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The problem with health care is people like me—doctors (mostly men) in our fifties and beyond, who learned medicine when it was more art and less finance. We were taught to go to the hospital before dawn, stay until our patients were stable, focus on the needs of each patient before us, and not worry about costs. We were taught to review every test result with our own eyes—to depend on no one. The only way to ensure quality was to adopt high personal standards for ourselves and then meet them. Now, at many health care institutions and practices, we are in charge. And that's a problem, because health care today needs a fundamentally different approach—and a new breed of leaders.
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Most recent discussions of health care have focused on its rising costs, but these financial challenges are really just a symptom. What is the real "disease"? The usual suspects have surprisingly small roles. Greed and incompetence surely exist, but economists agree that they don't account for double-digit annual cost increases on their own.
The good and the bad news is that the biggest driver of rising costs is medical progress: new drugs, new tests, new devices, and new ways of using them. These tools are frequently marvelous and complex, and their use requires increasing numbers of personnel trained in narrow fields. Patients with complicated conditions end up seeing a variety of physicians who are often spread across several institutions.
Of course this progress is welcome, and at times it seems miraculous. The Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester was diagnosed with lymphoma in September 2006, but he reported to spring training in 2007 and pitched a no-hitter in 2008. Steve Jobs is still on the job. Many patients diagnosed with heart failure can now go back to work after receiving a new type of high-tech pacemaker.
But this explosion of knowledge is going off within a system too fragmented and disorganized to absorb it. The result is chaos. In my own organization, Partners HealthCare, a poignant example involves the widow of a young man who died of cancer. In the last days of his final six-week stay in the intensive care unit, she demanded that all his doctors have a meeting with the family. The family didn't really need the meeting, she said—the doctors did. She wanted to be sure that the various physicians were actually talking to one another, because she so often received inconsistent or even contradictory messages from them. The confusion she described does more than distress families, of course. It leads to redundant care and errors that raise costs and threaten quality.
Tough Medicine
To effectively attack this chaos we need a new kind of leadership at every level of the health care system, from large integrated delivery systems like Partners to hospitals to physician practices. The specific kinds of work and performance measures may differ from one setting to another, but the key responsibilities of leadership are the same. To understand what they are, leaders must first absorb three painful messages:
Performance matters.
Most clinicians are hard workers, but the quality of their work should not be measured by how many patients they manage to see or tests and procedures they call for. What matters is their results. This is controversial, because comparing outcomes is notoriously complicated. After all, how well patients eventually do depends heavily on how sick they were to start with. Nonetheless, the bottom line is how patients fare. How often do they survive their illnesses and recover from their disabilities? How frequently do they get infections and other complications? Are their informational and emotional needs met?
"Value" is not a bad word.
When employers and insurance companies use the term, many providers suspect that it's code for cost reduction. But Michael Porter, of Harvard Business School, and others have been pointing out for years that in health care, "value" means something else: achieving good outcomes as efficiently as possible. It may never be expressible as a numerical ratio (quality divided by costs) that allows meaningful comparisons among providers. But measuring outcomes and costs does allow providers to push for improvement—and to learn from their competitors.
Improvements in performance require teamwork.
Individual clinicians and hospitals have only limited control over the fate of their patients. At any organization that provides health care, superior coordination, information sharing, and teamwork across disciplines are required if value and outcomes are to improve.
Many leaders of providers can pinpoint the moment when they realized that their world was changing; often it came when someone outside the organization started measuring its performance. Although few providers welcome this development, it provides context for a new breed of leaders. Traditional health care leaders try to buy time, fend off change, and maximize revenue under the existing payment system while they can. The new leaders focus on outcomes and use performance measurement as a motivating tool to organize their colleagues and drive improvements.
The challenges are similar whether these leaders are working in a large integrated delivery system, a hospital, a large multispecialty physician group, or a small physician practice. Although their tactics will vary from one setting to the next, the broad roles that leaders need to assume will not.
Articulating Vision and Values
The reorganization process starts with articulating the rationale and goals for change. Change is hard in any field, and medicine's altruistic core values actually reinforce practitioners' resistance to disturbing the status quo. My generation's traditionalists know that they are good people who work hard, and they have the courage of their convictions as they point out the risks of change. So the vision expressed by leaders in health care must convey both understanding and resolve. It should acknowledge the importance of what clinicians currently do, but make explicit that they have to work differently in the future. It should be direct about the measures by which they must succeed. And it should be both optimistic and realistic, expressing the beliefs that care can get better and that delivering superior care is the best business strategy.
An effective vision helps people accept inevitable changes and put information and events into context. For example, many physicians and hospital leaders have a viscerally negative reaction to public reporting on the quality of care they provide. They know the limitations of the data and are appalled that providers might be ranked numerically on the basis of inadequate, easily misinterpreted information. Their typical reaction to a decision to release data on provider quality: Civilization is coming to an end.
In contrast, consider how the cardiac surgeon Delos M. Cosgrove, who became CEO of the Cleveland Clinic in 2004, folded the imperative for performance measurement into a broad vision. If the clinic was committed to the idea of "patients first," he argued, it had to not only make a serious commitment to measuring patient outcomes but also demonstrate that commitment to the world. Cosgrove immediately took the measurement systems that had evolved in one part of the organization and disseminated them throughout the clinic. At first the new data were available only to insiders; now they are published, warts and all, on the clinic's website. Physicians were indeed uncomfortable with these changes, but seeing performance measurement as a tool to help (and attract) patients, rather than as just a carrot or a stick, brought them along.
Leaders at Seattle's Virginia Mason Medical Center made a similar commitment to the notion of patients first, but they took it a step further by making explicit its clear corollary: Physicians and everyone else come second. Whereas patients in most cancer centers do the walking—to the laboratory, to doctors' offices, to chemotherapy infusion rooms—patients visiting Virginia Mason's new cancer center are ushered into well-appointed rooms where doctors, nurses, and lab technicians come to them. These rooms are filled with natural light from large windows; the physicians work in windowless cubicles in the floor's interior.
Virginia Mason's cancer center embraced its patients-first vision so zealously that some of the doctors on the staff left. But those who remained, despite some grumbling, have helped engineer the center's financial turnaround and rise to national prominence.
Organizing for Performance
Focusing on performance in health care is more radical than it sounds. In the era now waning, the conventional wisdom has been that true quality can't be measured. Thus performance has generally been gauged by the volume and profitability of services delivered.
In the traditional world, medicine is organized around what doctors do rather than what patients need. For example, hospitals often have separate units for cardiology, cardiac surgery, cardiac anesthesiology, and radiology, each of which includes doctors and other clinicians who contribute to the care of patients with heart disease. Every unit has a physician leader and an administrative staff. At many hospitals the various units independently submit their bills ("claims") to insurance companies and patients. That's why patients are so often confused by multiple bills.
These clinicians may actually work well together in caring for individual patients, but increased costs and dysfunction are inherent in separated administrative structures. The units are staffed by people with good intentions, but they all have turf to defend—and in the mainstream of American medicine, threatening someone's turf is a quick path to destructive conflict. In the absence of compelling reasons to change this arrangement, inefficient structures remain stubbornly in place. And for clinicians to embrace a radical redesign of care delivery—well, that would be an unnatural act when they are organized according to their specialties and contented to remain so.
This fragmentation often goes deeper than the organizational division of physicians. At many hospitals relationships between doctors and administrators are downright antagonistic, and financial interests are poorly aligned or even in direct conflict. For instance, hospitals want to shorten lengths of stay because they receive a lump sum for a patient's entire admission, but doctors are paid for each visit on each hospital day, so the sooner patients go home, the less they make. Under most insurance plans, neither is rewarded for doing the extra work that might prevent a readmission to the hospital.
Organizing to deliver high performance (rather than units of service) can help break down all these barriers. As performance starts to matter, for example, some providers are moving toward structures for the delivery of care that are defined by patients' needs. In many cases, the first step is colocation—putting the various types of physicians who provide most of the care for a patient population in one place. Sometimes an opportunity for colocation is created by the construction of a new facility dedicated to patients with specific conditions, such as cardiac disease or cancer. More often, institutional leaders must move groups around in an elaborate multiyear effort to bring physicians from different disciplines but the same patient population closer to one another.
But colocation alone can't guarantee a well-coordinated effort to improve patient outcomes. That's why Delos Cosgrove abolished the Cleveland Clinic's traditional departments and replaced them with "institutes" defined by patients' conditions. He realized that as a cardiac surgeon, he needed to collaborate more with cardiologists than with surgeons who operated on other parts of the body. So he brought together the clinic's cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, and vascular surgeons in the new Heart and Vascular Institute, and started capturing and publishing information on how its patients have fared.
In similar facilities, such as the Head and Neck Center at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, physicians remain members of their various departments, but they're in close proximity on two adjacent floors. Over time they have come to identify more with their cancer-center roles than with their departmental affiliations.
The work of organizing care around the needs of patients instead of physicians' turf and politics plays out on smaller scales as well. Within many leading hospitals today, physicians from the departments of surgery, medicine, and radiology work together to perform hybrid procedures (such as simultaneous open-heart surgery and abdominal aneurysm repair) that previously would have been performed separately.
Large-scale organizational changes like these require strong leaders and a cultural context in which they can lead. For obvious reasons, such leaders gain additional leverage if they are physicians and their organization employs its doctors. At the Cleveland Clinic all physicians are on one-year renewable contracts, which sends a powerful message about the importance of team spirit.
Rule of Thumb
Not every institution will have the leadership wherewithal to undertake such transformative change. But even when integrating departments of clinicians seems unrealistic, strategically chosen performance measures can spur progress.
Developing a Measurement System
The first challenge in creating a performance measurement system is getting everyone across an organization to use the same "language"—that is, to measure the same things in the same way. Otherwise it's easy, and understandable, for resisters to challenge the validity of apparent differences. But once providers believe that apples are being accurately compared with apples, peer pressure and other incentives will help spread best practices. (See the sidebar "Using Peer Pressure to Improve Performance.")
Using Peer Pressure to Improve Performance by: Kelly W. Hall
Consider this example of the importance of a common language, which comes from my own organization. Bloodstream infections are a serious and frequent problem in patients who have indwelling catheters in their arteries and veins, and in January 2008 the Massachusetts state government announced plans to begin public reporting of each hospital's rate of such infections. Knowing that reporting was coming, my colleagues began including data on bloodstream infections in the internal quality report cards that are shared with our board and other senior leaders. These reports revealed apparent differences in the rates at two of our hospitals, but meaningful comparisons were hindered by their differing methods of detecting the infections.
Hospital A monitored for infections by drawing blood samples through the indwelling catheters—an approach that was painless and easy but more likely to lead to contamination or false positives. Hospital B checked for infections by drawing blood through fresh needle sticks. Hospital A usually had higher rates of infection, but its physicians always argued that this was simply a false finding resulting from their particular detection method. After they finally adopted Hospital B's method, however, they found that they still had a higher infection rate. With both hospitals measuring in the same way, claims about the source of the difference ended. Infection-control leaders became very interested in what else Hospital B did differently.
When data are uniform and reliable, leaders can push for the standardization of best practices throughout an organization. For example, clinicians at all the hospitals in our system have agreed to attach colored tape to catheters inserted under less-than-ideal conditions in the emergency department. The tape tells doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit to change those lines as soon as possible once the patient is stable—a practice that we expect will further reduce our infection rates.
In this case, standards were not dictated from the top of the organization. What did come from the top was pressure to collect data in the same way at all hospitals and use it to improve care. Innovation occurs at the front lines of health care; our senior managers would never have thought of using colored tape on catheters. But they could and did create the environment in which such ideas spread.
Finally, an effective measurement system requires clear metrics that detail costs and outcomes for episodes of care or even entire patient populations. These data can be wielded in ways of varying impact. Although workers in any environment, medical or otherwise, will respond to negative motivators ("Reduce the infection rate or you will be humiliated"), positive ones ("Reduce the rate because you want to provide the best possible care") can be more effective. Such value-oriented performance measurement should become the focus of internal improvement efforts—before measurement is forced upon leaders from the outside.
Building Effective Teams
Working in teams does not come easily to physicians, who still often see themselves as heroic lone healers. Nonetheless, developing teams is a key leadership function for health care providers of all types.
Working in teams does not come easily to physicians, who still often see themselves as heroic lone healers.
Consider how teams at Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System (where I sit on the board) have helped cut hospital readmissions by half. In the United States about 20% of Medicare patients discharged from the hospital are readmitted within 30 days. These "bouncebacks" should be seen for what they are—failures of the delivery system to meet patients' needs. Even in retrospect many readmissions seem unpreventable, but others result from confusion about what medicines the patient should be taking, what signs might suggest that a complication is brewing, when the patient should go back to which doctor, and so on.
In that confusion lies an opportunity for well-organized providers. The obvious ingredient in Geisinger's recipe for success is placing nurses ("care coordinators") in the offices of patients' primary-care physicians. The care coordinators stay in close touch with patients whose cases are complex, particularly when they are about to be discharged from the hospital or have recently gone home. They figure out which patients need to see which physicians and when.
The more subtle ingredient in this model's success—the secret sauce, as it were—is a culture in which care coordinators can actually coordinate care. It requires that physicians be both team leaders and team players. Not long ago, in the strict hierarchy of medicine, nurses were largely regarded as technicians whose job was to follow orders. No decision was made without a physician's knowledge and consent. The notion of a nurse as a critical contributor and independent decision maker on a clinical team would have seemed absurd.
That's changing, because providers that deliver care in the traditional way simply can't match the performance of Geisinger and other organizations where physicians work in teams with care coordinators. In these organizations the coordinator's role is something like that of a point guard in basketball, with the physician acting as a combined general manager and player-coach. Leading these teams requires physicians to hand off considerable responsibility to nurses. The payoff is improved performance on the metrics that matter most to them and their patients.
Team building is a critical competency for leaders of physician groups, particularly the increasingly common groups of 25 or more that include doctors from a range of specialties. Most of these doctors joined their groups not because they wanted to work collaboratively with others to improve performance but because they wanted to be in a big organization where someone else would worry about administrative hassles, they'd find some safety in numbers from market forces, and it would be possible to make additional revenue from ancillary services such as radiology and laboratory testing.
But the fortunes of these groups and others in all areas of medicine will depend on leaders who can improve performance by inspiring (or requiring) teamwork. In many markets insurers are incorporating costs and quality in insurance product design, so that patients pay more—or aren't covered at all—if they want to see physicians in more-expensive, less-efficient, or lower-quality groups. If patients don't come, the groups will fail. The ability to build high-performance teams confers competitive advantage.
Improving Processes
Health care teams can't view their purpose as time-limited or focused on one project. The day will never come when readmission rates are low enough, heart-attack treatment is fast enough, or all the processes of care delivery are efficient and reliable enough. Thus leaders must work relentlessly to reduce errors and waste and improve outcomes—for example, by preventing bouncebacks or reducing the time between a heart-attack patient's arrival in the emergency room and the opening of his or her blocked artery. To do so they need a culture of process improvement and the disciplined use of its methods, such as lean management, data collection, brainstorming, intervention, and impact analysis—and a long-term commitment to applying them. That culture and experience can be ingrained in a variety of ways.
The now classic health care example comes from Virginia Mason Medical Center, which a decade ago was in danger of losing market share and its best physicians to the numerous outstanding hospitals in the region. In 2001 the center's president, J. Michael Rona, happened to sit next to John Black, then the director of lean management at Boeing, on a plane. Black had sent hundreds of Boeing managers to Japan to study the Toyota Production System. By the end of his flight, Rona was convinced that Virginia Mason needed to do the same thing.
Rona and the center's CEO, a physician named Gary Kaplan, began taking groups of their colleagues to Japan for two-week immersion courses in TPS. Rona and Kaplan let it be known across the organization that leadership roles would most likely be reserved for people (including physicians) who took the training and adopted the lessons. Some of their star physicians left as a result. But Virginia Mason has used its version of TPS to reduce costs, improve quality and service, and strengthen its financial health.
Of course, not all hospitals or practices can or should fly their staff to Japan. But they can find (and increasingly are finding) alternative ways to bring the process-improvement culture inside. Many organizations have sent their midlevel and senior leaders for training at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, where Brent James, the chief quality officer, runs a highly respected process-improvement course. And James has generously helped some of these organizations, including mine, start their own courses to spread this expertise.
Dismantling Cultural Barriers
Why is collaboration so hard in a field that attracts idealistic people who want to do good? Why are performance measurement and improvement so problematic for some of the smartest, hardest-working, and most competitive people in society? Why is the concept of value rejected by providers that would benefit if they improved their care?
In a word, autonomy. The cultural barriers to change in health care—doctors' resistance to being measured, their need be "perfect," their reluctance to criticize colleagues, their resistance to teamwork—reflect a deep-seated belief that physician autonomy is crucial to quality in health care. Doctors have historically seen themselves as their patients' sole advocates, with the rest of the world divided into those who are helping and those who are in the way. A temper tantrum in the pursuit of patients' interests was acceptable behavior. Some of my most respected colleagues have confessed a wish that no one would even talk to their patients except through them.
Precious as this passion for patients' interests might be, physician autonomy is not synonymous with quality. For the needed structural and operational changes—performance measurement, process improvement, teamwork—to become mainstream, doctors must accept that to be all-caring is different from being all-knowing or all-controlling. To foster such acceptance, leaders can use three approaches:
Appeal to the better angels.
People who are drawn to health care want to focus their life's work on something good: helping patients. Altruism is core to the identity of physicians and virtually everyone else in medicine. Health care leaders cannot succeed without making it explicit that they share and will act on the same aspiration.
Twice during the past several years I watched James J. Mongan, the recently retired CEO of Partners HealthCare, sit quietly while colleagues discussed whether to make a given practice standard across our network of physicians. The first time was January 6, 2005, when we considered whether to mandate the use of electronic medical records. The second was March 6, 2007, when we weighed automatically enrolling patients with heart failure in a disease management program, as opposed to waiting for physicians to refer them.
We believed that both steps would improve patient care, but we hesitated because we knew we'd anger some physicians by curtailing their autonomy. They might leave our network and take their referrals with them. In both instances, though, Mongan brought the discussion to an end by saying, "I really think this is the right thing to do." No one could argue with him, and no one did. In medicine, more than in most other fields, a senior leader's appeal to doing "the right thing" can serve as a trump card.
A senior leader's appeal to doing "the right thing" can overcome physicians' resistance.
Show them the data.
Physicians are quick to challenge performance data and to identify methodological problems with them. But the fact is that they are mesmerized by data and cannot look away. Brent James may be the ultimate health care data swami; for decades he has put the collection and sharing of data on quality and efficiency at the core of Intermountain Healthcare's culture. Rather than make a frontal attack on physicians' autonomy, he wears down their resistance to change by showing them how their practice varies from the norm.
Define strategy around patients' needs.
What doctors know and do is constantly changing, but the needs of patients remain the same. They get diseases, they worry, and they hope to be cured or relieved of suffering. Meeting their needs is what health care is about. As we've seen, the leaders of organizations like the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, and Virginia Mason Medical Center have taken the concept of patients first from an abstraction to a robust organizational strategy.
A shift to value-oriented, performance-driven health care requires doctors to adapt or even reject some ways of working that are embedded in medicine's past. Difficult as this change will be, I am optimistic that the new generation of leaders will achieve it. In truth, they have no choice. Defending the status quo is no longer a viable strategy, even in the near term.


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Strollers Recalled by Kolcraft Due to Fingertip Amputation and Laceration Hazards
U.S. Consumer Product
Safety Commission
www.cpsc.gov Health Canada
Strollers Recalled by Kolcraft Due to Fingertip Amputation and Laceration Hazards
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed. It is illegal to resell or attempt to resell a recalled consumer product.
Name of Product: Contours Options three- and four-wheeled strollers
Units: About 36,000 in the United States and 270 in Canada
Manufacturer: Kolcraft Enterprises Inc., of Chicago Ill.
Hazard: A child or consumers finger can become caught in the opening formed when locking and unlocking the hinge mechanism which is used to adjust the handlebars on the strollers. This presents an amputation and laceration hazard to children and the adults handling the stroller.
Incidents/Injuries: Kolcraft and CPSC have received five reports of injuries involving the hinge mechanism, including reports of three children whose fingertips were amputated and two adults whose fingers were either smashed or lacerated.
Description: This recall involves Kolcraft Contours Options three- and four-wheeled strollers. Strollers included in the recall have model numbers starting with ZL002, ZL005, ZL008, ZL015 and ZL018. On the ZL002 model, the model number and date of manufacture is printed on a sticker above the left wheel. On the ZL005, ZL008, ZL015 and ZL018 models, the model number and date of manufacture is printed on a label sewn into the edge of back of the stroller seat pad. The strollers were manufactured from January 2006 through November 2009 and sold in various color schemes.
Sold at: Juvenile product specialty stores nationwide and online at Amazon.com, Target.com and ToysRUs.com from January 2006 and June 2012 for between $150 and $160.
Manufactured in: China
Remedy: Consumers should immediately stop using the product and contact the company to receive a free repair kit.
Consumer Contact: For additional information, please contact Kolcraft at (800) 453-7673 between 8 a.m. and 6:45 p.m. ET Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. ET Friday, or visit the firms website at www.kolcraft.com
Note: Health Canada's press release is available at http://cpsr-rspc.hc-sc.gc.ca/PR-RP/recall-retrait-eng.jsp?re_id=1629

subset: commoncrawl


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A woman who booked her family an all-inclusive vacation through a travel website will have to pay for the whole $3,500 trip, the province's civil resolution tribunal found.
In a decision rendered last week, tribunal chair Andrea Ritchie found that Salina Yu would have to pay $3,447 for the vacation she booked on Feb. 22, 2018, despite the fact that her credit card company refunded Yu that amount.
For her part, Yu told the tribunal she owes TripLink nothing and claims the company should pay for both the vacation and $1,149 in damages due to the "bad vacation."
Yu told the tribunal she booked an all-inclusive trip to Cuba for her, her husband and her son by mistake and that she meant to book it through a different booking agency.
However, Ritchie found since Yu filled out a long, detailed form to make the booking, her claim a computer virus had caused the error was not valid.
Yu used her credit card to get a refund after TripLink told her the trip was non-refundable, but the family went on the March 2018 vacation anyway.
Ritchie found that because the family did go on the vacation, she is "satisfied she is required to pay for the services she booked and used."
Yu's complaints about the quality of her room and that she and her son got sick during the trip do not involve TripLink, Ritchie wrote.
"In this situation, TripLink did not provide the vacation itself, as it was only a booking agency," the decision read.
Ritchie found TripLink did not negligently misrepresent the vacation Yu purchased and is not responsible for how she felt about its quality.
The tribunal ordered Yu to pay TripLink $3,677 within 15 days of the May 10 decision: $3,447 for the vacation package, $55.37 for pre-judgment interest and $175 in tribunal fees.


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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If you evacuate to a shelter, you should remember that you are also responsible to bring appropriate and important items with you and you must be ready to obey all the shelter rules.
- Water -- one gallon of water per person, per day
- Food -- Non-perishable, needing little or no cooking, such as ready-to-eat meats, fruits, vegetables, and canned juices. High energy foods such as peanut butter, jelly, crackers, granola bars, trail mix, and other snack foods.
- Special dietary foods -- such as diabetic, low salt, liquid diet, and baby food and formula
- Manual can opener
- Eating and drinking utensils including paper plates
- Portable ice chest with ice.
- One complete change of clothing including footwear.
- Sleeping bag, blanket and pillow (cots for elderly) -- cots will not be provided.
- Rain gear and sturdy shoes.
- Washcloth, small towel, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, sanitary napkins, tampons, paper towels, toilet paper, towelettes, etc.
- Medications -- clearly marked with your name, dosage, type of medication, and prescribing physician. You must be able to take all medications by yourself.
- First-aid kit in a waterproof box.
- Clothes, diapers, formula, bottles, nipples, food, blankets
- Name and address of doctors. Name and address of nearest relative not living in area. Identification and valuable papers
- Games, cards, toys, battery powered radios, flashlights (no candles or lanterns), batteries or other reasonable items you may need
Remember to:
- If possible, bathe and eat before you leave home
- Register immediately upon entering the shelter
- Obey shelter rules
- Keep the building safe and sanitary
- Pets (while some shelters do accept pets, make sure the shelter to which you're evacuating accepts them), alcoholic beverages or weapons


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Bonneville2008 Drama | Comedy
When Arvilla Holden promises her husband that she'll cremate him and scatter his ashes, she doesn't expect her promise to be called so soon. Neither does she expect a high-stakes fight with her step-daughter Francine, a Santa Barbara socialite determined to give him a proper burial. Convinced that she has no choice but to surrender the ashes to Francine, Arvilla sets off on a journey from Pocatello, Idaho, to Santa Barbara. Her friends, life-of-the-party Margene and goody-two-shoes Carol, volunteer to go with her for moral support. Expecting to fly, they're surprised when Arvilla picks them up in her '66 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, and shocked when she cruises serenely past the airport and hijacks them on a reluctant road trip that becomes the ride of their lives.


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Earth weaves its own invisible cloak - Polar fountains fill magnetosphere with ions
December 9, 1997
You don't need to stock up on bottled air - the leakage is tiny compared to Earth's atmosphere - but the studies are making us take a new look at 40-year-old assumptions about how the Earth interacts with the space environment.
The new look will be discussed in two papers by Drs. Rick Chappell and Barbara Giles at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Chappell and Giles are plasma physicists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
Starting with the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the first U.S. satellite in 1958, scientists have known that the Earth is surrounded by a cloud of electrified gas. This cloud, called the magnetosphere, is constrained by Earth's magnetic field, compressed by the solar wind to within about 100,000 km of the Earth on the sunward side, and drawn out by the solar wind to more than a million km on the night side.
"The conventional wisdom from the time I was in school 30 years ago," said Chappell, NASA/Marshall's associate director for science, "was that because these ions have so much energy (about 1,000 electron-volts [1 keV], they must come from the sun."
"Why should it be from the ionosphere?" Giles asked, repeating the thinking of the 1960s and '70s. The ionosphere, the top layer of Earth's atmosphere from about 60 km and up, is composed of ionized atoms and molecules. "It's so cold. What they were measuring they assumed came from the solar wind because the energies were right."
|The magnetosphere (left) is a complex structure that changes with the solar wind. Major features include the polar cusp where the magnetic field lines are almost vertical and leave the Earth's poles exposed to space, and a neutral plasma sheet which extends outward from around the magnetic equator. This complex region is being explored by the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) campaign comprising satellites such as Polar (right) which carries the TIDE instrument.
The perception started to change in the mid-1980s following the Aug. 3, 1981, launch of two Dynamics Explorer satellites designed to study the magnetosphere near the Earth. DE-1 carried Chappell's Retarding Ion Mass Spectrometer (RIMS), designed to measure the population of the plasmasphere, a torus or donut of low-energy in the inner magnetosphere.
To Chappell's surprise, the real find was around the north pole where RIMS measured gases flowing upward from the ionosphere into space as DE-1 arced to about 4.6 Earth radii above the pole (the orbit was 464 x 23,370 km [288 x 14,490 mi]).
"The more we measured it," he said, "the more we realized that this was a big source of material." RIMS measured ions of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and nitrogen rising at different speeds and on different trajectories.
Apparently, the particles that slammed into the ionosphere to paint the aurora borealis also energized enough atoms to head spaceward. (The same is true of the south pole where DE-1 made similar observations.) The acceleration mechanism is not fully understood, though. Giles said that very low frequency (VLF) radio waves, emitted in the magnetosphere, may contribute energy.
In 1987, Chappell and the RIMS team published a paper describing the polar ion fountain and described the ionosphere as a "fully adequate source of material for the magnetosphere."
That means that scientists did not need to look to the solar wind to fill the magnetosphere. Earth, they contended, does a good job of supplying all the materials.
RIMS, though, was not fully adequate to resolve the challenge that the science team had laid down. Its orbit only went to about 4 Earth radii (about 25,6000 km [ 16,000 mi]), and it was limited in measuring the environment around it.
RIMS also could not measure the lowest energy ions which would help confirm that the source was the ionosphere and not the solar wind.
It turns out that all spacecraft develop an electrical charge. For high altitude satellites, exposure to sunlight and the passage through plasmas give a satellite a charge of about 5 to 10 eV. A small cloud of ions, a plasma sheath, builds around the spacecraft and repels anything with lower energy.
"We needed a device to neutralize that plasma sheath," Chappell said. "Unless you can do that, you won't ever see those particles."
As luck would have it, NASA/Marshall had proposed building a Thermal Ion Dynamics Experiment (TIDE) for the upcoming Polar spacecraft which would be part of the International Solar Terrestrial Physics campaign.
"Because of the new technologies, we're just at the point where we can make these measurements," Giles said. "Controlling spacecraft potential is something that's fairly new."
TIDE works with a Plasma Source Instrument (PSI), a small ion gun that would squirt enough electrified xenon out to neutralize the spacecraft's plasma sheath.
An earlier SSL story explained why Plasmas Can't Hide from Neutralized TIDE.
"That allows the naturally low-energy ions to get to the spacecraft," Chappell said. While TIDE operates continuously, the plasma source has only been used for two months since Polar was launched because the plasma cloud obscures readings for other instruments.
Polar was launched Feb. 24, 1996, into, as the name suggests, a polar orbit, arcing to 8.9 Earth radii (the orbit is 5,558 x 50,420 km [3,446 x 31,149 mi].)
"And lo and behold, there's all this low-energy plasma flowing out of the atmosphere and into the magnetosphere," Chappell said. Some of the material does fall back to Earth, mostly the heavier ions with low energies, but enough apparently is accelerated to reach into the tail of the magnetosphere.
TIDE expanded on RIMS's measurements and showed that the ion flow starts with very low energies, down to a few tenths of an electron-volt, and that its altitude is twice as high as DE-1's orbit.
"The really incredible thing," Chappell said, "is that if you do a very careful model of the magnetic field and electric field, and then put in 10 eV particles, they go into the plasma sheet, and are energized at least a thousandfold."
|A computer model depicts the path of a hydrogen ion - a free proton - as it arcs away from the northern ionosphere to about as far away as the moon's orbit (384,000 km [240,000 mi]). When it flows into the plasma sheet, it is dramatically energized - from about 5 eV to 5,000 eV. Then it zooms back along the sheet and bounces back and forth (an effect called mirroring) along Earth's magnetic field lines. The simulation only shows about 3-1/2 hours of one of a large number of possible paths. In the top left view (from deep space towards the Earth), the ion would rise out of the screen, dive back, and then zig-zag into the screen as if tracing a series of ribs.
As instrument designs were advancing, so were computers and software which could model what is happening inside the magnetosphere. Dominique Delcourt, then working at NASA/Marshall, developed a program which takes the data from TIDE and shows particles zooming up to 60 Earth radii (almost 400,000 km) into the magnetotail, zipping back along the plasma sheet, and then bouncing back and forth along the Earth's magnetic field lines.
The last effect is called mirroring. As a particle moves along a magnetic field line, its orientation to the field line changes until the particle is repelled towards the other pole. How deep the particle penetrates depends on its angle with respect to the magnetic field. If the angle is aligned with the magnetic field, the particle will hit the upper atmosphere and cause the aurora borealis or australis. If it is at right angles, the particle will mirror and head in the other direction.
"We're not starting with a solar wind particle at 1 keV," Chappell sad, "but with atmospheric particles at a few eV. They make up everything you see up there."
Even if it is not filling the magnetotail, or even contributing a lot of material, the solar wind still plays an important role, Chappell said. It generates the electric field which energizes the tail, and even compresses it so it squirts materials back towards Earth to cause substorms that disrupt satellite communications, interfere with terrestrial power lines, and push the auroras towards lower latitudes.
Part of the challenge in these studies is that most of the magnetotail is made of the same material as the solar wind: protons. Actually, they are called hydrogen ions, but since most hydrogen is made of one proton circled by one electron, a hydrogen ion is just a free proton. And protons don't carry ID cards to tell whether they came from the Sun or the Earth. (Isotope analysis counts the numbers of protons and neutrons in an atom, so it only works on heavier elements.)
Other satellites at present do not carry instruments that can neutralize the plasma sheath as TIDE does. Flights with suborbital rockets can only make limited contributions to solving the question. Giles said: "Rocket flights work on a microscale. TIDE works on a global scale and long-term trends." Rockets also sample the source region for the polar fountain, while TIDE looks at the destinations and what happens to the particles.
Because each orbit measures a single arc over the polar region, Chappell would like to make a series of low-energy measurements, with the plasma source on, to get full coverage of the entire polar region under a range of seasonal conditions and different levels of solar activities.


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(visited by William Eskel)
30-May-2009 --
This was an enjoyable Confluence Point to visit but it took some work in time and driving distance. I started in Albuquerque heading south on I-25 for 75 miles to the town of Socorro where I headed west on highway 60 for a distance of 105 miles to the town of Quemado. Highway 60 is a two lane highway with not a whole lot of traffic. The scenery on this roadway is outstanding. Either side of this highway has some pretty remote country. About 50 miles west of Socorro, you come across the VLA (Very Large Array) of astronomical radio antennas. This is an array of 27 radio antenna dishes each having a diameter of 82 feet. They're located on the vast Plains of San Agustin, an ancient lake bed. As you continue west toward Quemado, you have a gain in elevation which supports coniferous tress like Junipers and Ponderosa pine. The town of Quemado is small with friendly people and a couple of café's which the locals frequent. 20 miles west of Quemado you turn left onto a dirt road marked B007. This is a well maintained dirt road with many cattle grates that run across it. About 10.7 miles in, you'll enter the National Forest and see a boundary sign indicating that. At this point on a topo map the road is designated Forestry road 19. Continue on for 5.8 miles until you hit the junction of forestry roads 19 and 205. Turn right heading west onto Forestry road 205. You'll see a county road designation of B024 just after you turn onto it. After 2.4 miles you'll cross under power lines. Continue for another 4.0 miles until you intersect Longitude 109W. You'll find an open area to park your vehicle just on the west side of Canovas Creek. This is where I began my hike toward the CP. The drive from highway 60 to this point is almost 23 miles but the dirt roads are in good shape. Well, at least this time of year. The drive offers remote views and wildlife aplenty. More on that later!
The surrounding mountaintops are 9000 feet in elevation made up mostly of Ponderosa Pine, and Juniper. The whole area is National Forest and pretty remote. The CP is about 2.0 miles due south as the crow flies but since this crow doesn't fly, it was a bit further. There is a logging road that parallels Canovas Creek that you can follow for about a half mile but then it ends at a dirt pile put there some time ago. The logging road does continue but it's not as evident. It's best to continue following Canovas Creek south for another half mile or so and you'll run into another logging road. This road doesn't see much use, and continues to follow the creek. About a half mile from the CP, you'll need to leave this road and bushwhack your way to the CP as the road and creek head off in a SSW direction. I followed a small dry creek bed up between two forested hillsides for several hundred yards. The CP is located on the right side hill a few hundred feet up from the small creek bed. I might also add that several times while hiking toward the CP, my GPS loss its signal. This was due to the forest canopy and the fact that you're hiking up a draw between two mountain tops. That wasn't a problem however. It was just a matter of stopping long enough for the GPS to regain the signal. Once at the CP area, I had to walk around a little to get the zeroes. I wasn't able to find the cairn that the first visitor built. I did see what looked like the remnant of a cairn however very close to the CP point. As you can see from the photos, the area is heavily forested so views are limited. I took all cardinal photos anyway and sat down for several minutes to enjoy the serenity. I headed back to my vehicle the same way I came in. It was a very enjoyable CP visit.
I saw quite a variety of wildlife. A few miles in from highway 60, I saw a herd of Pronghorn Antelope standing and grazing next to the dirt road. Further down the road in the National Forest area were several Mule deer. While hiking to the CP, I came across several more Mule deer as well as a couple of red tailed hawks. While hiking back from the CP on the second logging road I mentioned, I came across a Black Bear. This encounter was awesome. I first spotted this bear about 150 feet away walking toward me on the logging road. His nose was toward the ground and he had gone down into a slight dip in the road. I jumped behind a large Ponderosa Pine tree a couple of feet off the road. He never saw me and since I was downwind of him, he didn't catch my scent. He continued walking leisurely toward me on the logging road. When he was about 60 feet away, I decided to make my presence known. I did this because he would have practically walked on top of me before spotting me. It's never a good idea to startle a bear when he's 3 feet away from you. I've had 3 other encounters with Black bears and all have been positive experiences. Black bears are very shy and in most cases will run away from humans. But because how close this bear was going to be to me, I stepped out from behind the tree and let out a "hey bear" holler. He stopped dead in his tracks and the look on his face was almost comical. He let out a slight huff and bolted for the woods off to his right. This bear was fairly large and probably weighed between 250 and 300 pounds. This Black bear was also reddish brown in color. Not unusual for Black bears but he was the first brown Black bear I've seen. I let out a couple of more hey bear hollers and gave him a few moments before I continued down the logging road. What an impressive animal.


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One of the big supporters of SOPA, however, is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), which likes to blame piracy for a wide variety of industry ills. Today, in what seems like a hot-headed move, MPAA chairman and CEO Senator Chris Dodd issued a statement blasting companies planning SOPA protests. Read it after the break.
Here's the MPAA statement:
WASHINGTON —The following is a statement by Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) on the so-called "Blackout Day" protesting anti-piracy legislation:
"Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.
It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It's a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.
A so-called "blackout" is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this "blackout" to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy."
via /Film


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Known for its expertise in granola bars, Leclerc Foods USA made an unusual decision when equipping its newest location. Management opted for narrow rather than wide in the choice of its bar line. The company also selected an oven line capable of making both cookies and crackers.
It's all about flexibility at the new Kingsport, TN, facility because that manufacturing approach best serves the private-label customers of the Quebec-based family-owned-and-operated company. "For Kingsport, we wanted a line with high flexibility," explained Denis Leclerc, president and c.e.o., for Leclerc Foods USA, Montgomery, PA, and c.e.o. of the parent company, Groupe Biscuits Leclerc, Inc., St. Augustin de Desmaures , QC. "We already had a high-output line at Hawksbury, ON."
"Customers want unique products," added Jean-Sébastien Leclerc, account director, Leclerc Foods USA, "so flexible lines are necessary to accommodate their needs."
But when picking a location for the new facility, proximity to the market was just as important as flexibility in processing. "We developed a strategy 12 years ago to move production close to our growing markets," Denis Leclerc said. "We recognized that transportation costs would only continue to rise." He observed that for the better part of a half-century, one of the baking industry's major trends has been to consolidate into larger and larger plants to achieve better production economy. "But I feel we may see the reverse happening because of distribution costs," he explained.
Kingsport establishes the fifth production location for Leclerc Foods. "This plant is like two others that we have done recently," Denis Leclerc said. "It is of a size that we are very comfortable running, and we are very pleased with the results."
Two lines produce finished goods, and there is suffi - cient room to add a third production line in the future. For now, Leclerc Foods needed the capacity: Its Montgomery plant is quickly maxing out, according to Denis Leclerc.
AIMING HIGH. Leclerc Foods' owners make no secret of their goal to be the No. 1 private-label snack bar producer in North America. "We have lots of plans," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. "We are well established in Canada, and the US has huge potential for us." In Canada, Leclerc's national brands sell more than its private-label products, with about 10% as co-pack, approximately 30% in private label and the rest in branded products. In the US, it's nearly the reverse, with private-label items accounting for more than 90% of the business.
"We're the new kids on the block," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. "We're out knocking on doors. And we have had a pickup in sales because of the added capacity at Kingsport."
As a business, however, these "new kids" have 105 years of experience in baking, and the family's third, fourth and fifth generations are currently active in management. The company was founded in 1905 by François Leclerc, who was succeeded by his son Donat in 1938. In 1955, Jean-Robert Leclerc, Donat's son, joined, and he became president in 1971. Denis, Jean-Robert's son, moved into management of the company in 1998 and currently acts as president and c.e.o. of the US arm of the business, with Jean-Robert as chairman and responsible for Canadian operations.
Denis' son Jean-Sébastien worked as a supervisor at Montgomery and assisted with startup of Kingsport. He is now account director managing sales to private-label customers, while another son Alex is employed in production at Montgomery and is still in school.
"Although being family-owned means I don't have the same pressures as a c.e.o. of a publicly held company, I do need to please my father," Denis Leclerc observed. "It's a family business, and we're spending the money and investing for the long term. My father, my grandfather, myself — we're all like that."
SITE SELECTION. "Finding the right location and the right building was essential," said Francois Gingras, engineering director, Leclerc Foods, Montgomery, PA. After evaluating several sites, managers chose Kingsport. Because a number of other food producers make Tennessee their home, Denis Leclerc was assured that the new plant would have its choice of suppliers for ingredients and packaging.
The northeast Tennessee community welcomed its new neighbor with open arms. Jean-Marc Lemoine, executive vice-president, Leclerc Foods, Kingsport, cited the enthusiasm of the town's mayor, Dennis Phillips, in helping the company locate a suitable existing building. Also, Food City, the region's main retail grocer, based at nearby Abingdon, VA, began stocking Leclerc's branded products, "so people in the community could know who we are," Denis Leclerc noted.
The company also sited the new plant for efficient transportation to customers throughout the South, as far as Louisiana and Texas. One of its largest accounts has a distribution center in Georgia, only a few hours away. Interstate 81 runs close by the plant, "as it does at Montgomery, too," Denis Leclerc observed.
In June 2008, Leclerc purchased an existing 88,500-sq-ft building and immediately expanded the structure to nearly twice its size by adding a high-rise warehouse and packaging room. The Kingsport plant represents a $30 million economic investment. The facility's office area is physically separated from the production plant by a short, glass-walled walkway.
"The set-up here was different," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc observed. "We modified the building to the equipment, rather than modifying the equipment to the building."
To ready the building, engineers reworked its utilities, particularly electrical services and drainage. "We needed to have drainage access for CIP on as many pieces of equipment as possible," Mr. Gingras said.
"Green" concerns figured into the renovation, too. Good examples are the facility's state-of-the-art chillers and the on-demand lighting system throughout the whole building. The company also generates some savings through reuse of waste heat.
"We have one engineer at Quebec assigned full-time to 'green' issues," Denis Leclerc said. "This is all part of expecting to be in business 30, 40 and 50 years from now."
START-UP TIMETABLE. The first line into the plant was the granola line, both the cereal and bar sections, with bulk operations starting up in January 2009. The cookie/cracker line came in next, simultaneously with the automated warehouse, when the oven was delivered in June 2009. It went onstream in November. Packaging operations were brought up at the end of January. Production schedules vary, although the plant generally run two shifts on cookies or crackers and one on granola bars. The third shift affords time for sanitation and maintenance. When the second shift on granola bars gears up later this summer, plant staffing is expected to expand from its current 75 to a total of 100 to 120 individuals.
The installation and start-up schedule proceeded quickly. "That's the Leclerc way," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. "We have a fast, lean organization. When we look at projects, all the decision-makers are at the same table. This is a big advantage in engineering projects such as Kingsport. And it's how we answer the requirements of the customer."
Denis Leclerc observed that the company maintains longstanding relationships with its main vendors, citing Franz Haas, Sollich, ABF, Bosch and Swisslog in particular. "I was 17 years old when I bought my first piece of Haas equipment," he said some 30 years later.
"We also have a relationship with a company in Quebec that refurbishes equipment," Mr. Gingras explained. "A big part of the success on granola was because we physically installed the equipment in the rebuilder's plant to test the line, then shipped in sections to Kingsport. This saved considerable time."
STAFF READINESS. Nearly all local hires at Kingsport came without experience in food plant operations. The state of Tennessee provided grants to help with training. Mr. Gingras said that specialized training involved HACCP, quality assurance, good manufacturing procedures and the SAP business management software, as well as basic hygiene and sanitation related to work at a food factory. "For training specifically on the equipment, we had experienced operators from our other plants shadow, or mentor, the Kingsport staff," he added.
"For the first two weeks, 10 granola line operators went to Montgomery to train with the operators there," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. "This practice creates links between facilities, among the maintenance, engineering and operations staff, to exchange ideas, to solve problems," Mr. Gingras added.
With five operations to manage, the company installed videoconferencing capability. "It's a great way to get everyone together for meetings and brainstorming," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said.
AUTOMATED, FLEXIBLE. For the most part, Allen-Bradley PLCs equipped with PanelView terminals run the production, packaging and warehousing systems, which are also covered by a SAP system. The plant also uses many Loma and Safeline metal detection systems on all lines.
"What we try to achieve is a highly automated facility, so we have absolute control over quality," Mr. Lemoine said. "We use our people not to work hard but to work smart. They don't have to handle the product; they control the equipment instead."
This level of automation is found throughout the Leclerc plants. "Denis bought our first robot in the late 1970s, and we were the first in North America to operate an automated warehouse," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc observed.
Such automation helped recruit Mr. Gingras to Leclerc. "I previously worked in the high-tech field, and I had 'heard' things about bakeries," he said. He was not sure he was ready for the food industry but changed his mind quickly when he interviewed at Leclerc eight years ago. "What I saw instead was a tremendous level of technology."
The ingredient system installed at Kingsport includes a 110,000-lb flour silo, two liquid silos each capable of holding two loads of 90,000 lb of glucose and maltose. Other raw materials come in totes or small tanks and are pumped or pneumatically conveyed to usage points. Four interior silos contain granola cereal and puffed rice, two for each intermediate material. Automated Ingredient Systems Ltd. and Semco made the overhead ingredient supply hoppers above various mixers.
The plant has an on-site quality assurance lab, although the more complicated microbiology tests are sent to Quebec. "One centralized lab handles all the plants on such matters," Denis Leclerc said. "All other tests are done locally."
DESIGN TARGETS. Plant margins depend on running at optimum speeds with minimum waste. That need shaped the choice of technology for Kingsport. "As a company, we started with small-capacity granola lines," Mr. Gingras explained. "Then we went to huge lines, 36-to 40-in. wide at other plants, but we learned that such a big line was really too big to switchover easily. It was tough to manage production schedules.
"The idea here was to go smaller but to run the line at a speed to do full shifts of production without changeovers," he said. "In the future, we will continue to use the small, narrower lines and take advantage of their flexibility."
The bar line at Kingsport outputs 450 pieces per minute. "This allows us to go for smaller contracts," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. "Previously, 25,000 cases per year was our bottom limit, but we can accept smaller jobs now. The narrower lines can be more effective for more customers."
GRANOLA BASIS AND PREP. The granola blend for production of bars consists basically of oats and syrup, mixed and tumbled to achieve an even coating. The mixture flows down into an Aeroglide dryer where a spreader lays down a thick bed that dries under heated conditions for several minutes. At output, the granola blend moves into super sacks and tote bins, some of which are sent to the Montgomery and Quebec plants, while others supply the internal silos on the bar line.
Popped or puffed rice is also made inplant. A dough of rice flour and water is fed into an APV Baker extruder, which cooks the mixture and forces it through a die. The reduction in pressure at the die plate puffs the rice, and a knife cuts it off into small pieces. The company makes several sizes of puffed rice, according to the needs of various customers. The rice cools as it is pneumatically transferred to storage.
Leclerc prepares its syrup in-house using two 5,000-lb mixing tanks and one 3,500-lb holding tank by the granola line. The syrup is generally made a day ahead to allow proper hydration.
"This is the most complicated granola line we run," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc said. The line is capable of applying a layer of fruit leather on top of the bars, a process no other Leclerc plant has.
A prep station located on a mezzanine above the head of the line houses the cooking system for the leather. Ingredients are mixed, cooked, pasteurized and vacuumevaporated to achieve the proper Brix and texture.
In the meantime on the main floor, the granola ingredients come together in a horizontal mixer. The mass is dumped into a feed hopper that meters it onto a moving conveyor belt. The layer passes between two large-diameter rolls. If formulations call for chocolate chips, dispensers above the line meter chips onto the granola, and a section of stiff metal fingers work the chips into the sheet. Another set of gauging rollers compress the sheet so it holds together. A third roller station can be engaged to apply a layer of caramel, as required.
When formulations call for a layer of fruit, the cooked leather feeds automatically onto the top of a large-diameter chilled roll, which deposits the leather as a continuous layer over the bed of granola. The sheet is sprinkled with a small amount of granola.
CUT, COOLED, ACCUMULATED. A trip through a Sollich tempering tunnel cools the granola sheet to ready it for slicing. The cutting rolls separate the sheet into long, continuous strips that proceed to a spreader. Leclerc engineers redesigned the strip spreader to accommodate the extremely tacky product so that the strips' long edges would not stick together.
Strips pass through another metal detector before they enter the ultrasonic guillotine cutter. This system vibrates a vertical blade at ultrasonic speeds, cleanly cutting the strips into individual bars. "It's actually the vibrations that do the cutting, so there is no sticking to the blade," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc explained.
Bars pass through an APV Baker enrober for a bottom coating, and a drizzle is applied on the top by a Woody Associates string icer. They enter another cooling tunnel to temper the chocolate or compound coating before packaging.
A common problem in bar manufacturing is the need to accumulate products during temporary stoppages. Not satisfied with the usual last-in, first-out "layered" system, Leclerc adopted a new approach, which Mr. Gingras described as a "trombone" design. A continuous belt is installed on parallel tracks with a 180° turn at the halfway point. The belt accepts bars and moves them from the tunnel to the infeed sections of the packaging lines. When products must be accumulated, the whole assembly (parallel tracks, belt and turn) automatically lengthens, thus retaining first-in, first-out sequencing.
"This method of accumulating helps maintain consistent product weight and simplifies traceability," Mr. Gingras explained.
BAKE AND PACK. Seeking to optimize the Franz Haas tunnel oven installed at Kingsport for production of both cookies and crackers, the company opted for a combination dough makeup system from the same vendor. Accepting dough from a Peerless horizontal mixer, a Haas chunker feeds it in blocks to the cut-sheet laminator or the rotary cookie depositor. The makeup line incorporates a 3-station sheeting system and rotary moulders and cutters, which can be bypassed for cookie production."This is a very flexible line," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc observed. Formed dough pieces enter the tunnel oven, which is walled off from the rest of the production shop to isolate excess heat. After baking, the cookies or crackers encounter a short spiral cooling conveyor and then move onto another long conveyor for additional cooling and hardening, assisted by fans mounted above the belt carrying the products.
Packaging operations allow considerable flexibility to suit the variety of bagging, cartoning and casing styles required by customers. These include robotic systems such as the Bosch delta-style carton fillers and ABF case packers and Bosch Palomoa vision-guided cartoners, as well as Hayssen and TNA-Robag vertical form/fill/seal baggers and Bradman Lake horizontal f/f/s wrappers and carton erectors. Markem date coding systems mesh with Loma checkweighers to ensure accurate weights and codes. Filled cartons proceed through automatic closers and into cases. A Fanuc robot stacks the cases onto pallets for transport into the warehouse.
The Swisslog automated warehouse consists of three aisles, six racks high, supplied by three cranes. The shuttle carts can load and unload on both sides of the racking, and the warehouse accommodates incoming ingredient supplies, product-in-process and finished products. "We have automated storage at all our factories," Jean-Sébastien Leclerc explained, noting that the Quebec plant's system with its four cranes and 12 rack levels is three times larger than the Kingsport installation.
The plant includes a wash area for implements and mobile equipment. All totes are steam-cleaned before being returned to the vendors.
EAST AND/OR WEST. Leclerc Foods and its parent company Groupe Biscuits Leclerc sell products in more than 20 countries worldwide. "Our strategy is to take a territory approach, and we examine that on a yearly basis," Denis Leclerc said. With Kingsport well launched, he is already thinking about where the next plant will be located. The United Kingdom is one option, but so is the West Coast.
Leclerc currently supplies the UK with GM-free products produced in Canada. The fruit-filled bars made at Kingsport have good potential for this market. "More Europeans visit North America than ever before, and they tend to view US products as trendy," Denis Leclerc observed. "They are more ready to try different tastes, especially in the past five or six years. But I was also thinking that the Pacific Northwest has excellent opportunities for us."
It's been a good year for Leclerc Foods. "Our operations are doing well," Denis Leclerc said. "We are on a good track."


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28. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
28. Novimus autem quod iis qui diligunt Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum, iis scilicet qui secundum propositum vocati sunt sancti.
29. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
29. Quoniam quos præcognovit etiam præfinivit conformes imaginis Filii sui, ut sit ipse primogenitus inter multos fratres:
30. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.
30. Quos vero præfinivit, eos et vocavit; et quos vocavit, eos etiam justificavit; et quos justificavit, eos etiam glorificavit.
28. And we know, etc. He now draws this conclusion from what had been said, that so far are the troubles of this life from hindering our salvation, that, on the contrary, they are helps to it. It is no objection that he sets down an illative particle, for it is no new thing with him to make somewhat an indiscriminate use of adverbs, and yet this conclusion includes what anticipates an objection. For the judgment of the flesh in this case exclaims, that it by no means appears that God hears our prayers, since our afflictions continue the same. Hence the Apostle anticipates this and says, that though God does not immediately succour his people, he yet does not forsake them, for by a wonderful contrivance he turns those things which seem to be evils in such a way as to promote their salvation. If any one prefers to read this verse by itself, as though Paul proceeded to a new argument in order to show that adversities which assist our salvation, ought not to be borne as hard and grievous things, I do not object. At the same time, the design of Paul is not doubtful: "Though the elect and the reprobate are indiscriminately exposed to similar evils, there is yet a great, difference; for God trains up the faithful by afflictions, and thereby promotes their salvation."
But we must remember that Paul speaks here only of adversities, as though he had said, "All things which happen to the saints are so overruled by God, that what the world regards as evil, the issue shows to be good." For though what Augustine says is true, that even the sins of the saints are, through the guiding providence of God, so far from doing harm to them, that, on the contrary, they serve to advance their salvation; yet this belongs not to this passage, the subject of which is the cross.
It must also be observed, that he includes the whole of true religion in the love of God, as on it depends the whole practice of righteousness.
Even to them who according to his purpose, etc. This clause seems to have been added as a modification, lest any one should think that the faithful, because they love God, obtain by their own merit the advantage of deriving such fruit from their adversities. We indeed know that when salvation is the subject, men are disposed to begin with themselves, and to imagine certain preparations by which they would anticipate the favor of God. Hence Paul teaches us, that those whom he had spoken of as loving God, had been previously chosen by him. For it is certain that the order is thus pointed out, that we may know that it proceeds from the gratuitous adoption of God, as from the first cause, that all things happen to the saints for their salvation. Nay, Paul shows that the faithful do not love God before they are called by him, as in another place he reminds us that the Galatians were known of God before they knew him. (Galatians 4:9.) It is indeed true what Paul intimates, that afflictions avail not to advance the salvation of any but of those who love God; but that saying of John is equally true, that then only he is begun to be loved by us, when he anticipates us by his gratuitous love.
But the calling of which Paul speaks here, has a wide meaning, for it is not to be confined to the manifestation of election, of which mention is presently made, but is to be set simply in opposition to the course pursued by men; as though Paul had said, — "The faithful attain not religion by their own efforts, but are, on the contrary led by the hand of God, inasmuch as he has chosen them to be a peculiar people to himself." The word purpose distinctly excludes whatever is imagined to be adduced mutually by men; as though Paul had denied, that the causes of our election are to be sought anywhere else, except in the secret good pleasure of God; which subject is more fully handled in the first chapter to the Ephesians, and in the first of the Second Epistle to Timothy; where also the contrast between this purpose and human righteousness is more distinctly set forth. 268268 Hammond has a long note on the expression, κατὰ πρόθεσιν and quotes Cyril of Jerusalem, Clemens of Alexandria, and Theophylact, as rendering the words, "according to their purpose," that is, those who love God, — a construction of itself strange, and wholly alien to the whole tenor of the passage, and to the use of the word in most other instances. Paul has never used the word, except in one instance, (2 Timothy 3:10,) but with reference to God's purpose or decree, — see Romans 9:11; Ephesians 1:11; Ephesians 3:11; 2 Timothy 1:9. It seems that Chrysostom, Origen, Theodoret, and other Fathers, have given the same singularly strange explanation. But in opposition to these, Poole mentions Ambrose, Augustine, and even Jerome, as regarding "the purpose" here as that of God: in which opinion almost all modern Divines agree.
Grotius very justly observes, that κλητοὶ, the called, according to the language of Paul, mean those who obey the call, (qui vocanti obediunt) and refers to Romans 1:6; 1 Corinthians 1:24; Revelation 17:14. And Stuart says that the word has this meaning throughout the New Testament, except in two instances, Matthew 20:16. and Matthew 22:14, where it means, invited. He therefore considers it as equivalent to ἔκλεκτοι, chosen, elected, or true Christians. — Ed. Paul, however, no doubt made here this express declaration, — that our salvation is based on the election of God, in order that he might make a transition to that which he immediately subjoined, namely, that by the same celestial decree, the afflictions, which conform us to Christ, have been appointed; and he did this for the purpose of connecting, as by a kind of necessary chain, our salvation with the bearing of the cross.
29. For whom he has foreknown, etc. He then shows, by the very order of election, that the afflictions of the faithful are nothing else than the manner by which they are conformed to the image of Christ; and that this was necessary, he had before declared. There is therefore no reason for us to be grieved, or to think it hard and grievous, that we are afflicted, unless we disapprove of the Lord's election, by which we have been foreordained to life, and unless we are unwilling to bear the image of the Son of God, by which we are to be prepared for celestial glory.
But the foreknowledge of God, which Paul mentions, is not a bare prescience, as some unwise persons absurdly imagine, but the adoption by which he had always distinguished his children from the reprobate. 269269 Much controversy has been about the meaning of the verb προέγνω, in this place. Many of the Fathers, such as Jerome, Chrysostom, and Theodoret, regarded it in the sense of simple prescience, as having reference to those who would believe and obey the gospel. The verb is found only in this place, and in the following passages, Romans 11:2; Acts 26:5; 1 Peter 1:20; 2 Peter 3:17. In the second, and in the last passage, it signifies merely a previous knowledge or acquaintance, and refers to men. In 1 Peter 1:20, it is applied to Christ as having been "foreordained," according to our version, "before the foundation of the world." In this Epistle, Romans 11:2, it refers to God, — "God hath not cast away his people whom he foreknew;" and according to the context, it means the same as elected; for the Apostle speaks of what God did "according to the election of grace," and not according to foreseen faith.
The noun derived from it is found in two places, Acts 2:23, and 1 Peter 1:2. In the first it evidently means decree, foreordination, and in the second, the same; where it is said, that those addressed by the Apostle were elected, "according to the foreknowledge of God, κατὰ πρόγνωσιν Θεοῦ, through the sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience;" they were not then elected, according to God's foreknowledge or foreordination, because of their obedience. This entirely subverts the gloss put on the verb in this passage.
The usual meaning given to the verb here is fore-approved, or chosen. Grotius, Turrettin, and others, consider that γινώσκω has the same meaning with the verb ידע, in Hebrew, which is sometimes that of approving or favoring, or regarding with love and approbation. So the compound verb may be rendered here, "whom he fore-approved, or foreknew," as the objects of his choice: and this idea is what alone comports with the rest of the passage.
Stuart prefers another meaning, and that which it seems to have in 1 Peter 1:20, "foreordained." He says that γινώσκω means sometimes to will, to determine, to ordain, to decree, and brings examples from Josephus, Plutarch, and Polybius. Then the compound verb would be here, "whom he foreordained," or foredetermined. — Ed. In the same sense Peter says, that the faithful had been elected to the sanctification of the Spirit according to the foreknowledge of God. Hence those, to whom I have alluded, foolishly draw this inference, — That God has elected none but those whom he foresaw would be worthy of his grace. Peter does not in deed flatter the faithful, as though every one had been elected on account of his merit; but by reminding them of the eternal counsel of God, he wholly deprives them of all worthiness. So Paul does in this passage, who repeats by another word what he had said before of God's purpose. It hence follows, that this knowledge is connected with God's good pleasure; for he foreknew nothing out of himself, in adopting those whom he was pleased to adopt; but only marked out those whom he had purposed to elect.
The verb προορίζειν, which some translate, to predestinate, is to be understood according to what this passage requires; for Paul only meant, that God had so determined that all whom he has adopted should bear the image of Christ; nor has he simply said, that they were to be conformed to Christ, but to the image of Christ, that he might teach us that there is in Christ a living and conspicuous exemplar, which is exhibited to God's children for imitation. The meaning then is, that gratuitous adoption, in which our salvation consists, is inseparable from the other decree, which determines that we are to bear the cross; for no one can be an heir of heaven without being conformed to the image of the only-begotten Son of God.
That he may be, or, that he might be, the first-born, etc.; for the Greek infinitive, εἶναι, may be rendered in these two ways; but I prefer the first rendering. But in mentioning Christ's primogeniture, Paul meant only to express this, — that since Christ possesses a pre-eminence among the children of God, he is rightly given to us as a pattern, so that we ought to refuse nothing which he has been pleased to undergo. Hence, that the celestial Father may in every way bear testimony to the authority and honor which he has conferred on his own Son, he will have all those whom he adopts to be the heirs of his kingdom, to be conformed to his example. Though indeed the condition of the godly is apparently various, as there is a difference between the members of the same body, there is yet a connection between every one and his own head. As then the first-born sustains the name of the family, so Christ is placed in a state of pre-eminence not only that he might excel in honor among the faithful, but also that he might include all under him himself under the common name of brotherhood.
30. And whom he has foredetermined, (præfinivit,) them has he also called, etc. That he might now by a clearer proof show how true it is that a conformity with the humiliating state of Christ is for our good, he adopts a graduating process, by which he teaches us, that a participation of the cross is so connected with our vocation, justification, and, in short, with our future glory, that they can by no means be separated.
But that readers may better understand the Apostle's meaning, it may be well to repeat what I have already said, — that the word foredetermine does not refer to election, but to that purpose or decree of God by which he has ordained that the cross is to be borne by his people; and by declaring that they are now called, he intimates, that God had not kept concealed what he had determined respecting them, but had made it known, that they might resignedly and humbly submit to the condition allotted to them; for calling here is to be distinguished from secret election, as being posterior to it. That none then may make this objection — that it appears to no one what lot God has appointed for him, the Apostle says, that God by his calling bears an evident testimony respecting his hidden purpose. But this testimony is not only found in the outward preaching of the gospel, but it has also the power of the Spirit connected with it; for the elect are there spoken of, whom God not only addresses by the outward word, but whom he also inwardly draws.
Justification may fitly be extended to the unremitted continuance of God's favor, from the time of our calling to the hour of death; but as Paul uses this word throughout the Epistle, for gratuitous imputation of righteousness, there is no necessity for us to deviate from this meaning. What Paul indeed had in view was to show that a more precious compensation is offered to us, than what ought to allow us to shun afflictions; for what is more desirable than to be reconciled to God, so that our miseries may no longer be tokens of a curse, nor lead us to ruin?
He then immediately adds, that those who are now pressed down by the cross shall be glorified; so that their sorrows and reproaches shall bring them no loss. Though glorification is not yet exhibited except in our Head, yet as we in a manner behold in him our inheritance of eternal life, his glory brings to us such assurance respecting our own glory, that our hope may be justly compared to a present possession.
We may add, that Paul, imitating the style of the Hebrew language, adopts in these verbs the past instead of the present tense. 270270 Turrettin gives somewhat a different reason: "Paul speaks of these things as past, because they are as already done in God's decree, and in order to show the certainty of their accomplishment." A continued act is no doubt what is meant, according to this import, "Those whom God now, consistently with his purpose, exercises under the cross, are called and justified, that they may have a hope of salvation, so that nothing of their glory decays during their humiliation; for though their present miseries deform it before the world, yet before God and angels it always shines forth as perfect." What Paul then means by this gradation is, That the afflictions of the faithful, by which they are now humbled, are intended for this end — that the faithful, having obtained the glory of the celestial kingdom, may reach the glory of Christ's resurrection, with whom they are now crucified.
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text:
Monday, March 13, 2006
Those Italian-style "Ricotta Cookies" are very different to the American or English ones we know as they are very soft and moist. The ricotta gives them a smooth and fluffy texture that could be described as heavenly! Their taste is delicat and original; aromas of nutmeg and lemon are seldom mixed together, although they blend perfectly. And the frosting confers them an added tinge of lemon that is not unpleasant at all...
Their yummiliciousness is just not comparableto any cookie I have eaten so far. Those cookies are unique little jewels that are packed with aromas waiting to explode like firewoks in your mouth. "Ricotta Cookies" are fresh and spicy, light and dreamlike... I call them "angel cookies"!
Believe me, those pretty and delicious little cookies will be a hit with everyone!!!
The recipe was taken from www.cookingvillage.com and rearranged by myself after having googled around the net...
125g (1/2 Cup) Unsalted butter
220g (1 Cup) Castor sugar
1 Lemon, zested and pressed
1 Egg (~50g), beaten
250g (1/2 lb) Ricotta cheese
300g (2 Cups) Plain white flour
1 Tsp Baking powder
3/4 Tsp Baking soda
1/4 Tsp Ground nutmeg
A pinch of salt
240g (1 1/2 Cup) Powder sugar (icing or confectioner's sugar)
3 Tbs Milk (and more if needed)
A few drops of lemon extract
Coloured candy sprinkles
1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).
2. Mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, nutmeg and salt together.
3. Cream the butter and sugar together.
4. Add the lemon zest and juice, mix well with the help of a whisk.
5. Add the egg and beat well again.
6. Add the ricotta cheeese and beat until well blended, about 1 minute.
7. Slowly incorporate the dry ingredients, mixing only until blended.
8. Drop rounded teaspoonsful on a paper baking sheet.
9. Bake for 12-14 minutes in the middle of the oven.
10. Cool on wire rack.
11. Mix together the powder sugar, milk and lemon extract in order to obtain a brushable frosting.
12. Brush each cookie with the mixture and top with the colour candy sprinkles.
13. Leave the cookies on a wire rack until the frosting has set.
The ricotta cookies should be pale white and golden underneath, so don't overbake them!
Instead of brushing them with frosting, you can just simply sprinkle the cookies with powder sugar.
Serving suggestions:
Those cookies are absolutely perfect when eaten with a good cup of coffee or tea.
(Ricotta -Pic by www.cmlarioorientale.it)
14 comments:
Ils sont très mignons! Et quelle présentation amusante! :-)ReplyDelete
ELVIRA: Merci!ReplyDelete
- Anonymous6:50 AM, March 15, 2006
Very interesting...cookies with ricotta...never heard of it...but it sounds good! Might try them some day.ReplyDelete
LINDA: They are very good indeed! Try them once and you'll be converted to their unique taste!...ReplyDelete
- Anonymous3:25 PM, November 18, 2007
I would like to make these Italian Ricotta Cookies in a few days. Could you please confirm the amount of ricotta to be added is it indeed 1/2 pound? According to my calculations 1/2 pound of ricotta, is just a smidge less than 1 cup of ricotta. (Sorry, I don't have any way of measuring out by grams).ReplyDelete
ANONYMOUS: Thanks for passing by! 250g/1lb ricotta should give about 1 1/4 cups... I hope that this info will help and that your cookies will turn out well! Cheers, Rosa.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous2:25 PM, November 25, 2007
Hi Rosa.ReplyDelete
Thanks for your prompt reply. I made your Italian Ricotta Cookies using 1 1/4 cups ricotta as you advised. I served the cookies to my guests on Thanksgiving Day and everyone absolutely loved them. I'll be sure to make them again for Christmas. Thank you for sharing this wonderful recipe.
Sincerely, Gina
- Anonymous8:29 PM, November 29, 2007
Can you substitute for the lemon zest & juice? How about using vanilla extract in place of lemon in the icing? Thanks..ReplyDelete
GINA: Thanks for the message! I am glad that they turned out well and were very successful! Have a wonderful Christmas and eat well ;-P! Cheers, Rosa.ReplyDelete
ANONYMOUS: Thanks for the comment! I guess that you could substitute the lemon juice & zest by sour cream/buttermilk and vanilla extract. I guess that it is important to replace the lemon juice by something sour. Of course, you could very well use vanilla extract or marple flavoring in place of lemon oil (in the icing). I hope that I was able to help you a little...
i have extra ricotta so i'll be trying thedse!ReplyDelete
- Anonymous12:58 AM, December 22, 2010
Does anyone know why the icing on my ricotta cookies are wet? How do I store them?ReplyDelete
ANONYMOUS: Sorry to hear that your icing is wet. Keep the cookies at room temperature in a cookie box. If you keep them in the fridge, then the icing will get humid... I hope that helps. Thanks for passing by and for your interest in my blog! Cheers.ReplyDelete
they are very delizioso!!..they melt in your mouth..one problem: mine came out brown instead of white in color..any suggestions?ReplyDelete
could it be that i used allspice instead of nutmeg?
ENRICA: Thanks for passing by and for the comment! I'm glad you liked those cookies! Mmmmhhhh, strange... I don't think it has anything to do with the spice you used. My impression is that your oven could be a little too hot. Next time, try lowering the temperature a little.ReplyDelete


text:
Dave on the Low5 in the cold smoke of the Brevent. photo courtesy of Ross Hewitt
"I didn't know La Sportiva made Ski's, how are they?"
Seems to be something that I get asked a lot when I take MY Lo5's out in Chamonix.
Up until last year I didn't know they made ski's either. Everyone knows them for their boots and we've all seen the ridiculously light Ski Boots sat in the shops looking very racey. But Ski's? In an already vast market of ski's you need to find a good neash and do it well to get anywhere and I'm happy to say that quality wise they are very good.
Let me first describe my skiing and what I look for. I live in Chamonix which is of course a haven for steep and technical descents which are primarily human powered with the exception of the 'big pheriques'. Therefore there are two different days that I usually have in Cham. If there is fresh then the norm is to lap the Midi or the Grande Montet until I can't stand. These days require big ski's, stiff boots and a powerful approach to skiing. We don't get that many days like that unfortunately. This brings me on to the other type of skiing we have where you head out with a bag full of what you think might be useful i.e ropes, poons, axe(s) skins and you head to either a pre-planned objective or and area where you think it might be good… For days like this you need a predictable, stable ski with good edge grip and enough float to get you through the 3 day old pow. They need to be stiff enough to plow the crud and crust and light enough that you can rinse out 1200m+ of vert and still have enough in you to ski back to town. Finding a Ski which does it all is tough I agree so compromise needs to be made however I think I might of found my perfect partner with the Lo5's for days like these…..
Most of the people I ski with will run a 100m waisted ski as their touring ski. We all like to enjoy the down with big turns and airs and we don't have time for mincy skiing on floppy Rando planks. We want to go deep into the massif in a day and ski out fast so we can get back to our homes to re-hydrate, refuel and plan for the next day.
This past week in Cham I have exclusively skied on the La Sportiva Lo5 to give them a proper test. I was skiing for 4 days around work and here's what I did.
Day 1: Two laps of the Aiguille du midi via the Valley Blanche/Envers du plan. Deep, fresh powder and an icey, Bumpy track back to town. A good day- Perhaps better to have been on a bigger pow ski but still the Lo5's put a smile on my face and gave me a good day out for sure. They handled the bumps very well and kept me on the straight and narrow (track).
Day 2: Y Couloir on the Aiguille d'Argentiere. Steep (up to 50 degrees) decent in perfect cold snow. 1200m up and 2650m down in a day up to 3900m. I felt super confortable and secure on the Lo5's putting in jump turns in the steep and narrow couloir and they felt light on my back during the hike up. Skiing the Grande Montet homerun (red run) in the failing/flat light was a breeze. They handled very well on the piste with good carve ability.
Day 3: Col hopping in the Aiguille Rouge. We wanted to ski a steep north facing couloir but ended up skiing a sloppy south face with variable snow and some fun drops to get through the rock bands. The ski's handled all the messy snow well. They delt with the cunderballs, debris, powder, semi corn and icey track in equal measures and again I appreciated the low weight as we spent most of the day going up.
Day 4: South Couloir of the Aiguille De l'Eboulement. 1500m of vert in a day and 2250m down in variable snow, which was mostly breakable crust. Tricky skiing for sure and not really that pleasant. Only a massive reverse camber ski would have been fun on the way down. I still felt glad to have the Lo5's on my feet as they were predictable to turn on the steeps and the early tip rise helped no end in the crust.
All in all a pretty full on week in Cham. All kinds of snow experienced and I'm still loving the Lo5's as my touring ski. As a light and reliable SKIMO tool these pretty much hit the nail on the head and would be a good companion to any Climber or Ski Mountaineers/ Tourer who needs a reliable and predictable yet fun ski to rip the resort, pow, steeps and bumps with ease.
Other info:
I mounted My Plum Guides 1cm forward from the line with quiver killer inserts. I have the 178 and my set up is exactly 4Kg in total.
editors note:
Dave and my buddy Jerry, a ski patroler in Montana, have been ripping and raving on the Lo5s this season.
Jerry's comments on the Lo5.
Dane -
Snow here has been so thin I have only skied them once (but am going for three days starting saturday). I took them up to Bridger on a day with 6-8 inches of very cold powder (@0-10F) and a firm base. Skied bumps, pow, chop, nd a few rocks. Was skiing with a former US Team member and his son so we were mostly hauling ass.
I didn't know when I ordered these that they were the same dimensions as my 165 Kilowatts (the sportivas are 178) so I have a good comparison although the BDs are around five years old. Both have dynafits mounted.
My first impression is that I now get it when they say the early rise skis seem short. These feel about the same as the BDs - not a bad thing except for steep bumps where a longer ski would be better. That sounds counterintuitive but this ski in a 188 would really smooth out the fore and aft. Even with a more traditional boot (I was skiing the green dynafit), you just can't get that tip to do much. Opposite on the powder and chop where they require no effort. They are more fun than my Fischer Wateas at 114 at the waist. More control and feel. No issues on the packed and I could carve pretty easy with an upright over the feet stance (I ski a lot like Pierce and Arnold - not as well but standing pretty upright).
As a one quiver ski I think they would be fine if you kept them out of the firm bumps (did I mention these were really firm bumps). Since I have no interest in skiing that sort of terrain I would ski them every day at BS. Would like to try the 188s. I patrol on a big Dynastar Legend at 188 and really enjoy them and think the Low 5 in that length would be stellar especially at about a third the weight. I think the sidecut is the new standard for an all round ski and have no problem keeping an edge in firm spring snow.
I've never skied the DPS so can't say how them compare but based on talking with those that own them they either come with a lifetime supply of cocaine or are some of the best skiing boards out there. (DB sez: Its true, the DPS do ski well ;-) For me and how and where I like to ski the Lo5 is going to be fine. I spend more and more time in the BC taking tours and skiing open faces and tight chutes. This ski is going to replace my BDs, save weight, and give more float skinning and skiing - what's not to like?
Here in the PNW, on Cascade Cement much of the time I have been using the Hi5 for the last two seasons going on three now. I still haven't found anything to replace them and I have a a few more pairs of skis now. So it isn't without trying. More on the Hi5 here: