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Canon Honored with Buyers Laboratory LLC Line of the Year Award for Energy Efficiency
Canon Honored with Buyers Laboratory LLC Line of the Year Award for Energy Efficiency
LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- In recognition of outstanding environmental performance, Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging solutions, today announced the Company's A3 line of multifunction products featuring imageRUNNER and imageRUNNER ADVANCE models has been named the Buyers Laboratory LLC 2013 (BLI) Line of the Year for Energy Efficiency. Buyers Lab, with a database covering over 16,000 products, is the leading independent office-equipment testing lab and business consumer advocate.
To qualify for the award, devices had to achieve energy consumption rates of 35 percent or more below the competitive average. Canon's A3 line of products consistently achieved levels of energy consumption significantly lower than the industry average ranging from 37 to 62 percent below competitor averages. Many of the Canon models tested feature additional energy saving features including toner-save mode, automatic duplexing functionality and the ability to fax or scan documents without having the device completely warmed up.
"Canon is extremely honored to be the recipient of this prestigious award from Buyers Laboratory," said Sam Yoshida, vice president and general manager, Marketing, Business Imaging Solutions Group, Canon U.S.A. "We are proud to be recognized for providing our customers with high-performance and quality products while at the same time helping to reduce energy consumption."
This is not the first time Canon has positioned itself as an industry leader in providing highly energy-efficient products. Canon has won 18 BLI "Outstanding Achievement" awards for energy efficiency to-date, which is more than any other vendor. For this year, the Canon models tested include imageRUNNER ADVANCE monochrome and color devices ranging from 20 pages per minute to 75 pages per minute.
About Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Canon U.S.A., Inc., is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions. With approximately $45.6 billion in global revenue, its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYS: CAJ) , ranks third overall in U.S. patents registered in 2011† and is one of Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies in 2012. In 2012, Canon U.S.A. has received the PCMag.com Readers' Choice Award for Service and Reliability in the digital camera and printer categories for the ninth consecutive year, and for camcorders for the past two years. Canon U.S.A. is committed to the highest level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing 100 percent U.S.-based consumer service and support for all of the products it distributes. Canon U.S.A. is dedicated to its Kyosei philosophy of social and environmental responsibility. To keep apprised of the latest news from Canon U.S.A., sign up for the Company's RSS news feed by visiting www.usa.canon.com/rss.
†Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office.
All referenced product names, and other marks, are trademarks of their respective owners.
About Buyers Laboratory
Since 1961, Buyers Lab has been the leading independent office-equipment testing lab and business consumer advocate. In addition to publishing the industry's most comprehensive and accurate test reports on office document imaging devices, each representing months of exhaustive hands-on testing in BLI's US and UK laboratories, the company has been the leading source for extensive databases of specifications and pricing on copiers, printers, fax machines and multifunctional products. The company's databases cover over 13,000 products and have a long-standing reputation for being the industry's most trustworthy and complete source for global competitive intelligence. They are available to BLI subscribers online via the company's bliQ competitive information service. This encyclopedic resource also provides quick and easy access to BLI's First Look Reports, Field Test Reports, Lab Test Reports, Solutions Reports, and BLI-produced articles.
In addition to the testing of office equipment for its subscribers, Buyers Lab provides consulting services to buyers and a vast array of confidential for-hire private testing services that include document imaging device beta and pre-launch testing, performance certification testing, consumables testing (such as toner, ink and photoconductors), software solutions and print media testing (including virgin and recycled papers).
For more information on Buyers Lab, please call (201) 488-0404, visit www.buyerslab.com, or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.
Canon U.S.A. website:
Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Daniel Lorenzo, 516-328-5184
KEYWORDS: United States North America New York
The article Canon Honored with Buyers Laboratory LLC Line of the Year Award for Energy Efficiency originally appeared on Fool.com.
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Interim HealthCare of Portales, NM
Offers Home Health Agencies
About Interim HealthCare of Portales, NM in Portales, New Mexico
Home health care services from Interim allow individuals to stay safe, independent, and engaged while remaining in their own homes. We offer:
Personal Care and Support
Companionship and help with daily living activities such as grooming, bathing, fixing meals, and laundry.
Nursing Services
As allowed by state law, Interim offers in-home nursing care provided by Registered Nurses (RNs), Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) or Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVNs). Available services include the monitoring of blood pressure, glucose, and other vital signs, disease and treatment education, wound care, and medication administration.
Many therapies can be provided at home to speed recovery from illness, injury or surgery, while also allowing families to be more closely involved in the rehabilitation process. Interim offers physical, occupational, and speech therapies.
Respite Care
Respite care from Interim provides family members breaks from the daily routine of care giving. Whether it's for a few hours or a long vacation, Interim can provide the support and relief needed.Get Costs
Services and Amenities of Interim HealthCare of Portales, NM in Portales, New Mexico
Health services
- Physical Therapy
Quality of Service
Timeliness of providing service96.1%
Taught patient or caregivers about their drugs97.8%
Checked patient's risk of falling100%
Checked patient for depression98.7%
Checked for flu vaccination75%
Checked for pneumonia shot90.6%
Provided diabetes specific care including getting doctors orders, giving foot care, and teatching patients about foot care98.9%
How often patients had less pain moving around76.4%
How often home health patients had to be admitted to the hospital18.2%
How often patients receiving home health care needed urgent, unplanned care in the ER without being admitted11.4%
How often home health patients, who have had a recent hospital stay, had to be re-admitted to the hospitalWorse Than Expected
How often home health patients, who have had a recent hospital stay, received care in the hospital emergency room without being re-admitted to the hospitalWorse Than Expected
Patient Improvement
Walking or moving around82%
Getting in and out of bed83.9%
Wounds/healing after an operation99.2%
Medication compliance81.5%
Agency Type
- Full Service Agency
Range of services
- Companion Care
- Personal Care Assistants
- Physical Therapy
- Occupational Therapy
Types of care
- Transportation: Yes
- Doctor Visit Companionship
- Light Housekeeping
- Transfer Assistance
- Bathing And Toileting
- Exercise
- Finances Bookkeeping
- Home Maintenance
- Blood Work And Other Medical Care
- Walking Wheelchair Assistance
- Memory Care
- Companionship
- Meal Preparation
- Errand And Grocery Assistance
- In Person Interviews
- Reference Checks
- Immunizations
- Residency Confirmation
- Background Checks
- Drug Screening
- Sex Offender Check
- Continual Training
Training Areas
- Patient Transfers
- Stress Management
- Family Communication
- Transition Issues
- Memory Care Training
- Ethics
- Validation Techniques
Payment options
- Insurance
- Credit Card
- Check
Payment details
- Payroll Provided For Caregivers
- Bonded And Insured

subset: commoncrawl


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House Hunting & Property Guidelines
Start Your VA Home Loan
Get a personalized assessment from a Home Loan Specialist
Property Condition
Real estate agents can help better target your home search by focusing on properties that are likely to meet the VA's appraisal guidelines and lender requirements.
The VA appraisal is meant to help veterans and service members purchase homes that are safe, sanitary, structurally sound and appropriately valued. There are broad criteria that a VA-backed home must be measured against, known as "Minimum Property Requirements," or MPRs.
Some of these property requirements include:
- Mechanical systems must be safe and have reasonable future utility
- Heating must be adequate
- Roofing must be adequate
- Crawl spaces and basements must be dry
- Property must be free of termites, dry rot and fungus growth
- Lead-based paint must be remediated
VA-savvy agents can help you immediately identify homes that might prove problematic for the VA appraisal process or lenders. To be sure, property condition problems don't mean a home is automatically out of reach. But some issues will need to be repaired or otherwise addressed before the loan can close, which means sellers or buyers may have to spend additional money upfront to keep the deal alive.
In addition to the VA's property requirements, lenders can have their own standards that homes need to meet. That means some properties may not ultimately be eligible for financing from a particular lender, even if they otherwise meet VA guidelines.
It can be frustrating (and expensive) to get under contract on a home, pay for a home inspection and even an appraisal only to find out the property falls short of VA or lender guidelines. At that point, you have to to decide whether it's worth it – or even possible – to move forward. Different lenders and different locales can mean varying property requirements.
Here are a few immediate red flags that could signal problems ahead with a particular home:
Condo Approvals
Condo developments need to be approved by the VA. Your lender or a VA-savvy real estate agent can help you determine if a development is already on the approved list. You can also check the VA's searchable condo database. Don't despair if you fall in love with a condo that isn't in an approved development. Your lender can ask the VA to approve a development that isn't on the list, but understand that process can take months to complete and isn't guaranteed to succeed.
Unique Properties
If you have your eye on the A-frame home down the street, you may want to reconsider. A VA appraiser will use recent comparable home sales, or "comps," to help determine the value of a home. In the case of unique properties, the appraiser may have trouble finding similar homes that have sold recently. Lenders aren't likely to consider financing a purchase without at least one good recent comparable sale.
Similarly, while there's no acreage limit with VA loans, properties with a lot of land can sometimes prove problematic in terms of finding good comps. In addition, lenders may have their own in-house guidelines and requirements regarding property types.
For example, some lenders may not be willing to lending on:
- Geodesic domes
- Converted churches
- Ranches, orchards or working farms
- Co-ops and condotels
- And more
Talk with your lender immediately if you're interested in a property that's in any way out of the ordinary.
Income-Producing Properties
Properties that have income-producing attributes may be a problem for some VA lenders. Defining what constitutes an income-producing property can get tricky, but things like a working farm, a outbuilding with a shop or even a horse barn can all be problematic. Lenders are usually concerned about financial liabilities and liens when there's business crossover with your residence. Again, policies and requirements can vary by lender.
At Veterans United, we're generally OK with income-producing attributes unless an appraisal notes that the "highest and best" use of the property is commercial in nature rather than residential, or if those income-producing features may create future marketability issues with the property. Check with your loan officer if you have questions about a specific property.
Homes Listed "As-Is"
As-is properties may come with a bargain price tag, but beware – it's common for these types of listings to have serious structural issues or deferred maintenance that the seller doesn't want to deal with. If an inspection or an appraisal turns up problems, these sellers aren't likely to cover the cost of any needed repairs. You'd either have to pay for the repairs yourself to keep your loan alive, if that's even possible, or move on to the next house on your list.
Major Improvements
If the seller did any rehab work or made improvements to the home, make sure they (or their contractor) obtained all necessary permits. Building codes can vary by community, and not all renovations and home improvements require a permit from the local municipality. But if the seller failed to get a permit for work that requires one, you may have a headache on your hands. Non-permitted improvements can spell trouble on your VA appraisal report, and obtaining permits retroactively can be time-consuming. Look for the proper paper trail following any big home improvement projects.
Foundation Problems
Cracks or other foundation issues can seriously affect the structural integrity of the home. These can also be expensive repairs. Foundation problems would need to be repaired before a loan could close, and whether the seller will make the repairs is often the question. Paying for foundation work on a property you hope to purchase may not be a wise investment.
Heating or Cooling Problems
Working heating and cooling systems will be required in most parts of the country. The VA and lenders want to see a permanent heat source, which means space heaters and similar sources will not alone suffice. Homes with permanently installed non-electric, non-vented fireplaces or space heaters may be eligible, provided the buyer signs a "hold harmless" agreement and the unit meets applicable codes and has an approved oxygen depletion sensor.
VA doesn't currently require a heating system in about a dozen south Florida counties.
Roof Problems
The roof will need to be in good shape and have sufficient remaining economic life. Just how many years that needs to be can vary depending on the lender. The VA doesn't specify a certain number.
But some lenders may require a minimum number of years of remaining economic life. Policies and guidelines can and will vary.
Historic Properties
If a home doesn't have sufficient remaining economic life, your purchase could be flagged as a risky investment. Older homes sometimes fail to meet other requirements as well. Stacked stone foundations, inadequate heating and cooling systems, lead paint and improper insulation are just a few things to look out for if you're in the market for an older home.
Buying Foreclosures or Short Sales
A foreclosure occurs when a financial institution takes back a home from a borrower who's unable or unwilling to pay. A short sale is when a bank allows homeowners to sell their home for less than what's owed.
Buyers can be drawn to the prospect of substantial discounts reflected in distressed properties. But buyers can pay a price for that discount, often in frustration and delays. Purchasing a bank-owned home can take considerably longer than a traditional home purchase.
Another challenge to consider: Every potential VA property must go through the VA appraisal process. Many distressed properties haven't been properly maintained and will fall short of the VA's Minimum Property Requirements. Some sellers are willing to make repairs to bring a home up to VA standards, but banks may have other priorities. Banks usually want a quick, hassle-free sale, so they often prefer to sell properties "as is."
Don't set your sights on a fixer-upper in foreclosure. Even though banks want to sell quickly, many won't make any repairs to their foreclosures. You may have more luck if your less-than-perfect home is a short sale property, as individual homeowners may be more willing to make needed improvements. You can also pursue an FHA 203k loan, which allows qualified borrowers to include money for repair and rehabilitation work.
Also, keep your expectations low if you've fallen in love with a wreck of a home. You can ask a bank to make repairs or even see if they'll allow you to do so, but be prepared for them to say no. Always have a back-up plan in case the sale falls through, and don't pursue foreclosures in poor condition if you're on a strict timeline.
Understand that it can take longer to finalize the purchase of a distressed property, so your homebuying journey may take longer. Adjust your schedule and your expectations accordingly.


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Developed in 2005, Akasa International is a top brand in manufacturing and supplying premium quality Commercial Kitchen Equipment in Visakhapatnam. These products have a huge demand in the market owing to their high affordability and durability. We keep our product prices fair so that more people can make use of them.
We as an exporter of Kitchen products aim to provide reliable products to our clients in every part of the country. We strongly believe that to design quality products, we need to work hard to deliver what our clients exactly need. This is why our professional team of skilled workers believe in offering world-class product range that leaves them with full contentment.
We are striving hard to create our mark in the market with our reliable products such as Commercial Pizza Ovens, Deep Fryers, and Food Warmer Hot Case etc. We stand as the renowned supplier of Kitchen products in India. Our products are highly acknowledged by our customers and their positive feedback and unstable trust in us make us deliver more.Read More
210, Neo Corporate Plaza, Ramchandra Lane, Marve Road, Malad-West , Mumbai - 400064View More
Akasa's UVC sterilizers are using best in class - Made in Poland Philips UVC lamps with life of 9000 hours. Tested and certified by NABL accredited lab. Kills upto 99.99% germs mkaing it ideal for your homes, office
We represent ourselves on all important international exhibitions to position our company on international markets by presenting our products to a professional audience. You are most welcome at our booth on our exhibitions.
Find the latest news and stories related to commercial kitchen appliances. Stay updated with the latest trends and important news by reading our important news regularly. We keep you updated with our fresh, and informative news.
Thanks Akasa for delivering the optimum quality of sandwich griller at my doorstep on-time. I loved the sandwich griller provided by them. Great product, fast delivery, and low prices!
I have purchased Electric Pizza Oven three months back from Akasa and I am really enjoying making my kids favorite Pizza in it. It consumes less power and is very easy-to-use. Thanks for offering the quality pizza oven at a great price!
Excellent Hot Case with reasonable rates! I would highly recommend Akasa to those who are looking for the best and cheapest hot case.
We are working to fulfil the requirement of customers all over India. Currently, we are manufacturing commercial kitchen equipments, fast food equipments, hotel kitchen equipments etc.


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This company is not one of those hop-or-top startups that either grow huge or fail. It is rather one that has a strong technical USP and will definitely get it's sales if they manage to ship a solid product. Their product is priced like a sports car and they have already a handful of beta systems out there that are used by key customers. So far the feedback is great. With some thousand sales in mind they aim at a valuation in the middle tens of millions within 5 years. Of course that is idle speculation but so far everything looks good.
Two month ago i was introduced into this company as a freelancer. Their dev team consisted of a hardware technician, a maths genius who creates their USP and one guy, who integrated hardware and math and developed the existing UI on top of it. They told me about a trade fair four weeks later and that they needed to show their product with a new, fancy UI. They wanted to have this metro style kind of thing with tiles and touch friendly and stuff like that. And since they weren't able to build it on their own, they needed me – desperately. I asked for an attractive salary and they happily accepted. So i went back to my office and within two weeks i knocked up a complete application with everything they wanted. We needed the other two weeks to integrate their existing algorithms and hardware and the trade fair was a huge success. Well, of course i just put together pieces from my earlier projects and restyled the whole thing according to their CI, but hey, for them i am the rock star programmer.
Then darkness was setting in. Their only programmer resigned. Within four weeks this company would have algorithms that are far superior to their competition but nobody who can build the software that moves the data around. Nobody who turns the algorithms into a product. Their current application was still far from being a product. In the following three weeks i helped them to fix things and incorporate new features for the next fair and then they realized their situation: No finished product and nobody who can build it. It is their only true product and obviously they need somebody who takes responsibility of it. For them i am still the rock star programmer and i already worked myself through the whole system. And they have only one week left to replace their resigned developer.
Needless to say that they asked me to stay. They want as much commitment as i can give and they want me to be part of the company. They offered shares and assured immediate budget for another developer. I shall be the one who build their dev team.
So where is the problem? First, i have my own two-man company and my own clients that sometimes need my time. I certainly won't let them down. Second, i have (of course) some ideas for new products that i want to try. And third, i doubt that they can afford me if i would work full time at the current rate.
So i made up my mind and decided that i can only ensure three days a week. That doesn't mean i wouldn't work full time in case there is justified demand, but certainly not on a regular basis. At the same time, i think this company has potential. I kind of believe in their success and therefore i would love to take the ride and join them. Basically i want to tell them: Hey, i don't want to give more than three days and a verbal assurance that i help as much as i can, i want to work for the same rate as i did as an external and yet i want to be part of your company and get a piece of the cake. I know that i have a very strong position to negotiate but the above claim sounds like i get everything and you get nothing. What could be a reasonable compromise? What is a good strategy to negotiate?
EDIT: read comments on hackernews if you like.


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Endpoint Security , Enterprise Mobility Management / BYOD , Open XDR
How the Remote Workforce Is Changing the Threat LandscapeDuo Security's Jon Oberheide on Securing Access to Devices, Cloud Services
Today's workforce increasingly works remotely and relies on a variety of devices and cloud services to accomplish their jobs. Organizations must support and secure this push, or they risk driving employees to adopt less secure - or corporate-managed - forms of shadow IT, warns Jon Oberheide of Duo Security, a Cisco company.
See Also: Live Webinar | Cyber Resilience: Recovering from a Ransomware Attack
In a video interview with Information Security Media Group at RSA Conference 2019 in San Francisco, Oberheide discusses:
- Security challenges posed by a workforce that increasingly works remotely;
- How "bring your own device" security concerns and challenges have evolved;
- The "zero trust" principle.
Oberheide is CTO of Duo Security. Wile his research interests span across the security domain, he has expertise in mobile security, cloud security and malware analysis. He held positions at Merit Network and Arbor Networks before co-founding Duo Security in 2009. The company last year became part of Cisco.


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With its strong PR roots, Malaysia has grown to become one of the leading PR firms in the world. The most reputable PR firms in Malaysia offer a variety of services which include public relations (publishing the press, PR, conferences and events), event marketing (books, PR) and consumer packaged media (programming, advertising) as well as non-profit marketing (consolidation, branding as well as branding, consolidation, PR) Government PR and education (focusing on innovation and communication). Below is a short profile for each of those listed as the Best PR Agencies Malaysia.
Mad Hat Asia. Mad Hat Asia, a PR agency with strong ties to China and India was founded in the year 1998. It offers a range of services to clients such as advertising, printing media, and radio along with commercial marketing as well as non-profit promotional. The agency also works with projects in India, Thailand and the Philippines. Mad Hat Asia has more than 300 employees , and is located in Kuala Lumpur. Beyond its core area of PR and mass communications, Mad Hat Asia offers several specialties such as digital and niche agencies, specialized agencies, as well as regional PR firms.
Carat Comms. Also called Caratt Commision, this agency was founded in 1986. It's part of the conglomerated PR firm known as Caratt International. The agency is specialized in corporate communications, business development, communications as well as direct mail Internet services, and local government administration in Malaysia, India, and China. The firm aims to create durable, mutually beneficial, and long-term relationships with clients.
Best PR Agencies Malaysia. Best PR Agencies Malaysia was founded in the year 1998, by Azad Ali Sitthichit. He was the Marketing Manager, and Associate Director Rene Kumar Teo. The goal of the company is to improve the level of service offered to its customers. There are numerous people in the firm. The company also receives reviews from customers regularly, and uses the reviews to formulate strategies as well as its services.
Media Relations Malaysia. The agency for PR located in Malaysia can provide conventional and nontraditional media relations and public relations support. The company aims to improve Malaysia's image by strategic planning, effective control of advertising budgets, and creative solutions to many challenges.
Communications Agency. Communications is a vital aspect of daily business in Malaysia. It is , therefore, essential for agencies to create effective, efficient communication programs. It provides strategic planning in the creation of programs aimed in building its name and advertising its services along with overall experienced guidance when it comes to designing, launching, and maintaining their campaign.
PR Executive. This type of executive position is mostly held by firms that specialize in this area. These agencies that are located in Malaysia are referred to as Kuih Tunis or Kuih-teriyang. The person in charge of PR must have knowledge in the field of advertising, communication, and promotion.
PR Executive. A good PR agency should include several key positions. They include a director of communications who supervises communication, collaborates with media outlets, performs administrative duties and media planners, as well as events director and the project manager. These positions ensure that the agency is always positioned to respond to any shift in attention from the public's attention. The posts also enable the agency to be able to tackle tasks such as handling day-to-day PR work including media and media campaigning, along with various other important PR tasks assigned by the top management.
Communications Manager. Communications Manager. Malaysia All PR firms are aware the fact that social media is an increasingly important medium of communications for businesses. This is why a PR agency in Malaysia needs to set up a separate department to serve to accomplish this goal. the Communications Director (or Communications Director in local languages) is accountable for the business's online strategy that includes the pursuit of local consumers via Search Engine Optimization. It is responsible for controlling social media accounts and websites, blogs, and maintenance.
Consulting in Public Relations. Consulting in Public Relations. Malaysian PR agencies can use a consultant in a variety of projects, including market research and strategy consulting. Consultancies can also be used for advice about local issues in Malaysia, particularly those that affect the rights of the local population, such as religion tolerance, land ownership and. Consultants are extremely valuable since they provide expert opinions about sensitive subjects, which enable PR agencies to better serve their clients.
Marketing Manager. PR agencies operating in Malaysia should hire a marketing director for strategic planning as well as project management and programming development. Due to the fact that Malaysia has a population that is young and a young population, the manager for marketing must be able attract and educate the best individuals for the job. In a country with many Internet users, it is crucial that the firm reaches its customers. Marketing executives must have the capability to design advertisements that can be relevant to Malaysians and reach their target viewers.


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Singer Tina Campbell is the newest Black celeb to publicly show their support for President Donald Trump.
The member of popular gospel group Mary Mary took to Facebook on Wednesday to pen an open letter explaining why she supports Trump and why we all should have faith in him.
"I believe that understanding and compassion [are] absolutely necessary for the progress of all people," she wrote.
"So, although I don't always understand or agree with Mr. Donald Trump's politics, perspective, and approach, I believe that the same God that created all of us has deposited greatness inside of him that goes far beyond what many of us have seen and what many of us could imagine."
She also continued to say that like her, Trump believes that all lives matter and that he too respects the lives of this nation's citizens. (Does he really though?)
"I believe that all people and all lives matter, including that of Mr. Donald Trump and his family. I believe that the leaders of this nation should protect the opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for every single one of its citizens. And, I choose to believe that Mr. Donald Trump shares this same belief," she added.
Guess she hasn't been watching much of the news lately.
Well perhaps she has, because she continued saying that instead of speaking ill of Trump and protesting in the streets, we should pray for Trump and his family instead. Apparently, that's what she is going to despite not always agreeing with his policies and beliefs.
"I choose to stand with him, and pray for him; because, as a follower of Jesus Christ and a firm believer in the Holy Bible, according to 1 Timothy 2:1-3, I have been commanded to: 'The first thing I want you to do is pray every way you know how… especially for rulers and their governments, to rule well. This is the way our Savior God wants us to live,'" she wrote.
She concluded her rather lengthy letter saying that if Trump is united with God, the country will prosper.
"I choose to believe that America is great, always has been great, and is becoming greater because it is in God that we trust. He is the founding father of this nation, and there is no failure in Him. I chose to believe that a people led by President Donald Trump, united under God, will never be defeated."
What could be her motive in making this announcement?
Our Difficult First Week With President Donald Trump
Supporting Trump Is The Godly Thing To Do, Singer Tina Campbell Says was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
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'African-American Muhammad': Did Marjorie Taylor Greene Make Up A Fake Black Trump Supporter?


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Ice wine, Canada's distinctive contribution to the world of wine, holds a fascinating place in the world wine price tables and so qualifies for inclusion in The Wine Economist's extreme wine series.
Top of the World
Which country gets the highest average price for its bottled wine exports? You might think it would be France with all those expensive Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy wines or Portugal with its costly eponymous after-dinner wines. But both of these countries also export a good deal of much cheaper wine, bringing their average export earnings (USD per liter) down to $4.24 and $3.70 respectively. (Data are for 2005 from my copy of The Global Wine Statistical Compendium.)
New Zealand with its gorgeous Pinot Noirs and Sauvignon Blancs ($6.64) and the UK with its classy sparkling wines ($6.87) both earn more per liter of bottled wine exports than the "usual suspects" of France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain to say nothing of New World powers Argentina ($1.87), Australia ($3.65), Chile ($2.72) and South Africa ($2.42).
(Remember that wines that are exported for, say, $4.00 will have a much higher price on your store shelves due to transport costs, distribution and retail margins and applicable taxes.)
At the very top of the table, for reasons that I think are due to exchange rate sand import resales more than domestic wine prices, is Switzerland ($8.23 per liter) followed closely by Canada ($7.32). How can frigid Canada rate so high? Ice wine (or Eiswein) , of course!
The Highest Compliment?
Canada didn't invent ice wine (credit Austria with that) but it is the world's largest producer of this chilly wine, making nearly a million liters in a good year according to John Scheiner's authoritative The Wines of Canada. Ice wine's high cost is the biggest single factor in Canada's lofty export earnings average.
Tiny bottles of ice wine bring enormous prices — $50, $100, even $500 and more for a half bottle at retail. Who pays these spectacular prices? Japan and other Asian countries are the largest export market. Ice wine is the quintessential high end gift wine — attractively sweet, beautifully packaged and luxuriously expensive. Tourists snap bottles at Duty-Free to take home to Asia.
I've heard that so much ice wine is bought by Tokyo-bound travelers that some Canadian duty-free stores have special bonded facilities in Japan to make purchases more convenient. Pay at the airport in Canada and pick up your ice wine at baggage claim in Japan. Sweet!
Ice wines are so expensive and sought after in Asia that counterfeiting is a serious problem. Some experts believe that as much as 50 percent of the ice wine sold in Taiwan is bogus — sweet wines from Canada and elsewhere that are doctored up and repackaged.
Check out this image from the label of one of the faked wines — brewed, not fermented! Yikes. Must have got ice wine mixed up with ice beer. These may be big counterfeiting operations, but not necessarily sophisticated ones.
A recent Globe and Mail article suggests the problem may be even worse in China.
Well over 50 per cent of icewine in China is fake from what I've seen and heard," said Allan Schmidt, president of Vineland Estates, which has quit the market entirely. "If it was 80 per cent … I wouldn't be surprised.
The legitimate Chinese market for Canadian icewine has grown rapidly, which the industry attributes to a burgeoning middle class and the desire to give exotic gifts. It rose to $2.16-million in 2007 from $270,000 in 2005. The market sagged in 2008, but was worth $1.2-million in the first half of this year [2009]. It's our most important flagship wine produced," said Bob Keyes, vice-president of economic and government affairs with the Canadian Vintners Association.
Chilly Saga, Intense Experience
Ice wine is a very particular product. The grapes for ice wines are left on the vine long after regular grapes have been picked. By law natural ice wine in Canada can only be made from grapes that have been frozen to -7 degrees Celsius (17 degrees F) and harvested at minimum 35 degrees brix. The juice, what is left of it, is highly concentrated so each grape yields just a drop or so. Picking is done by hand, of course, since many clusters will have experienced bird damage or fallen prey to disease.
Vidal Blanc is the grape of choice for Canadian ice wine — its tough skin can stand up to harsh weather — along with lesser amounts of Riesling and other varietals. Most of Canada's ice wine is produced in Ontario, where wine makers can pretty much count on frightfully low temperatures early in the winter season. But the first ice wines came from out west in British Columbia.
North America's first commercial ice wine was made in 1978 by German-born Walter and Tilman Hainle of Hainle Vineyards Estate Winery in Peachland, British Columbia. Tillman Hainle, Walter's son, generously shared precious bottles of a recent vintage from with us at the 2008 Riesling Rendezvous meetings. [See Tilman's helpful comment below.] It was one of the most memorable wines I've ever tasted, so I just had to visit Hainle Vineyards on my recent Okanagan wine country expedition.
Sue and I met with Dr. Walter Huber, the proprietor of Hainle Vineyards and Deep Creek Wine Estate, who purchased the business from the Hainle family after Walter's death. Dr. Huber was an extremely generous host, pulling corks with almost excessive enthusiasm. He's refuses to release his wines before their time, choosing to let them dribble out slowly to lucky wine club members. He is generous to a fault with inquisitive visitors like me, even letting us sample an ice wine from 1984. Wow! I purchased some old vine Rieslings to drink a few years from now when they have fully matured.
Only the Beginning
Ice wine is what made Canada's reputation in wine, Dr. Huber explained, but it's not all there is to Canadaian wine these days, especially in the Okanagan Valley in eastern B.C., where the vineyards overlook Lake Okanagan and dozens of very different micro-climates co-exist. Winegrowers are able to ripen cool climate grapes like Riesling and Pinot Noir, of course, but also Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah and apparently even Zinfandel!
I love ice wine, but it is only one element of Canada's dynamic wine industry. I'll report on the surprising wine tourism industry in my an upcoming post, followed by a peek at what might be the future of Canadian wine. O Canada, you produce some unexpected wines! Check back soon to learn about what's happening today and what the future may hold.
[Note: This post is part of an occasional feature on extreme wines. Extreme wines? You know, the cheapest, the most expensive; the biggest producers, the smallest; the oldest, the newest and so forth.]


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Inverse, Exponential and Logarithmic Functions
University of Michigan
Runs his own tutoring company
Carl taught upper-level math in several schools and currently runs his own tutoring company. He bets that no one can beat his love for intensive outdoor activities!
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University of Michigan
Runs his own tutoring company
Carl taught upper-level math in several schools and currently runs his own tutoring company. He bets that no one can beat his love for intensive outdoor activities!
One real world application of exponential equations is in compound interest. The formula for compound interest with a finite number of calculations is an exponential equation. We can solve for a parameter of this equation, and can use logarithms to access parameters in the exponent. Students may be asked to solve compound interest problems with interest compounded biannually, monthly, or daily.
Compounding interest, so what compounding interest is basically you have an investment you put a certain amount of money into an account and interest is calculated a set number of times per year okay? So what we're dealing now is this formula right here is for a set number of times that interest is calculated. It could be daily, monthly, weekly, annually once a year all different sorts of different ways that interest can be calculated and the formula reflects all those different things okay? So what we have is a is equal to p 1+r over n to the nt. Okay and what I have written down here is what each of those variables stands for.
Okay a is just going to be your ending amount okay? p is stands for principal another way of saying starting amount so if you invest $2,000, p would be 2,000 okay? Rate is going to be your percent interest so say you get 4% you'll always need to put in as a decimal so that 4% becomes 0.04 okay, n is the number of times per year interest is calculated okay so if it's daily you put in 365, weekly 52 weeks an year put in 52, monthly 12 quarterly means 4 times a year so 4 so on and so forth okay so n is just the number of times an interest is calculated and lastly t is the time of investment in years.
Okay so sort of we're looking formula lot of variables going on but overall just 5 things we have to consider interest, amount you put in the amount that comes out rate [IB] number of times this is calculated and the length of time of your investment.


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Every now and then a prominent religious zealot proclaims that the end is nigh. Harold Camping is the most recent example of such a doomsayer. He declared that judgment day commenced on May 21, 2011, and he also predicted that the destruction of the universe would follow on October 21. Wouldn't it be nice to know which day of the week our universe would end? After all, if it were to fall on a Tuesday, why bother going to work that week?
It's easy to declare that October 21 is a Friday, and many people can tell you that May 21 was a Saturday—because those are relatively recent dates. The real challenge is to determine the day of the week for an arbitrary date in history. One need not look very far for an arbitrary apocalyptic date.
In a book titled 1994?, Camping predicted that September 6, 1994, would be the end of days. Of course, that day came and went without incident. But what day of the week was it? While we're at it, why don't we raise the stakes further by rolling back the calendar a couple centuries: What day of the week was September 6, 1752, in England and its American colonies?
Algorithms in Wonderland
When he was not writing literary works like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll dabbled in mathematics. One of the results of his diversion was an 1887 perpetual calendar algorithm for calculating the day of the week for a given date. Many calendar algorithms preceded Carroll's. In fact, the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss had his own version in 1800. But Carroll was the first person to devise an algorithm suitable for mental calculation. Carroll himself could perform his calendar algorithm in his head, calculating the day of the week for a given date in about 20 seconds.
Many years later longtime Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner read about Carroll's calendar algorithm. (In addition to writing his popular "Mathematical Games" column, Gardner was a serious Carroll scholar.) Gardner then told his friend, John Horton Conway, about Carroll's algorithm and challenged Conway to come up with a simpler one. Conway, being a world-class mathematician, did come up with a much simpler algorithm in 1973. He called his algorithm the "doomsday rule."
The doomsday rule is now more commonly known as the doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple and only involves basic arithmetic. Moreover, it requires very little memorization. With practice, it can done mentally without paper and pencil in just a few seconds. In a 1999 profile of Conway, Scientific American's Mark Alpert wrote that Conway's computer was programmed to quiz him with random dates; he could usually come up with the answer in less than two seconds.
The end is not nigh
Despite its usefulness in retracing failed predictions by Camping and other prognosticators of end times, the doomsday algorithm has nothing to do with the apocalypse. Conway named his calendar algorithm after discovering an interesting property of a certain day of the week in a given year, which he called "doomsday." But his use of "doomsday" is probably a misnomer. One could just as easily refer to it as "anchor day."
The idea that makes the doomsday algorithm tick is that certain memorizable dates always share the same day of the week within any given year. For example, April 4, June 6, August 8, October 10 and December 12 all fall on a Monday in 2011. Moreover, you can check on a calendar that these dates all fall on the same day of the week in any year. For instance, in 1994 they were all Mondays, too. Conway used this fact as the basis for his algorithm. This special day of the week, shared by 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12, is the anchor day. (Which day of the week anchor day falls on varies from year to year.)
Other memorizable dates also fall on a given year's anchor day: 5/9, 9/5, 7/11 and 11/7 are all Mondays in 1994 and 2011. Just as 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12 are easy to remember because of repeating digits, one can easily remember the four additional dates using Conway's simple mnemonic: "Working 9 to 5 at the 7–Eleven." Armed with these memorizable anchor dates, one can easily determine the day of the week for nearby dates. (There are other tricks to assist with dates in the first months of the year—for example, the last day of February is always an anchor day, leap year or no.) For instance, since we already know that 9/5 was a Monday in 1994, it is easy to deduce that September 6, 1994—Harold Camping's no-show apocalypse—was a Tuesday. The use of a nearby anchor is the key to the doomsday algorithm.
The drifting anchor
The day of the week drifts annually for a given date. October 21, 2010, was a Thursday. October 21, 2011, will be a Friday and—assuming that the world does not really end that day—in 2012 October 21 will be a Sunday and October 21, 2013, will be a Monday. There must be a pattern here. Indeed, the day of the week for a given date progresses by one annually, except on leap years, where it progresses by two. Moreover, there is a simple mathematical formula for measuring the cumulative annual drift of the day of the week from the start of the century. Although the formula is simple, it is difficult to solve without pencil and paper. Lewis Carroll discovered an alternative formula for this calculation in 1887, which looks more complex but is actually more suitable for mental calculation. In fact, Conway reused Carroll's method as part of the doomsday algorithm.
Last year Michael K. Walters of the Air Force Institute of Technology and I came up with a different way of calculating the cumulative drift of the day of the week. We believe that our method is easier to perform mentally than Carroll's, because our method requires fewer divisions and memorizations. We call our method the Odd+11 method. A summary of our method is available as a flowchart here.
So what day of the week did September 6, 1752, fall on? To answer that question, one needs to know a bit of history on our current calendar system. Earth spins around its axis approximately 365.24219 times annually. This rate is known as the mean tropical year. The true number of days in the mean tropical year actually varies slightly over time. Our modern calendar system of 12 months started with the Julian calendar circa 45 B.C. The Julian calendar approximated the mean tropical year as 365.25 days and proposed 366-day leap years for every one divisible by four. This approximation made the Julian calendar fairly accurate in tracking the annual seasons for several centuries. But eventually the approximation errors accumulated. By 1582 the Julian calendar was out of sync with the seasons by several days. Pope Gregory XIII mandated a reform to the calendar; his Gregorian calendar approximated the mean tropical year as 365.2425 days. The pope thereby amended the rule for determining leap years: A year divisible by 100 is only a leap year if it is also divisible by 400. For example, the year 2000 was a leap year, but the year 1900 was not, because when divided by 400, it does not render a whole number.
The Gregorian calendar was not widely adopted across the world until much later. In fact, the British Empire and its colonies did not use the updated calendar system until 1752. By then the Julian calendar was out of sync with the seasons by 11 days. In order to synchronize with the Gregorian calendar, it was mandated that Wednesday, September 2, 1752, be followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752. Hence, the date September 6, 1752, does not exist in British and American history! A nonexistent date certainly does not have a day of the week. If you think that daylight saving time is confusing, try skipping days on for size.
What Day Is Doomsday? How to Mentally Calculate the Day of the Week for Any Date
The so-called doomsday algorithm uses clever mental arithmetic and mnemonic tricks to enable a quick determination. Trick question: What day did September 6, 1752, fall on?
Every now and then a prominent religious zealot proclaims that the end is nigh. Harold Camping is the most recent example of such a doomsayer. He declared that judgment day commenced on May 21, 2011, and he also predicted that the destruction of the universe would follow on October 21. Wouldn't it be nice to know which day of the week our universe would end? After all, if it were to fall on a Tuesday, why bother going to work that week?


text: The security community has grown to depend on some basic technologies in the fight against cyber thieves, such as antivirus software and firewalls. But are practitioners clinging to tools that outlived their usefulness long ago? Were those tools ever really useful to begin with?CSOonline.com recently conducted an unscientific survey on the matter, asking those questions to a variety of security forums on LinkedIn and following it up with e-mails and phone conversations. What follows are four technologies several cited as overrated in today's security fight.We'll follow up next week with security technologies many believe are underrated. It's safe to predict that some of the technologies on this list will also appear there.1. Antiviruscomplaining that antivirus has grown obsolete because the security vendors can't keep up with all the AV definition changes required to thwart every new piece of malware. In fact, some of the more advanced security practitioners of the world are ditching it altogether. In a previous story on the subject, David Litchfield, a leading database security expert who has authored such books as "Oracle Forensics," "The Oracle Hacker's Handbook" and "The Database Hacker's Handbook," summed up why he's lost faith in AV:This one isn't a total surprise. Security experts for years have been "As an experienced security guy, I have no faith in most of the AV packages out there because they're completely reactive, offer little advance protection, massively increase the attack surface and have a long history of vulnerable ActiveX controls," he said at the time. "I've never used AV software and I've never once been infected with a virus."Most organizations are still advised to have AV software in place. But security experts generally agree IT shops need a variety of other security tools to go with it. In other words, companies need defense in depth."Any reactive security technology keeps failing more and more each year. AV does not work, [a fact] proven by a detection rate that degrades each year," said Ari Takanen, founder and CTO of Codenomicon in Finland. "All technologies that look for attacks can be worked around by building a tailored attack that will not be detected. Even if you take a five-year-old attack you probably see that it passes through undetected today. You just cannot keep building more and more walls around bad-quality technology." 2. FirewallsFirewalls have faced equal scrutiny in recent years for similar reasons. But the biggest problem cited in our most recent poll is that the increasingly disappearing perimeter has rendered the technology obsolete."The firewall is the most worthless. It's dead. The perimeter is gone. We cannot afford enough firewalls to protect our devices," said Guy Hadsall, a Washington D.C.-based information security specialist. "In most cases, it's protection from ourselves. At best it's a check box on a PCI audit, at worst it's a pacifier to a user base intent on click-thru surfing."3. IAM AND multi-factor authentication Identity and Access Management and multi-factor authentication are not exactly the same thing. The latter is more a sub-category of access management. But they do have one thing in common, according to those who've become expert at using these technologies -- implementation is key.The problem here isn't that identity and access management technology doesn't work as advertised. It's that many companies have failed to use it properly. "With any IAM solution, it takes years to get them to work correctly," said Scott Damron, a solutions engineer at Accuvant. Given the rapid evolution of malware and social engineering, companies simply don't have years to get it right, he said.A similar point was made last week at the Security B-Sides event in San Francisco. There, presenters warned that badly-implemented IAM can be as bad as sticking with the insecure passwords it is meant to replace.Jennifer Jabbusch, CISO at Carolina Advanced Digital Inc. in North Carolina, noted how companies implement multi-factor authentication but don't always get the implementation right. That's when the company is left with nothing but "feel-good security.""We need to draw a line and not pursue solutions that simply offer a feeling of security," she said. "Things make you feel better don't really help."Michael Santarcangelo, founder of the Security Catalyst Community, noted that users can diminish the usefulness of multi-factor authentication just as they've diminished the usefulness of passwords. "People will write their PINs right on their token. So have we decreased risk? We've created a bigger barrier but that's not enough," he said.4. NACnetwork access control (NAC) as overrated for the same reason as IAM: "It takes years to get it working correctly," he repeated.Damron, from Accuvant, fingered Sharing that view is Tom Giangreco, information security officer at SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union, formally Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union."I would agree with the NAC appraisal. It's taken us more than three years to get it working according to our requirements and not those of a university campus, which they seem to have been designed for," he said.


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By MICHELLE FAUL
Associated Press
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) _ The Nigerian civil war movie "Half of a Yellow Sun" will finally premier in its home country in August, the film's producer announced Tuesday. The move came after Nigerian censors had earlier refused to approve it, saying the movie could undermine national security.
The censors had demanded cuts and it was unclear Tuesday what changes were made to satisfy the National Film and Video Censors Board.
The movie is an adaptation of a novel by award-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that has been read by millions since it was published in 2006. But many more millions of illiterate Nigerians will be able to appreciate it now through the movie.
The movie is partly set in the 1960s during Nigeria's civil war, which remains a subject so sensitive that it is not taught in Nigerian schools. Many commentators on social media suggested the censors were afraid that the film could inflame tribal rivalries.
The movie also comes as Nigeria is confronting an Islamic uprising that threatens to tear the country apart as tensions increase between Muslims and Christians, who make up almost equal parts of Nigeria's 170 million people.
The censors' board confirmed it has cleared the movie for viewing by people over 18.
It stars Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, the lead actor in "12 Years a Slave," and Thandie Newton and was supposed to premiere in Nigeria on April 25. The day before, the censors said it had not been cleared.
"Half of a Yellow Sun" already has been shown to audiences in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
A statement from producers Shareman Media and FilmOne Distribution announced the Aug. 1 premiere and thanked Nigerians for their patience.
About 1 million people died in the war for an independent Biafra for the Igbo people of the southeast. Many Igbos starved to death because food imports were blocked. At the time, leaders of the Igbo, who are almost exclusively Christians, accused the federal government of failing to protect them when Muslims from the Hausa tribe in the north slaughtered about 30,000 of them.
The ethnic tensions and mistrust that led to that war remain strong.
Today, some northern leaders accuse the federal government, led by a Christian southerner, of orchestrating mass killings of Muslims by soldiers in the northeast. And thousands have died in ongoing conflicts over land and resources across central Nigeria that pit mainly Muslim Fulani herders against predominantly Christian farmers from other tribes.
British-Nigerian director Biyi Bandele in May defended his movie, telling The Associated Press it is not a war film.
"This movie is a sort of love story, a love letter to Nigeria's very complex and complicated history," he said. "It was meant to be a cautionary tale to say we can disagree as much as we want but war is never the answer."


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1608: St. Thomas Garnet, protomartyr of Stonyhurst
June 23rd, 2013 Headsman
June 23, alas, was the end of the line for Jesuit Thomas Garnet, martyred on that date in 1608 for Catholic proselytizing in England.
Now accounted a saint and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, Garnet was the nephew of Henry Garnet, a priest executed in 1606 for complicity in the November 5, 1605 Gunpowder Plot.
Thomas, too — then about 30 years old — was arrested during this same backlash, and put to torture for evidence against uncle Henry. Thomas had been exercising his covert ministry in England since 1599, after slipping English custody once before.
As a result of the Gunpowder Plot hubbub, Thomas Garnet was among 47 Catholic clerics shipped across the English Channel to Flanders in July 1606, where they were warned that they faced execution should they ever again be caught in England.
Thomas Garnet returned, of course. He was betrayed within weeks by another priest named Rouse — whom Garnet publicly forgave while being drawn, hanged, and quartered on this date in 1608. (His faith was treasonable because he refused to swear an oath of allegiance demanded of Catholics post-5.11.)
Garnet's remains were translated back to his Catholic school on the continent. In more tolerant times, long after Garnet's death, this English Jesuit school finally had liberty to relocate back to England proper. While Garnet's relics were destroyed in the French Revolution, he remains the protomartyr (the first martyr associated with a place) of the venerable Stonyhurst College, now in Lancashire.
On this day..
- 1939: Toribio Martinez Cabrera - 2020
- 1915: Carl Frederick Muller, fluent in languages but not in espionage - 2019
- 1865: Thomas King, heartstabber - 2018
- 1505: The Val Camonica witches - 2017
- 1784: Fifteen crooks hanged at Newgate - 2016
- 1886: John W. Kelliher lynched in Becker County, Minnesota - 2015
- 1977: Jerome Carrein, the second-last in France - 2014
- 1954: George Robertson, the last hanged in Edinburgh - 2012
- 1786: David Nelson, but not William Horbord - 2011
- 1989: Sean Patrick Flanagan, self-hating gay man - 2010
- 1592: Roger Ashton - 2009
- Unspecified Year: Justine Moritz, Frankenstein family servant - 2008
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Drawn and Quartered,England,Execution,God,Gruesome Methods,History,Martyrs,Public Executions,Religious Figures,Torture
Tags: 1600s, 1608, henry garnet, june 23, london, thomas garnet, Tyburn


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UPDATE | The buzzer factor: did Watson have an unfair advantage?
February 18, 2011 by Amara D. Angelica
Does Watson have an unfair advantage over humans because it can signal its response instantly? It seemed that way in the three "Jeopardy!" TV shows this week, especially Wednesday night, as Watson proceeded to totally own the humans.
From Final Jeopardy: Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker:
"After the match, Jennings and Rutter stressed that the computer still had cognitive catching up to do. They both agreed that if 'Jeopardy' had been a written test — a measure of knowledge, not speed — they both would have outperformed Watson. 'It was its buzzer that killed us,' Rutter said."
Note that this appears to contradict statements made by IBM, cited below.
It gets down to human vs. computer reaction time to the light that signals that players can press the button. (After the host reads the question, a light signals the contestants that the button is armed so they all have the same start cue.) According to one literature review, the accepted figure for mean simple reaction times for college-age individuals for light stimuli is about 190 ms (0.19 sec). (You can test your reaction time to a traffic light change or dot color change.)
What about Watson? Its reaction time is just five to ten milliseconds, according to a white paper provided to me by IBM and written by Dr. David Ferrucci, who heads up the Watson computer design team. That's a 38:1 advantage!
But wait — Ferrucci throws us a curve: "By anticipating and 'timing the buzz,' top players do not have to wait for the enable lights," he reveals. "Rather, they start their neurons and muscles going well ahead of the very end of the clue.
They win the buzz consistently, with remarkable speeds under twenty, ten and even under four milliseconds after the enable lights go on! They can and have timed the buzzer faster than Watson's fastest possible speed to the buzz."
Back on the stage, disconnected from any life-lines, Watson goes head-to-head with "Jeopardy!" champs. The clue appears, and the process begins: Watson deeply analyzes the question, explores millions of pieces of text, and considers hundreds of possible answers, gathering and analyzing all the evidence it can for each possibility. Watson computes a strong confidence in its top answer. It does ALL this before the host finishes reading the clue.
But so did Sue [another contestant in pre-trials]. Sue times the buzz through learned anticipation, as do all good human 'Jeopardy!' champs. She's got the rhythm, she is synced-up to the cadence of Alex's voice, she knows what the penultimate syllable will sound like, she tenses her muscles, readies her mind, the answer she computed seemingly ages ago is on the tip of her tongue, she is anticipating….anticipating.
The milliseconds are zipping by, the end of the clue is being spoken and then with uncanny accuracy she anticipates the [buzz delay] and finally her own electromechanical delay and bam! — Sue's electrons steal the buzz just two milliseconds after the enable lights go on. Three whole milliseconds later, Watson's fastest signal arrives — too late. Watson was beaten to the buzz.
— David Ferrucci white paper
It's actually even worse for Watson, Ferrucci goes on. "It spends its 2,800 compute cores trying to understand and answer the question in enough time to get any chance to buzz in. The current version of Watson does this about 90%-95% of the time. Depending on the specific game, Watson may not have enough time to even decide to buzz for the about 5%-10% of the clues. If Watson gets ready to buzz in fast enough, it can leverage its speedy hand, but it still does not buzz perfectly; Watson has to manage its risk." The risk here is that there is a penalty if a contestant buzzes before the light: a quarter-second (250 ms) lock-out." (The contestant is blocked from responding.)
"According to our estimates, in Ken Jennings' 74-game winning streak, he buzzed in first for about 60% of the questions in a game. This was his average "buzzer-ability" over the entire streak. He had games where he buzzed in first for over 70% and even up to 80% of the board! On a game like that, he totally dominated, leaving only 20% (not counting rebounds and triple stumpers) for the two other players to split." (See "Timing analysis" below for more details.)
OK, but what can we realistically conclude about Watson's capabilities from this demonstration? After all, it's TV entertainment — not a controlled lab experiment. Watson was capable of giving correct responses to the clues. But we can't conclude Watson knew more, or "thought" faster that human contestants. Contestant fatigue, distractions, and stress levels could have also affected the outcome. Some might also conclude that the clues were relatively simple (that's how many of them seemed to me), which could have made reaction time a bigger factor in scoring than the contestant's knowledge. A definitive test would eliminate the buzzer.
In other words, what are Watson's (or more importantly, DeepQA's — Watson's question answering software) real capabilities compared to humans? I ran across an in-depth discussion of DeepQA in D. Ferrucci et al., "Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project," AI Magazine, Fall 2010 that offers some clues.
Next week, we'll look at where IBM plans to take DeepQA next. Hint: not a TV show.
At the same time the clue is displayed on a screen to the contestants, it is transmitted electronically to Watson. It is sent in the same format that appears on the Jeopardy! display (usually all uppercase letters) but is sent as a single line of text. Given the speed of light and of electronic transmission, the clue text hits Watson's chips at essentially the same time that it hits the human players' retinas. And then the language processing begins for both human and machine.
The enable light travels to the human eye at roughly the same speed the enable signal travels to Watson's chips. Electronic signals over wires travel a bit slower than light and Watson is a bit further away from the signal source so perhaps the humans may have a few billionths of a second advantage….
After Watson gets the enable signal, the third and most discussed interface comes into play: the physical buzzer. If and only if Watson has computed an answer with a sufficiently good confidence will it send an electronic signal to its hand.
Yes, Watson has a "hand" that it uses to physically depress the "Jeopardy!" buzzer. Watson's hand looks like a clear, Plexiglas, cylindrical soda can with a few metal screws in the top and a wire extending from the bottom that is connected to Watson's Front-End Controller. The mechanical hand wraps around the Jeopardy! buzzer which is inserted in the bottom of the Plexiglas cylinder and is held in place by a clamp. Watson's hand uses a solenoid to physically press the same button that the humans must press. After all, if the humans have to physically push plastic down onto a spring, so should Watson. It should not have a direct electronic link. Fair enough.
Watson's hand is pretty fast in terms of raw speed — it takes somewhere between five and ten milliseconds for Watson to activate the buzzer once it decides to answer. This delay is affected by the speed of the solenoid and other small, sometimes hard-to-pin-down delays inherent in the software stack. This refers to layers of software through which the enable signal and then the decision to buzz must go to get to Watson's hand. Watson does not, however, win the buzz all the time, not by a long shot.
— David Ferrucci white paper


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In 2012 and 2013, Jim had the honor to serve as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He came away from the experience inspired by the young women and men he had met, and learned from. In 2015, he consolidated his reflections into a talk for the Global Leadership Summit, organized into seven questions. While its message speaks to leaders of all ages, Jim developed the talk with those under age 35 very much in mind.
|Personal Hedgehog Concept
|The 10 Greatest CEOs | 10:37
|Aligning Your Organization with Its Vision | 02:46
|Are the Great Companies from the Research Great Places to Work? It Depends | 03:58
|Autopsies without Blame | 01:56
|Being Charismatic and Wrong Is a Bad Combination | 03:01
|The Bell Curve V. the Double Hump | 00:52
|Building Mechanisms Drives Progress | 04:55
|Building Vision — the Physics and Engineering Principles of Building Great Companies | 03:34
|Can a Hedgehog Be a Program? | 03:40
|Can My Hedgehog Concept Help Provide Satisfaction with My Current Work? | 01:19
|Can You Be a Level 5 Leader without a Hedgehog Concept? | 02:54
|A Conversation with a Church Leader About the Resource Engine | 01:58
|The Council as a Mechanism to Understand the Inflection Points of Change | 03:45
|Creating a Pocket of Greatness | 02:31
|"Dialogue and Debate, Not Consensus" | 02:47
|The DNA of Enduring Greatness Lies in the "AND" | 04:15
|Do You Suffer the Curse of Competence?* | 04:05
|The Essence of Level 5 as Demonstrated by Abraham Lincoln | 02:11
|Even the Great Make Hiring Mistakes | 01:15
|"First Who" Is Not Just a Business Concept | 02:34
|"First Who, the Hedgehog Concept, and Your Personal Trajectory" | 02:58
|The Five Key Things to Consider When Looking for the Right People | 05:22
|The Fundamental Inputs to Create Superior Performance | 00:35
|Funding: Time-Telling Vs. Clock-Building | 01:51
|A Funny Thing Happens Around Level 5 Leaders | 01:03
|GE and the Process Hedgehog | 03:11
|"Getting Back to Values, and Other Lessons from IBM" | 03:50
|Getting People Off the Bus | 01:56
|Getting the Right People in the Right Seats over Time | 03:36
|Getting the Right People on the Bus - And the Wrong People Off the Bus - In a Family Business | 04:08
|Getting Your Core Values Right | 02:50
|Good Is the Enemy of Great | 01:07
|Greatness Is a Matter of Conscious Choice and Discipline | 00:58
|Harnessing the Flywheel | 00:40
|How Companies Go from Good to Great to Irrelevant | 02:04
|How Do You Do "Stop Doing?" | 02:31
|How to Find Your Company's Three Circles | 03:35
|How to Find Your Personal Hedgehog Concept | 02:15
|A Hypothesis: Executive and Legislative Leadership | 01:07
|I Am a Recovering Leadership Atheist | 02:46
|"If We Only Have Great Companies, We Will Merely Have a Prosperous Society - Not a Great One" | 00:35
|The Importance of Distinguishing Inputs from Outputs | 00:50
|The Inverse Relationship of Leadership and Power | 03:12
|Is Level 5 Learnable? | 04:41
|It Really Matters that You Have Core Values. It Really Doesn't Matter What They Are! | 03:22
|Lack of Resources Is No Excuse for Lack of Rigor | 01:24
|The Level 5 Evolution | 04:03
|Managing Expectations Before Breakthrough | 02:36
|"The Moment You Begin to Think of Yourself as Great, You've Lost It" | 01:00
|Money Is a Commodity; Talent Is Not | 00:22
|The Path to the Book Good to Great Began with a Question | 03:06
|The Power of the Comparison Analysis | 01:10
|The Pursuit of Greatness Is a Journey that Never Ends | 02:28
|Revolution at Egg...* | 00:47
|The Role of Strategic Planning as a Mechanism for Disciplined Thought | 02:55
|The Social Sectors' Compelling Advantage: The Desperate Craving for Meaning in Our Lives | 00:42
|The Solution Is Not to Be More Like a Business | 00:35
|The Stockdale Paradox | 02:35
|The Story of Starbucks' Journey to Find its BHAG | 02:18
|Thinking About Your Economic Denominator | 03:32
|The Three Circles and the Resource Engine | 00:40
|Trying to Motivate People is a Waste of Time | 00:58
|The Way You Confront the Brutal Facts Can Mean the Difference Between Good and Great | 02:07
|You Don't Need to Be Big to Be Great | 00:23
|What About Companies that Stumble? | 04:01
|What About Luck? | 03:49
|What Is Important About a Personal Council or Board of Directors?* | 01:54
|Why Built to Last Is the Wrong Title | 01:25
|Why You Can't Get a Yellow Shirt | 02:06
|Work-Life Balance and the Level 5 Leader | 01:53
|The Wrong People Can't Be Motivated to Do the Right Thing | 03:16


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Welcome back to our weekly event, Friday Foodie Fix. This is where you link up your gluten free recipes each week that contain the Secret Ingredient!
You will also find each week there will be loads of information on that ingredient so even if you don't have any recipes to share, you'll gather some useful information.
Make sure you check back to see what recipes have been added.
This week's secret ingredient is Tomato!
Healthy Facts
Tomatoes are one of those beautifully colored red and orange foods that are full of lycopene. Just a reminder that lycopene is associated with lowering the risk for several types of cancer including skin, breast, cervical, lung and prostate. It also is known to lower the risk for macular degeneration. Don't forget it helps lower the risk for coronary artery disease. It's a good source for Vitamin C and both help to stimulate the immune system. If you want to get 2-8 more times the amount of lycopene, cook your tomatoes to release the carotenoid bound within the cell walls. Oh and lets not forget the iron, potassium, fiber, b vitamins and quercetin (a phytochemical that helps protects against cancer as well as heart and degenerative eye disease).
How to Buy
Look for plump tomatoes with tight skin and dark color. Oh and give them a sniff. You'll want to find an earthy scent.
How to Store
Do not put those beautiful tomatoes into the refrigerator but into a nice bowl on your countertop or table. If you need them to ripen you can place them into a paper bag.
Favorite Tip
All of those good benefits I just shared on the lycopene in tomatoes will need fat to be used. Lycopene is fat-soluable so make sure you eat both raw and cooked tomatoes with a little fat. Think about Olive Oil for salads or coconut oils when cooking.
Last Week's Favorite Links
Nom Yum & Free shared Mini Summer Squash and Baby Carrot Cupcakes
Gluten Free Happy Tummy shared Summer Squash Fries
The Tasty Alternative shared Garden Summer Pasta
Linking up Guidelines
- Share your own recipe using the Secret Ingredient. This must be your recipe, not copied from someone else. If you were inspired by another recipe you MUST ALWAYS note that in your recipe.
- Link the URL of your Specific Individual Recipe Post, NOT to your home page.
- Please link back to this post, not a static page so your readers can find the recipes here.
- When you link, please tell us what you're sharing.
- This is a Gluten Free Resource so please make sure you share gluten free recipes.
- Recipes do not need to be brand new on your blog, just your own and contain the Secret Ingredient.
- There is no limit to how many times you can post on any given Secret Ingredient, just Link Back.
- Please use the FFF icon in your post and feel free to add it to your sidebar! Here's the code:
Next Week's Secret Ingredient for Friday Foodie Fix is … Carrots!
Now it's your turn to share your gluten free recipes with tomatoes below.


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Confronted with a positive steroid test, San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera employed a fake website and a phony cover story to deflect the consequences, the New York Daily News has reported. Major League Baseball found him out, and Cabrera remains suspended for 50 games for testing postive for a banned performance-enhancing substance.
Cabrera's ruse may have been distinctly elaborate. But over the years, elite athletes facing doping bans have come up with a long list of defenses – unusual, dubious and even preposterous. Here, from court records and interviews, are some remarkable ones.
Doctor's orders. U.S. sprinter Kelli White won two gold medals at the 2003 World Championships in Paris, but she tested positive for the stimulant modafinil.
With the aid of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO steroid lab, White said she created a cover story. White claimed she had suffered for years from the sleep disorder narcolepsy and had been prescribed modafinil. Conte even arranged for a doctor to vouch for White's diagnosis. White's story crumbled, and she later confessed and was suspended from track.
The morning-after pill. In 2002, bicycle racer Tammy Thomas tested positive for the use of the designer steroid norbolethone and was banned from cycling. But she disputed the ban, saying that her use of contraceptives had caused a false positive test. In 2003 she repeated her denials before a federal grand jury.
"Actually, they never found norbolethone in my system," she testified at one point. "What they found was alleged metabolites." She was convicted of perjury and sentenced to house arrest.
Vitamin B-12. At a 2005 congressional hearing, Baltimore Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger at lawmakers and denied using banned drugs. That summer he tested positive for steroids.
Palmeiro denied wrongdoing, and blamed the positive test on an injection of vitamin B-12 provided by teammate Miguel Tejada. Tejada told congressional investigators he had never used banned drugs and didn't know any other players who had, either. Palmeiro was suspended. Tejada pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and was put on probation.
Tainted meat. When cycling champion Alberto Contador tested positive in 2010 for the banned drug clenbuterol, the cyclist blamed a steak dinner. He said the meat must have been cut from a cow that had been dosed with the substance. After two years of appeals, the doping charges were upheld, and he was stripped of his Tour de France title.
A vanished twin. In 2005, tests showed cyclist Tyler Hamilton had undergone a blood transfusion – a banned method of boosting endurance by increasing the number of red blood cells in an athlete's system.
Hamilton denied wrongdoing, blaming the test result on a twin sibling he had never known. As the New York Times summarized the defense, Hamilton said he had "a twin that died in utero but, before dying, contributed some blood cells to him during fetal life. And those cells remained in his body, producing blood that matched the dead twin and not Hamilton."
Hamilton was suspended anyway. In 2011, he told the television show "60 Minutes" that he had repeatedly used banned drugs during his cycling career. He also implicated cycling great Lance Armstrong in the use of banned drugs.
Sabotaged by the masseur. Elite track coach Trevor Graham contended that sprinter Justin Gatlin was deliberately dosed with steroids after a 2006 race in Kansas. Graham claimed that Gatlin's former masseur rubbed a mysterious cream into the runner's groin area. The masseur was angry because Gatlin had fired him and the cream triggered the positive test, Graham claimed.
Gatlin was banned for four years. In a BALCO-related prosecution, Graham was convicted of lying to federal investigators about distributing steroids to his runners and put on house arrest.
Somebody else's urine. In their 2003 raid on the BALCO steroids lab in Burlingame, federal investigators found reports indicating that Giants slugger Barry Bonds had tested positive for steroids in a series of private tests. Bonds' trainer, Greg Anderson, had delivered the urine samples to BALCO for the private tests, according to evidence in the case.
After Bonds was indicted on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroids, his lawyers asked the judge to forbid any mention of the private steroid tests. The only way to prove that the urine belonged to Bonds and not somebody else was to question Anderson, the trainer, the defense lawyers said. Anderson, who had pleaded guilty to steroid-dealing in a separate case, refused to testify against Bonds and served more than a year in prison for contempt instead.
The judge threw out the test results as Bonds' lawyers requested. The government failed to convict Bonds on charges of lying about his use of steroids, although the jury found the slugger guilty of obstruction of justice.
View this story on California Watch
This story was produced by California Watch, a part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.californiawatch.org.


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Recollecting trivial and sometimes dull Facebook posts is easier than recalling the same information in a book. It also takes less effort to remember posted patter than someone's face, according to new research.
The result could be due to the colloquial and largely spontaneous nature of Facebook posts. Whereas books and newspapers typically are combed over by fact-checkers and carefully rewritten by editors, Facebook posts tend to be free flowing and more closely resemble speech. "It's a new way of thinking about memory," says John Wixted, an experimental psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. "Our minds are naturally prepared to encode what is naturally produced."
If memories are the product of evolution, then the ability to remember socially derived conversations may have provided an advantage that helped early humans survive, he adds.
The study involved three different experiments with a sample that largely included undergraduate females and controlled for such factors as the use of emoticons, variations in character size and emotional content. What the research team found didn't make sense—at first.
Laura Mickes, a cognitive psychologist at U.C. San Diego and lead author of the study, says colleagues in her department were amazed by the consistency of the results. "To our surprise the microblogs, the Facebook posts, are much more memorable than one would expect," Mickes says. "People mostly think they're mundane and would be easily forgotten."
Even accounting for associative thinking—such as, "that is something my friend Emily would post"—the social networking site still had a pronounced effect on the extent to which information was remembered by study subjects. Facebook's advantage over books and faces is on the same scale as the advantage that the average person has over the memory-impaired, Mickes wrote in the January 2013 Memory & Cognition. Both Mickes and Wixted agree that additional experiments are needed before these findings can be applied broadly, largely due to the lack of diversity among the study subjects.
Still, the implications are profound. Marketing firms could use Facebook-like advertisements to increase brand recognition. Teachers, too, might incorporate shorter, more colloquial sentences on study guides and in textbooks to raise test scores. The applications could be extensive: "I think there are implications for the way we teach, for how we advertise, how we generally communicate," Mickes says. "There are already professors who are into tech who have incorporated social media into their classrooms."
According to the study, Facebook users in total post more than 30 million times per hour. Whether it's easier on the brain, that's a lot to remember.


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His And Her Wedding Ring Set. Solid 14K Real White Gold 2.00 Ct Oval Simulated Diamond Halo Vintage Style Engagement Ring Set Wedding Band Set. This simulated diamond Engagement ring hereby offered by DJ4L has a total carat weight (TCW) of 2.50 TCW. Everything is beautifully set in an 14K White Gold setting with an approximate gold weight of 7 grams. Our free ring sizing service means that you can rest assured that the ring will be sized to perfectly fit your finger, simply let us know your ring size and we will take care of the rest.This ring is also available in other configurations with other options for the center diamond as well as rose or yellow gold plating options. Please confirm your ring size, when you finalize your Order. WHY USE Swarovski SIMULATED DIAMONDS. Swarovski Diamond's have more fire than diamonds at. 065 dispersion compared to diamonds at.
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This item can be shipped to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia.


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Because Apple does not allow large numbers of people actually test its products before releasing them publicly, Mac users have to wait for a major update after each OS X release before they get to something resembling final, RTM-quality code. That release shipped today as Mac OS X 10.5.2, a massive 180 MB patch to Leopard that fixes some of the stupidity Apple forced on users in Leopard. I complained about these features in my original Leopard review.
The big changes include:
Stacks update, which adds two new view styles that users have been begging for since the "final" release: List view and Folder view. Apple also changed the background on Grid view to make it less translucent.
Menu bar update. The horribly transparent menu bar that debuted in Leopard to huge criticism has been modified to support a return to its pre-Leopard opaque roots. That's right: You can turn off the transparency now. Additionally, related another "feature" that was foolishly added to Leopard has been detuned: System menus are now less translucent, like they used to be.
Bug Fixes Oh My. Apple has fixed bugs in virtually every single Leopard component, including the Finder, AirPort, Dashboard, iCal, iChat, Mail, networking, parental controls, the Preview application, printing, Safari, disk repair, Login and Setup Assistant, Energy Saver, and Time Machine, as well as "general stability" issues. Also, there were fixes and additions to Leopard's Active Directory support, Back to my Mac, the desktop, iSync, RAW image support, Automator, and two international keyboard layouts. Gosh, that's like 300+ buggy features that were fixed.
It's like getting a new Mac. Again!
Just a thought: This is what Leopard could have been like back in October if Apple just did a proper beta test with non-developers.


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Railfreight transport – Challenges for the year 2050
A strategy paper presented by the International Union of Railways (UIC), which met in Portorož (Slovenia) in June, bears the ambitious title Challenges 2050. Railfreight transport is prospering and has a very favourable environmental reputation in many countries, but as a mode of transport it has to battle with a lack of international coherence in many places.
The 84th general assembly of the UIC took place at a historic spot this year – in 1921 the decision to create the multilateral Union Internationale des chemins de fer (UIC), whose brief is to develop international rail transport, was taken in the town of Portorož on the Adriatic Sea.
The UIC's strategy paper Challenges 2050 is sufficient proof that the global railway organisation's 240 members on five continents are still aware that much remains to be done, even after 93 years of international cooperation. In the railfreight transport sector success stories and ambitious infrastructure projects go hand in hand with a lack of international consistency and insufficient modernisation in our digital era.
Model countries
Railways need space. For this reason, railfreight transport is of prime importance in countries that cover a large area. In Australia, for example, more goods are transported by rail than by road, and in Russia around 1.2 billion t of freight was hauled by rail in 2013.
China registered 2.9 billion tkm last year, which was on a par with the record level of 2012. The Association of American Railroads has already published figures for H1 / 2014, showing that a total of 9.5 million carloads of freight and 8 million teu were conveyed by rail in Canada, the United States of America and Mexico in this period. This represents an increase 2.3% and 5.8% respectively, compared to volumes recorded in 2013.
These slightly abstract figures are backed by superlatives in these countries. In Canada, for instance, the length of freight trains has been set at a maximum of 3,700 m and at 3,000 m for bulk shipments for safety reasons. The USA does not have such limitations, so that monster trains consisting of 295 wagons and several locomotives and measuring up to 5.5 km have been successfully tested.
China is deploying even longer freight trains for regular shuttle services between Datong and Qinhuangdao, to the north of Beijing.
Backlog in Asia and Africa
The examples above have primarily caught the attention of emerging market players. In the last decade, a large number of ambitious infrastructure projects have transformed the railway enterprises, and converted them from objects that had stood in the shadows of road haulage for many years.
A spectacular connection between the Orient and the Occident was ushered in at the end of 2013, with the inauguration of the 13.6 km long Marmaray rail tunnel in Istanbul (see ITJ Daily of 11 November 2013). Turkey has already earmarked EUR 3 billion for additional projects to expand its rail network. Saudi Arabia is seeking to merge its rail network and is also promoting a north–south railway, which will be used to transport raw materials from the north of the country to the Gulf ports.
Last year, India began to implement its target of setting up a 1,800 km dedicated railfreight corridor that will connect the Punjab in the northwest with Bengal in the east, and a second 1,500 km link between Mumbai and New Delhi. Around EUR 13.5 billion has been set aside for the development of these corridors.
Some African countries, together with foreign investors, are banking on the development of railfreight routes too. In May contracts for the construction of railtracks to Mombasa (Kenya), Rwanda and Southern Sudan were signed with Chinese companies in Nairobi. Two other major projects in Africa concern connections from the Moatize region in Mozambique to the coast, and from Addis Ababa to Djibouti. On top of that, the South African rail service provider Transnet has presented a USD 18.8 billion freight railway development plan for transporting raw materials.
Congruence needed in Europe
In directive 913 from 2010, the European Union outlined three main challenges for railfreight in Europe, which already has relatively dense rail connections. The domains pertain to closer multilateral cooperation in infrastructure policy, finding a better balance between freight and passenger transport and improving intermodal services.
However, as an integrated railfreight network is still on a rather distant horizon in some regions, nine pan-European freight corridors have been earmarked for expansion. The continent's three different track gauges continue to present almost insurmountable hurdles, as do the five electricity grids and the seven different signalling systems. In addition, railfreight volumes, which began to decline in many Central and Eastern European countries in 1990, have not yet recovered.
Some progress has been registered since the end of 2013 in the corridor that runs across the continent from northern Italy to Rotterdam. However, the EU still needs to do a lot of preparatory work to achieve its declared goals of shifting 50% of all freight traffic transported between Dutch and Italian seaports to the railway by the year 2050.


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FLIRT BASE is your classic soft-bra shape with subtle and feminine detailing and just the right look to give your whole outfit that little extra...
This sustainable soft-bra has adjustable straps, so you can personalize the fit and it has a smooth single hook and eye fastener at the back. The cups give the bust a natural shape and support. This everyday bra is perfect for any occasion and compliments every outfit whether it be a baggy t-shirt or a fitted dress.
90% Modal, 10% Elastane. Modal is a beechwood pulp fiber. It is smooth, soft and breathable- your skin will love it! The dying of this fabric has been without toxic components and it is Ökotex certified according to EU legislation.
But we can all do a difference towards a more sustainable world, so we suggest for you to wash your soft-bra at 30 degrees.