, I need to pave way for new advancements.
Thank you all!
F. Kenneth Taylor ~ Owner/Creator
Some'n Unique Magazine, LLC, affectionately, "S.U.M", is the 'unique' combination of an ethnic-rich, Community/Culture/Business publication headquartered in St. Louis, MO. Created by Self-Published Author/Entrepreneur, F. Kenneth Taylor, S.U.M is devoted to producing authentic, engaging, culturally-diverse content for every walk of life.
Some'n Unique Magazine also has an equally diverse staff of writers and photographers in St. Louis, MO, Virginia, and Australia. Our quaint, tight-knit, family has allowed us to authoritatively taken the helms of;
- Creative & Visual Arts
- Entrepreneurship
- Family & Education
- Current/Social World Events & More!
This site displays all that Some'n Unique Magazine, LLC has to offer; from our monthly issues to our live, poetry open mics at The Book House Bookstore, to our weekly internet radio shows on BlogTalkRadio, as well as our involvement in our communities. This site was also designed to allow the S.U.M writers and audience (you!) the opportunity to connect on a more personal level.
Some'n Unique Magazine, LLC delivers more than well-written, thought-provoking articles, we also strive to network with fellow entrepreneurs and small businesses to forge lasting rapports within the business community.
To expand upon our efforts of connecting with the business and entrepreneurial communities, we offer the following services;
- Interviews
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- Advertising
- Book Reviews & More
Some'n Unique Magazine, LLC continues to work to present additional services, content, events, and features to our peers and audience in the near future. Please continue to support us… WE TRULY APPRECIATE YOU!


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Play Best Free Online Ratatouille Grab the Grub Games
Avoid the cooks and pick up all the ingredients you need to cook your recipe.
How to play & walkthrough: Use Arrow Keys to move.
Ratatouille Grab the Grub is a free online animal, collecting games, obstacle game. Here you can play online games and find a lot of animal, collecting games, obstacle, ratatouille, grab, grub games in different category like games and more.


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___________________________________"My body is not your battleground My hair is neither sacred or cheap, neither the cause of your disarray nor the path to your liberation My hair will not bring progress and clean water if it flies unbraided in the breeze It will not save us from our attackers if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun" ____________________________________
Mohja Kahf
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ORGANISING A SCREENING PLEASE GET IN TOUCH: firstname.lastname@example.com
DVDs FOR PERSONAL USE
Check our DISTRIBUTION campaign page for DVDs and VOD
BBC talks about "I wasn't always dressed like this"SEE HERE
The National talks about "I wasn't always dressed like this" SEE HERE
Dr Eylem Atakav speaks to BBC Norfolk about the documentary in relation to the recent debate about the veil. READ here
FIRST SCREENING IN THE UK, October 2013 – Our short documentary "I wasn't always dressed like this" will be screened in the UK during October. Please READ the PR developed by the press department at University of East Anglia.
Betty Martins presented a paper about the methodology of the documentary at the international Symposium Mediating Religions – Representations of Religions in the Media: Multidisciplinary Approaches, in Liverpool, on the 30th of June.
Click here for a review of the documentary by an influential Muslim Feminist.
Paper about the documentary presented at the International Conference "Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism in European Media and Film: Rights, Responsibilities, Representations" in May 2013 at the University of Manchester.
Trailer do documentário disponível em português, en Español: "Nem sempre me vesti assim" "No siempre me vestí asi"
"At the beginning of the twenty first century, the topic of Islam, fundamentalism, terrorism, extremism and women's position in Islam in on many people's minds, from the local bus driver to the specialist scholar. The discourse in the popular mind is one of the backwardness, violence and barbarity of Islam, Arabs and Muslims. The oppression of women is a given. This makes challenging the popular Western stereotype that the veil is a symbol of Muslim women's oppression an uphill battle…" (Bullock, Katherine)
The veil is an object that tends to instigate profound and diverse feelings. Its practice and meaning have been greatly abused throughout history. Within the context of the West the question one might ask: "In a free country, why are women choosing to veil?"
In a very intimate and meditative mode, three Muslim women reflect around issues of cultural memory, identity, self-censorship, feminism, politics and media. By appreciating the personal and experiential quality of veiling, this documentary is able to articulate critically and reflexively while challenging its popular perception.
Produced and Directed by: Betty Martins
Edited by: Elle Sillanpaa
Music By: Noura Sanatian
DOP: Maria Anastassiou
Camera: Lorena Cervera Ferrer
Camera 2: Caroline Iandoli
Production Assistant: Marcela Bianchi
Academic Consultants: Dr Eylem Atakav Dr Barni Nor
Collaborator: Afroze Zaidi-Jivraj
Please email email@example.com for Press Kit (Available also in Portuguese and Arabic)
Developed in collaboration with Apekatu Creative Thinking ___________________________________


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About IV Infusion
Intermittent infusion is the infusion of liquid substances directly into the vein.
It is used when a patient requires medications only at certain times. In our outpatient infusion lab, Carrus patients arrive at our facility daily, weekly, monthly or even semi yearly for convenient IV infusion or injections. Carrus' infusion center is quiet, efficient and comfortable, allowing the patient to receive their necessary care and be on their way.


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A fabulous standing crow, done up in pincushion style, with a thimble holder hat and two tuffeted wing pockets for your pins. 11". 38.00
A wee little duo of extra prim osnaburg shoes, with calico pin cushion tuffets and tiny osnaburg bird perched atop. 28.00
A whimsical and nostalgic bird pincushion, from muslin and calico 36.00
Extreme primitive black pumpkin headed witch sitter has abundant hand stitches and deep dark aging. 54.00
Huge overstuffed tomato pinkeep is stitched up from aged tapestry and felt and is adorned with a vintage key satin thread and aged tags. 28.00
Prim little kitties are 12" and are stitched up from vintage woolens from my stash.. $28.00
super prim angel stitched from osnaburg. She is weatherbeaten and worn, and has stick arms, rusty jingle bells, a stitched on pocket 34.00
This awesome old pinpoke is stitched up from burlap and calico and is deeply aged. Seams are X stitched and its accented with rusty bells. 48.00
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Weatherbeaten whitewashed star hanger has a pocket with nesting bird, moss, twigs, and pip berries. 38.00
A whimsical pair of woolen witchy boots, tall and skinny, with lots of prim details. 36.00
extra prim witchy boots, with pin tuffets, laced up fronts, and stitched pockets on each side 36.00
prim pincushion stitched from some wonderful cashmere and spiced nubby wool 44.00
Extreme primitive hand is created from osnaburg and has a stitched on heart and arangement from one of my weedwalks 22.00
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VIDEO: Team USA rolls into semifinals with rout of Slovenia
BARCELONA — Spain has supplanted the U.S. National Team as the trendy pick to win gold here at the FIBA World Cup.
Everybody from TNT's very own Charles Barkley to members of the teams the U.S. crushes on their way to Thursday's semifinal have chimed in and sided with the host nation Spaniards.
After the U.S. used one of the their trademark blitzes to run Slovenia off the floor at Palau Saint Jordi 119-76 in Tuesday's quarterfinal, Phoenix Suns All-NBA point guard Goran Dragic weighed in with his belief that Spain is indeed the favorite.
That's fine with the stars on the U.S. team, whose refusal to panic when things are tight early has become a hallmark for this bunch. Starters James Harden and Steph Curry were scoreless at halftime and the lead was just 49-42.
Not a problem. Not when Klay Thompson (20 points) and Derrick Rose (12) are your "backups."
A swift 18-5 third quarter run later and the U.S. was off to the races, cashing in with its 61st straight win in World Cup/World Championship/Olympic and international competition, and one step closer to that date with Spain in Sunday's gold medal game in Madrid.
"I thought we played really hard the whole game and we just couldn't finish in the first half some of those plays," U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski said, "and then they stayed with it and then the floodgates opened in the second half."
The U.S. faces Lithuania, a 73-61 winner of Turkey in Tuesday's first game, Thursday at 3 p.m. ET.
They'll do so having played arguably their best game, so far, of the competition. They stroked Finland by 59 points in their opener last week in pool play. But beating Slovenia down was a tougher task.
"It was tough. They are a really good team," Harden said. "They kind of slowed us down in the first half, dictated the tempo. Coach talked to us at halftime about playing our brand of basketball and how we like to play. And we came out with that intensity."
Harden did heat up, scoring 12 of his 14 points in the third quarter. Kenneth Faried finished with 14 points and 10 rebounds and Anthony Davis 13 and 11. The depth the U.S. boasts is like no other team in this competition, not even a seasoned Spanish team.
Rose, in particular, had his teammates fired up.
"You [saw] him," Harden said of Rose. "He looked amazing. He's so quick and athletic, the way he followed the holes and finished … he made some amazing passes tonight. He was phenomenal."
While it certainly helped having Thompson in a groove from the start on both ends, Rose needed a push. With the Coach K mandate that he play with a green light, Rose was as aggressive as he's been offensively at any point in the tournament.
Rose was just 8-for-37 shooting before Tuesday, so whatever color his light was prior to seeing Slovenia, is anyone's guess.
"It eased me a little bit," Rose said. "Gave me a lot of confidence. I'm not lacking in confidence, but when the head coach tells you to go out there and be aggressive it makes you think in another way. Coach gave me that green light and said go out there and play the way I play. Don't worry about getting other guys involved … I felt good."
On a team that is suddenly dealing with an underdog status, at least here in Spain, Rose, Thompson and some of these other elite reserves are finding a rhythm at just the right time.
Just in time for Thursday's semifinals and then on to Madrid, where the underdogs might finally have their say about who should really wear the favorite's tag.


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I want to give a small preview of what the new form editor for creating dynamic and flexible forms in BeeGIS will look like. On one hand because it is coming quite nice and on the other to show to those that pay us on this (ARPA Piemonte) that we are getting closer.
Well, what would a form editor be? A tool to create forms to make surveying easier and also more standard. Once a form is defined for a certain shapefile, attributes of the features in the file can be modified in the same way by everyone through the form. I do not want to describe further here, that will be a task for the manual writers.
Let's see where we are now.
The "form language" has been defined on an xml base, so a file that looks like that
will produce a graphcial interface for feature editing like this one
This is a quite complex one and has more then one tab
Comboboxes can be described in a human readable way, while they modify the attributes with codes:
Well, yes, who would write such an xml to get a complex form? How long would it take. It took me about 2 hours to create the one I am showing here, but do not despair, we won't let users alone.
In fact there is also a form editor in progress that will make the generation of form files easy.
I will make the huge error to show you what it will more or less look like, but I also warn you that this is just a first draft prototype, things might change at least a bit.


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Returns / Refunds Policy
No goods may be returned without the prior written consent of CRSCS. Where this consent is given and the goods supplied were correct as ordered the customer will pay a 20% handling charge (minimum £10.00). Any credit issued will be applied as a credit to the account,or debit/credit card used at the point of purchase cash refunds will only be issued if used as the original payment method. We cannot accept opened, used, personalised, part packs or goods supplied more than 28 days ago and returned goods must be in original un-damaged packaging suitable for resale. It is our normal practice to replace any goods supplied which are damaged on arrival and no charge will be made in this case.


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st: RE: -levpet- with additional state variables - is it possible?
"Nick Cox" <firstname.lastname@example.com>
st: RE: -levpet- with additional state variables - is it possible?
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:03:52 -0000
The Statalist FAQ asks that you identify where non-official commands you
are using come from. There are, I guess, a few thousand such commands.
An experienced user might be familiar with a few hundred, but more
importantly new users will know about almost none, even in their
specific field of interest. So, such details are very widely
You don't say how you got a copy of -levpet- but
. findit levpet
points directly to its publication in the Stata Journal with help and
other files accessible for download.
Matej Drev
I am trying to estimate a production function with two state variables -
capital stock and r&d stock - using the -levpet- command. However, it
seems that the Stata routine only allows for specification of one such
variable - capital stock. Is there a way to estimate this production
function in Stata using -levpet-?
I couldn't find help for this online, so I would appreciate any
clarification on this.
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
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Bury St Edmunds
Wildlife Group
What we do
With some 750 members, we are an active group, with good attendance at our winter meetings programme. We also have a very active summer programme. You can find out all about these in our newsletter.
How you can help
You could join in at our enjoyable fundraising and social events, which are always very well supported by members and are a successful way of raising funds for local wildlife.