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I am honoured to host this guest post by Fern Champion. Fern is next week giving evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sexual Violence, speaking from her own experience about the widespread problems in accessing Rape Crisis centres. This is Fern's story.
I can't count the number of times I've tried to do this. To tell my story and have it listened to. To engage with police, insurance companies, support services, employers, and friends across the globe.
"I need to talk to the police" I said to the girl working on the reception of the hostel I was staying at in Kuala Lumpur, as I walked in clutching my bra in my hands.
"I've been raped" I said on the phone to the British Embassy Consulate the next day, after spending the last 24 hours either with the police or in hospital.
"I've missed my flight because when I should have been boarding, I was being examined by a surgeon" I said to my airline and travel insurance company.
"I think I had my drink spiked and had to have a pregnancy test" I said to my friend who I sent various incomprehensible messages to the night before.
So here it is, one more time. My story, which really isn't just my story.
On the 18th/early hours of the 19th July 2016, I was raped by a man whilst I was heavily intoxicated. He first assaulted me whilst I was unconscious on his couch, and then he carried me to his bed where he forced his penis into my mouth, vagina and anus throughout the night, all while I was passing in and out of consciousness. Everytime I protested, he told me that he could "really fucking hurt me". It wasn't difficult to pin me down.
My assault occurred in Kuala Lumpur. I was 3 months in to my cliche 'gap year' and I had a series of flights booked the day after to get me to New Zealand, where I would be living for a year.
In August 2016, I arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, and met with the Wellington Rape Crisis. I was put in contact with them through the British Consulate Office in Kuala Lumpur, and they immediately put me on their waiting list for support and treatment.
I spent the next year trying to rebuild my life on the other side of the world, having arrived in New Zealand with 26p left of my overdraft. I spent a lot of that time working, though I got to travel too. I fought against my insurance company for six solid months, though eventually I won. I can't make out that whole year was terrible, because it wasn't. I got to live and work in one of the most beautiful countries on earth. I furthered my career, built lasting friendships and even got to work with the WRC on publishing a 'Survival Guide' for travellers who are assaulted overseas, but I had to do all that whilst processing what happened to me with no support. I spent the entirety of my year in New Zealand on Wellington Rape Crisis' waiting list.
In August 2017, I arrived back in the UK and contacted both East and South London Rape Crisis centres but was told that I could not get onto the waiting list at either. In September I moved to Tooting and was told by SLRC to try again in January 2018. That month, I also contacted my local MP, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan to discuss the lack of access to support I have been facing since my attack over a year earlier and the impact that must be having on survivors all over the country. She wrote to the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, and asked what steps his Department is taking to provide support to survivors of sexual assault when services are over-subscribed. He replied that "allocations for Sexual Assault Referral Centres have increased this year". She also asked the Secretary of State for Justice, David Gauke, what he is doing to reduce general access times to rape crisis centres. He responded with "In 2017/18 the MoJ directly allocated around £7.2m as a contribution to 97 Rape Support Centres across England and Wales"
And yet in March 2018, I was told once again that South London Rape Crisis waiting list remains closed.
This really isn't just my story. In March 2017, the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 646,000 of adults aged 16 to 59 experienced sexual assault in the previous 12 months. 2017/18 data published by Rape Crisis England and Wales shows that 78,461 individuals accessed Rape Crisis specialist services. The CSEW have not yet published their data for the same period but I think it can be safely assumed that the numbers will remain proportionately similar, meaning that nearly 88% of those sexually assaulted will not have accessed Rape Crisis specialist services. It's going to take a lot to convince me that that 88% have been able to access support elsewhere, seeing as more and more services are having to shut down their waiting lists.
As such, 17 July 2018 is going to be a big day for me. Not only will it nearly be the two year anniversary since my attack, but I will also be addressing the All Party Parliamentary Group for Sexual Violence, who will be discussing the funding landscape for specialist sexual violence services. Because I, and everybody else in that 88%, deserve answers.
Why should we be forced to wait months, if not years, on end for sustained support to help us process a trauma which was not our fault in the first place? Why should we endure ongoing nightmares or total emotional oblivion as we continue to sleepwalk through a world that continuously tells us it was our fault, with the knowledge that only 7% of our attackers will be convicted relentlessly pounding our skulls? I reported my attack as soon as I was safe. The police were provided with my medical report, clothes, access to CCTV footage of two different bars, witness statements which corroborated mine, GPS data of where my phone tracked me during the hours of my attack, and still my attacker was not caught. Why?
Why did they ask me what was I wearing? How much I'd had to drink? How many men I've previously slept with? Why I didn't fight? Why I couldn't remember the details of what happened when I was unconscious?
Why will they never get to ask my attacker why did you rape her?
This government, namely Jeremy Hunt and David Gauke, seem to think they have done enough to help women like me. I am here to tell them they are wrong because somehow, despite all of this, I am one of the lucky ones. In March this year, I was finally able to access support through my employer when I very rapidly crashed through rock bottom and found myself unable to go to work, or even leave the house. How many others in that 88% who have been unable to access Rape Crisis do you think can say the same? As a university educated, white female with a shiney corporate job in the city, I have been protected by a certain amount of privilege which has allowed me to get me to where I am today. What about everybody else? This government, like so many before them, is failing them all.
It has long been known that 1 in 5 women will be raped, or nearly raped in her lifetime. It is now abundantly clear that the vast majority of those women will not be able to access support services crucial to their recovery. Enough is enough. We all have a duty to fight this so I am asking you now, write/tweet/send an owl to your local MP and ask them if they will be attending the APPG on Sexual Violence on the 17 July. Ask them if they will hear my story and help me to create something positive from what has been an almighty shitshow of the last two years. Your MP will represent so many women with stories like mine, maybe even you yourself have a story like mine, so let those stories be heard.
Please don't let me continue talking to an empty room.


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Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure American Spectator
Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure American Spectator
By Granville Sewell Published 12/28/2005 12:05:33 AM
In the current debate over "Intelligent Design," the strongest argument offered by opponents of design is this: we have scientific explanations for most everything else in Nature, what is special about evolution? The layman understands quite well that explaining the appearance of human brains is a very different sort of problem from finding the causes of earthquakes; however, to express this difference in terms a scientist can understand requires a discussion of the second law of thermodynamics.
The first formulations of the second law were all about heat: a quantity called thermal "entropy" was defined to measure the randomness, or disorder, associated with a temperature distribution,
http://www.spectator.org/blogger.aspand it was shown that in an isolated system this entropy always increases, or at least never decreases, as the temperature becomes more and more randomly (more uniformly) distributed. If we define thermal "order" to be the opposite (negative) of thermal entropy, we can say that the thermal order can never increase in a closed (isolated) system. However, it was soon realized that other types of order can be defined which also never increase in a closed system. For example, we can define a "carbon order" associated with the distribution of carbon diffusing in a solid, using the same equations, and through an identical analysis show that this order also continually decreases, in a closed system. With time, the second law came to be interpreted more and more generally, and today most discussions of the second law in physics textbooks offer examples of entropy increases (order decreases, since we are defining order to be the opposite of entropy) which have nothing to do with heat conduction or diffusion, such as the shattering of a wine glass or the demolition of a building.
It is a well-known prediction of the second law that, in a closed system, every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease, as everything tends toward more probable states. Not only will carbon and temperature distributions become more disordered (more uniform), but the performance of all electronic devices will deteriorate, not improve. Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability, it uses probability at the microscopic level to predict macroscopic change: the reason carbon distributes itself more and more uniformly in an insulated solid is, that is what the laws of probability predict when diffusion alone is operative.
The reason natural forces may turn a spaceship, or a TV set, or a computer into a pile of rubble but not vice-versa is also probability: of all the possible arrangements atoms could take, only a very small percentage could fly to the moon and back, or receive pictures and sound from the other side of the Earth, or add, subtract, multiply and divide real numbers with high accuracy.
The discovery that life on Earth developed through evolutionary "steps," coupled with the observation that mutations and natural selection — like other natural forces — can cause (minor) change, is widely accepted in the scientific world as proof that natural selection — alone among all natural forces — can create order out of disorder, and even design human brains with human consciousness. Only the layman seems to see the problem with this logic. In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ("A Mathematician's View of Evolution," 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000), after outlining the specific reasons why it is not reasonable to attribute the major steps in the development of life to natural selection, I asserted that the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in Order and Chaos (Basic Books, 1967), write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law…. Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."
According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal — and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. According to this equation, the thermal order in an open system can decrease in two different ways — it can be converted to disorder, or it can be exported through the boundary. It can increase in only one way: by importation through the boundary. Similarly, the increase in "carbon order" in an open system cannot be greater than the carbon order imported through the boundary, and the increase in "chromium order" cannot be greater than the chromium order imported through the boundary, and so on.
In these simple examples, I assumed nothing but heat conduction or diffusion was going on, but for more general situations, I offered the tautology that "if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable." The fact that order is disappearing in the next room does not make it any easier for computers to appear in our room — unless this order is disappearing into our room, and then only if it is a type of order that makes the appearance of computers not extremely improbable, for example,
computers. Importing thermal order will make the temperature distribution less random, and importing carbon order will make the carbon distribution less random, but neither makes the formation of computers more probable.
What happens in a closed system depends on the initial conditions; what happens in an open system depends on the boundary conditions as well. As I wrote in "Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?" (The Mathematical Intelligencer 23, number 4, 8-10, 2001), "order can increase in an open system, not because the laws of probability are suspended when the door is open, but simply because order may walk in through the door…. If we found evidence that DNA, auto parts, computer chips, and books entered through the Earth's atmosphere at some time in the past, then perhaps the appearance of humans, cars, computers, and encyclopedias on a previously barren planet could be explained without postulating a violation of the second law here (it would have been violated somewhere else!). But if all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments, it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here."
THE EVOLUTIONIST, therefore, cannot avoid the question of probability by saying that anything can happen in an open system, he is finally forced to argue that it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn't, that atoms would rearrange themselves into spaceships and computers and TV sets.
Darwinists believe they have already discovered the source of all this order, so let us look more closely at their theory. The traditional argument against Darwinism is that natural selection cannot guide the development of new organs and new systems of organs — i.e., the development of new orders, classes and phyla — through their initial useless stages, during which they provide no selective advantage. Natural selection may be able to darken the wings of a moth (even this is disputed), but that does not mean it can design anything complex. Consider, for example, the aquatic bladderwort, described in Plants and Environment, by R.F. Daubenmire (John Wiley & Sons, 1947):
The aquatic bladderworts are delicate herbs that bear bladder-like traps 5mm or less in diameter. These traps have trigger hairs attached to a valve-like door which normally keeps the trap tightly closed. The sides of the trap are compressed under tension, but when a small form of animal life touches one of the trigger hairs the valve opens, the bladder suddenly expands, and the animal is sucked into the trap. The door closes at once, and in about 20 minutes the trap is set ready for another victim.
In a Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (Nature Publishing Group, 2004) article on Carnivorous Plants, authors Wolf-Ekkehard Lonnig and Heinz-Albert Becker acknowledge that "it appears to be hard to even imagine a clearcut selective advantage for all the thousands of postulated intermediate steps in a gradual scenario…for the origin of the complex carnivorous plant structures examined above."
The development of any major new feature presents similar problems, and according to Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who describes several spectacular examples in detail in Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996), the world of microbiology is especially loaded with such examples of "irreducible complexity."
It seems that until the trigger hair, the door, and the pressurized chamber were all in place, and the ability to digest insects, and to reset the trap to be able to catch more than one insect, had been developed, none of the individual components of this carnivorous trap would have been of any use. What is the selective advantage of an incomplete pressurized chamber? To the casual observer, it might seem that none of the components of this trap would have been of any use whatever until the trap was almost perfect, but of course a good Darwinist will imagine two or three far-fetched intermediate useful stages (and maybe even find one in Nature!), and consider the problem solved. I believe you would need to find thousands of intermediate stages before this example of irreducible complexity has been reduced to steps small enough to be bridged by single random mutations — a lot of things have to happen behind the scenes and at the microscopic level before this trap could catch and digest insects. But I don't know how to prove this. (Lest anyone imagine a lot can be accomplished by single random mutations, note that if a billion animals each typed one random character per second throughout the Earth's 4.5 billion year history, there is virtually no chance any one of them would duplicate a given 20-character string.)
I am furthermore sure that even if you could imagine a long chain of useful intermediate stages, each would present such a negligible selective advantage that nothing as clever as this insect trap could ever be produced, but I can't prove that either. Finally, that natural selection seems even remotely plausible depends on the fact that while species are awaiting further improvements, their current complex structure is "locked in," and passed on perfectly through many generations. This phenomenon is observed, but inexplicable — I don't see any reason why all living organisms do not constantly decay into simpler components — as, in fact, they do as soon as they die.
When you look at the individual steps in the development of life, Darwin's explanation is difficult to disprove, because some selective advantage can be imagined in almost anything. Like every other scheme designed to violate the second law, it is only when you look at the net result that it becomes obvious it won't work.
A National Geographic article from November 2004 proclaims that the evidence is "overwhelming" that Darwin was right about evolution. Since there is no proof that natural selection has ever done anything more spectacular than cause bacteria to develop drug-resistant strains, where is the overwhelming evidence that justifies assigning to it an ability we do not attribute to any other natural force in the universe: the ability to create order out of disorder?
Three types of evidence are cited: first, the fact that species are so well suited to their environments is offered as evidence that they have "adapted" to them. Of course, if they were not well-adapted, they would be extinct, and that would be offered as even stronger evidence against design. Second, they point to changes due to artificial selection, where intelligent humans select features already present in the gene pool, as evidence of what can be accomplished when natural forces select among genetic accidents. But, as always, the main evi
dence offered is the "evolutionary tree" of similarities connecting all species, fossil and living. These similarities were of course noticed long before Darwin (many animals have four legs, one head, two eyes and a tail!); all modern science has done is to show that the similarities go much deeper than those noticed by ancient man.
Although these similarities may, to our modern minds, suggest natural causes, they do not really tell us anything about what those causes might be. In fact, the fossil record does not even support the idea that new organs and new systems of organs arose gradually: new orders, classes and phyla consistently appear suddenly. For example, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson in "The History of Life" (in Volume I of Evolution after Darwin, University of Chicago Press, 1960) writes:
It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution…This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?
Finally, I am well aware that logic and evidence are powerless against the popular perception, nurtured by prestigious journals such as National Geographic and Nature, that no serious scientists harbor any doubts about Darwinism, so I want to offer here a portion of a November 5, 1980 New York Times News Service report:
Biology's understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years. At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin's epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes. At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested… Exactly how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists. Although the debate has been under way for several years, it reached a crescendo last month, as some 150 scientists specializing in evolutionary studies met for four days in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History to thrash out a variety of new hypotheses that are challenging older ideas… At issue during the Chicago meeting was macroevolution, a term that is itself a matter of debate but which generally refers to the evolution of major differences… Darwin knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups, but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links. "The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist," declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.
SCIENCE HAS BEEN so successful in explaining natural phenomena that the modern scientist is convinced that it can explain everything. Anything that doesn't fit into this materialistic model is simply ignored. When he discovers that all of the basic constants of physics, such as the speed of light, the charge and mass of the electron, Planck's constant, etc., had to have almost exactly the values that they do have in order for any conceivable form of life to survive in our universe, he proposes the "anthropic principle" and says that there must be many other universes with the same laws, but random values for the basic constants, and one was bound to get the values right. When you ask him how a mechanical process such as natural selection could cause human consciousness to arise out of inanimate matter, he says, "human consciousness — what's that?" And he talks about human evolution as if he were an outside observer, and never seems to wonder how he got inside one of the animals he is studying. And when you ask how the four fundamental forces of Nature could rearrange the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards and the Internet, he says, well, order can increase in an open system.
The development of life may have only violated one law of science, but that was the one Sir Arthur Eddington called the "supreme" law of Nature, and it has violated that in a most spectacular way. At least that is my opinion, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn't, that, under the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and spaceships and computers. But one would think that at least this would be considered an open question, and those who argue that it really is extremely improbable, and thus contrary to the basic principle underlying the second law, would be given a measure of respect, and taken seriously by their colleagues, but we aren't.
Granville Sewell is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, and visiting professor at Texas A&M University. He has two new books released last summer, Computational Methods of Linear Algebra, and The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, both published by John Wiley & Sons, 2005. The latter includes an Appendix entitled, "Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?" which contains material referred to in this article, a long version of which can be found at http://www.math.tamu.edu/~sewell/odes_pdes/article.pdf
Granville Sewell Mathematics Dept Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843 email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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This Week at 148Apps: July 30-August 3
This week at 148Apps, a new video revolution began, as Amazon.com released its Amazon Instant Video app for the iPad. Carter Dotson writes, "Amazon Instant Video is now available on iPad, expanding out the Amazon's vast library of video offerings to iOS users. This offers streaming of purchased movies and TV shows from Amazon, with the ability to sync up watch lists between devices. It also includes titles available from Amazon Prime, similar to Netflix, a service offering over 120,000 streaming movies and TV shows. It is only available as a yearly subscription from Amazon as part of the Prime service that also includes free 2-day shipping on Amazon items."
Read more about this exciting development for iOS at 148Apps.
Amazon Prime Video
Over at GiggleApps.com, writer Amy Solomon got us ready for mealtime wither her review of Bo's Dinnertime. She writes, "Bo's Dinnertime in a cute and fun interactive universal app that teaches the sequencing of events that lead up to dinnertime, such as food shopping, putting away groceries, cooking and setting the table, as well as eating dinner and cleaning up afterwards. A simple and sweet song is also included, as is a section dedicated to selecting and eating foods with the tap of a finger. Narration is included, leading children though varied food related exercises, complete with subtle highlighting of new objects to tap or interact with, keeping the flow of this app going nicely."
Want more? Read the full review at GiggleApps.
Bo's Dinnertime Story
Last, but certainly not least, 148Apps.biz writer Carter Dotson explored the results of a recent study by KinderTown. He says, "KinderTown, developers of an app that helps collect the best kids apps on the App Store, have released a study based on searches within their app. Their "KinderSights" analytics study collected data from June 20th to July 10th, and they have released the results from the study, revealing some key insights into those that search for kids' apps on the App Store.
The most-searched criterion was age, with 50.2% of searches looking for apps for a particular age. Second was price at 40.6%, followed by platform at 31.8%, and the type of app was last at 30.2%."
Keep track of this and more mobile app news stories on 148Apps.biz.
This week may be done, but there's no need to worry. More app reviews, news and contests are always on their way across the 148Apps network. Just follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook to stay on top of all the happenings. See you next week, Gothamites!


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Recipe By: Sue Spitler, adapted from Simply Vegetarian!: Easy-To-Prepare Recipes for the Vegetarian Gourmet
Serving Size: 6
"Oriental foods and flavors combine with black-eyed peas in this sesame-accented main course."
8 ounces snow peas — diagonally cut into halves
1/3 cup chopped onion
1 small red, or green, bell pepper — sliced
1 tablespoon finely chopped gingerroot
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 serrano, or jalapeno, chili — finely chopped
1 teaspoon sesame oil
3 cups thinly sliced bok choy, or Chinese cabbage
2 15 oz cans black-eyed peas — rinsed and drained
1 to 2 tablespoons reduced-sodium tamari soy sauce
1 to 2 teaspoons black bean, or hoisin sauce
1 16 oz package Chinese-style noodles, or 4 cups cooked rice
2 teaspoons toasted sesame seeds
Stir-fry snow peas, onion, bell pepper, gingerroot, garlic, and Serrano chili in sesame oil in wok or large skillet 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in bok choy; cook, covered, over medium heat until wilted, 2 to 3 minutes.
Stir black-eyed peas into wok; stir-fry until hot, about 5 minutes. Stir in soy sauce and black bean sauce. Serve mixture over noodles or rice; sprinkle with sesame seeds.


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I've been a (more than) full-time writer for ten years. It takes talent, ambition and the ability to manage your time and money to be successful. Contrary to popular belief, you can be a successful freelance writer without starting your own business. However, if you have a habit of slacking or procrastinating, this probably isn't the path for you.
My typical day includes writing for up to ten clients at a time. This includes everything from SEO-rich web content to brochures for international hotel chains. I scour job boards for new openings and apply daily, even if I have a full workload for the next few months. I'm also updating my resume, website and LinkedIn while learning new skills like SES qualifications as I accept new projects. [Read more…]


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Remarks by Senator John Edwards
St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hamphshire
October 29, 2007
Many of you know that I am the son of a mill worker – that I rose from modest means and have been blessed in so many ways in life. Elizabeth and I have so much to be grateful for.
And all of you know about some of the challenges we have faced in my family. But there came a time, a few months ago, when Elizabeth and I had to decide, in the quiet of a hospital room, after many hours of tests and getting pretty bad news – what we were going to do with our lives.
And we made our decision. That we were not going to go quietly into the night – that we were going to stand and fight for what we believe in.
As Elizabeth and I have campaigned across America, I've come to a better understanding of what that decision really meant – and why we made it.
Earlier this year, I spoke at Riverside Church in New York, where, forty years ago, Martin Luther King gave a historic speech. I talked about that speech then, and I want to talk about it today. Dr. King was tormented by the way he had kept silent for two years about the Vietnam War.
He was told that if he spoke out he would hurt the civil rights movement and all that he had worked for – but he could not take it any more – instead of decrying the silence of others – he spoke the truth about himself.
"Over the past two years" he said, "I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silence and speak from the burning of my own heart."
I am not holier than thou. I am not perfect by any means. But there are events in life that you learn from, and which remind you what this is really all about. Maybe I have been freed from the system and the fear that holds back politicians because I have learned there are much more important things in life than winning elections at the cost of selling your soul.
Especially right now, when our country requires so much more of us, and needs to hear the truth from its leaders.
And, although I have spent my entire life taking on the big powerful interests and winning – which is why I have never taken a dime from Washington lobbyists or political action committees – I too have been guilty of my own silence – but no more.
It's time to tell the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington is corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interests to benefit they very few at the expense of the many. And as a result, the American people have lost faith in our broken system in Washington, and believe it no longer works for ordinary Americans. They're right.
As I look across the political landscape of both parties today – what I see are politicians too afraid to tell the truth – good people caught in a bad system that overwhelms their good intentions and requires them to chase millions of dollars in campaign contributions in order to perpetuate their careers and continue their climb to higher office.
This presidential campaign is a perfect example of how our politics is awash with money. I have raised more money up to this point than any Democratic candidate raised last time in the presidential campaign – $30 million. And, I did it without taking a dime from any Washington lobbyist or any special interest PAC.
I saw the chase for campaign money at any cost by the frontrunner in this race – and I did not join it – because the cost to our nation and our children is not worth the hollow victory of any candidate. Being called president while powerful interests really run things is not the same as being free to lead this nation as president of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If protecting the current established structure in Washington is in your interest, then I am not your candidate. I ran for president four years ago – yes, in part out of personal ambition – but also with a deep desire to stand for working people like my father and mother – who no matter how hard things were for our family, always worked even harder to make things better for us.
But the more Elizabeth and I campaigned this year, the more we talked to the American people, the more we met people just like my father, and hard working people like James Lowe. James is a decent and honest man who had to live for 50 years with no voice in the richest country in the world because he didn't have health care. The more people like him that I met, the more I realized something much bigger was stirring in the American people. And it has stirred in each of us for far too long.
Last month Ken Burns – who made the great Civil War documentary – launched his newest epic on World War II on PBS – and what a story it tells.
At the cost of great suffering, blood and enormous sacrifice, within four years after Pearl Harbor it is incredible what this nation achieved. America built the arsenal of democracy worthy of our great history. We launched the greatest invasion armada in the history of warfare against Hitler's fortress Europe, and, with our allies, we freed a continent of suffering humanity.
At the same time on the other side of the globe we crossed 10,000 miles of ocean and liberated another hemisphere of humanity – islands and nations freed from the grip of Japanese militarists. While at the same time succeeding in the greatest scientific endeavor ever undertaken – the Manhattan project – and topped it off with building the Pentagon, one of the largest buildings in the world in a little over a year.
It is incredible what America has accomplished. Because no matter what extraordinary challenges we have been faced with, we did exactly what America has always done in our history – we rose to the challenge.
And, now, as I travel across America and listen to people, I hear real concern about what's going on. For the first time in our nation's history, people are worried that we're going to be the first generation of Americans not to pass on a better life to our children.
And it's not the fault of the American people. The American people have not changed. The American people are still the strong, courageous people they have always been. The problem is what our government has become. And, it is up to us to do something about it.
Because Washington may not see it, but we are facing a moral crisis as great as any that has ever challenged us. And, it is this test – this moral test – that I have come to understand is at the heart of this campaign.
Just look at what has happened in Iraq. What was the response of the American people to the challenge at hand? Our men and women in uniform have been heroes. They've done everything that's been asked of them and more. But what about our government? Four years after invading Iraq, we cannot even keep the lights on in Baghdad.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the American people were at their best. They donated their time and their money in record numbers. There was an outpouring of support. I took 700 college kids down to help – young people who gave up their spring break. But what about our government? Three years after hurricane Katrina thousands of our fellow Americans, our brothers and sisters, are still housed in trailers waiting to go home.
There's no better example of the bravery and goodness of the American people than the response to the attacks of 9/11: firefighters and first responders risking and too often giving their lives to save others, charging up the stairs while everyone else was coming down; record bloodbank donations; and the list goes on. But what about our government? Six years after 9/11, at Ground Zero there sits only a black hole that tortures our conscience and scars our hearts.
In every instance we see an American people who are good, decent, compassionate and undeterred. And, American people who are better than the government that is supposed to serve and represent them.
And what has happened to the American "can do" spirit? I will tell you what has happened: all of this is the result of the bitter poisoned fruit of corruption and the bankruptcy of our political leadership.
It is not an accident that the government of the United States cannot function on behalf of its people, because it is no longer our people's government – and we the people know it.
This corruption did not begin yesterday – and it did not even begin with George Bush – it has been building for decades – until it now threatens literally the life of our democracy.
While the American people personally rose to the occasion with an enormous outpouring of support and donations to both the victims of Katrina and 9/11– we all saw our government's neglect. And we saw greed and incompetence at work. Out of more than 700 contracts valued at $500,000 or greater, at least half were given without full competition or, according to news sources, with vague or open ended terms, and many of these contracts went to companies with deep political connections such as a subsidiary of Haliburton, Bechtel Corp., and AshBritt Inc.
And in Iraq – while our nation's brave sons and daughters put their lives on the line for our country – we now have mercenaries under their own law while their bosses sit at home raking in millions.
We have squandered millions on building Olympic size swimming pools and buildings that have never been used. We have weapons and ammunition unaccounted for that may now be being used against our own soldiers. We literally have billions wasted or misspent – while our troops and their families continue to sacrifice. And the politically connected lobby for more. What's their great sacrifice – higher profits.
It goes on every minute of every day.
Corporate executives at United Airlines and US Airways receive millions in compensation for taking their companies into bankruptcy, while their employees are forced to take cuts in pay.
Companies like Wal-Mart lobby against inspecting containers entering our nation's ports, even though expert after expert agrees that the likeliest way for a dirty bomb to enter the United States is through a container, because they believe their profits are more important than our safety. What has become of America when America's largest company lobbies against protecting America?
Trade deals cost of millions of jobs. What do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys in our children's cribs laden with lead. This is the price we are made to pay when trade agreements are decided based on how much they pad the profits for multinational corporations instead of what is best for America's workers or the safety of America's consumers.
We have even gotten to the point where our children's safety is potentially at risk because nearly half of the apple juice consumed by our children comes from apples grown in China. And Americans are kept in the dark because the corporate lobbyists have pushed back country of origin labeling laws again and again.
This is not the America I believe in.
The hubris of greed knows no bounds. Days after the homeland security bill passed, staffers from the homeland security department resigned and became homeland security consultants trying to cash in. And, where was the outrage? There was none, because that's how it works in Washington now It is not a Republican revolving door or a Democratic revolving door – it is just the way it's done.
Someone called it a government reconnaissance mission to figure out how to get rich when you leave the government.
Recently, I was dismayed to see headlines in the Wall Street Journal stating that Senate Democrats were backing down to lobbyists for hedge funds who have opposed efforts to make millionaire and billionaire hedge fund managers pay the same tax rate as every hard-working American. Now, tax loopholes the wealthy hedge fund managers do not need or deserve are not going to be closed, all because Democrats – our party – wanted their campaign money.
And a few weeks ago, around the sixth anniversary of 9/11, a leading presidential candidate held a fundraiser that was billed as a Homeland Security themed event in Washington, D.C. targeted to homeland security lobbyists and contractors for $1,000 a plate. These lobbyists, for the price of a ticket, would get a special "treat" – the opportunity to participate in small, hour long breakout sessions with key Democratic lawmakers, many of whom chair important sub committees of the homeland security committee. That presidential candidate was Senator Clinton.
Senator Clinton's road to the middle class takes a major detour right through the deep canyon of corporate lobbyists and the hidden bidding of K Street in Washington – and history tells us that when that bus stops there it is the middle class that loses.
When I asked Hillary Clinton to join me in not taking money from Washington lobbyists – she refused. Not only did she say that she would continue to take their money, she defended them.
Today Hillary Clinton has taken more money from Washington lobbyists than any candidate from either party – more money than any Republican candidate.
She has taken more money from the defense industry than any other candidate from either party as well.
She took more money from Wall Street last quarter than Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama combined.
The long slow slide of our democracy into the corporate abyss continues unabated regardless of party, regardless of the best interests of America.
We have a duty – a duty to end this.
I believe you cannot be for change and take money from the lobbyists who prevent change. You cannot take on the entrenched interests in Washington if you choose to defend the broken system. It will not work. And I believe that, if Americans have a choice, and candidate who takes their money – Democrat or Republican – will lose this election.
For us to continue down this path all we have to do is suspend all that we believe in. As Democrats, we continue down this path only if we believe the party of the people is no more.
As Americans, we continue down this path only if we fail to heed Lincoln's warning to us all.
"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected," he asked, "if it ever reaches us it must spring up amongst us. It can not come from abroad. If destruction be our lot – we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide."
America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.
To give our children a better future than we received.
I stand here today the son of Wallace and Bobbie Edwards. The father of Wade, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack – and I know, as well as you, that we must not be the first generation that fails to live up to our moral challenge and keep the promise of America.
That would be an abomination.
There is a dream that is America. It is what makes us American. And I will not stand by while that dream is at risk.
I am not perfect – far from it – but I do understand that this is not a political issue – it is the moral test of our generation.
Our nation's founders knew that this moment would come – that at some point the power of greed and its influence over officials in our government might strain and threaten the very America they hoped would last as an ideal in the minds of all people, and as a beacon of hope for all time.
That is why they made the people sovereign. And this is why it is your responsibility to redeem the promise of America for our children and their future.
It will not be easy – sacrifice will be required of us – but it was never easy for our ancestors, and their sacrifices were far greater than any that will fall on our shoulders.
Yet, the responsibility is ours.
We, you and I, are the guardians of what America is and what it will be.
The choice is ours.
Down one path, we trade corporate Democrats for corporate Republicans; our cronies for their cronies; one political dynasty for another dynasty; and all we are left with is a Democratic version of the Republican corruption machine.
It is the easier path. It is the path of the status quo. But, it is a path that perpetuates a corrupt system that has not only failed to deliver the change the American people demand, but has divided America into two – one America for the very greedy, and one America for everybody else.
And it is that divided America – the direct result of this corrupt system – which may very well lead to the suicide Lincoln warned us of – the poison that continues to seep into our system while none notice.
Or we can choose a different path. The path that generations of Americans command us to take. And be the guardians that kept the faith.
I run for president for my father who worked in a mill his entire life and never got to go to college the way I did.
I run for president for all those who worked in that mill with my father.
I run for president for all those who lost their jobs when that mill was shut down.
I run for president for all the women who have come up to Elizabeth and me and told us the like Elizabeth they had breast cancer – but unlike Elizabeth they did not have health care.
I run for president for twenty generations of Americans who made sure that their children had a better life than they did.
As Americans we are blessed -- for our ancestors are not dead, they occupy the corridors of our conscience. And, as long we keep the faith -- they live. And so too the America of idealism and hope that was their gift to us.
I carry the promise of America in my heart, where my parents placed it. Like them, like you, I believe in people, hard work, and the sacred obligation of each generation to the next.
This is our time now. It falls to use to redeem our democracy, reclaim our government and relight the promise of America for our children.
Let us blaze a new path together, grounded in the values from which America was forged, still reaching toward the greatness of our ideals. We can do it. We can cast aside the bankrupt ways of Washington and replace them with the timeless values of the American people. We can liberate our government from the shackles of corporate money that bind it to corporate will, and restore the voices of our people to its halls.
This is the cause of my life. This is the cause of our time. Join me. Together, we cannot fail.
We will keep faith with those who have gone before us, strong and proud in the knowledge that we too rose up to guard the promise of America in our day, and that, because we did, America's best days still lie ahead.
[emphasis mine]
If you ever wondered why the news' coverage of John Edwards always discusses the nonsense of his campaign, like haircuts and good ole' boys, this is why. They're part of the corruption he's referring to, and they don't want that to change. The large corporations that run the news, both in print and broadcast form, hate people like this, and they'll ignore them and what they really stand for as long as they can. Then they'll try to dismiss them as not worthy of consideration by serious people.
So, here's what I say - if you like the speech, pass it on. You're not going to be seeing any of it on TV, I can guarantee you.


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I can't believe it's really over. Twenty-three years of marriage, done. Signed away with a couple of forms. We used to be so in love. What ever happened? I suppose we'll never know. But if there's one thing I can take solace in after all this, it's the fact that—right up until the very end—we acted like heinous, backstabbing beasts.
I realize this divorce has been tough on both of us, Neal. But at least we conducted ourselves without even a shred of compassion for the other person. That much we can say for certain.
You know I'll always have feelings for you. Nothing can change that. Not the divorce, not the terrible things I said about you and your mother, or the months of ceaseless and petty bickering during which we stubbornly refused to acknowledge our own pain and vulnerability, and instead went at each other's throats like two ravenous wolverines fighting over the putrid deer carcass that was once our love.
May I also say that, even though we have only a few paltry assets between us that could have been simply and amicably divided, I'm glad each of us chose to hire two lawyers. The six months of expensive litigation during which we went back on every vow of our marriage, dragged our young children through a painful custody battle, and alienated all of our mutual friends were truly an apt finale to the love we squandered.
Life doesn't always turn out the way you expected, I guess. From the first moment I met you, I was sure we'd spend the rest of our lives together. We created a family, shared our joys and our fears, and grew closer in love and understanding. But if that dream wasn't meant to be, then I, for one, am glad that our last few months together were spent shrieking obscenities through locked doors in front of our kids. After all, we spent almost half our lives together. It only makes sense to part ways with nothing but malice and unfounded accusations of adultery.
I hope one day I can look back on our marriage and remember the good things. We had some fun times didn't we? Like that summer we took the kids up to Lake Leelanau, and you covered your body in sand and seaweed and chased them around the cabin, pretending to be the monster of Gitche Gumee? We ate crabs on the dock with our feet hanging in the water, and I told you I'd love you until my last breath. And then, 11 years later, I stood in a courtroom and swore before a judge that I've seen you hit our daughter on several occasions, and that I worry about your drinking. Remember that?
Memories like that will stay with us forever.
Memories of the way we attacked each other's personal reputations like a pack of hyenas tearing apart a young gazelle. Of how we slashed and ripped each other like crazed sharks in a feeding frenzy, maddened into irrational spasms of carnage and gore by the smell of fresh blood in the open water. Of how we snarled and spat, like saber-toothed tigers digging their fangs into the flank of a stunned woolly mammoth and bringing it to the ground as it thrashes and howls in pain.
We'll always have that.
There's no reason divorce has to be a terrible experience. What's important is that we both know in our heart of hearts that our divorce was as bad as it could be. It's a comfort to think that the utter dissolution of our marriage was as ugly as humanly possible, without resorting to actual, physical violence. After all, we're adults, right? There's no reason we shouldn't handle this matter with the maturity of two screaming, biting five-year-olds.
If not for us, then for our children. Or should I say your child and my child, now that the custody battles are finally settled?
Well, my darling ex-husband, it has certainly been memorable being your wife, your lover, and the counterclaimant in several vicious lawsuits. Even though our marriage has come to an end in the most spiteful manner possible, I hope that when you think of me, your once-wife, and the life we shared together, some part of you will always know that you can suck my dick, you two-faced, no-good fuckhead. I hope you burn in hell.


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Blue Roses
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It started off with the Scout Jamboree ...
We had multiple visits to potential high schools for Miss 12 .. ended up enrolling her in one that we hadn't planned on, but we think it's the right choice.
We've decided to move Miss 10 from her current school too, to the local public one. It's in walking distance and again we think this is the right decision for her.
Both girls have had a great year - Miss 10 has done really well with both her horse riding and squash. She will continue with both these passions in the coming year.
Miss 12 tried out many new things and did well in them. Moving forward she'll stick to Fire Cadets and Fire Running as her main activities.
Work for me has been pretty quiet, but the upside to this was that I got to work from home a lot - with the occasional trip over east. I have enjoyed what I have done this year but am looking forward to more client contact in the coming year.
I also started a Diploma in Project Management as a distance education student. I am enjoying the challenge and am looking forward to finishing it in the near future.
There have been other challenges and changes through out the year but all-in-all I have to say that it has been a good one.
And I'm looking forward to the new challenges that 2014 will bring.
Wishing all my blog readers a safe NYE and a great 2014!!!
Wishing all my blog readers a safe NYE and a great 2014!!!


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Techworld — Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, best known for their epic legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg over ownership rights to Facebook, have reportedly invested $1 million in a new social network aimed at the financial community, called SumZero.
Founded by fellow Harvard alumni Divya Narendra and Aalap Mahadevia in 2008, SumZero has about 7,500 members. The network enables users to get advice from other investors, and spread the word about investments they have made.
Members are vetted personally by Narendra, and about 75% of applications are rejected, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The site also requires members to regularly submit trading ideas to maintain access to material posted by others.
It is this element of exclusivity that appeals to the Winklevoss twins, who likened the concept to the early days of Facebook, when only people with ".edu" email addresses from certain universities were eligible to join.
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The company will move into the Winklevosses' Manhattan office space near Madison Square Park when it opens in October. "We want to get involved and really roll up our sleeves," said Tyler Winklevoss.
SumZero is the first investment made by Winklevoss Capital, a firm set up using the money from their $65 million settlement with Facebook in 2008.
The Winklevoss twins tried to reopen the case in January 2011, seeking more money. However, a US appeals court ruled that they would have to accept the settlement.
The twins' lengthy battle with Zuckerberg was portrayed in the 2010 film The Social Network, in which the story of Facebook's beginnings at Harvard University is dramatised.


text: Artist: OutKast f/ Raekwon the Chef Album: Aquemini Song: Skew It on the Bar-B Typed by: OHHLA Webmaster DJ Flash {with help from liner notes} Intro/Chorus: OutKast Old school players to new school fools 'Kast keep it jumpin like kangaroos but skew it on the bar-b we ain't tryin to lose Say 'I be got damnit they done changed the rules' (repeat 2X) Verse One: Andre Benjamin The common denominator, the nigga numerator Never know who the hater, niggaz cater to your ego I'm sorry like Atari whose the cousin to Coleco.. Vision caught a Rico, back on the street like Chico.. DeBarge he large and got a 'Llac in the garage Few parts here and there, I declare hard, my lawd One at Clark, one at Spelman Both know each other and it's cool, you can tell when he step off in the party women jump for joy But all the wild niggaz scheamin they gon' jump the boy for spittin all that bourgeoise, my watch, my car I'm a star -- I'd rather be a comet by far -- rrrahhh! Chorus Verse Two: Raekwon the Chef Deliver this through your audio, ghetto mafioso Grow hydro, then bag it up yo Price that longevity, suggest make moves slow take time grow eight, react nine blow Hydro slide raw like fuck Renaldo Fly ride though, shit lookin wild dope then glide yo, flippin the page, I go Watch five-oh, jump on my meat, ride slow Watch those, undercovers, cop those, rock those Glocks blows leave em baggy and collect spot grows Keep a watch froze, lean on the yacht and wash clothes Let the chop' blow, bag a half a block plot grows, what? Chorus Verse Three: Big Boi Boi, I bust raps like D-boys bust gats, shit We the type of people that don't bury the axe or the hatchet, everytime we see your link we snatch it Ridin round our hood talkin that dumb shit, your cabbage is cracked, like plumber's ass, and summer's grass I been in the game for a minute, seen some suckaz like y'all passin thinkin you're light skinned, aight then, lil' boy why you frightened? The Dungeon Family gon' be here nigga so keep writing I gotta hit The Source, I need my other half a mic because that _Southerplayalisticadillacmuzik_ was a classic, right! College Park, East Pointe and Decatur they got my back, so We gon' keep on jammin and stabbin off in the track, ahh Think it's time to bungee but buddy we will be back and I'm fin' to put some D's on the 'Llac, know dat! Chorus


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STRIPE rectangle pillow no. 1
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the front is hand-tufted with 100% wool yarn, and backed with hand-dyed 100% cotton fabric.
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this rectangle pillow is 9" x 16".
mish mash tufty pillows are one-of-a-kind and zero-waste - the perfect piece of home decor!


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Idea in Brief
The Problem
Employers continue to hire at a high rate and spend enormous sums to do it. But they don't know whether their approaches are effective at finding and selecting good candidates.
The Root Causes
Businesses focus on external candidates and don't track the results of their approaches. They often use outside vendors and high-tech tools that are unproven and have inherent flaws.
The Solution
Return to filling most positions by promoting from within. Measure the results produced by vendors and new tools, and be on the lookout for discrimination and privacy violations.
Businesses have never done as much hiring as they do today. They've never spent as much money doing it. And they've never done a worse job of it.
For most of the post–World War II era, large corporations went about hiring this way: Human resources experts prepared a detailed job analysis to determine what tasks the job required and what attributes a good candidate should have. Next they did a job evaluation to determine how the job fit into the organizational chart and how much it should pay, especially compared with other jobs. Ads were posted, and applicants applied. Then came the task of sorting through the applicants. That included skills tests, reference checks, maybe personality and IQ tests, and extensive interviews to learn more about them as people. William H. Whyte, in The Organization Man, described this process as going on for as long as a week before the winning candidate was offered the job. The vast majority of non-entry-level openings were filled from within.
Recruiting: Series reprint
Today's approach couldn't be more different. Census data shows, for example, that the majority of people who took a new job last year weren't searching for one: Somebody came and got them. Companies seek to fill their recruiting funnel with as many candidates as possible, especially "passive candidates," who aren't looking to move. Often employers advertise jobs that don't exist, hoping to find people who might be useful later on or in a different context.
The recruiting and hiring function has been eviscerated. Many U.S. companies—about 40%, according to research by Korn Ferry—have outsourced much if not all of the hiring process to "recruitment process outsourcers," which in turn often use subcontractors, typically in India and the Philippines. The subcontractors scour LinkedIn and social media to find potential candidates. They sometimes contact them directly to see whether they can be persuaded to apply for a position and negotiate the salary they're willing to accept. (The recruiters get incentive pay if they negotiate the amount down.) To hire programmers, for example, these subcontractors can scan websites that programmers might visit, trace their "digital exhaust" from cookies and other user-tracking measures to identify who they are, and then examine their curricula vitae.
At companies that still do their own recruitment and hiring, managers trying to fill open positions are largely left to figure out what the jobs require and what the ads should say. When applications come—always electronically—applicant-tracking software sifts through them for key words that the hiring managers want to see. Then the process moves into the Wild West, where a new industry of vendors offer an astonishing array of smart-sounding tools that claim to predict who will be a good hire. They use voice recognition, body language, clues on social media, and especially machine learning algorithms—everything but tea leaves. Entire publications are devoted to what these vendors are doing.
The big problem with all these new practices is that we don't know whether they actually produce satisfactory hires. Only about a third of U.S. companies report that they monitor whether their hiring practices lead to good employees; few of them do so carefully, and only a minority even track cost per hire and time to hire. Imagine if the CEO asked how an advertising campaign had gone, and the response was "We have a good idea how long it took to roll out and what it cost, but we haven't looked to see whether we're selling more."
Hiring talent remains the number one concern of CEOs in the most recent Conference Board Annual Survey; it's also the top concern of the entire executive suite. PwC's 2017 CEO survey reports that chief executives view the unavailability of talent and skills as the biggest threat to their business. Employers also spend an enormous amount on hiring—an average of $4,129 per job in the United States, according to Society for Human Resource Management estimates, and many times that amount for managerial roles—and the United States fills a staggering 66 million jobs a year. Most of the $20 billion that companies spend on human resources vendors goes to hiring.
Why do employers spend so much on something so important while knowing so little about whether it works?
Where the Problem Starts
Survey after survey finds employers complaining about how difficult hiring is. There may be many explanations, such as their having become very picky about candidates, especially in the slack labor market of the Great Recession. But clearly they are hiring much more than at any other time in modern history, for two reasons.
The first is that openings are now filled more often by hiring from the outside than by promoting from within. In the era of lifetime employment, from the end of World War II through the 1970s, corporations filled roughly 90% of their vacancies through promotions and lateral assignments. Today the figure is a third or less. When they hire from outside, organizations don't have to pay to train and develop their employees. Since the restructuring waves of the early 1980s, it has been relatively easy to find experienced talent outside. Only 28% of talent acquisition leaders today report that internal candidates are an important source of people to fill vacancies—presumably because of less internal development and fewer clear career ladders.
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Less promotion internally means that hiring efforts are no longer concentrated on entry-level jobs and recent graduates. (If you doubt this, go to the "careers" link on any company website and look for a job opening that doesn't require prior experience.) Now companies must be good at hiring across most levels, because the candidates they want are already doing the job somewhere else. These people don't need training, so they may be ready to contribute right away, but they are much harder to find.
The second reason hiring is so difficult is that retention has become tough: Companies hire from their competitors and vice versa, so they have to keep replacing people who leave. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that 95% of hiring is done to fill existing positions. Most of those vacancies are caused by voluntary turnover. LinkedIn data indicates that the most common reason employees consider a position elsewhere is career advancement—which is surely related to employers' not promoting to fill vacancies.
The root cause of most hiring, therefore, is drastically poor retention. Here are some simple ways to fix that:
Track the percentage of openings filled from within.
An adage of business is that we manage what we measure, but companies don't seem to be applying that maxim to tracking hires. Most are shocked to learn how few of their openings are filled from within—is it really the case that their people can't handle different and bigger roles?
Require that all openings be posted internally.
Internal job boards were created during the dot-com boom to reduce turnover by making it easier for people to find new jobs within their existing employer. Managers weren't even allowed to know if a subordinate was looking to move within the company, for fear that they would try to block that person and he or she would leave. But during the Great Recession employees weren't quitting, and many companies slid back to the old model whereby managers could prevent their subordinates from moving internally. JR Keller, of Cornell University, has found that when managers could fill a vacancy with someone they already had in mind, they ended up with employees who performed more poorly than those hired when the job had been posted and anyone could apply. The commonsense explanation for this is that few enterprises really know what talent and capabilities they have.
Protecting Against Discrimination
Recognize the costs of outside hiring.
In addition to the time and effort of hiring, my colleague Matthew Bidwell found, outside hires take three years to perform as well as internal hires in the same job, while internal hires take seven years to earn as much as outside hires are paid. Outside hiring also causes current employees to spend time and energy positioning themselves for jobs elsewhere. It disrupts the culture and burdens peers who must help new hires figure out how things work.
None of this is to suggest that outside hiring is necessarily a bad idea. But unless your company is a Silicon Valley gazelle, adding new jobs at a furious pace, you should ask yourself some serious questions if most of your openings are being filled from outside.
Employers are obsessed with new technologies and driving down costs.
A different approach for dealing with retention (which seems creepy to some) is to try to determine who is interested in leaving and then intervene. Vendors like Jobvite comb social media and public sites for clues, such as LinkedIn profile updates. Measuring "flight risk" is one of the most common goals of companies that do their own sophisticated HR analytics. This is reminiscent of the early days of job boards, when employers would try to find out who was posting résumés and either punish them or embrace them, depending on leadership's mood.
Whether companies should be examining social media content in relation to hiring or any other employment action is a challenging ethical question. On one hand, the information is essentially public and may reveal relevant information. On the other hand, it is invasive, and candidates are rarely asked for permission to scrutinize their information. Hiring a private detective to shadow a candidate would also gather public information that might be relevant, yet most people would view it as an unacceptable invasion of privacy.
The Hiring Process
When we turn to hiring itself, we find that employers are missing the forest for the trees: Obsessed with new technologies and driving down costs, they largely ignore the ultimate goal: making the best possible hires. Here's how the process should be revamped:
Don't post "phantom jobs."
It costs nothing to post job openings on a company website, which are then scooped up by Indeed and other online companies and pushed out to potential job seekers around the world. Thus it may be unsurprising that some of these jobs don't really exist. Employers may simply be fishing for candidates. ("Let's see if someone really great is out there, and if so, we'll create a position for him or her.") Often job ads stay up even after positions have been filled, to keep collecting candidates for future vacancies or just because it takes more effort to pull the ad down than to leave it up. Sometimes ads are posted by unscrupulous recruiters looking for résumés to pitch to clients elsewhere. Because these phantom jobs make the labor market look tighter than it really is, they are a problem for economic policymakers as well as for frustrated job seekers. Companies should take ads down when jobs are filled.
Design jobs with realistic requirements.
Figuring out what the requirements of a job should be—and the corresponding attributes candidates must have—is a bigger challenge now, because so many companies have reduced the number of internal recruiters whose function, in part, is to push back on hiring managers' wish lists. ("That job doesn't require 10 years of experience," or "No one with all those qualifications will be willing to accept the salary you're proposing to pay.") My earlier research found that companies piled on job requirements, baked them into the applicant-tracking software that sorted résumés according to binary decisions (yes, it has the key word; no, it doesn't), and then found that virtually no applicants met all the criteria. Trimming recruiters, who have expertise in hiring, and handing the process over to hiring managers is a prime example of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Reconsider your focus on passive candidates.
The recruiting process begins with a search for experienced people who aren't looking to move. This is based on the notion that something may be wrong with anyone who wants to leave his or her current job. (Of the more than 20,000 talent professionals who responded to a LinkedIn survey in 2015, 86% said their recruiting organizations focused "very much so" or "to some extent" on passive candidates; I suspect that if anything, that number has since grown.) Recruiters know that the vast majority of people are open to moving at the right price: Surveys of employees find that only about 15% are not open to moving. As the economist Harold Demsetz said when asked by a competing university if he was happy working where he was: "Make me unhappy."
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Fascinating evidence from the LinkedIn survey cited above shows that although self-identified "passive" job seekers are different from "active" job seekers, it's not in the way we might think. The number one factor that would encourage the former to move is more money. For active candidates the top factor is better work and career opportunities. More active than passive job seekers report that they are passionate about their work, engaged in improving their skills, and reasonably satisfied with their current jobs. They seem interested in moving because they are ambitious, not because they want higher pay.
Employers spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their budgets on recruiters who chase passive candidates, but on average they fill only 11% of their positions with individually targeted people, according to research by Gerry Crispin and Chris Hoyt, of CareerXroads. I know of no evidence that passive candidates become better employees, let alone that the process is cost-effective. If you focus on passive candidates, think carefully about what that actually gets you. Better yet, check your data to find out.
Understand the limits of referrals.
The most popular channel for finding new hires is through employee referrals; up to 48% come from them, according to LinkedIn research. It seems like a cheap way to go, but does it produce better hires? Many employers think so. It's hard to know whether that's true, however, given that they don't check. And research by Emilio Castilla and colleagues suggests otherwise: They find that when referrals work out better than other hires, it's because their referrers look after them and essentially onboard them. If a referrer leaves before the new hire begins, the latter's performance is no better than that of nonreferrals, which is why it makes sense to pay referral bonuses six months or so after the person is hired—if he or she is still there.
A downside to referrals, of course, is that they can lead to a homogeneous workforce, because the people we know tend to be like us. This matters greatly for organizations interested in diversity, since recruiting is the only avenue allowed under U.S. law to increase diversity in a workforce. The Supreme Court has ruled that demographic criteria cannot be used even to break ties among candidates.
Measure the results.
Few employers know which channel produces the best candidates at the lowest cost because they don't track the outcomes. Tata is an exception: It has long done what I advocate. For college recruiting, for example, it calculates which schools send it employees who perform the best, stay the longest, and are paid the lowest starting wage. Other employers should follow suit and monitor recruiting channels and employees' performance to identify which sources produce the best results.
Persuade fewer people to apply.
The hiring industry pays a great deal of attention to "the funnel," whereby readers of a company's job postings become applicants, are interviewed, and ultimately are offered jobs. Contrary to the popular belief that the U.S. job market is extremely tight right now, most jobs still get lots of applicants. Recruiting and hiring consultants and vendors estimate that about 2% of applicants receive offers. Unfortunately, the main effort to improve hiring—virtually always aimed at making it faster and cheaper—has been to shovel more applicants into the funnel. Employers do that primarily through marketing, trying to get out the word that they are great places to work. Whether doing this is a misguided way of trying to attract better hires or just meant to make the organization feel more desirable isn't clear.
Much better to go in the other direction: Create a smaller but better-qualified applicant pool to improve the yield. Here's why: Every applicant costs you money—especially now, in a labor market where applicants have started to "ghost" employers, abandoning their applications midway through the process. Every application also exposes a company to legal risk, because the company has obligations to candidates (not to discriminate, for example) just as it does to employees. And collecting lots of applicants in a wide funnel means that a great many of them won't fit the job or the company, so employers have to rely on the next step of the hiring process—selection—to weed them out. As we will see, employers aren't good at that.
Once people are candidates, they may not be completely honest about their skills or interests—because they want to be hired—and employers' ability to find out the truth is limited. More than a generation ago the psychologist John Wanous proposed giving applicants a realistic preview of what the job is like. That still makes sense as a way to head off those who would end up being unhappy in the job. It's not surprising that Google has found a way to do this with gamification: Job seekers see what the work would be like by playing a game version of it. Marriott has done the same, even for low-level employees. Its My Marriott Hotel game targets young people in developing countries who may have had little experience in hotels to show them what it's like and to steer them to the recruiting site if they score well on the game. The key for any company, though, is that the preview should make clear what is difficult and challenging about the work as well as why it's fun so that candidates who don't fit won't apply.
It should be easy for candidates to learn about a company and a job, but making it really easy to apply, just to fill up that funnel, doesn't make much sense. During the dot-com boom Texas Instruments cleverly introduced a preemployment test that allowed applicants to see their scores before they applied. If their scores weren't high enough for the company to take their applications seriously, they tended not to proceed, and the company saved the cost of having to process their applications.
If the goal is to get better hires in a cost-effective manner, it's more important to scare away candidates who don't fit than to jam more candidates into the recruiting funnel.
Test candidates' standard skills.
How to determine which candidates to hire—what predicts who will be a good employee—has been rigorously studied at least since World War I. The personnel psychologists who investigated this have learned much about predicting good hires that contemporary organizations have since forgotten, such as that neither college grades nor unstructured sequential interviews (hopping from office to office) are a good predictor, whereas past performance is.
Since it can be difficult (if not impossible) to glean sufficient information about an outside applicant's past performance, what other predictors are good? There is remarkably little consensus even among experts. That's mainly because a typical job can have so many tasks and aspects, and different factors predict success at different tasks.
There is general agreement, however, that testing to see whether individuals have standard skills is about the best we can do. Can the candidate speak French? Can she do simple programming tasks? And so forth. But just doing the tests is not enough. The economists Mitchell Hoffman, Lisa B. Kahn, and Danielle Li found that even when companies conduct such tests, hiring managers often ignore them—and when they do, they get worse hires. The psychologist Nathan Kuncel and colleagues discovered that even when hiring managers use objective criteria and tests, applying their own weights and judgment to those criteria leads them to pick worse candidates than if they had used a standard formula. Only 40% of employers, however, do any tests of skills or general abilities, including IQ. What are they doing instead? Seventy-four percent do drug tests, including for marijuana use; even employers in states where recreational use is now legal still seem to do so.
Be wary of vendors bearing high-tech gifts.
Into the testing void has come a new group of entrepreneurs who either are data scientists or have them in tow. They bring a fresh approach to the hiring process—but often with little understanding of how hiring actually works. John Sumser, of HRExaminer, an online newsletter that focuses on HR technology, estimates that on average, companies get five to seven pitches every day—almost all of them about hiring—from vendors using data science to address HR issues. These vendors have all sorts of cool-sounding assessments, such as computer games that can be scored to predict who will be a good hire. We don't know whether any of these actually lead to better hires, because few of them are validated against actual job performance. That aside, these assessments have spawned a counterwave of vendors who help candidates learn how to score well on them. Lloyds Bank, for example, developed a virtual-reality-based assessment of candidate potential, and JobTestPrep offers to teach potential candidates how to do well on it. Especially for IT and technical jobs, cheating on skills tests and even video interviews (where colleagues off camera give help) is such a concern that eTeki and other specialized vendors help employers figure out who is cheating in real time.
Revamp your interviewing process.
The amount of time employers spend on interviews has almost doubled since 2009, according to research from Glassdoor. How much of that increase represents delays in setting up those interviews is impossible to tell, but it provides at least a partial explanation for why it takes longer to fill jobs now. Interviews are arguably the most difficult technique to get right, because interviewers should stick to questions that predict good hires—mainly about past behavior or performance that's relevant to the tasks of the job—and ask them consistently across candidates. Just winging it and asking whatever comes to mind is next to useless.
More important, interviews are where biases most easily show up, because interviewers do usually decide on the fly what to ask of whom and how to interpret the answer. Everyone knows some executive who is absolutely certain he knows the one question that will really predict good candidates ("If you were stranded on a desert island…"). The sociologist Lauren Rivera's examination of interviews for elite positions, such as those in professional services firms, indicates that hobbies, particularly those associated with the rich, feature prominently as a selection criterion.
Interviews are where biases most easily show up.
Interviews are most important for assessing "fit with our culture," which is the number one hiring criterion employers report using, according to research from the Rockefeller Foundation. It's also one of the squishiest attributes to measure, because few organizations have an accurate and consistent view of their own culture—and even if they do, understanding what attributes represent a good fit is not straightforward. For example, does the fact that an applicant belonged to a fraternity reflect experience working with others or elitism or bad attitudes toward women? Should it be completely irrelevant? Letting someone with no experience or training make such calls is a recipe for bad hires and, of course, discriminatory behavior. Think hard about whether your interviewing protocols make any sense and resist the urge to bring even more managers into the interview process.
Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning models.
Culture fit is another area into which new vendors are swarming. Typically they collect data from current employees, create a machine learning model to predict the attributes of the best ones, and then use that model to hire candidates with the same attributes.
As with many other things in this new industry, that sounds good until you think about it; then it becomes replete with problems. Given the best performers of the past, the algorithm will almost certainly include white and male as key variables. If it's restricted from using that category, it will come up with attributes associated with being a white male, such as playing rugby.
Machine learning models do have the potential to find important but previously unconsidered relationships. Psychologists, who have dominated research on hiring, have been keen to study attributes relevant to their interests, such as personality, rather than asking the broader question "What identifies a potential good hire?" Their results gloss over the fact that they often have only a trivial ability to predict who will be a good performer, particularly when many factors are involved. Machine learning, in contrast, can come up with highly predictive factors. Research by Evolv, a workforce analytics pioneer (now part of Cornerstone OnDemand), found that expected commuting distance for the candidate predicted turnover very well. But that's not a question the psychological models thought to ask. (And even that question has problems.)
The advice on selection is straightforward: Test for skills. Ask assessments vendors to show evidence that they can actually predict who the good employees will be. Do fewer, more-consistent interviews.
The Way Forward
It's impossible to get better at hiring if you can't tell whether the candidates you select become good employees. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. You must have a way to measure which employees are the best ones.
Why is that not getting through to companies? Surveyed employers say the main reason they don't examine whether their practices lead to better hires is that measuring employee performance is difficult. Surely this is a prime example of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Some aspects of performance are not difficult to measure: Do employees quit? Are they absent? Virtually all employers conduct performance appraisals. If you don't trust them, try something simpler. Ask supervisors, "Do you regret hiring this individual? Would you hire him again?"
Organizations that don't check to see how well their practices predict the quality of their hires are lacking in one of the most consequential aspects of modern business.


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SALISBURY – Only a couple more steps to go until the process to construct a new Bennett Middle School (BMS) could be underway.
The Wicomico County Council voted unanimously this week to introduce legislative bill 2012-07 to allow the county to appropriate $12,550,000 in bonds to be used in the fiscal year of 2013 to construct a replacement for BMS. The bill also calls for a $50,000 contingency fund to be used to pay the difference between estimates costs and actual costs.
The inception of the BMS project, the construction of a new school and the demolition of the current school, began over three years ago and the county has already bonded $8 million to go toward the project. The estimated total cost is $75.3 million.
Many concerns have been expressed over the conditions of the 46-year-old school, including its noncompliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, faulty wiring, lack of technology, security of students, over population of students, lack of air conditioning and a list of maintenance issues.
According to the Board of Education, the groundbreaking for the replacement of the school could take place as soon as January 2013. The new school will be built on a 36-acre property on South Division Street in Fruitland. The school will have an enrollment capacity of 937 to comfortably hold the current 925 students enrolled. The estimated completion date is currently August 2016.
Once the replacement for Bennett Middle School opens, the old school will be demolished to create room for Bennett High School's new athletic fields, which would complete the high school's project all together. There is $7.3 million waiting on the sidelines for the new fields and the funds can only be used for that purpose.
County Attorney Edgar Baker explained that the introduction of the bill is the first step. Following the adoption of the Capital Improvement Budget, the next step would be to hold a public hearing concerning the bill and the final step would be to the acceptance of a bond resolution.
"I look forward to things moving forward," Councilwoman Sheree Sample-Hughes said prior to the council take roll call vote, which resulted in unanimous consensus.
Director of Finance Andy Mackel said the county's financial advisor, Davenport & Company LLC, suggested the county go to the bond market as soon as possible to not interfere with elections in November. The goal is to go to the bond market by the first week in October because there has to be a 60-day period following the bill's passage before the sale can occur.
The council will hold a public hearing on July 12 at 6 p.m. in council chambers in the Government Office Building. A vote will take place that night or the following County Council legislative session.


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Despite claims that server virtualization makes everything easier, in many ways it has made data centers more complex to manage. By virtualizing the physical server, gone are the days of managing one app, one server. On the flip side, also gone are the days of server vendor lock-in. Because virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware, it is easier for data center administrators to have multiple server hardware vendors in play, allowing administrators to rack the best (or cheapest) hardware they can get their hands on.
Does that mean hardware vendors will stay out of the virtualization management game? Hardly. In spite of this newfound freedom, hardware vendors are still fighting to maintain control as that "single pane of glass" when it comes to systems management. So how do you handle management across multiple vendors in a virtual environment?
[ Find out more about Dell's Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter at InfoWorld's Lab Notes. | Also on InfoWorld, read about VMware's presidential shake-up and learn about their four co-presidents. ]
Dell has its own systems management solution, Dell OpenManage, but it wasn't originally designed to manage a virtual server environment, so Dell is trying other ways to make it easier for its customers to manage their PowerEdge servers in this new environment. Last year the company worked hard to integrate its servers, service processors, and Dell OpenManage administration tool with Microsoft's System Center. Now Dell is attempting to ease administration burdens for VMware users by hooking Dell PowerEdge servers into VMware's vCenter management console via a new Dell plug-in.
Dell seems to have come to the conclusion that it has little chance of circumventing VMware users from using vCenter as their main entry point into their virtual environments. Thus, they created a plug-in for vCenter that allows it to reach into OpenManage, the Dell PowerEdge Lifecycle controller, and the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) for remote systems management. The plug-in provides administrators with the capabilities of provisioning bare-metal servers, deploying ESX and ESXi hypervisors on to bare metal, handling firmware and BIOS updates, and managing alerts directly from within VMware's vCenter console.
IBM's approach to virtualization management takes a different path. Despite what Dell may have heard from customers, IBM doesn't believe VMware should be that single-pane-of-glass view into the virtual data center. IBM's approach is more open and focused on managing both physical and virtual resources, regardless of whether the virtualization environment is VMware, KVM, or something else. The company claims this approach will give IT administrators with a more holistic, integrated view of their IT infrastructure that spans servers, storage, and networking.
"Using IBM Systems Director, we can manage physical and virtual resources across the entire IBM Systems portfolio (System x, Power, System z, storage, and networking) and across multiple virtualization environments -- such as VMware, KVM, Hyper-V, PowerVM, and z/OS -- using plug-ins like VMcontrol, Network Control, Storage Control, and Active Energy Management," said Alex Cabanes, manager of IBM system software. "These products work in conjunction with virtualization environments. In addition, IBM Systems Director can interface using the open UIM [Upward Integration Module] into the Tivoli Management Framework, Tivoli NetView, HP OpenView, Microsoft SMS, Microsoft Operations Manager, CA Unicenter NSM, and BMC Patrol, so customers can use their existing Systems Management infrastructure to manage their IBM Systems in a cohesive, integrated manner."


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