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It is an age-old problem of course: that a manager is unable, or sometimes unwilling, to extract the very best from one of his players. In fact it is hardly unusual when a new manager comes into an established squad full of players with whom he has never worked or, sometimes, hardly seen. This is the place that David Moyes has found himself in this season, not least when it comes to Shinji Kagawa, Wilfried Zaha, and Fabio da Silva, to name but three.
Yet, it really comes to something when a manager has coached a player for seven years and still doesn't seem to know how, or where, to get the best of his charge. The biscuit is well and truly taken when the manager's club spends more than £27 million acquiring said player.
It is, however, the inescapable conclusion from Marouanne Fellaini's first two months at Manchester United, with the Belgian hardly auspicious in a midfield for whom he was supposedly the saviour. The right man for an area desperately lacking in star quality? Sadly, it seems not.
United's weekend victory over Fulham in west London is a case in point, with Fellaini left on the bench despite Michael Carrick's Achilles injury. The 25-year-old appeared as a second half substitute for Tom Cleverley; just in time for the already beaten Fulham to take the game to United in the closing 45. Fellaini was hardly in the mix.
Sure, the player was neat enough in the second period, completing 39 of 43 passes and making two successful tackles, two interceptions and winning three headers. It certainly helps when the Belgian retains possession better than his historical average of less than 80 per cent passes completed, although the majority of Fellaini's passes were short – safe – and backwards or sidewards. The classic water-carrier.
Yet, Fellaini remains a puzzle. He is, after all, a player who rarely tackles, appears to boast few genuine defensive instincts and, for a giant man, is too easily brushed off the ball. The ease with which Southampton players brushed off the midfielder in recent matches was deeply troubling.
Nor is the Belgian creative either, while his lack of pace and, indeed, tendency to slow the game down has become a distinct frustration. In seven games for United Fellaini has scored none, made none, and averaged just one tackle per game, although rather unhelpfully on six occasions an opposition player has dribbled past the Belgian.
To give the player his due Fellaini has, as the statisticians like to call it, made one key pass. All season that is. Yet, the total pass count oer game is also substantially lower than when Fellaini wore blue, although far more accurate than in previous seasons at least.
The data doesn't seem to stack up with the fearsome player who was supposed to become "United's Yaya Toure," marauding through opposition midfielders to give United both defensive bite and an attacking threat. Aside from the lack of quality demonstrated to date, Fellaini doesn't appear to have the personality that dominates key matches.
Perhaps the disappointment is simply caused by a remnant of a collective consciousness; that fans' memory of Fellaini's contribution for Everton against United in recent seasons was so much more impactful than reality.
It was, after all, just two moments. One goal at Goodison Park, when bullying midfielder-turned-central defender Carrick, on the opening day of the 2012/13 season. Another strike at Old Trafford as Everton drew 4-4 in the previous campaign to damage United's title hopes.
More pertinent still, neither of these contributions came with Fellaini deployed in the kind of defensive midfield role he has now been tasked with at Old Trafford. The 'terror', if it was really that, came with Fellaini doing what he is best at – getting on the end of direct attacking play and set-pieces, when deployed in an attacking role.
Yet, the player is certainly less talented as a withdrawn attacker than Wayne Rooney, Adnan Januzaj and the aforementioned Kagawa. Possibly even less so than Ashley Young, and that really is saying something.
The inference is clear: unless Moyes truly wants to transform United into a functional outfit, deploying percentage football, then Fellaini's role is predominantly going to be defensive. And in that Moyes cannot extract the greatest possible value from his new acquisition.
It posses the question: why was Fellaini brought to the club at all and, more importantly perhaps, in what role did Moyes hope to use the Belgian giant? Neither answer is substantively clear, nor it seems was Moyes as the transfer window closed in early September.
Still, the player remains confident that his performances will eventually match the very lofty price tag, despite a global community focused in on United's only major summer acquisition. The period of acclimatization has apparently been steep.
"I am United's only signing this summer, so the media spotlight has been fully on me," said Fellaini recently.
"I couldn't believe what I saw when I arrived at the club. It was a change and a big leap for me. United are the top level. I am used to it now, but I struggled to take it all in at the beginning.
"There have never been any problems between Moyes and myself. It was his decision to leave me out against Stoke, and nothing more. I have taken it well and it is up to me to prove I can play. I can make a real contribution to the team winning trophies in the future."
In that hope is not lost that Fellaini's performances will improve, even if the raw ingredients fall short of the very highest quality. Moreover, the midfielder's rush to protect youngster Januzaj, as the clock ticked towards the final whistle on Saturday, will certainly win round many fans.
A few well-intentioned reducers in upcoming matches, even if poorly timed, will help too. After all, if you can't be great, be the evil bastard the club has been missing since Roy Keane departed in 2005.


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But Allen West Seems Very Troubled!
The Ironman triathlon is among the most grueling sporting events in the world. Leanda Cave, the 2012 international women's champion, came in 46th overall. That was good enough to put her ahead of 1,419 male competitors, which is to say, almost all of them. (The fellow Ms Cave finished just ahead of does not look a slouch.) What about fighting mano y mano against a "brutal" enemy? My guess is that Ronda Rousey, the Strikeforce women's bantamweight champion, is more dangerous in close quarters than most Taliban insurgents. Of course, few women have the endurance of Leanda Cave, or the martial-arts prowess of Ronda Rousey. But then neither do many men. In most sports, the best men outperform the best women, but the best women outperform almost all men. Of course, it doesn't take testosterone to pull a trigger. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper during the second world war, is credited with over 300 kills. The Nazis surely would have preferred a Soviet army with no such female combat troops.
The best argument against women in combat specialities runs as follows: Although standards for training and physical capacity may initially remain high, over time these standards may slacken for institutional and political reasons (a USMC embarrassed by a lack of women in the infantry informally and selectively relaxes standards, etc.), leading to the inclusion of less than fully capable infantry-persons, which will consequently lead to less effective combat teams, as so forth. It's not a terribly compelling argument; the average US infantry-person is considerably more physically and intellectually capable today than in Vietnam/Korea/WWII, and so even if we grant the hypothetical decline in standards the US is still, by historical and relative standards, deploying extraordinarily capable soldiers with an extraordinarily sophisticated support network. As an argument for pre-emptive exclusion of a class of citizens from combat specialties, the "relaxation of standards" case has to establish both that a particular set of standards are sufficiently critical to national security to merit such an exclusion, and that organizational misbehavior cannot be remedied by any means other than this exclusion. Doesn't seem to me that the argument can meet either concern.

subset: commoncrawl


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Another in a position-by-position series examining the Steelers' roster in advance of the start of free agency.
(Free Agent Scorecard at the position: 3 unrestricted free agents – Plaxico Burress, Jerricho Cotchery, Emmanuel Sanders)
He turned in one of the most productive seasons in franchise history, and he did it by becoming the first player in NFL history to catch at least five passes for at least 50 yards in all 16 games of a regular season. Brown is a compulsive worker who has to be told when the team's facility will be closed for the day, and he also is that rare big-time receiver who still is a regular as a returner. When the Steelers signed Brown to a long-term extension instead of Mike Wallace, there were questions about their decision. There shouldn't be any now.
His height (6-foot-3) is intriguing, but it wasn't enough to get Brown a roster spot after being the Steelers' first pick in the sixth round of the 2013 draft. There have been players drafted on the sixth round with the surname Brown who have become great players for the Steelers (see, Antonio), but after spending the season on the practice squad it remains to be seen if Justin has enough to get himself a spot on the roster in 2014.
Does the team want him back? Does he have anything left? Burress will be 37 in August, and he's due to become an unrestricted free agent. At the time of his training camp injury last summer, he wasn't a lock to make the final roster.
Signed to a futures contract on Jan. 10. A complete unknown.
A potential unrestricted free agent, Cotchery will be 32 in June and is not a starting caliber player at this stage of his career. That aside, he still is making significant contributions is definitely on the field and as an example of how to be a professional to the up-and-comers on the team. Cotchery gets it. And with a career-high 10 touchdown catches in 2013, he still gets it done.
Spent the year on the practice squad after posting modest preseason statistics as a receiver and returner. He should expect to have to improve upon those to make it out of the preseason again.
Maybe it was because he grew up in Western Pennsylvania and went to Penn State, or maybe it was because he is 6-5, but Moye became something of a favorite among a faction of the media. He finished with two catches, including a touchdown, and was inactive for nine games. He's going to have to be more than just tall in order to have a bigger role in 2014.
Signed to a futures contract in early January, Sampson played his college football at Baylor and spent the majority of 2013 on the Cowboys' practice squad. Prior to that he had been waived by Indianapolis.
The Patriots thought he was worth $2.5 million and a third-round draft pick as a restricted free agent last offseason, and so the assumption is that Sanders will get a lucrative offer as an unrestricted free agent come March. The decision here would seem to come down to economics, as in how much Sanders can claim on the open market vs. how much the Steelers believe is a reasonable amount to spend to keep him.
His rookie season was spoiled by a broken finger that required surgery, and this relegated him to special teams duty primarily. Wheaton has difference-making speed, and should Sanders leave he has to be expected – as a No. 3 pick – to ramp up his contributions to the offense considerably. Because Wheaton was not permitted to take part in the offseason program last year because of Oregon State's graduation date, these next several months will be very important to the goal of advancing Wheaton's development. The Steelers need significant production from him in 2014.


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Hoping to recapture the grassroots energy of last month's "tea parties," Republican Govs. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Rick Perry of Texas will host a tele-town hall Thursday that's being dubbed "Tea Party 2.0."
The Republican Governors Association said it is expecting 30,000 people to participate in the town hall, which will take place roughly one month after the much-publicized anti-tax tea party rallies held in hundreds of locations across the country on April 15, the tax filing deadline.
Sanford and Perry will each speak for several minutes before opening up the town hall to up to an hour-long question and answer session.
RGA Executive Director Nick Ayers said that while the effort Thursday will be on a smaller scale than the April tea party rallies, it still represents "a great opportunity to mobilize that support."
Both Perry and Sanford are favorites among the tax-averse tea party attendees.
Sanford, who attended a tea party in Charleston, gained national notice for his high-profile battle with the White House over his resistance to federal stimulus funds designated for his state. The fate of those funds remains undecided as Sanford continues to battle with state lawmakers over how much of the $350 million in funds allocated for South Carolina his state will accept.
Perry spoke at three tea parties across Texas and helped promote the rallies during numerous radio and television interviews prior to the events.
The Texas governor generated widespread publicity after endorsing a state House resolution reaffirming the state's sovereignty, a veiled shot at the president's stimulus package.
"I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state," Perry said at the time.
Perry drew praise from the conservative media for the move, but was widely derided by the left for suggesting that Texas may consider seceding from the union in protest of the stimulus.
Ayers said both governors "heard the frustration" of the tea party attendees and "understand that our Republican governors are the best positioned to lead on these issues."
The RGA, Ayers said, is hoping to use the town hall as a springboard for organizing support and fundraising for key gubernatorial races this year in Virginia and New Jersey.
"We don't have to wait until 2010 to send a message to Democrats in Washington that they are spending too much and borrowing too much," he said. "We'll have an opportunity to do that this year."
GOP govs plan Tea Party sequel
Hoping to recapture the grassroots energy of last month's "tea parties," Republican Govs. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Rick Perry of Texas will host a tele-town hall Thursday that's being dubbed "Tea Party 2.0."


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Nope, You Can't Make This Stuff Up (UCMTSU) Dept. This, just in, courtesy of The Guardian:
Canadian police investigate dozens of allegations against psychiatrist nicknamed for use of electricity to 'cure' gay soldiers
Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 March 2010 19.47 BST
A leading Canadian psychiatrist who kept accusations of gross human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa hidden has been charged in Calgary with sexually abusing a male patient and is being investigated over dozens of other allegations.
Dr Aubrey Levin, who in South Africa was known as Dr Shock for his use of electricity to "cure" gay military conscripts, was arrested after a patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances. Levin, who worked at the University of Calgary's medical school, has been suspended from practising and is free on bail of C$50,000 (£32,000) on charges of repeatedly indecently assaulting a 36-year-old man.
The police say they are investigating similar claims by nearly 30 other patients. The Alberta justice department is reviewing scores of criminal convictions in which Levin was a prosecution witness.
Levin has worked in Canada for 15 years since leaving South Africa, where he was chief psychiatrist in the apartheid-era military and became notorious for using electric shocks to "cure" gay white conscripts. He also held conscientious objectors against their will at a military hospital because they were "disturbed" and subjected them to powerful drug regimens.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard that Levin was guilty of "gross human rights abuses" including chemical castration of gay men. But after arriving in Canada in 1995 he managed to suppress public discussion of his past by threatening lawsuits against news organisations that attempted to explore it.
Following the arrest, other male patients have contacted the authorities. One, who was not identified, told CTV in Canada that he had gone to Levin for help with a gambling addiction and alleged he had been questioned about his sex life and subject to sexual advances.
The arrest has raised questions about how Levin was allowed to settle in Canada. Canada admitted other South African medical practitioners accused of human rights abuses, including two who worked with Wouter Basson, known as Dr Death for his oversight of chemical and biological warfare experiments that included the murder of captured Namibian guerrillas.
Levin, who made no secret of his hard rightwing views and was a member of the ruling National party during apartheid, has a long history of homophobia.
In the 1960s, he wrote to a parliamentary committee considering the abolition of laws criminalising homosexuality saying that they should be left in place because he could "cure" gay people.
His efforts to do just that in the army began in 1969 at the infamous ward 22 at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria, which ostensibly catered for service personnel with psychological problems. Commanding officers and chaplains were encouraged to refer "deviants" for electroconvulsive aversion therapy.
The treatment consisted of strapping electrodes to the upper arm. Homosexual soldiers were shown pictures of a naked man and encouraged to fantasise, and then the power was ratcheted up.
Trudie Grobler, an intern psychologist on ward 22, saw a lesbian subjected to severe shocks.
"It was traumatic. I could not believe her body could handle it," she said later.
One gay soldier claimed to have been chemically castrated by Levin. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was told by investigators that he was not alone. It also heard that at least one patient had been driven to suicide. Levin refused to testify before the commission.
Levin also treated drug users, principally soldiers who smoked marijuana, and men who objected to serving in the apartheid-era military on moral grounds, who were classified as "disturbed".
Levin subjected some patients to narco-analysis or a "truth drug", involving the slow injection of a barbiturate before the questioning began. In an interview with the Guardian 10 years ago, he did not deny its use but said it was solely to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress.
Levin said he left South Africa only because of the high crime rate, and denied abusing human rights. He said electric shock therapy was a standard "treatment" for gay people at the time and those subjected to it did so voluntarily.
"Nobody was held against his or her will. We did not keep human guinea pigs, like Russian communists; we only had patients who wanted to be cured and were there voluntarily," he told the Guardian in 2000.


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Joint statement: EU anti-discrimination law: Six years and (still) waiting
Today (2 July), the European Union 'celebrates' a sadly recurrent anniversary: six years ago, on 2 July 2008, the European Commission proposed a directive on equal treatment.
In addition to the existing protection in the area of employment, the proposed directive extends the prohibition of discrimination to cover the grounds of disability, religion and belief, sexual orientation, and age (in addition to race and gender, already protected) in all areas of life.
The directive has yet to be adopted, however, due to strong resistance from a few countries and a general lack of enthusiasm by a majority of member states.
The European Parliament has consistently supported it. The newly-elected MEPs are meeting for their first plenary this week. We hope they will be as supportive as their predecessors. And as such, the adoption of an ambitious EU equal treatment legislation should be a key demand of the EP at the hearing of the next EU commissioner for fundamental rights.
The failure to adopt this legislation is at odds with the EU's obligations under the EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
In addition, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has stated that the economic crisis has increased marginalisation and poverty and has a detrimental effect on the full enjoyment of rights, including access to goods and services, housing, health and education.
Today, across Europe, LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex) people, people living with disabilities, older and or young people, and religious minorities, are not protected evenly against discrimination in schools, in access to health, or when they want to go to the restaurant, to the cinema, when they want to travel or to use public transport.
They may be afforded a strong protection in the country where they live, but this protection does not extend beyond national borders.
What does it mean very concretely for them? What does it mean for us, for our children, for our neighbours?
Here are some examples:
Active ageing seems to be a key priority of our political leaders, but did you know that in almost all countries, banks impose age limits to access loans and that these are usually set at the official retirement age? Moreover, upper age limits, downgraded insurance products and prohibitive premiums constitute barriers preventing older people from accessing quality and affordable healthcare.
Aren't you puzzled when children are denied access to school because they wear a headscarf, a kippah or a turban?
Do we find it acceptable that in Europe today, gay couples can be denied access to a double room in a hotel or may be thrown out of a restaurant because of a gesture of love? Or that an older lesbian woman may be harassed by other residents in a nursing home, without anyone supporting her?
Shouldn't we be shocked by the fact that people in a wheelchair are banned from the job market merely because public transport is not accessible? Or when we hear that a child with autism cannot go to see a movie in a cinema for fear of disturbing other customers?
We call on our leaders, at European and national level, to fulfil their responsibilities to all discriminated groups, and ensure that in the future nobody is left without any protection against discrimination in Europe.
If we cannot achieve this, then, how can we convince European citizens that Europe really does defend their rights?
Originally published on EUObserver


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Trees Destroyed by Wildfire Will Be Replaced Thanks to East Texas
It was a little more than a year ago that the most destructive wildfire in Texas history destroyed much of the vegetation in Bastrop County near Austin. It was a major setback for the renowned Lost Pines ecosystem. The fire covered 32,400-acres, destroyed 1,660 homes and killed 1.5 million trees.
Now, one East Texas town is coming to the rescue. Eleven-hundred pounds of tree seeds that were almost thrown into the land fill at one point, will help rebuild the Bastrop ecosystem.
The Texas Forest Service says, for five years those seeds sat on the top shelf in the very back of a refrigerated Brookshire Bros. warehouse in Lufkin. Demand for the seeds declined and they just sat there. In August 2011 geneticists started making plans to toss them into the landfill, but for some reason things didn't get to that point. Then the fires happened in September and October of 2011, and plans for the seeds began to change.
Tree experts in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma spent the past year nurturing the seeds, growing them into seedlings that could be used to reforest Bastrop State Park and surrounding areas. Yesterday, the first shipment — 200,000 loblolly pine seedlings grown by ArborGen, a commercial nursery based in East Texas — arrived at Bastrop State Park. Another 200,000 seedlings grown by the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry will be in Bastrop on Friday. Volunteers will start planting the seeds at Bastrop State Park on Saturday, December 1. The Texas Forest Service says the Arbor Day Foundation is covering the costs.
Anyone else have a very strong urge to see The Lorax right now? Those Bastrop trees must have had someone to speak for them - a real live Lorax of their own.


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How many pitches did pitchers really throw "back then?" You know, during the days when men were men, a mustache was a mustache, and pitchers weren't coddled. No one did any drugs ever, especially in baseball, and pitchers finished what they started. Just ask any lawn care professional who specializes in youth removal and was a fan of the game back then. Yes, the 1960s and 1970s were the halcyon days of high pitch counts, when all that you needed was a 10-man pitching staff. It was glorious.
But of course, something changed. Now, a pitch count much further north of 100 is treated like a major catastrophe and teams often carry enough relievers to fully staff a couple of barbershop quartets. The complete game has gone the way of Britney Spears's dignity. Everything is so different now, and those who, for whatever reason, are beholden to the idea that 40 or 50 years ago, everything was so much better want to know what happened. The answer is a little surprising: Things have changed, but not as much as one might think, nor as dramatically.
Perhaps the biggest shift over time has been from the four-man rotation to the five-man rotation (and we'll take that up some other time), but we've also seen a shift within a single start. In 1950, the average starter faced 29.4 batters and recorded 20.0 outs during his time on the mound. By 2012, those numbers had fallen to 25.1 batters and 17.5 outs. Over more than 60 years, starters have lost a little less than an inning of durability. In a nine-inning game, that's not inconsequential, but a graph of how it happened shows that there wasn't any one point where suddenly, starters stopped being interested in going deep into games. In fact, what's striking about this graph is how gentle a descent it really is.
But let's talk about pitch counts. It's relatively easy to find pitch count data for recent games. Even before PITCHf/x information was collected, Retrosheet (for the Hall of Fame!) has near-complete records of games played since the turn of the millennium, and fairly good data going back into the 1990s (and even enough to merit mention in the late 1980s). The big problem is that for anything before 1988, there's almost nothing there. Almost. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Brooklyn Dodgers kept pitch sequencing and pitch count data that give us some insight into what was really going on back then. But what happened the rest of the time? Were pitch counts really that high?
Tom Tango (yikes! 10 years ago!) has taken a quick look at this question and developed a pitch count estimator for use with historical data. His work holds up several years later, although I would suggest a few improvements. This chart shows the number of average pitches per plate appearance in baseball from 1950-1963, and then from 1988-2012. (My graphical output smushes them all together. I drew a red line on the chart to show the split.) We can see that over time, there's been a drift upward from 3.37 pitches per PA in 1950 to 3.77 pitches in 2012.
One thing that we can use to our advantage is that we know that if a plate appearance ended in a strikeout, it must have taken at least one, two, three strikes until he was out. Walks necessitate at least four pitches. Again, from 1950-1963 and 1988-2012, we see the average number of pitches per PA, broken down by what the eventual outcome of the PA was. We see some drift upward in the number of pitches each batter sees (although not with strikeouts, interestingly). Balls in play (hits and outs) all congregate just above three pitches per plate appearances, with strikeouts slightly higher at around four and a half, and walks higher than that at around five and a quarter. It's more important to know what the outcome was, but we do need to account for that upward drift.
With the data that we have available, we can make a nice little regression line that tells us how much we should adjust upward in each year per plate appearance. In addition, I also wanted to see whether pitchers who have high strikeout rates have more (or less?) efficient strikeouts than the Aaron Cook types. So, I built a model that regressed the number of pitches contained in a strikeout, based on the year and the pitcher's annual rates of several outcomes (strikeouts, walks, singles, etc.). I then did similarly for the number of pitches contained in a walk, and so forth. It turns out that this did improve the model's performance a little bit, but not by a great deal.
I totaled everything up for each starting pitcher in each game for which Retrosheet has a full log of the game's events. I went back and looked at how well the model did compared to the games for which there are actual pitch count data. The model correlated with all available data at .88, and looking specifically at data from before 1988, the model correlated at .95.
A few other model diagnostics for the super-initiated (#GoryMath)
All Available Data (1950-2012)
Pre-1988 Data
Correlation (predicted vs. actual)
Equation of the line predicting actual
.887 * predicted + 9.54
.941 * predicted + 0.69
Median residual
The correlation is quite good, and with the median almost exactly at zero, we at least aren't worried about the distribution of the residuals being overly skewed. However, the equation of the line suggests that our predicted values are slightly on the high side. This is confirmed by this graph showing the residuals based on actual pitch count (for the pre-1988 data; the other one looks similar). Here we see that as we cross into outings that we know in reality took more than 100 pitches to complete, the model tends to somewhat over-estimate the number. So, our results are a bit biased upward for high-pitch-count games. We'll keep that in mind.
And yes, the RMSE is nine and a quarter pitches, meaning that a customary two-standard-deviation margin of error is going to be 18.5 pitches wide in either direction when we are talking about our estimate of a single game. We need to be a little careful in our interpretations from here on out.
Have Pitch Counts Really Gone Down Over Time?
Here's what the average estimated pitch counts look like over time by year.
I estimate that in 1950, the average starter threw 104 pitches in a game. In 2012, that number had fallen to 93, so yes, average pitch counts for starters have gone down. Again, this is not insignificant, but let's keep some sense of perspective. We're talking about a 10-percent drop in average workload. Not only that, remember that in environments where there were more high-pitch-count games (and we'll see in a moment that there really were in decades past), the model tends to inflate how many pitches it thinks were thrown. The actual drop may have been slightly smaller.
But perhaps the more important (or more discussed) issue is the question of games where the pitch count really starts climbing. In 2013, Tim Lincecum threw a no-hitter and delivered 148 pitches in the process. The Giants and manager Bruce Bochy were roundly criticized (including by me) for letting Lincecum throw so many pitches, for fear that the outing might lead to arm troubles. In 2010, Edwin Jackson had a similar 149-pitch (eight-walk) no-hitter. Those criticisms were generally met by assertions that pitchers used to throw 140 pitches on a regular basis. What's the big deal?
The data do back up that particular critique. This chart shows the percentage of starts within each year that, according to our estimates, lasted (moving vertically downward by line) more than 100 pitches, 110 pitches, 120, 130, and 140, at least based on our pitch-count estimator. Again, we see a gentle downward trend in ultra-marathon pitch count games to the point where they mostly disappear over the past few years, with the curious note that the line has a bit of a spike in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 60s and 70s that everyone longs for may have been an era of high pitch counts, but in the overall trend, they seem to be the aberration. Not surprisingly, looking at the data on a molecular level, the jump occurs after 1968, when the pitching mound was lowered and offense went up. Batters got more hits, and so pitchers had to face more batters, and thus they needed more pitches to finish their work. At least until the market corrected itself and the line resumed its downward trend.
We do see that pitch counts of 140 were never a particularly common event, even in 1950. The model estimates that in 1950, only 12.5 percent (one in eight starts) reached that point, although that's high enough that a couple of starters around MLB (assuming a then-full slate of 16 starters) would do so on an average day. One quarter of games in 1950 (26.7 percent) saw a starter throw 130 pitches. It happened, but not every single time a pitcher took the mound. By the time we get to 1970, only 13.5 percent of starts featured 130 pitches and 4.9 percent featured 140. There once was a time when starters had a longer leash, but let's not exaggerate what they actually did with it.
Maybe the more interesting trend is the distance between the "over 100 pitches" line and the "over 110 pitches" line. Much is made about the fact that 100 pitches seems to be a magic numbers that teams adhere to (maybe too much?) in deciding whether to remove a pitcher. We see that in the 1980s, the line of pitchers who made it to 110 starts to drift downward faster than the line of those who made 100. It's as if someone started screaming, "The line must be drawn here! 105 pitches, no father!"
Here's a graph (again, by year) of the percentage of all pitchers who had already crossed the (estimated) 100-pitch line, and then were allowed to exceed 110. There has been a general move toward a 100-pitch limit over time, but sometime in the early 1980s, there was a sort of inflection point. In 1950, 85.9 percent of pitchers who made it to the century mark were allowed to throw another 10 pitches (at least). As late as 1983, more than two thirds of pitchers who made it to 100 also made it to 110. But over the last 30 years, that rate has fallen precipitously to fewer than one third (32.1 percent in 2012). Between 2000 and 2001, there was a particularly sharp drop from 51.3 percent to 43.8 percent. To say that teams have only recently become obsessed with the number 100 isn't entirely correct. The movement has consistently been in this direction, but it picked up steam in the 1980s, and even more steam after the turn of the millennium (not long after the initial publication of Pitcher Abuse Points).
Same as it Ever Was…
If there's a take-home message from all of this, it's that the idea of asking starting pitchers to do a little less is not a recent development. Looking back at what things were like 40 or 50 years ago, it's easy to see the huge differences in the way that managers approach the job description of a starting pitcher. What's harder to see is how it got where it is today. The impulse to protect pitchers is something that's been acting for several decades—yes, even back in the "golden age" of pitching when men were men. Throughout the last 60 years, pitch counts per start have consistently and steadily gone down, save for one brief period in the 1960s and '70s when the game was still adjusting to the new mound. High-pitch-count games have slowly and consistently declined. The idea of 100 pitches being a Platonic ideal for what a start should look like is something that's become more and more accepted over time, and there never really was a time when things weren't generally headed in this direction of asking starters to do a little less. There is nothing new under the sun.
Maybe the game would be better if starters put in longer shifts, whether from the point of view of cultural aesthetics (this is not an empirical question) or strategic optimization (this is). But either way, there was no golden age when managers were not afraid of what a huge workload would do to their pitchers, whether you consider that a sign of manliness or foolhardiness. There was only a time when the impulse to protect the pitcher hadn't had as much time to work yet.
Thank you for reading
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Apple has purchased solid-state drive (SSD) maker Anobit, an Israeli start-up that makes storage products for data center use out of consumer-grade NAND flash memory.
According to the Israeli newspaper Calcalist.com , Apple paid about $500 million to purchase the private company.
According to published reports, Anobit's executives gathered employees at its Herzliya headquarters to inform them of the completion of the Apple deal.
Apple already uses Anobit's flash chip technology in the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air laptops. According to reports, Apple would use Anobit's technology to increase the flash memory in its devices, as the cost to produce it would be significantly lower than purchasing it from a third-party provider.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted about the deal stating, "Welcome to Israel, Apple Inc. on your first acquisition here. I'm certain that you'll benefit from the fruit of the Israeli knowledge."
Neither Anobit, nor Apple would immediately confirm the acquisition.
Anobit has produced two generations of its Genesis SSD technology . The intellectual property that sets it apart from other SSD manufacturers is its controller, which uses firmware it calls Memory Signal Processing (MSP).
The controller technology extends the endurance of standard consumer-grade multi-level cell flash from about 3,000 write/erase cycles to more than 50,000 cycles -- making MLC technology suitable for high-duty cycle applications such as relational databases.
"You're either using a more advanced controller with consumer grade NAND or your leveraging enterprise-class NAND. Anobit's approach is to use the cheapest NAND they can find and then use their more advanced controller technology," said Jeff Janukowicz, a research director at IDC.
Anobit is not alone among SSD processor makers who can extend MLC NAND's reliability. For example, Sandforce makes a processor that uses data compression and RAID architecture to get around the limitations of MLC.
Sandforce uses 24-bit/512-byte error correction code in its flash controllers to extend the life of MLC-based SSDs. "However, the fundamental issue is that the signal quality is declining, and Anobit's technology helps to get a 'cleaner' signal," said Gregory Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights.
Anobit's Genesis 2 T-Series SSD
As of September, Anobit said it had sold 20 million MSP controllers to systems makers, which include consumer-grade products as well as single-level cell (SLC) SSDs sold by other vendors.
If Anobit's numbers are accurate, the Genesis 2 SSD has staggeringly high performance. The drive generates random read-write rates of 70,000 I/Os and 40,000 I/Os per second, respectively.
The Genesis 2 SSD boasts a maximum sequential read/write rate of 540MBps and 510MBps, respectively. The new SSD's predecessor had a sustained sequential read/write rate of 220MBps and 180MBps, respectively.
Anobit has shrunk its circuitry from the earlier 40+ nanometer (nm) process to 25nm, thereby allowing it to double the capacity of the drive while also shrinking it from a 3.5-in. form factor to 2.5-in. The Genesis 2 ranges in capacity from 100GB to 200GB, 400GB and 800GB.
As circuitry shrinks in flash memory products, error rates increase because the electrons used to create bits of information leak between the thinner cell walls.
In order to fix data errors, manufacturers include error-correction code in their NAND flash. The higher the bit-error rates, the more ECC is required. Simply put, Anobit's processor is able to continue to read data for a longer period of time compared with typical NAND flash with hard-coded ECC, which takes up flash capacity.
Wong said Anobit is the first company to commercialize its signal-processing technology, which uses software in the controller to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, making it possible to continue reading data even as electrical interference rises.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is email@example.com .
Read more about storage in Computerworld's Storage Topic Center.


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Which of the following molecules have the highest heat of combustion per CH2?
Correct Answer: A. A
Due to the angle strain, deviating most from the ideal angle of 109.5°, as found in cyclohexane C, cyclobutane A (ring strain, very unstable) has the highest heat of combustion per CH2 (the most energy released).
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If you've scanned through all the big-name hotels and resorts and can't find anything that'll suit your budget, England Inns could be just what you're after. Run for real travellers, this age-old style of lodging is sure to keep costs to a minimum. Granted, it's not going to be as shoestring as a campground, but with the added draws of hearty food and regional beers on tap, the chance to sleep in individually designed suites or to chat to locals over a local ale, it's clear that there's loads of extras packed into the price.
It shouldn't be hard to find inns for holiday breaks in England that burst with character. That's precisely what this sort of stay is all about – something different, something really memorable. It could be that there's a lively pub joined to the rooms. It could be that there's a leafy garden out front. It could be that there's a kitchen that sizzles with the scents of local produce and regional cooking. Whatever it is that sets them apart, you're bound to find something special in England Inns.
Food is actually one of the main features of an inn. It's what makes it different to a B&B or classic hotel. Originally conceived of as pitstops for travellers on long-distance trading routes, these establishments almost always have an on-site kitchen and bar. That's great news if you were hoping to sample bona fide England cuisine, or if you're looking for a stay somewhere a little more off the beaten path, far away from all the main restaurants and bistros.
Because they've traditionally been out-of-town lodgings, historically fringing main roadways leading in and out of destinations, don't be surprised if you find many England Inns nestled in the countryside. To go with the location, a large proportion of these sorts of accommodations are pet-friendly, sat close to popular nature parks and near the start of major hiking trails. There's plenty of scope to feel surrounded by nature, away from the hustle and bustle of the busier parts of town.
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The ever-changing story in Miami centered around suspended Dolphins guard Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin has kick-started a larger conversation: Should NFL locker-room culture change?
Michael Irvin, Marshall Faulk, Deion Sanders, Steve Mariucci and Michael Silver all spoke Thursday on NFL Network about their various experiences inside locker rooms. And the conversation was fascinating.
Sanders spoke of one Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman, nicknamed "Delicious," who was picked on mercilessly. The player only stopped the trend by taking Sanders' advice and starting a fight.
"Charles Haley came in with trouble, but he was also a big part of the team and a captain," Irvin said on "NFL Total Access Kickoff." "And we trusted Charles. And you need guys that can get everybody going because every day, everybody on the field like having practice. You need guys that know how to joke, get people's minds off everything. You need to know when (it's) too much. ...
"There was one thing that went down on our airplane. Charles Haley ... was in one of those moods and he was coming after a staff member on our team. I said, 'Charles, listen enough's enough. This guy doesn't want that.' Charles kept going and said, 'I'll get up there, I'll come back there and whoop your butt.' I said, 'No, you're not coming back here to hit this man.' ...
"(Haley) said, 'What, Mike? You gonna come whoop my butt?' I said, 'No, I'm not coming to whoop your butt, but I'm not letting you get to him either.' And thank God Charles Haley sat back down and didn't move. And I was worried, got off the plane looking around the plane because he's crazy.
The key part of that entire story: "You need to know when (it's) too much."


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When news broke eight days ago that reigning Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel faces an NCAA investigation into whether he sold autographs, the college football world reacted with either confusion or outright skepticism. After all, the press had created an image of the Manziel family that suggested something out of TV's Dallas. Wright Thompson's recent ESPN The Magazine feature alluded to the "Texas oil fortune" that "still funds the family." As Manziel's father, Paul, told Thompson, "It's not Garth Brooks money, but it's a lot of money." If Johnny Football's so rich, the thinking went, why would he stoop to selling autographs for pocket change?
But maybe it isn't so weird. It turns out the Manziels are a much more colorful and interesting bunch than any of the profiles thus far have indicated. Their fortune was indeed made in oil—wildcatting, specifically—but there were also family sidelines in cockfighting, small-time grifting, match-fixing, and, if you believe the federal indictments, cocaine-trafficking and murder. In fact, the first great sporting success under the family name wasn't Johnny Football; it was the Manziel grey gamefowl, bred by Johnny's great-grandfather. The Manziels arrived in Texas after cockfighting was outlawed, but they wound up with a breed named after them anyway.
That's the story of the Manziels in America. It's the story of making money just this side (and occasionally that side) of the rules.
It begins with Johnny Football's great-great grandfather Joseph Manziel, in the Mount Lebanon region of Syria in 1883.1 On Aug. 31, 1907, Joe Manziel emigrated to America, bringing his wife Mary and their 2-year-old son, Esahiah, who would become known as "Bobby Joe." They settled in Louisiana, where in 1921 Joe found himself caught up in a mineral rights scam. The story, as explained by a Louisiana Supreme Court decision issued June 30, 1923, is great, if a little complicated.
The short version goes something like this: On June 27, 1921, an oilman named Lee Sanders agreed to sell mineral rights to one J.H. Mitchell, a Louisiana businessman. While the mineral deed was in escrow, the deal fell through. Mitchell's lawyer, George Day, accompanied Sanders to the bank on July 12 to retrieve and dispose of the deed transfer. Day pretended to tear it up, but instead he stole it intact. He then wrote up a transfer deed to Joe Manziel, pre-dating it July 9 and outwardly absolving Joe of any role in the fraud. (The notary public hired to notarize the sale to Manziel called this to both parties' attention, but they insisted it was correct.)
On July 21, Joe Manziel went to the county courthouse and filed both the original sale deed—which was, at this point, nearly a month old—and his new deal naming himself the owner. In the dispute that ensued, Manziel would testify that he'd paid $2,500 cash for the property, having carried it around in his pockets for days through the Claiborne Parish oil fields.
The Louisiana Supreme Court's written opinion called this a "most unlikely story," propping up the decision of the district judge, who had declared himself "fully convinced Manziel participated in a crooked and dishonest deal [...] and was, in fact, a party to it." The high court denied Joe Manziel's appeal.2 It was not the last time a hustle would land someone named Manziel in court, nor was it the last time a Manziel would lose his case.
Bobby Joe Manziel, Joe's son and Johnny Football's great-grandfather3, worked a few angles of his own. He was variously a boxer ("The Syrian Kid"), a promoter, and a writer. In 1927, he was accused of fixing a professional wrestling bout between Greek heavyweight champion Jim Londos and Russian titleholder Count Ivan Zarynoff.4 The scandal cost him his license to promote fights in Louisiana.
But the Syrian Kid had made an important connection. Bobby Joe was a lightweight sparring partner of Jack Dempsey's, and the pair would eventually become business partners. In 1956, the New York Times called them "close friends." As legend has it, Bobby Joe moved to East Texas in 1930 with less than two dollars in his pocket, seeking riches as an oilman.5 (Census records show he left behind a young wife and infant daughter, neither of whom is ever mentioned in recent accounts of his life. The wife was quickly divorced, while the daughter, Gloria, mostly shows up in lawsuits as a Manziel heir.)
Convinced he'd found oil on the property of the Negro New Hope Baptist Church, Bobby Joe found himself in urgent need of two things: money for drilling and consent from the parishioners. For the money, he wired Dempsey. According to his autobiography, the Manassa Mauler barely remembered Bobby Joe—who'd mostly served as Dempsey's chauffeur—but he sent $400 anyway.6 As for getting permission from the parishioners, here's how the Dec. 18, 1937, Baton Rouge State-Times told the story:
Starting out with the deacons, he ran the negroes down in his flivver until all 40 would permit him to drill in the church's backyard.
That turned out to be the central motif in Bobby Joe's professional life. He would work a deal into the ground. Dempsey, thrilled by the 1,000 percent return on his investment, helped Bobby Joe drill dozens of new wells; the first 11 were dry,7 but subsequent efforts were so lucrative the pair openly and aggressively ignored state and local limits on production. Texas didn't take so kindly to this, and the attorney general's report from 1934 shows the state had hauled Bobby Joe into court six times in eight months for overproduction, violation of proration orders, operating illegal bypasses, not storing oil for measurement, and failure to pay proper royalties.
The drilling even landed Bobby Joe in jail for disobeying state injunctions, with Dempsey's involvement turning the scandal into national sports news. In February 1934, the state railroad commission took over the company's highest-producing well, declaring Manziel and Dempsey "chronic violators of Texas proration laws"8 (proration laws, designed to guard against overproduction, limit production of oil wells to a fraction of their capacity). Two weeks later, a judge friendly to Bobby Joe threw out the charges and slapped the Texas Rangers who'd enforced the railroad commission order with contempt of court.9
As for the feds, Bobby Joe and Jack Dempsey argued that the U.S. government has the right to regulate only interstate commerce; as long as Manziel Oil did business only within Texas, the company was out of the federal government's reach. Their argument won the day at the East Texas federal courthouse, and the case would change the oil industry for good. In 1939, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Charles I. Francis told Time, "As far as the federal government is concerned, oil regulation is wrecked."
Bobby Joe remarried in 1937, this time to 18-year-old Dorothy Nolan, an LSU student he'd met "several years" before, at a "Syrian convention," according to a 1937 story in the Baton Rouge State-Times. While the federal government was finally off his back, Bobby Joe's legal challenges were mounting. He was a regular in the court of appeals in Texarkana; state records show that between the years of 1941 and 1953 Bobby Joe lost at least nine different lawsuits, with complaints ranging from "fraud, deceit, and malicious connivance" to attempting to drill for oil in an unfenced area frequented by schoolchildren. And in 1951, he tried to evict a competing oilman from the home he was renting by purchasing it outright.10 Even after Bobby Joe's death, in 1956, the Manziel oil fortune suffered legal setbacks—especially in 1962, when the Texas Supreme Court ruled against the family in Railroad Commission of Texas v. Manziel et al., a case that defined the differences between above- and below-ground trespassing and established a major precedent in geologic and environmental law.
Meanwhile Bobby Joe's wells continued to produce—when they weren't exploding, that is. We found repeated references in local papers throughout the '40s and '50s to out-of-control Manziel wells, none worse than a March 1950 explosion that sent up a geyser of fiery crude oil that could be seen, and felt, for miles. This, too, found its way into the national sports pages, with headlines like "Gas Fire Feared At Outlaw Well" attached to Dempsey's name.
It was an explosion of a different kind that marked the low point for Bobby Joe Manziel in 1950, though. On Sept. 27, he attempted to start his new cabin cruiser when it exploded upon his turning the ignition. Knocked unconscious by the blast, Bobby Joe was saved by a local man named Russell Bowdoin. Manziel spent weeks in the hospital, while Bowdoin earned a Carnegie Hero prize and a breed of fighting cocks named in his honor.11 It was never established if the explosion was an accident or an assassination attempt.
By the time Bobby Joe died in 1956, his relationship with Dempsey had apparently soured enough that the latter became party to a lawsuit seeking rights to a land deal on which an associate said the Manziels had reneged. That suit wasn't decided until four years after Bobby Joe died, but it prompted the boxing champ to leave Tyler and move to Dallas—despite Dempsey having just started construction on a home near Bobby Joe's.12
Still, Dempsey signed on to back Bobby Joe's fantastic dream of building a $3 million auditorium—"bigger than Madison Square Garden"—in Tyler, which at the time had a population of about 45,000. When architects asked to see Manziel's blueprints for the 20,000-seat "Oil Palace," he insisted he needed no blueprints.13 Bobby Joe even purchased the box seats used at the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago and planned to install them, complete with politicians' names still attached, in his arena.14
In October 1956, Billboard reported that the Oil Palace was expected to be finished by the end of the year. But Bobby Joe died in November, and despite its alleged near-completion, the property was abandoned; at one point in the 1970s, it was used as a junkyard. Jack Dempsey died without ever seeing the grand arena completed, and those prized seats from the '56 Democratic Convention would eventually be given to a church.15
Something called the "Oil Palace" finally opened in 1983, but with only 7,000 seats it was far from the Texas coliseum that Bobby Joe and Dempsey had envisioned.
For sure, lawsuits and well failures are facts of life in the petroleum industry. (Every great fortune is a racket in some way, and that goes double for money made during the Texas oil boom.) And there's no question that in the boom days Bobby Joe Manziel was making money hand over fist. But he was spending it, too. While his God-given talents may have impelled him toward amateur geology, his passion in life was cockfighting—Time called him "the biggest of Texas chicken men"16—and it's to that enterprise he dedicated much of his resources.
Despite cockfighting having been banned in Texas before the Manziel family even arrived in the United States, the sport earned much of Bobby Joe's attention. Before he was even a teenager, Manziel was a champion cockfighter (the image above is from 1916). He dedicated a large portion of his land to raising more than 1,200 battle roosters and even bought a private plane to transport them to the makeshift backwoods arenas that hosted the illicit activity.17 (In John Bainbridge's 1961 book The Super-Americans, Bobby Joe claims Texas had more cockfighting pits than movie theaters.) When his competitors dropped out of the gamecock business, Bobby Joe was there to buy up their stock. If he has one true legacy, it's the famed breed of gamefowl that bears his name, the Manziel grey. By reputation, Manziels are fast and hard to raise.
He passed his love for the bloodsport to his sons; Bobby Joe Jr. earned a worldwide reputation for his gamecock breeding skills, and Norman Paul claimed the title of Cockfighting World Champion in 1983.18
Norman Paul Manziel is Johnny Football's grandpa.
Norman "Big Paul" Manziel was born Oct. 21, 1942, alongside his twin Nolan Edward. On Nov. 20, 1958, cops busted Norman Paul street racing on Broadway Street in Tyler, Texas. When he slammed on the brakes, his car collided with that of his 16-year-old competitor. The boy was injured in the crash, and his family sued Norman Paul for damages. The Manziels won in court, but only after three years of appellate challenges.
It would hardly be the last time Norman Paul saw a courtroom. In 2001 he faced felony evasion charges after an attempted DWI stop and eventually pleaded down to a misdemeanor with five years of probation. Part of the deal required him to perform community service, but a year later he was back in handcuffs—with cops claiming he'd bribed his way out of performing it. (Those charges were dropped when the FBI, which executed the sting, refused to turn over the equipment used to record it—claiming "national security concerns."19) The case cost him his probation, though, and later he'd spend another seven months in prison for witness-tampering.
But Norman Paul could have avoided a lot of trouble if he'd just stayed away from his older brother.
Bobby Joe Manziel named his first son for himself. And in many ways Bobby Joe Jr.—Johnny Football's great-uncle, born Nov. 16, 1938—was the heir to the rougher corners of the family business. He, too, raised gamecocks, and he, too, was something of a hustler.
Bobby Joe Jr.'s first major brush with the law came in 1965, when he was busted for counterfeiting. This was no normal counterfeiting case, though. Here are the words of Irving Goldberg, a federal judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit:
In 1963 Howard Wallace Barbee and Bobby Joe Manziel, then gullible and motivated by avarice, lost ten thousand dollars in a confidence racket. The memory of that hoax lingered with them, and two years later, still motivated by avarice, they sought to recoup their losses by instigating the same racket for their benefit. The only difference was that their intended victim notified the police, and Barbee and Manziel were arrested. They were convicted in a federal district court for illegal possession of altered currency in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 472, which currency had been the subject of their fraud. Their appeal, unlike many criminal cases that come before us, is not burdened with significant factual disputations. Barbee and Manziel admit the facts of their scheme and even concede that it may have been morally reprehensible. They contest merely its illegality.
The confidence racket which was employed in 1963 and in 1965 involves a "stir man," a genuine federal reserve note, an altered federal reserve note, and of course a "sucker." The "stir man" contacts a "sucker" and shows him a "counterfeit" reserve note which is an exact duplicate of a genuine note and which even experts would claim to be genuine. He guarantees that a revolutionary duplication process can be put in motion for quite a reasonable investment. To the "sucker's" dismay, after contributing his share of the investment, he learns that both reserve notes were genuine and that the only process performed had been the altering of serial numbers and other markings on one note to correspond with the other.
The court didn't buy Bobby Joe Jr.'s argument—"it is impossible to defraud a dishonest man"—and he was convicted of a federal felony.
In 1980, Bobby Joe Jr. was indicted on a conspiracy charge in the 1975 murder of a Tyler grocer, supposedly over unpaid gambling debts.20 He persuaded the assistant prosecutor, Doug Mulder, to flip sides and represent him instead; Mulder got the homicide charge dropped.21 We couldn't locate the file anywhere. The only allusions to the case we could find were in a pair of old newspaper stories.
In 1990, Bobby Joe Jr. made a cameo in a case involving a man named Reginald Dean, a bank robber appealing his conviction. Testimony in the case tied Bobby Joe Jr. and an associate named Mondee Stracener—one of Dean's original co-defendants—to gambling and to something called the "Dixie Mafia"24:
Q. Now, it's no secret that Mondee Stracener and Bobby Joe Manziel are colleagues or friends. It's no secret to the police department, is it?
A. No sir.
TR, April 7, 1986 at 20. Testimony of Paul Black. Officer Black also agreed to defense counsel's assertion that it was no secret that Stracener and Manziel liked to gamble and bet on rooster fights. On re-direct, the prosecutor returned to the relationship between co-defendant Stracener and Manziel:
Q. Mr. Carroll also brought out that Mr. Stracener here is a colleague of Mr. Manziel, and you agreed that he was. Would you explain what you meant by colleague?
A. Okay, it's my understanding that Mr. Stracener and Bobby Joe Manziel have ties in the gambling world and also could be members of the Dixie Mafia out of Louisiana.
THE COURT: Well, do you still suspect Mr. Manziel of being a participant in the activities of the Dixie Mafia?
THE WITNESS: Your Honor, that's just what I've heard on the street and from other police officers.
THE COURT: Do you still suspect that Mr. Stracener was a member of the Dixie Mafia?
THE WITNESS: I have nothing to back that up with, no, sir.
THE COURT: Well, do you suspect him of it? That's what I'm asking you.
THE WITNESS: Yes, sir.
In 2002, Bobby Joe Jr. found himself in handcuffs again when a federal jury indicted him on cocaine trafficking charges in what was described22 as a "$2,000 quick-money scheme." There was a plea deal, according to federal court document, and according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Bobby Joe Jr. was released in 2005.23
Nevertheless, Bobby Joe Jr. managed to spend most of his life as a free man; he still operates the Oil Palace, where he regularly welcomes notable conservatives like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
His son, Bobby Joe III, hasn't been so lucky with the law. The Texas Department of Public Safety reports that Lone Star State cops have busted Bobby Joe III, born Aug. 21, 1962, at least 13 times. Charges range from grand theft to fraud to felony drug possession. He's spent most of the past 20 years in prison or on probation. (His last sentence, for drugs, ended seven weeks ago). Interspersed among these are more minor crimes, like theft of a value less than $50. A post on a cockfighting message-board suggests Bobby Joe III followed his dad and grandfather into the sport:
Sometime in the early nineties, Little Bobby Joe Manziel III came over to train our birds he used a socket knife that had a different curved design. He used it during his first derby at roligon a 5cock. He used the same knife on all ten of the birds and did not sharpen it once. He lost the first and then won 9 straight. The knives (3of them) were stolen after the derby.
Bobby Joe III's first cousin John Paul Manziel, born Dec. 6, 1966, is Johnny Football's dad. Paul, as he's known, has been busted once—for criminal mischief, in 2002, though details on that incident seem to be lost to history. He has otherwise avoided the kind of trouble that found Bobby Joe III, unless you include his repeatedly getting banned from college football message boards. (Paul married a Tyler woman named Cindy Boaz in 1987, according to Nevada marriage records. They divorced in 1990, and a year later Paul married Johnny Football's mom, Michelle. Texas A&M's official website describes the pair as "high school sweethearts.")
Paul is general manager at Fenton Honda in Longview, Texas. That's a three-hour drive from Bryan, where the Manziel family lives. (It's more than six hours from Kerrville, where the family used to live.) In fact, he comes home only on the weekends.25 That's a lot of hard work for the grandson of an oil heir. He certainly doesn't possess the air of a man living idly off a family fortune.
And in any case the oil money may be more narrowly held than the many profiles would have us believe. Remember grandpa Norman Paul's twin brother, Nolan Edward?
Compared with the rest of the Manziels, who traveled loudly through 20th-century America, Nolan Edward Manziel might as well be a ghost. Other than state and county business records, he barely exists on the Internet or in periodical databases. He's never been in trouble with the law, that we can tell, and he's never been individually sued. The only public drama in his life was the 1981 death of his 12-year-old daughter, Deborah, in a fire that destroyed their house. He was not home at the time.26
As recorded in publicly accessible databases, business filings for the Manziel family oil practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s featured not the full set of Manziel heirs (as seen in the '60s) but just two names: Bobby Joe's widow, Dorothy Nolan Manziel, and Nolan Edward. When the Manziels bought something, Dorothy and Nolan signed the note. When they sold assets, their names went on the deed. The family fortune, at least outwardly, was moving away from Bobby Joe Jr., Norman Paul, and the other Manziel children.
On June 21, 1993, Nolan Manziel created the Manziel Family Oil & Gas Partnership Limited. Public records show he's the sole officer and registered agent. Two months after Nolan created the company, county records show Dorothy Nolan Manziel sold what appears to be the entirety of the family's oil and gas interests to the partnership. The price? $10.
[Clarification, Oct. 4: The price was $10 "and other goods and valuable consideration," which is boilerplate contractual language. Also, according to John Tedesco's rigorous but generally sententious bird-dogging of our story, Dorothy Manziel sold only her personal share. You can read all of Tedesco's criticism here. It's based on a very narrow and ungenerous reading of this story, but he does clear up several details.]
On paper, the cash doesn't appear to reach Johnny Football's branch of the family. Some of it may come that way regardless. But the real inheritance for the young quarterback appears to be the greater Manziel legacy. In his Sports Illustrated profile of Manziel, Andy Staples wrote:
After Manziel won the Heisman, the signature requests exploded. He had learned to avoid the professional autograph hounds, but he didn't know how to manage the ones in his own inner circle. School officials wanted him to sign memorabilia. Manziel says one teammate filled a pool table and a Ping-Pong table with items to be signed. Friends of Manziel's mother, father, grandmother and aunt sent dozens of items with requests for autographs. At one point early this year Manziel's parents' garage was stuffed with memorabilia awaiting his signature. He couldn't take it anymore. He spent hours each week signing, and he grew angry with his parents for accepting the autograph requests. But Manziel, who posed for hundreds of pictures during the same period, was just as bad as his family members. He couldn't say no.
In the early 20th century, a celebrity athlete helped open the spigot for the family; in the 21st, the family's very own celebrity athlete has become the spigot himself. Maybe the autographs weren't merely a token of his new and overwhelming fame, as the many profiles have it. Maybe they were exactly what they seem to be: a way to make a buck. Wildcatting in the NCAA bylaws, you might say. Defrauding college sports' dishonest men. Just another piece of family bidness.
1 Immigration documents show the Manziel family reported themselves as Syrian. Contemporary articles often claim Johnny Football's family is Lebanese. Neither Lebanon nor Syria existed as independent countries before the Manziels emigrated here, both being regions belonging to the Ottoman Empire.
2 The Southern Reporter, Vol. 97, 1924.
3 Texas A & M's official Manziel website says Bobby Joe is Johnny's "great-great uncle." This is wrong.
4 The Atlanta Constitution, July 17, 1927.
5 Time, February 19, 1934.
6 Jack Dempsey, Dempsey By The Man Himself, 1960.
7 The Victoria Advocate, July 11, 1956.
8 Ogden Standard-Examiner, Feb. 7, 1934.
9 Dallas Morning News, Feb. 27, 1934.
10 Dallas Morning News, Aug. 23, 1951.
11 Pampa News, Oct. 21, 1951 .
12 Dallas Morning News, Sept. 12, 1956.
13 Paris News, March 15, 1950.
14 Odessa American, May 4, 1985.
15 Dallas Morning News, April 19, 1960.
16 Time, March 8, 1948.
17 Ibid.
18 Josh Katzowitz, Johnny Football: Johnny Manziel's Road from the Texas Hill Country to the Top of College Football, 2012.
19 Roger W. Shuy, Creating Language Crimes, 2005.
20 Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, Dec. 5, 1980.
21 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 28, 1993.
22 Shuy.
23 Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Oct. 3, 2002. And if you haven't figured it out yet, Norman Paul's bribery charge was a direct result of the FBI's (successful) sting operation on Bobby Joe Jr.
24 Testimony from Dean v. United States, U.S. District Court, 1990.
25 Katzowitz.
26 Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, Dec. 31, 1981.


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(Sinibaldo de' Fieschi)
Count of Lavagna, born at Genoa, date unknown; died at Naples, 7 December, 1254. He was educated at Parma and Bologna. For some time he taught canon law at Bologna, then he became canon at Parma and in 1226 is mentioned as auditor of the Roman Curia. On 23 September,1227, he was created Cardinal-Priest of San Lorenzo in Lucina; on 28 July, 1228, vice-chancellor of Rome; and in 1235 Bishop of Albenga and legate in Northern Italy. When Celestine IV died after a short reign of sixteen days, the excommunicated emperor, Frederick II, was in possession of the States of the Church around Rome and attempted to intimidate the cardinals into electing a pope to his own liking. The cardinals fled to Anagni and cast their votes for Sinibaldo de Fiesehi, who ascended the papal throne as Innocent IV on 25 June, 1243, after an interregnum of 1 year, 7 months, and 15 days. Innocent IV had previously been a friend of Frederick II. Immediately after the election the emperor sent messengers with congratulations and overtures of peace. The pope was desirous of peace, but he knew from the experience of Gregory IX how little trust could be put in the emperor's promises. He refused to receive the latter's messengers, because, like the emperor himself, they were under the ban of the Church. But two months later he sent Peter, Archbishop of Rouen, William of Modena, who had resigned his episcopal office, and Abbot William of St. Facundus as legates to the emperor at Melfi with instructions to ask him to release the prelates whom he had captured while on their way to the council which Gregory IX had intended to hold at Rome. The legates were furthermore instructed to find out what satisfaction the emperor was willing to make for the injuries which he had inflicted upon the Church and which caused Gregory IX to put him under the ban. Should the emperor deny that he had done any wrong to the Church, or even assert that the injustice had been done on the side of the Church, the legates were to propose that the decision should be left to a council of kings, prelates, and temporal princes. Frederick entered into an agreement with Innocent on 31 March, 1244. He promised to yield to the demands of the Curia in all essential points, viz., to restore the States of the Church, to release the prelates, and to grant amnesty to the allies of the pope. His insincerity became apparent when he secretly incited various tumults in Rome and refused to release the imprisoned prelates. Feeling himself hindered in his freedom of action on account of the emperor's military preponderance, and fearing for his personal safety, the pope decided to leave Italy. At his request the Genoese sent him a fleet which arrived at Civitavecchia while the pope was in Sutri. As soon as he was notified of its arrival, he left Sutri in disguise during the night of 27-28 June and hastened over the mountains to Civitavecchia, whence the fleet brought him to Genoa. In October he went to Burgundy, and in December to Lyons, where he took up his abode during the following six years. He at once made preparations for a general council, which on 3 January, 1245, he proclaimed for 24 June of the same year. Innocent had nothing to fear in France and proceeded with great severity against the emperor.
At the Council of Lyons the emperor was represented by Thaddeus of Suessa, who offered new concessions if his master were freed from the ban; but Innocent rejected them, and having brought new accusations against the emperor during the second session, on 5 July, solemnly deposed him at the third session, on 17 July. He now ordered the princes of Germany to proceed to the election of a new king, and sent Philip of Ferrara as legate to Germany to bring about the election of Henry Raspe, Landgrave of Thuringia. The pope's candidate was elected on 22 May, 1246, at Veitshochheim on the Main. Most of the princes, however, had abstained from voting and he never found general recognition. The same may be said of the incapable William of Holland, whom the papal party elected after Henry Raspe died on 17 February, 1247. But Innocent IV was determined upon the destruction of Frederick II and repeatedly asserted that no Hohenstaufen would ever again be emperor. All attempts of St. Louis IX of France to bring about peace were of no avail. In 1249 the pope ordered a crusade to be preached against Frederick II, and after the emperor's death (13 December, 1250), he continued the struggle against Conrad IV and Manfred with unrelenting severity. On 19 April, 1251, Innocent IV set out for Italy and entered Rome in October, 1253. The crown of Sicily devolved upon the Holy See at the deposition of Frederick II. Innocent had previously offered it to Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III of England. Upon his refusal, he tried Charles of Anjou and Edmund, son of Henry III of England. But after some negotiation they also refused owing to the difficulty of dislodging Conrad IV and Manfred who held Sicily by force of arms. After the death of Conrad IV, 20 May, 1264, the pope finally recognized the hereditary claims of Conrad's two-year-old son Conradin. Manfred also submitted, and Innocent made his solemn entry into Naples, 27 October, 1254, but Manfred soon revolted and defeated the papal troops at Foggia (2 Dec., 1254).
In England, Innocent IV made his power felt by protecting Henry III against the lay as well as the ecclesiastical nobility. But here and in other countries many just complaints arose against him on account of the excessive taxes which he imposed upon the people. In Austria, he confirmed Ottocar, the son of King Wenzel, as duke, in 1252, and mediated between him and King Béla of Hungary in 1254. In Portugal, he appointed Alfonso III administrator of the kingdom, because the people were disgusted at the immorality and the tyranny of his father, Sancho III. He favoured the missions in Prussia, Russia, Armenia, and Mongolia, but owing to his continual warfare with Frederick II and his successors he neglected the internal affairs of the Church and allowed many abuses, provided they served to strengthen his position against the Hohenstaufen. He approved the rule of the Sylvestrines on 27 June, 1247, and that of the Poor Clares on 9 August, 1253. The following saints were canonized by him: Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, on 16 December, 1246; William, Bishop of St-Brieuc, in 1247; Peter of Verona; Dominican inquisitor and martyr, in 1253; Stanislaus, Bishop of Cracow, in the same year. He is the author of "Apparatus in quinque libros decretalium", which was first published at Strasburg in 1477, and afterwards reprinted; it is considered the best commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX. The registers of Innocent IV were edited by Elie Berger in four volumes (Paris, 1881-98) and his letters, 762 in number, by Rodenberg in "Mon. Germ. Epp. sæculi XIII", II (1887), 1-568.
A Short biography of Innocent IV was written by his physician, NICOLAS DE CORBIA. It was published by MURATORI, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, III (Milan, 1723-51), 1, 589-593. The modern sources are: DESLANDRES, Innocent IV et la chute des Hohenstaufen (Paris, 1908); WEBER, Der Kampf zwischen Papst Innocenz IV. und Kaiser Friedrich II. bis zur Flucht des Papstes nach Lyon (Berlin, 1900); FOLZ, Kaiser Friedrich II. und Papst Innocenz IV., ihr Kampf in den Jahren 1243-1245 (Leipzig, 1886); RODENBERG, Innocenz IV. und das Königreich Sicilien (Halle, 1892); MAUBACH, Die Kardinäle und ihre Politik um die Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Bonn, 1902); ALDINGER, Die Neubesetzung der deutschen Bistümer unter Papst Innocenz IV. (Leipzig, 1900); HAUCK, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, IV (Leipzig, 1903), 808-851; BERGER, S. Louis et Innocent IV; étude sur les rapports de la France et du saint-siège (Paris, 1893); MASETTI, I pontefici Onorio III, Gregorio IX, ed Innocente IV a fronte dell' Imperatore Federico II (Rome, 1884); MICHAEL, Papst Innocenz IV. und Oesterreich in Zeitschrift für kath. Theologie, XIV (Innsbruck, 1890), 300-323; IDEM, Innocenz IV. und Konrad IV., ibidem, XVIII (1894), 457-472; GASQUET, Henry the Third and the Church (London, 1905), 205-353.
APA citation. (1910). Pope Innocent IV. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08017a.htm
MLA citation. "Pope Innocent IV." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08017a.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Douglas J. Potter. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is webmaster at newadvent.org. Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads.


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AUSTIN – Harmony's Daven Murphree completed a stellar high school track and field career last Saturday by winning the class 2A pole vault championship at the UIL state track meet held on the campus of the University of Texas.
Murphree cleared 15 feet 3 inches on his first attempt which topped all eight of his state competitors. He attempted to clear 17 feet, but was unsuccessful.
By claiming Saturday's gold medal, Murphree claimed a three-peat, his third state AA vaulting crown.
He possibly could have won the event his freshman year, but was sidelined by a broken bone injury.
During the spring 2013 track season, Murphree won the New Balance Indoor National Relays in New York.
His best vault came last month at the Texas Relays in Austin, when he had a winning vault of 17 feet 8.5 inches in the high school division.
Murphree is rated the No. 1 scholastic pole vaulter in the nation. He has signed a letter-of-intent to attend Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, where he plans to continue his vaulting career in the Southland Athletic Conference. He will continue to enter USATF meets this summer before enrolling in SFA in the fall semester.


text: Brent Franks wrote: > On 9/14/06, Craig Tierney <ctierney at hypermall.net> wrote: >> I have heard some horror stories about SATA disk in raid systems and how >> vendors have to work around quirks in the SATA disks to get them to >> work ok. They describe it as the SATA disks go 'out to lunch' >> occasionally and a disk will have a large pause before continuing. >> Those comments come from a vendor (Be wary). > > We have been quite pleased with SATA disks as stated. We did have > issues for the first two months of putting them into testing in which > we thought it was the controller, but alas it ended up just being > Maxtors. We received another batch from maxtor, same issue. The > maxtor would drop out of the array, the array would degrade, and > everything else undesireable would ensue. > My 'be wary' was not to be wary of the disks, but of what the vendor said. For my applications, the SATA arrays we installed worked great. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, but the performance was a bit less than our other scsi array (but not worth the price difference. Craig > After *finally* convincing our vendor it was Maxtor (we've had > problems w/ them before this as well) they shipped us a batch of > Seagates, and it's been operational now for quite some time. No > sleeping drives, so far set and forget. > > This, as a disclaimer, was just for our particular application. I > will say however, that I will never buy Maxtor again. > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf


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In Yemen, 7 million people are on the brink of famine, FAO Director-General warns
Graziano da Silva briefs UN Security Council on need to save lives by saving rural livelihoods in Yemen
12 July 2017, Geneva - The scale of the food crisis in conflict-ridden Yemen is staggering with 17 million people - two thirds of the population - severely food insecure and seven million of these on the verge of famine, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today in a briefing to the UN Security Council.
In a video link from Geneva, he noted how conflict and violence in Yemen - "the largest humanitarian crisis today" - have disrupted agricultural livelihoods and are intensifying in some of the most food insecure and famine-risk areas.
The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification conducted in March this year, registered a 20 percent increase in the number of people estimated to be severely food insecure (IPC Phase 3 and above). Seven million are in IPC Phase 4 meaning they are a step away from being classified to be in Famine (IPC Phase 5).
In Yemen "crop production last year already fell by 40 percent compared with the pre-conflict average. This year, because of poor rains the harvest will be even lower," he said.
The virtual collapse of public health and veterinary services has further heightened the risk of disease and death. In addition, there are risks in the use of poor quality water of irrigation and food preparation.
Livestock disease surveillance and vaccination programmes have come to a halt pushing the risk of disease outbreaks higher. The risk of emerging and endemic zoonoses (animal diseases) exists across the country.
Saving lives by saving livelihoods
The need for long-term political solutions for achieving sustainable peace in Yemen is unquestionable, but there is much we can do now to fight hunger and malnutrition. "We save lives by saving livelihoods," Graziano da Silva said.
"If we don't urgently address the needs of rural people - who make up 70 percent of Yemen's population - we will not have the prospect for a better future."
Graziano da Silva addressed the UN Security Council together with the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
FAO's response
FAO is doing its best to respond to the crisis on many fronts and with limited funding. So far this year, FAO has reached 450 000 people with a mixture of animal health, dairy, animal feed, crop and vegetable production.
In Yemen, at a cost of $220 per family, a crop kit can yield enough food for about three months. A vegetable kit costing $80 per family can yield enough vegetables that families can eat and even sell to their communities all year long.FAO is working closely with the World Bank, the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and others to increase food production, maintain and enhance livelihoods, protect public health and conduct the IPC analysis.


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WASHINGTON, DC, October (ENS)
Perchlorate, a toxic component of rocket fuel that contaminates drinking water at sites in at least 35 states, will not be regulated at the national level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has decided.
The agency announced its preliminary decision not to regulate perchlorate in drinking water late Friday. Instead, the EPA said in a statement that it is "committed to working with states and localities to ensure public health is protected."
"States have the right to establish and enforce drinking water standards and EPA encourages state-specific situations to be addressed at the local level," the EPA said.
California and Massachusetts have already passed laws regulating perchlorate in drinking water.
Ammonium perchlorate is widely used throughout the aerospace, munitions, and pyrotechnics industries as a primary ingredient in solid rocket and missile propellants, fireworks, and explosive charges. It is a component of more than 350 types of munitions, according to the Department of Defense.
The chemical has been found not only in drinking water but also in lettuce and milk. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration reported finding perchlorate in 217 of 232 samples of milk and lettuce in 15 states.
Perchlorate has been found in drinking water in 35 states. (Photo courtesy NASA)
Perchlorate affects the ability of the thyroid gland to take up iodine, which is needed to make thyroid hormones that regulate many body functions. Children and pregnant women are are especially susceptible.
The EPA said in its statement Friday that after a review of scientific data on the health effects of exposure to perchlorate from drinking water and other sources the agency found that "in more than 99 percent of public drinking water systems, perchlorate was not at levels of public health concern."
Based on the Safe Water Drinking Act criteria, the agency said there is not a "meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction" through a national drinking water regulation.
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said this finding is the result of political, rather than scientific, considerations. "No explanation of this bizarre finding is offered. Perhaps none is needed. Everyone who's paying attention knows that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is acutely tuned-in to the political signals coming from the White House – so tuned-in that his conversations with the executive branch have become a form of highly privileged state secret."
The EPA is seeking public input on its decision and will make a final determination for perchlorate after considering information provided in the 30-day public comment period.
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California lost no time in offering her public comment.
"Once again on a Friday, when nobody is paying attention, the Bush administration announces a policy that will harm the American people. The Bush EPA's failure to set a standard for perchlorate, a dangerous contaminant found in drinking water, is outrageous and I will do everything in my power to reverse it," Boxer said.
"Perchlorate contamination endangers the health of our families, especially pregnant women and children," she said, "and to simply allow it to remain in our drinking water is immoral."
Perchlorate is found in the drinking water supplies of up to 16.6 million Americans, according to EPA. But Boxer cites the estimates of independent researchers that 20 million or more Americans are exposed to the toxin.
In July, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed two measures to protect the public from exposure to perchlorate. One requires the EPA to resume testing of drinking water for perchlorate and disclose the results of those tests to the public. The other requires the EPA to promptly set a standard for perchlorate in drinking water that protects pregnant women and children. Neither of these measures has become law.
Rocket launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force)
Perchlorate has been found at 46 Superfund sites out of 1,557 current and deleted sites, EPA's Assistant Administrator for Water Benjamin Grumbles told a House of Representatives hearing in 2007.
Of these 46 sites, he said, 12 are private sites and 34 are federal facilities. At approximately 28 sites, perchlorate concentrations in ground water or drinking water exceed 24.5 parts per billion, which is the Defense Department's level of concern for managing perchlorate in ground water.
Perchlorate has been discovered in over 350 of 6,400 public water supply wells tested in California, the EPA says on its website. "Contamination of groundwater and of the Colorado River affects important drinking water and irrigation water supplies. There may be over 30 sites with perchlorate in California alone. Thirteen of these are EPA Superfund sites and the state of California leads cleanup efforts at 12 other sites."
In Massachusetts, the chemical has been found in groundwater plumes issuing from the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod.
The Pentagon has denied any role in the EPA's decision, saying, "We have not intervened in any way in EPA's determination not to regulate perchlorate. If you read their determination, that's based on criteria in the Safe Drinking Water Act."
Cleanup technologies for perchlorate are available. The EPA states on its website that the agency has demonstrated "cost-effective, full-scale perchlorate treatment technologies" at California's Aerojet, San Gabriel Valley, Lawrence Livermore Site 300, and NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory Superfund sites. The San Gabriel perchlorate treatment system was the first in the nation to treat millions of gallons of water per day to deliver clean water to a municipal water supply.
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved