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01.04.2021 NOLA Public Schools to Shift Students to Distance Learning in Response to Concerns Over Increase of COVID-19 in New Orleans
(New Orleans - January 4, 2021) -- Due to a very concerning spike in the prevalence of COVID-19 in New Orleans, NOLA Public Schools (NOLA-PS) will return to distance learning District-wide to best protect the health and safety of our students, their families, and our staff and teachers.
School leaders were instructed Monday to move all Pre-K-12 classes to distance learning no later than Thursday, Jan. 7, to give parents, guardians, and families some time to adjust their schedules. NOLA-PS will continue to monitor COVID-19 data and trends and reevaluate this decision no sooner than Jan. 21, in hopes that the local trend in positivity rates and case counts improves.
The City's data tracking the pandemic showed a significant jump in the rate of positive cases over the past few days, indicating a worsening trend -- one of several metrics NOLA-PS considered in order to make this grave but necessary decision.
As with every decision NOLA-PS has made since the start of the pandemic, this latest decision was driven by data and the advice of our public health experts.
"All along, we have taken a very measured approach as we respond to the shifting circumstances of this pandemic," NOLA-PS Superintendent Dr. Henderson Lewis, Jr. said. "Citywide data over the past few days has shown a dramatic uptick in positivity rates, and so, based upon the advice of our health advisors, we felt we had to make the very unfortunate but necessary decision to return to distance learning to keep our students, staff, teachers and community safe. We recognize this will be extremely difficult for our families and hope that everyone takes the necessary precautions to reverse the spread of this terrible virus. I want all of us across NOLA Public Schools to stay close and be in constant communication as we tackle this next challenge. We're one team, and we'll get through this together."
We encourage parents and families to contact their schools regarding their campus-specific, distance-learning transition plans. Likewise, NOLA-PS has compiled several online resources for parents to access during distance learning at https://nolapublicschools.com/covid19/parentresources.
While distance learning will resume, schools will continue to offer critical services and support to families as needed, such as school meals. NOLA Public Schools will continue to provide a list of all schools providing community feeding to any student on our website. Families can access this information here. Schools also will be permitted to accommodate instruction for special populations under reduced class sizes, or provide in-person instruction for younger students, Pre-K-5, in smaller groups of no more than 15. Families should contact their schools for site-specific information.
During transition from in-person to distance learning, NOLA-PS has instructed schools to continue enforcing COVID-19 safety protocols – checking temperatures, using hand sanitizer, wearing masks, practicing social distancing – on their grounds.
In-person learning is the ideal education environment for students because it addresses the whole child, academically, socially, and emotionally. Our goal is to safely reopen schools when the COVID-19 trends we're tracking improve. But for the immediate future, distance learning will be in place out of an abundance of caution.
About NOLA Public Schools: NOLA Public Schools is the public school district for Orleans Parish. It includes the district's administration and elected school board, known as the Orleans Parish School Board. NOLA Public Schools currently oversees 76 public schools and is led by Superintendent Dr. Henderson Lewis, Jr.
When you subscribe to the blog, we will send you an e-mail when there are new updates on the site so you wouldn't miss them.


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The Effects of Exercise Type and Elbow Angle on Vertical Ground Reaction Force and Muscle Activity during a Push-up Plus Exercise
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subset: commoncrawl


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I remember the smog in Beijing rendering the most beautiful skies. There was an innocence to the air pollution back then, before the engines of economic development really got going.
It was just a pretty sunset, or a delicate brown haze that romantically softened the edges of things—while wrecking your lungs, of course. But, like the sand storms, pollution gave the city a different, rarified quality.
There was also less of it—less pollution and less city. Beijing, like most Chinese cities, was much smaller ten years ago; there were fewer buildings; hardly any dirty trucks bellowed smoke en route to construction sites. Most people didn't own cars. Things were just getting started.
The way Beijing's smog is being written about now makes me think of Lars Lerup's "zoohemic canopy", which he described in his book, After the City. The atmosphere floating above Houston was intrinsic to its character.
But Lerup's canopy was benign, passive, even beautiful, a giant friendly blob that formed another plane of life. It was not, like China's apocalyptic air, something conjured by brute economic ambition and reckless nationalism. Lerup's canopy was more weather than toxic byproduct.
Beijing's smog is always at its worst right about now, in the depths of winter when the city smokes coal like cigarettes to keep the heat up.
When I lived there, this "haze" was certainly dreaded when it showed up, but it was not yet an international issue or a measure of progress. Over the past couple of weeks, Beijing's air quality has become a specter of China's on-going development frenzy—an economic trajectory we in the west are wholly complicit in helping to create. China's coal-fired engines are running for our Walmarts and iPads, our intertwined economic fates.
Part of the west's dream of China is that it was once defined by a benign past, not by contemporary economic might. Even though we depend on it, we are less at ease with this China. It has been our greatest and most necessary realm of otherness, helping to prop up popular notions of contemporary institutional and cultural superiority. But this trope has become destabilized with China's rise. It is now polluting with the best of us.
In a way, air pollution has turned into the menacing beige megashape of our xenophobia. The more China pollutes, the more it projects power, its pollution an accidental and unexpected index of aggression. China spreads it smog around the way it spreads its money and people around. Back in 2008 there were fears that China's toxic cloud would reach Europe. At that time, the world also watched to see if the air would clear enough to hold the Olympics.
There were days last week when the AQI (Air Quality Index) in some districts of Beijing was reported to have been above 900. According to the World Health Organization, this is the sort of air quality that can potentially decrease your lifespan by five years. So, everyone in Beijing: You may have just had five years stolen from you.
Globally, roughly 40% of all power is produced using coal. 42% in the US. In China its 79%. Moreover, according to a New York Times special report, to meet increasing demand, China will be adding about 160 new coal-fired power plants within the next four years. Coal is still king…and emperor too. It will be for some time.


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Getting promoted from within is often trickier than is readily apparent. Getting promoted from within during a turnaround is far trickier still. It's important to strike the right balance between continuity and change. With that in mind, RIM's new CEO, Thorsten Heins, needs to change his current thinking on that balance.
The Wall Street Journal reports Heins as saying that he largely plans to continue the company's current strategy. "It's going to be continuity, but it's not going to be a standstill." This is what we'd expect IBM's new CEO Ginni Rometty to say as she takes over the top job in a company that is doing well. RIM is in trouble. Heins' sudden promotion is a discontinuity itself. Heins and his team need to build on that.
Heins can't fall into the trap of thinking that his promotion is the platform for change. It's not about him. It's about the team. In almost every case, an external platform for change resonates better than an internal one. People don't like to be told they are the problem. They prefer to be the solution to a problem caused by others.
There's no doubt that Heins will have supporters, as well as detractors and watchers. He needs to get his message right, get his story right, and then start moving each one step. He needs to turn the supporters into champions, some of the watchers into supporters, and neutralize the detractors – especially the covert detractors.
RIM's environment demands change. Heins may or may not be able to stick with the same values. But he clearly needs to change his team members' attitudes, the way they relate to each other and the outside world, and their behaviors.
He can do this by following Michael Brown's ABCs of behavior change. Brown's premise, which I follow, is that you modify someone's behavior by changing the antecedent and the consequences. There are, logically, four approaches to altering the balance of consequences:
- Increase the positive consequences of desired behavior
- Increase the negative consequences of undesired behavior
- Decrease the positive consequences of undesired behavior
- Decrease the negative consequences of desired behavior
Here then is what Heins needs to do:
- Confirm the current context and culture
- Determine what changes he and his team need to make
- Put in place and implement a message, story, and communication plan to:
- Turn supporters into champions
- Turn watchers into supporters
- Neutralize his detractors
Continuity in an organization that has fallen behind technologically and disappointed so many users so many times recently is not an option. Change is imperative. And it starts with changing Heins' platform for change.
This is a good example of step 5 of The New Leader's Playbook: Drive Action by Activating and Directing an Ongoing Communication Network (Including Social Media)
Everything communicates. You can either make choices in advance about what and how you're going to communicate or react to what others do. It is important to discover your own message and be clear on your platform for change, vision, and call to action before you start trying to inspire others. It will evolve as you learn, but you can't lead unless you have a starting point to help focus those learning plans. Identify your target audiences. Craft and leverage your core message and master narrative. Monitor and adjust as appropriate on an ongoing basis.
Click here to read about each step in the playbook
Click here for YouTube videos highlighting each step
The New Leader's Playbook includes the 10 steps that executive onboarding group PrimeGenesis uses to help new leaders and their teams get done in 100-days what would normally take six to twelve months. George Bradt is PrimeGenesis' managing director, and co-author of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan (Wiley, 3rd edition 2011) and the iPad app New Leader Smart Tools. Follow him at @georgebradt or on YouTube.


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Congratulations to T.C. Macker for being nominated and selected to serve on the National Advisory Board for Coldwell Banker Commercial, a committee made up of highly regarded affiliate members.
Macker is one of the eight members on the exclusive board and will represent the California region.
The purpose of the Coldwell Banker Commercial Advisory Board is to guide and contribute to the enhancement of the systems, tools, and services delivered to all affiliates by the Coldwell Banker Commercial brand. In addition, each board member serves as a liaison, which allows the exchange of ideas between the organization's corporate leaders and the CBC franchisees within their respective region.
Each Advisory Board member is held in high esteem. Their input is an invaluable resource that helps shape and aid in the company's efforts to comprehend and meet the needs of their market and affiliates.


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This article specifically covers an advanced topic that will allow you to bypass the automatic behavior of data source filters in EachScape apps.
Every time an app uses the Switch to Another View action with the Add to History option checked, the current state of filters and sort order is preserved on all data sources. When you use the (back) option on Switch to Another View, these filter and sort order settings are restored as they were when the app left that view. Because of this interaction, if the app sets a filter or changes the sort order and then return to a previous view, the new filter will not appear to be applied. Instead the filters and sort order will be as they were when the app switch from that view.
To get around this, there are few things you can do. The most drastic solution is to bypass using history for managing views. We discourage you from doing this because it can consume more processing time requerying the data and can change the appearance of a view when the app returns back to that view. For example, if the user scrolled down through a list, switched to a detail view and returned, the scroll position is reset if the list view is redrawn.
A better approach is to clear the filters after returning to the first view. To get the filter actions to run out of their default sequence, you may need to use the Run Script After action, which allows you to call a custom script out of sequence.
A third option is available. If you have to set multiple filters from a single view, it's possible this approach will not work. A solution in this case is to use the Save Filter/Sort script action prior to setting the filters and later to use Restore Filter/Sort when you want all the filters back as they previously were. This action is only applicable for local data sources.
Note that if the normal behavior of your app is merely to filter the data source as the user descends through a series of views drilling down through the data, there's no reason to worry about all this. It just happens automatically because of the restoration of the filters and sort order.


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Daily Energy Supplied by Imagination
Ciaran Kelly walks us through a process of using imagination each and every day in order to improve both your health and your life. Why do we refuse to exercise our imagination, because someone else wants us to be efficient? If we use our imagination on a daily basis, only then will we control our lives and destiny.
About the speaker
Ciaran S. Kelly is the General Manager of Zepter International and a Member of its Board of Advisors. Previously he was head of the Task Force Team at SKODA Auto 2011-2013, and before that Director of Sales, Operations and Marketing for AAA AUTO Group 1999-2010. In addition he has been teaching courses at Prague universities in the subjects of Humanities and Business/Communications since 1999. He also helped to start the Czech Association of American Football back in 1992. Since then he has coached or refereed every season. He has 5 x National titles as coach of Prague Panthers.


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LED Bulb
Energy System Company® specialize in energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, and long lasting Solid State Lighting solutions for commercial and industrial applications including warehouses, factories, office buildings, college campuses, hotels, hospitals, parking garages, and parking lots.
LED technology, also known as Solid State Lighting – SSL, has been around for some time but only for lower wattage lighting like flashlights, and decorative residential indoor and outdoor lighting. As a result of rapid developments in the industry, it's now the dawn of the LED Era for commercial applications of LED technology in interior and exterior lighting.
According to The U.S. Department of Energy, "Solid-state lighting is a pivotal emerging technology that promises to fundamentally alter and improve lighting systems – and buildings – of the future. No other lighting technology offers our nation so much potential to conserve electricity, at a time when our nation needs bold solutions to achieve greater energy independence."
Advantages of Solid State Lighting
Saves Energy: LED lighting consumes a fraction of the electricity compared to incandescent and gas-based lights to produce the same amount of light, resulting in dramatic savings of electricity costs. Simple payback from one to five years is common depending on the type of lights replaced and daily usage.
Saves the Environment: Unlike traditional lamps, LED lights contain NO hazardous gases dangerous to humans and our planet. Furthermore, LED lighting reduces greenhouse gases 1.6 pounds of Carbon Dioxide pollution is avoided from power plants for each kilowatt hour -kWh saved by LED lighting.
Saves Maintenance Costs: LED lights have long life spans and require no ballast, thus reducing the labor and material costs associated with repairing and replacing incandescent, fluorescent, metal-halide, and sodium lamps and fixtures.
1. LED bulb light can save 80% energy compared with traditional bulb or halogen lamp.
2. LED bulb has no flickering which is eliminate eye-discomfort caused by traditional lamp.
3. Extremely low maintenance costs.
4. Long lifespan more than 50,000 hours.
5. No UV and IR radiation, not lead, mercury and other pollution.
6. Luminous efficiency up to 100 lm/w, various color temperature available, high color rendering index
7. Solid-state, high shock resistant
8. Low power consumption, high intensity
Availabe Now: 3watt, 5watt, 7watt, 9watt & 12watt both AC & DC.
LED Bulb
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TRNN Panel with Ralph Nader examines the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and how it almost failed to beat the Republicans in the midterms, even though they were in a relatively weak position
Story Transcript
MARC STEINER: I want to come back to this; I think it's really important. But I want to bring our other guest in here. Just joining us by phone is Ralph Nader. Ralph, good to have you with us. How are you?
RALPH NADER: Very good, thank you. The Democrats almost blew it again. They're going to probably win the House, but they should have landslided this corrupt, cruel, vicious, openly anti-people, anti-patient, anti-environment, anti-worker party called the Republican Party. And when are we going to learn that it comes down to voter turnout? In neighborhood after neighborhood half the people stayed home, even though it was a higher turnout than 2014.
So the close races where black candidates lost in Georgia and Florida, they never would have been competitive a few years ago. Why did they become competitive? Because of voter organization and turnout. The areas where the people won in Arkansas on minimum wage, or the ex-felon enfranchisement Initiatives, over 60 percent, won in Florida is because of voter turnout.
You know, we can talk about the oppressors, and we have to. We can talk about Trump, and we have to. We can talk about the corporate giant takeover of our governments, from Washington to state capitals. We can talk about the ripoffs, and the fraud, and the crime. But we have to talk about organizing movements in every congressional district, and starting with the Congress. The Congress is our most powerful tool. It's the smallest branch; the most powerful, by far, under our Constitution. War declaration, appropriations, on and on. There's in Congress the taxing power. And there are only 535 of them, and we know their names. And one thing they want more than money from special interests, commercial interests, is our votes.
And we've got to get over this overconcentration on discriminatory injustice at the expense of indiscriminate injustice; that is, where everybody is being ripped off, regardless of their gender, or racial or, or cultural, or whatever identity. We have to focus on the discrimination deep from corporate prisons, to mass incarceration, to the kind of public facility destruction that happens to be in poor areas, and poor areas of the city, and lack of healthcare, and all that. But we have to mobilize where everyone is ripped off.
You know, I've talked to conservative Southern audiences on consumer protection being ripped off; hospital malpractice, credit fraud, all the rest. They're all ripped off the same way. Conservatives and liberals, self-styled voters, are ripped off the same way. So the major redirections that we can win soon are living wage- that's a left-right support among workers. You think conservative workers at Wal-Mart don't want a better wage? The second is full Medicare for all. The third is dealing with the $1.4 trillion of gouging student debt that is aborting their opportunities in life year after year. The fourth is law enforcement, law and order crackdown on corporate crooks. From the ghettos to Wall Street they're ripping off trillions of dollars of money that people earned.
And the other one is a new tax system where revenues can be raised and redirected from the corporate welfare subsidy handout, bailout budgets, to rebuild the public works in every community in America. We're not talking just about highways and bridges. We're talking about community health clinics. We're talking about libraries. We're talking about sewage and safe drinking water systems. We're talking about public transit. And in order for this to happen- and you don't think that comes in at 90 percent back home? Those kinds of jobs, good paying jobs that can't be exported to China in every community? In order that for happen the military budget has to be confronted. There are a lot of retired generals and national security officials who think the military budget is bloated, the Pentagon procurement system is corrupt, that the empire around the world is boomeranging against us. More and more countries, more and more fighters hate us. That's what we're getting for the trillions of dollars, and we've got to stop blowing up other countries and building infrastructure here.
And that all comes down to Congress. 535 people. If you get an enlightened billionaire, for a hundred million dollars a year you can start, jumpstart, Congress watchdog groups that represent majority opinion on living wage, on full Medicare for All, on adequate housing and public transit and public infrastructure. And look at that, that's peanuts. There's a there's a near billionaire. His name, you may know him, his name is Nick Hanauer. He's from Seattle. And he writes these wonderful articles lecturing his business colleagues to raise that minimum wage to a living wage. It's now frozen at $7.25 federal. Some states have it higher. And you know what he said the other day? He said in Politico, he said if the Democratic Party doesn't markedly move left they will not be where the center is. In other words, there's huge left-right support for major redirection of priorities and investments and public budgets and tax reform in this country.
So let's, let's not get away with our legitimate rage at what's happening to our country, and its impact in the world and climate disruption, which hits the poor even worse than people who have more money. Let's not get away from the nuts and bolts, getting out the vote. When you have half the people who don't vote in this country- we know who they are. They're African Americans, Hispanic Americans, they're poor whites. They feel disempowered, they feel discouraged, they feel excluded, disrespected, underpaid, underinsured. They're desperate, you know, to try to make ends meet. They're deep in debt. Forty percent of the families in this country in a study didn't couldn't handle a sudden $400 debt that they weren't planning for.
And that's the coalition that's going to win control the Congress. Now, you win control of the Congress, and then things change at the executive level. Different kinds of judges are confirmed, or not confirmed. It affects the state legislatures. 530 men and women. Don't you think we outnumber them? Don't you think there are a lot of conservative and liberal voters who want the same things for their children? Good schools, good public services, fair taxation, clean air, clean water, safe medicine, safe food, and an end to this televised corporate pornography that sidesteps parental authority, whether they're liberal or conservative, and directly markets to 8, 9, 10-year-olds junk food, junk drinks, and unbelievable violent programming. You don't think that's a left-right support thing? These corporations are raising our kids; they're undermining parental authority and morality. They are electronic child molesters.
The Democrats have lost one issue after another. They're trying to defeat today the Republican Party with a hand and two fingers tied behind their back because they're completely indentured to their commercial funders. And that's why they didn't make an emblazoned issue of living wage, which comes in 70, 80 percent. That's why it didn't make a major issue of full Medicare for All. They didn't even talk about the public option. That's why they didn't make a major issue of cracking down on the corporate crime wave that goes into every neighborhood and it's baleful impacts; redlining, loan sharks, rent-to-own rackets, payday loan rackets. That's why they didn't make an issue of the public corruption of the Trump administration, and how Trump is taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat, from the coal industry, to the oil industry; banking to insurance. Again and again they are losing the winning issues because they don't put them up for the voters.
MARC STEINER: OK, Ralph, now hold on just one second. I want to introduce another guest who just came in.


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The ScopBOX™
is based, in terms of hardware, on the last mini barebone Intel "Next Unit of Computing." But careful! The performances of the new ScopBOX has no relation to its size. ScopBOX may be small in size, but it is huge in power and performance. Although only 1.5" (3.9 cm) high for a base of 4.4" (11.2 cm), it is limited only by the number of licensed extensions (telephones) to be managed:
Finished is the big bulky, noisy, and energy sucking mainframe. Also finished is the wiring dedicated solely to telephony. The ScopBOX™ naturally fits into your computer network, and delivers its entire functionality to you! Reduced heat dissipation, power consumption similar to that of a light bulb, and without any noise! The immense power in such a quiet little box will amaze you! No humming fans - no moving parts at all!
If you do not have the resources or simply prefer a managed solution, we will prepare and integrate everything for you. Upon purchasing a ScopBOX, we will provide a Request For Information (RFI) document to establish in detail your functional requirements, and meet the specific characteristics of the concerned installation.
Besides the ScopTEL IP PBX software integration within the ScopBOX, the provided integration includes: General settings, network settings, creating facilities (Class of Service), extensions, trunks, outgoing/incoming lines, the provisioning of devices with group settings, functional testing and general validation. ScopTEL fully supports TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 for secure encrypted connections with all devices to ensure fully secure communications.


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Paul Hammond says all the right things about redisigning other people's sites.
One point he makes in this excellent rant is that some sites already have a new design in the works but just haven't quite gotten all of the kinks out of it yet. That's certainly the case here.


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A week after Paris Fashion Week had ended, a group of French journalists found themselves in the Tuscan city of Pietrasanta, where Florentine designer Ilaria Nistri had brought them that noon. Tea and cakes had been forthcoming in front of the roaring fireplace of the Albergo Pietrasanta, a perfectly picturesque and historic townhouse a stone's throw away from the town's cathedral, which the designer had privatised for the two days. Some had elected to remain curled up with the last of the fashion month duties while others roamed along the streets to soak in the sights.
While many designers would have taken a press trip as an opportunity to crowd every waking moment with reminds on the brands, for Ilaria Nistri it was the occasion to immerse a likeminded group of people into her universe, organizing a cultural stroll through the city, hosting her collection presentation in a workshop specialized in marble artwork. Dinner would later take place among a bevy of plaster and marble works, ranging from the abstract contemporary to the historically charming. Models clad in her latest collection took a pose among the statues as guests listened to cellist and singer Naomi Berrill and pianist Simone Graziano warming the air with their performance.
Of course, this wasn't completely unrelated to her work as a designer, since her latest collection is titled Marble Echoes. For several seasons now, the Florence-based designer has been drawing inspiration from destruction: sometimes of the natural kind, as is the case here with the beautiful cracks visible in the marble due to the compound effects of time and other elements but also the disruptions brought on by man (one particularly memorable collection featured images of a beautiful lake whose color was entirely due to the deep pollution that made it deadly to man and beast alike).
Although the unexpected downpour would prevent the planned visits to the marble quarries planned for the next day (and even returning to Paris, thanks to a no-less-unexpected tornado that closed Pisa airport), the trip highlighted not only Nistri's wonderful eye for the unusually lovely but also her roving eye for culture.


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Our Mission is to build leaders that not only excel on the training floor, but at home, in school and in their communities. We teach our students how to set goals and how to persevere to achieve their goals through hard work, self discipline, positive motivation and encouragement.
Our goal is to help improve our student's physical and mental attitude through both a traditional and progressive Martial Arts Program. To establish a set of positive values, such as; self discipline self control, respect, integrity, focus and indomitable spirit, which can be applied to every aspect of their lives.
Our number one concern is our students and their families. We are committed to leading by example to build the leaders that our communities deserve.
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BI and analytics delivering over 1300% ROI according to Nucleus Research: Do you believe it?
According to a new study, released this month by analyst firm Nucleus Research, organizations that invest in analytics solutions, such as Business Intelligence (BI) software, are experiencing average returns of $13.01 for every dollar spent in 2014.
But, as implausible as these results seem, Nucleus Research has in fact discovered that analytics ROI is also on a sharp upward trend.
A similar Nucleus Research study, analyzing the successes of 60 separate analytics implementations, reported an average ROI of $10.66 for each dollar spent in 2011.
"With all the changes that have happened in the market in the past three years, Nucleus again looked at case studies published since 2011 to determine if vendor investments in new analytics capabilities have paid off in terms of delivering more ROI to customers," stated the report. "In looking at the case studies published since our last analysis, Nucleus found that for every dollar a company spends on analytics, they now get back $13.01 – 1.2 times more than they got just three years ago."
Nucleus said that these conclusions were reached after a thorough analysis of all Nucleus Research analytics case studies since November 2011, and included a breadth of deployment sizes, types as well as major and smaller vendor solutions.
Drivers: Need for data transparency, faster decision-making, competitive advantage and emergence of new technologies
The Analytics Pays Back $13.01 for Every Dollar Spent research note cited the need for greater data transparency, faster time-to-action in highly competitive markets, and improved processes driven by fact-based decision-making as the major drivers spurring heightened BI investment.
"Over the past three years, organizations continued to recognize the need for improved visibility and productivity," stated the report. "Existing business processes are no longer meeting the demand for quick, usable, and reliable insights for business decisions."
Nucleus Research concluded that, due to increasingly crowded markets across all major industry segments, organizations "can no longer afford to wait weeks for reports on profitability, revenue, budgeting and forecasting, [or] delay marketing campaigns."
Tough competition within the BI market – leading to the creation of a multiplicity of niche vendors and development of new innovate technologies focused on harnessing Big Data and cloud-based deployment – was also linked to increased adoption and ROI.
"New vendors have also entered the market in the past three years, with both niche and smaller vendors offering high levels of usability, integration into other systems, competitive pricing strategies, and ease-of-deployments that reduce the need for hardware, IT resources, as well as the overall cost of software," stated the report. "Larger vendors are following suit to remain competitive, and many have adjusted packaging, pricing, and product capabilities to match those of the up and coming new vendors. Customers now have a much greater choice of vendors and deployment types, enabling them to reduce IT dependency via the cloud while sourcing the lowest cost, most functional options for solution deployments."
Challenges and inhibitors
According to Nucleus Research, data quality and transparency also remain consistent barriers to effective BI programs, trustworthy reports and therefore BI ROI.
"One of the biggest challenges still facing organizations is the lack of visibility to data – the one version of the truth," said the report. "Many of these organizations have siloed data systems, multiple sources of information, and complex, manual processes of data consolidation."
Additionally, manual processes related to data manipulation, collation and preparation continued to act as an inhibitor towards greater productivity – even within organizations with well-established BI initiatives. The report pinpointed this area as something that BI-using organizations, and technology vendors alike, could improve upon to continue to boost BI ROI.
"Even with the availability of analytical applications, organizations continued to rely on manual processes for reporting, data consolidation, analysis, planning, budgeting, and in the financial close," read the report. "Many hours and resources were dedicated to the manual compilation and validation of information and data within spreadsheets. Additional hours are also committed to the processes around incorporating that information into the systems of record."
Despite the well-publicized benefits of reporting and analytics, joint research from the Economist Intelligence Unit and consulting firm PwC indicate that many executives still rely on experience and intuition when making crucial business decisions – even disregarding data-based insights in the process.
This culture of decision-making remains another strident challenge to BI adoption and ROI. The report revealed that senior executives still relied on "intuition" and the "advice and experience of others" when taking critical action the majority of the time. These personal judgments formed the underpinning methodology behind decision-making 58% of the time. Of the 1,135 executives who participated in the global survey conducted in May 2014, only one-third said that they relied "primarily on data and analytics" when undertaking their most recent significant decision-making process. Despite this, it's also clear that business leaders understand the capacity of BI technology to assist the decision-making process, with all survey respondents stating that investing in better data analysis was a top priority over the next two years.
"A company's success today is tied to how good it is at making big decisions," said PwC's Global and US Data and Analytics Leader, Dan DiFilippo. "While executives say they continue to rely on experience, advice or their own gut instinct, they also see investment in data and analytics as critical to success. Experience and intuition and the use of data and analytics are not mutually exclusive. The challenge for business is how best to marry the two."
With many of the significant barriers to BI ROI well known, the benefits – according to Nucleus Research, include the ability for analytics applications to "improve the effectiveness of business processes, to increase visibility, to drive greater business profitability, and to drive greater productivity and results".
Source: BusinessIntelligence.com
Nucleus Research also concluded that further adoption of BI technology, and a culture of analytics-based processes and decision-making, also had the ability to assist organizations to:
- Eliminate the manual requirements of business processes and sources dedicated to report building, and therefore reduce operating costs
- Consolidate and collaborate effectively around data
- Improve the trustworthiness and transparency of information, and therefore confidence, in the decision-making process
- Improve organizational visibility by breaking-down information silos and creating uniform standards for reporting throughout the enterprise – across departmental divides, functional business areas and previously disparate business systems (ERP, CRM, etc)
- Make better, faster strategic and operational decisions
- Improve organizational and individual productivity by re-allocating resources previously involved in manual data processes, to "revenue-driving business activities", leading to increased operating profits and customer satisfaction
Patterns: More use cases, more BI tools and more data
The report also found that as the potential benefits of BI become better publicized within the BI industry, and socialized throughout an organization, reporting and analytics would continue to break out of more traditional IT-controlled deployments and financial-oriented use cases, spreading to new parts of the business.
"Analytics are being implemented to streamline and automate decision-making and reporting and are increasingly being extended to other operational areas such as CRM, ECM, HCM, and ERP," said the report. "Customer leveraging of analytics is increasing the relevance of the market to become an operational cornerstone for success, as BI becomes a platform for cross-operational analysis, able to piece together the big picture for operations management."
The study indicated that, given the emergence of new and multiple use cases within a single organization, it was also increasingly likely that many businesses would become home to multi-tool deployments: "Many companies have seen the gains made in different parts of their organizations through analytics, and are looking to complement existing implementations with additional tools." The report also argued that "With the increased competitiveness in the market, customers are able to find solutions that are driving greater ROI, providing improved collaboration, usability, mobility options, and more competitive pricing options."
As with recent research published by Gartner, Nucleus Research has also articulated an interesting shift in BI purchase habits and patterns. With many more business functions looking to harness the decision-making capabilities of reporting and analytics solutions, in conjunction with the development of business-user-oriented technology, heads of department and business leaders (as opposed to IT) are playing an increasingly large role in the BI purchase and procurement process.
The report also cited the fact that – aside from reduction in initial purchase and deployment barriers – many vendors are now offering a broader range of purchasing options as another reason behind "the ability for business to purchase BI solutions with lower implementation costs as well as reduced IT requirements".
The other major pattern detected and discussed in the study was the fact that the continued development of the Big Data phenomenon is driving significant investment, due to a number of key factors:
- Organizations have an increasing desire to exploit more data types and sources, and larger data volumes in general, for the purpose of reporting and analytics and decision-making
- The proliferation of existing data sources, and the creation of new ones, is producing more complex reporting and analytics requirements
- The rapid development of new tools capable of processing and analyzing increasingly larger and more varied data sources and types
"As the need to deal with greater volumes of data and disparate data sources grows, [in conjunction with] increased demands from business users for access, organizations are turning to analytic solutions and applications to deal with these pressures," stated the report.
Increased prevalence of ROI use cases driving stronger investment
So, is it a case of the emergence of more ROI use cases spurring greater investment in business analytics, or is that stronger spend within the industry is responsible for organizations yielding better results? Perhaps the answer is both.
According to a recent industry study by MarketsandMarkets – titled "Business Intelligence Market by Types, by Function, by Deployment, by Features, by Verticals, by Organization Size, by Regions: Worldwide Trends, Market Forecasts and Analysis (2013 - 2018)" – the global BI market is set to grow at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.3%, increasing from $13.9 billion in 2013 to $20.8 billion by 2018.
Source: Forbes.com
Intriguingly, a recent report from Technology Business Research (TBR) suggested that the international BI software market would in fact exceed $40 billion by 2018, despite indications suggesting that market growth was actually slowing. According to TBR's Business Intelligence Software Vendor Benchmark study, "customers' BI software consumption patterns are maturing and broadening, with customers moving from stand-alone tools to packaged BI applications and then to analytic complements of business applications."
What's particularly noteworthy though is that this report clearly estimates the global BI market to be developing from a much higher base, with TBR forecasting a modest average year-to-year growth rate of four percent between 2013 and 2018 – a "slowdown from the double-digit growth rates of 2011 and 2012 that reflects the rising maturity of this market and the extent to which customers can extend BI software deployments".
This rising maturity, resulting in more widespread and sophisticated BI deployments and use cases, might go some way to explaining the results of an industry report released by IDC last month. The IDC investigative study expects the global business analytics services market to total $51.6 billion by the conclusion of 2014, reaching $89.6 billion during 2018 – representing a strong 14.7% CAGR.
Senior research analyst for IDC, Ali Zaidi, told information-management.com that "Talent shortage, coupled with the high interest in adoption of new technologies, will continue to drive growth in business analytics services spending at the worldwide level."


text: Openwork silk stockings. Thigh high, One Size fits most. Available in Cream and Black. Based on extant examples, these have a lovely openwork pattern, centered on the front of the leg. The design starts at mid-calf and continues down to the top of the toe. Styles of openwork patterns began to appear in stockings near the beginning of the 19th century. They continued to change and elaborate into the early 20th century. Embroidered openwork and lace inserts in both silk and cotton were seen on many fashionable feet throughout the Regency, Victorian and Edwardian eras. The cream colored stockings are dyeable.


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Click on image for full screen view.
| Wait-A-Bit Vine, Creeping Bird of Paradise, Dwarf Poinciana, Phyllanthoides Caesalpinia
Caesalpinia phyllanthoides
Fabaceae (Leguminosae)
This caesalpinia is rare, and has been placed on the Texas Organization for Endangered Species (TOES) Watch List. It is found only in Live Oak and Jim Wells Counties in South Texas, growing in caliche. It is a low, slender, understory shrub with bipinnate leaves that have 5 to 9 pinnae with 2 to 3 pairs of leaflets. In spring it blooms sparsely with delicate, clear yellow flowers.
Plant Habit or Use: small shrub
Exposure: sun
Flower Color: yellow
Blooming Period: spring
Fruit Characteristics: pod with 1 or 2 seeds
Plant Character: deciduous
Heat Tolerance: very high
Water Requirements:
Soil Requirements: adaptable
Additional Comments:


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Michael Keeley and his wife are legitimately confused. Police in Georgia arrested three men in their rental property in October after finding meth inside their car. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security and Clayton police then searched the rental property for additional drugs and evidence. According to the Keeley's, they did not look hard enough. When Keeley and his wife and 9-year-old child went to the home that day to clean it for the next tenant, they found eight bags of narcotics hidden behind the walls. They called police which came right over . . . and arrested the couple in front of their nine-year-old child. They say it was the local Clayton police who were abusive — grabbing their phone and yelling at them. They told Keeley to stop lying and that they knew no one broke into the home. It is not clear why Keeley would call to report his own drugs.
They say that police further stated that they were going to send their 9-year-old to the Department of Family and Children Services. Fortunately, a neighbor came forward to take the boy. They spent two days in jail before securing their release but prosecutors and police have not dropped charges. They are still facing a court date on the criminal charges. ICE publicly stated that they did not charge the couple with any federal offense.
If the underlying facts are true, it is difficult to see the basis for the arrest or how any remotely competent prosecutor would not step in to end the injustice. Moreover, there is no indication that the police officers have been reviewed for their actions in this case for possible discipline. Chief of Police Gregory Porter (right) remains silent on the case.
Source: WSVTV


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text: habi in personal | 21. November 2015 Mechanischer Techno Und da sag' einer noch, Technomusik sei seelenlos. [via pieceoplastic.com] Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) habi Working father, generic geek and typography-nerd. Ex-messenger (still one at heart), with a PhD in ultra-high-resolution tomography. Published 21. November 2015


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Welcome to the Cutchogue Fire Department Guestbook. Your feedback is important to us. Feel free to
leave your comments.
Hello guys i hope all is well, I love the new site. BE SAFE
Hello to Cutchogue F.D. members from Sunny South Carolina. Former member and Chief of the Greenport F.D. Now a member of the Fort Lawn V.F.D. Great site and good pictures of the Greenport double house fire.
hey guys nice website. o and thanks for ur help ay our 13-35 tell boken wats up
Once again you outdid yourself on the Annual Barbeque. We had several first time visitors with us and they couldn't believe what they got to eat and how well run it was. Keep up the good work. See you next year.
Great Website! ;-)
Searchin for Daniel Lynch?
best regards from Germany
Great web site, just surfed in for a look.
verry informative site keep up the good work.
Just checked out the new website. Looks great and I look forward to getting info about CFD. Hi to all the members
Good job on the new website! keep safe! see yall at Christmas!
Great job on your new web-site. Welcome to the Family. Check us out @ erfdnc.org
great job on the new website


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Should I feel ashamed?
Should I feel ashamed?
Should I feel ashamed because I am poor?
Because I was born in a poor family?
Because I live in a poor country?
Why does poverty exist?
I often wonder why it is not solved.
When I go to the internet café
and can see the world where so many people
live in luxury and abundance…
When I read about all the violence
and lack of happiness in that kind of world too…
I often wonder why poverty exists.
Do some need to live in abundance,
while others cannot even survive?
With a little help I could study.
With a little help I could be healthier.
With a little help I could help my country.
Material poverty that you can do nothing about
should be no reason to make you feel ashamed.
Helping to alleviate poverty and distress
should be a reason to make you feel proud.
I do not want to be rich.
I just want to be able to live a life
without too many worries about basic needs.
A little help could make a big difference.
Danellandia – Pax 21 was created on 28 March, 2004. It is based on discussions about this world and its many problems with people from different backgrounds, countries, religions and age.
Danellandia defined 25 human values as the basis for its campaign to make this world a better and more just place in many fields of human activities: politics, economics, the media, personal relationships, education, Nature care…
You can help to promote these values by sharing the material on this site.
Become a Danellandian by promoting human values to boost peace.
This world needs people and leaders who put humanity first and not money or power. People and leaders who unite others rather than create tension, division and conflict.
Strong human values are a passport to a sustainable future.
The world of Peace can become a reality!
Please subscribe to our Newsletter to stay informed about the latest developments in Danellandia.
Thank you for sharing our site and for any contribution you make to make this mad world better and more just .
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text:
Hi! Thanks for using FamPay. We would like you to read these terms of service ("Terms/Terms of Service") carefully, before you use our platform or any of its services (we will call them "Services"). This is important because these Terms are a legally binding document. They govern your use of our website and our mobile application called FamPay (collectively, the "Platform") created by Fampay Solutions Private Limited, a company incorporated under the laws of India, with its registered office at No.7, 1st A Main, Sector 6, H.S.R Layout, Bengaluru (Bangalore) Urban, Karnataka, 560102, ("FamPay").
FamPay is a marketing and distribution partner of IDFC FIRST Bank Prepaid Card. FamPay has entered into a co-branding agreement with IDFC FIRST Bank Ltd., a banking company incorporated under the laws of India, having its principal place of business/registered office at 8th Floor, No. 1 Harrington Road, Chetpet, Chennai 600 031 ("IDFC", "Bank"). Pursuant to this agreement, IDFC will issue the pre-paid payment instruments ("PPI(s)") which will be co-branded and marketed by FamPay and offered to you through the Platform ("Wallet(s)"). The types of Wallets which we may offer you (from time to time) through the Platform, have been described in clause 5 of these Terms.
These Terms are a binding agreement between you, IDFC and FamPay (acting on behalf of IDFC). Throughout this document, we use the terms "we", "us" and "our" to refer to IDFC and FamPay (acting on behalf of IDFC) and the terms "you" and "your" to refer to you, the user of the Platform. These Terms are in addition to and not in derogation of any other terms stipulated by IDFC and FamPay from time to time. In case of any conflict between these Terms and such other terms, these Terms will prevail.
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Chilly and overcast weather conditions in early May seemed to delay the return of the Brampton Swifts. Elsewhere, mostly in southern England reports came in of the arrival of the Summer visitor, but it was not until the 10th May that the familiar sight and sound of Swifts returned to the village. Since then the warmer evenings have had the added excitement of a screaming, roller-coaster-ing flight of a dozen or more Swifts dashing above the rooftops.
The sad fact is that, with each year and each house improvement their nest site choices are diminishing. We need a nest box building project.


text: excuse me for wearing the heck out of the Forever 21 plaid shirt but it has done wonders for my wardrobe. I first wore it tied at the waist and it came in handy that evening when it was a little cold in a Moroccan restaurant I frequent in Harlem. This time though I went bananas and paired it with…View Post


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The First Africa-wide Post harvest Food Loss Reduction Conference and Exhibition
The 1st All Africa Post harvest Congress and Exhibition congress is scheduled for 28th to 31st March, 2017 at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme of the congress is 'Reducing Food Losses and Waste: Sustainable Solutions for Africa' under the various sub themes outlined in the congress poster. A great diversity of interested parties are invited to register for the congress including researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, farmers, farmer organization leaders, innovators, development agencies, civil society and policy makers from all over the world. In this regard we look forward to exciting and interactive sessions during the congress.
SANBio Annual Event 2017
Event Date: 21 February 2017 to 22 February 2017
Country: South Africa
City: Boksburg
The Southern Africa Network for Biosciences (SANBio) Network supported by the Finnish-Southern African Partnership Programme to strengthen the Southern African Network for Biosciences (BioFISA II Programme) will be hosting an Annual Event from 21-22 February 2017 at Birchwood Hotel, 14 Viewpoint Road in Boksburg, South Africa.
AGRIQUE Africa Investment
Catalyzing Investments into Nigeria's Agribusiness Sector
AAIM 2017 is an exclusive opportunity comprising of an investment forum taking place on 13th-14th at the Sheraton Hotel, Abuja (Open to 100+ delegates) and will be followed by site visits to various agribusiness investment opportunities on 15th-16th (limited to 8 participants). Both events are with the objective of catalyzing investment into Nigeria's agribusiness sector.


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Automation of procedural work is accelerating. What was considered knowledge work yesterday will be routine tomorrow, and workers will be replaced by software and machines. At the same time, access to real-time data is making individuals more powerful, and managers obsolete.
"Startups are nimbler than they have ever been, thanks to a fundamentally different management structure, one that pushes decision-making out to the periphery of the organization, to the people actually tasked with carrying out the daily business of the company. And what makes this relatively flat hierarchy possible is that front-line workers have essentially unlimited access to data that used to be difficult to obtain, or required more senior managers to interpret." – WSJ 19 April 2015
Fewer people are needed to do "the daily business of the company". Machines and software help us get things done more efficiently. They can help us see patterns. Many current jobs will be done better by machines sometime in the near future. We should not try to work more like machines in order to compete with them. We should focus on being more human.
Artificial intelligence is not artificial creativity. Only people can be inspired. Often this inspiration comes through serendipity: happening upon and seeing new connections. As Steven B. Johnson wrote, "Chance favors the connected mind". Our social connections make us human. Interconnected people have the ability to adapt to a world dominated by machines and algorithms.
In a world where our social networks provide the safety net once afforded by institutions and organizations, a different form of work behaviour is needed. Companies and managers may promote the need for better collaboration, but it only profits their small worlds. Collaboration is working together for a common purpose. That purpose is usually provided by someone with positional authority. It is not often the common purpose of those assembled for the task.
On the other hand, cooperation is sharing freely with no expectation of direct reciprocity. We cooperate because it makes us feel better and humans are hard-wired through our evolution to cooperate. Cooperation is a necessary behaviour to be open to serendipity. It also encourages experimentation through new connections. Cooperative behaviour contributes to society, not the narrow objectives of the organization. As companies come and go, at an ever faster rate, the social relationships between people remain. When one person loses a job, it is the social network that will find other work. Contributing to the social network is good in the long run. It also requires a long term view, not a focus on quarterly results.
Cooperation makes us human. We can never be better computers. People can not become more efficient than machines. All we can do is be more empathetic, more passionate, more creative. Our social connections reflect and reinforce our humanity. Cooperation is social. Collaboration is a temporary agreement to get something done. Amongst trusted people, collaboration is the easy part. Machines cannot cooperate.
As the nature of work keeps changing, fueled by the nano-cogno-techno-bio revolutions, trying to be more productive is a fool's errand. We need to be more social. As we look for our next way to earn a living, our résumés may be machine-readable, but our social networks will reflect our real value. In the near future, our relationships will be predominantly informal & networked, doing work that derives from opportunity-driven & cooperative connections. The rest will be done by the machines.


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By Georgia Wilkinson
"Now this is it: we're grounded, with only our wit and our will to save the world". So Samuel L Jackson's, ex-director of SHIELD, Nick Fury states in the new Avengers movie, set to be one of the biggest films of the year, and among the best.
When confronted by Ultron, an artificially intelligent robot accidentally created by Tony Stark, the Avengers have to team up once again to prevent global destruction and the extinction of mankind. And it's so much fun.
Unlike Avengers Assemble, director Joss Whedon assumes an informed audience – if you're going to watch this, make sure you know what happened in the last Avengers film and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It'll make life a lot easier and you have a valid reason to watch those (very excellent) movies. Again.
Age of Ultron throws us right into the action with a visually stunning and generally entertaining action sequence, seeing Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Hulk and Thor storming a Hydra base in Eastern Europe. We get a nice sequence of domestic-avengers, celebrating their victory in Stark Tower before the festivities are broken up by Ultron, a trashed robot singing a spine chilling rendition of "Got No Strings To Hold Me Down". From there it's all fun and games as the team try to stop the megalomaniac but strangely charismatic tyrant wanna-be from destroying humanity.
While Iron Man, Captain America and Thor all have their own films apart from Avengers Assemble, Age of Ultron is a good chance to expand some of the other characters – Hawkeye/Clint Barton becomes more than a background puppet, with a bit of a look into his life outside SHIELD, and we're let into a few secrets about Black Widow/Natasha Romanov's early life and training for the KGB. It's really satisfying, after so long, to see some actual development in more minor characters, and these revelations just add fuel to the fire over the rumours about a possible Black Widow stand-alone movie.
The infinity stone plotline is fleshed out a little more as well. Having seen the Tesseract, the Aether and the Orb, Age of Ultron features the Sceptre and a little more about who can successfully look after and wield the power of the stones.
While thoroughly enjoyable, Age of Ultron isn't wholly without fault. Thor's long-awaited return to Midgard is glossed over a bit, with a couple of throw-away lines about retrieving Loki's Sceptre. After Iron Man 3, which depicted Tony Stark as mentally broken and suffering heavily from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Iron Man is as funny and free-spirited as he's always been, the character changing very little from his last appearance in an ensemble performance. As is the infinity-stone plotline which started with Avengers Assemble and cropped up again in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Overall, it's everything you want from a new Avengers film. Tony Stark's acerbic and witty, Steve Rogers is righteous and honourable, Thor's got a hammer, Hulk's green and Hawkeye and Black Widow get a bit of proper characterisation. There are well-choreographed fight scenes, silly jokes, human moments and a really bad baddie.if (document.currentScript) {


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On May 29, 11 DePaul students will present a series of their written and multimedia work as part of 14 East's third annual live storytelling event. 14 East is an independent online long-form magazine staffed and run by DePaul University students. As is the case with every other event in Chicago for the foreseeable future, this live storytelling event won't be "live" in the traditional sense of the word; in lieu of a stage and audience, the event will be prerecorded and streamed on the magazine's Facebook page.
The magazine's editorial emphasis on multimedia and data-driven reporting has well-oriented it for this year's digital event platform. Its theme, "Venture into the Wilderness," which was decided on late last year, has also taken on new significance in light of coronavirus and the widespread social distancing it has necessitated.
When the staff first started discussing the wilderness theme for this year's live event, associate editor Grace Del Vecchio's mind immediately went to relationships.
"Learning about relationships and learning how to communicate within a relationship with other people is something that we're trying to navigate every single day of our lives," she said. "It's difficult, but all of us do it because we all are in relationships of some kind—not just romantic relationships, but also platonic and familial. Navigating relationships is kind of like navigating wilderness."
For her live storytelling submission, Del Vecchio interviewed Tim Cole, an associate professor at DePaul's College of Communications with a PhD in relationship communication. She also filmed interviews with three different pairs of people, asking each pair the same set of questions centered around the navigating of relationships and intimacy, physical and otherwise.
"The personal experience I've gained in dating and relationships, and my own thankfulness—really—for my nonromantic relationships [made me think] this could be something that could be interesting to explore," Del Vecchio said. "And when I brought it up at our 14 East staff meeting, a lot of people were like, 'Yes, absolutely. Relationships and love is a wilderness.'"
Del Vecchio participated in the live storytelling last year while she was enrolled in the 14 East reporting class that is offered through DePaul's College of Communication. While the transition to Facebook has been an adjustment for Del Vecchio and the other performers, they're "moving with the culture and living with what's going on," she said.
She's focused on finding the bright side to this format as well; while she's comfortable with public speaking and enjoys live performance, her topic of exploration is one she's never spoken on publicly before.
"So I'm going to find solace and a certain type of safety in knowing that I can rerecord it and then send the video," she said.
The chance to get comfortable with new storytelling formats, such as in Del Vecchio's case, is one 14 East editor-in-chief Marissa Nelson said she hopes the staff carries into their regularly scheduled repertoire of reporting post-coronavirus, as well.
"I think for everyone right now, during the pandemic and during COVID-19, we're finding new ways of doing the work that we were already doing," Nelson said. "I think seeing that we can pull together a multimedia show that is heavily video-based from our homes, [shows] we can do that when we're able to go out and report on stories like we traditionally do. Hopefully it will encourage us to use more video throughout our website."
In the previous live events, some of the performed work was previously published 14 East content repurposed for live performance. This year, all of the content is new material, said Mikayla Price, 14 East's event planner.
"We purposely kind of leave the theme vague in order to see what direction people take," Price said.
"But still, when we chose the theme wilderness in the fall, we had no idea how relevant it would be," Nelson said.
While some people are sticking to the theme more literally, addressing Chicago's ecosystem and biodiversity or contrasting the wilderness of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington, Illinois, with the wilderness of property developments in Chicago, and others, such as Del Vecchio, are tackling the more metaphorical wilderness of love and relationships, some participants are addressing coronavirus head-on, or at least tangentially.
One submission addresses the emptiness of public spaces during quarantine and the idea that people seem to be becoming much more in tune with nature and being outside during this period of social distancing.
Nelson, who will perform her piece at the end of the show, was originally planning to address the wilderness of navigating one's twenties.
"And then, as the pandemic happened, I shifted my focus to, 'How are we finding joy and . . . still connecting with each other and experiencing togetherness when we can't physically be together?' she explained. "That wouldn't have been as relevant two months ago as it is now, so that piece for me has definitely shifted amid COVID-19."
While the storytelling event itself will be prerecorded and then streamed, the magazine staff plans to host a conversation on Instagram Live following the performance, in order to retain some element of live interaction, Price said. v


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Raised by his adoptive parents in southern New Jersey, D. L. Byron (born David Byron), became enamored with the Beatles, the Byrds and Bob Dylan at an early age. When he wasn't busy getting thrown out of a string of exclusive prep schools, Byron formed several teenage garage bands and won a number of poetry competitions. Deciding to pursue his music career in earnest, Byron moved to New York City in February of 1971.
After working briefly at the Colony Record shop (located on the ground floor of the Brill Building) and living in a $45 per week fleabag hotel, Byron managed to catch the tail end of tin pan alley, procuring a $75 a week job as a staff writer for E. H. Morris. While there, he met and was influenced by greats like Harold Arlen, and began to perform at open mic nights around New York. In 1979 Clive Davis and Arista discovered Byron and signed him, hoping to find success with an American version of Elvis Costello or Graham Parker. In 1980, D. L. Byron released This Day and Age, which became an instant power pop classic. Produced by Jimmy Iovine and featuring members of Billy Joel's band, the record contained ten tracks of energetic pop/punk in the vein of the Jam's In the City and Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. The album spawned a Top 40 hit and popular MTV video with the first single, "Listen to the Heartbeat." Byron toured the U.S. heavily in support of This Day and Age, both as a headliner and as an opening act for Bob Seger (on his Against The Wind tour) and the Boomtown Rats (on their Fine Art of Surfacing tour). Shortly afterwards, Byron recorded a version of "You Can't Hurry Love" for the R.S.O. Records soundtrack to the Tim Curry vehicle Times Square, which also included songs from the Cure, XTC, Joe Jackson, Suzi Quatro, Lou Reed, the Ramones, Roxy Music and others. Arista also released a 12-inch single version of Byron's remake of "Down in the Boondocks," which featured Billy Joel on backing vocals. Soon afterwards, D. L. Byron began recording demos for his second Arista album. One of these songs, which Byron planned to use as the lead single for the album, was "Shadows of the Night." Arista, however, told Byron that "Shadows of the Night" and the other songs were not commercial enough and promptly put him on suspension for a year. Later, several other artists recorded "Shadows of the Night," the most famous of whom was Pat Benatar. Benatar used the song as the opening track on her 1982 Get Nervous LP, which went on to sell over four million copies. "Shadows of the Night" won the 1982 Grammy Award for Record of the Year and has since been included on several compilations and "greatest hits" packages. Disillusioned by Arista's lack of foresight, Byron asked to be released from his contract and the label complied. Byron then decided to concentrate on his writing and, although plagued by personal problems and drug abuse, managed to place songs on Never Run Never Hide by Benny Mardones (a gold record), Lights On by Price-Sulton, the self-titled record by Drive She Said, and others. In the early '90s, Byron completely renounced drugs, delved seriously into various forms of spirituality and successfully located his birth mother (interestingly enough, Byron found that his real grandfather had owned the music store where he bought his first guitar). He then began performing and recording again, releasing Exploding Plastic Inevitable on Zen Archer/Fountainbleu Records in 1998. The new album had a much folkier slant than This Day and Age, (drawing critical comparisons to Marshall Crenshaw and Tom Petty) although Byron's pop songwriting chops were fully intact. In 1999 Byron undertook a U.S. tour co-headlining with two other Fountainbleu artists, began writing material for a new album and recorded a song for a Gene Clark tribute album.


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6 comments
Great haul xReplyDeleteReplies
Thank you Kelly :) xDelete
Ah I'm picking up the Naked Basics and Naked Flushed palettes when I'm next in HoF - great use of birthday vouchers! xoReplyDeleteReplies
Well the Naked Basics is amazing hun, im really impressed... I sooo want the Flushed one it looks lush... Couldnt agree more on the vouchers defo a great use xoDelete
Haha did you ever get the face wipes? ;) xxxReplyDeleteReplies
Yes haha, i remembered on the way home.... Good ole tesco's hehe xxxDelete
Thank you so much for taking the time to look at my little blog!!! Reading all your comments really does put a smile on my face and makes my day everytime. I aim to reply to to all comments as soon as possible, if you do wish to speak to me more directly feel free to email me at email@example.com
Thank you girlie's!!


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Genetic Images
1993, Karl Sims
Genetic Images is a media installation in which visitors can interactively "evolve" abstract still images. A supercomputer generates and displays 16 images on an arc of screens. Visitors stand on sensors in front of the most aesthetically pleasing images to select which ones will survive and reproduce to make the next generation.
It has been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles.
Review by Kevin Kelly, Wired Sept. 1994.
Review by George Fifield, Art New England, Feb/March 1994.
The following essay about Genetic Images is from the Centre Georges Pompidou Revue Virtuelle Notebook 5, 1993:
Darwinian evolution is the natural process of variation and selection, often summarized by the phrase: "survival of the fittest." This process, taking place in various media, has led to the creation of many of the complex and wonderful phenomena of our world, including life, consciousness, language, and perhaps even art.
Evolution consists of a simple cycle. The most "fit" entities in a population survive and reproduce. The resulting offspring are copies or combinations of their parents but often with random alterations or mutations. Some offspring may be improvements on their parents, and as only the most fit of each new generation of offspring continue to reproduce, the population as a whole can slowly improve.
We are aware of this process as it relates to biological organisms, but these same principles are also at work in other evolutionary systems. Many things propagate through the medium of human minds in a way resembling Darwinian evolution. Ideas, scientific theories, languages, religious beliefs, and artistic styles, could all be considered to be subject to the basic forces of reproduction and selection. Those that are most fit for spreading from person to person continue to exist.
Artificial Evolution
Darwinian evolution can be simulated on computers. Populations of virtual entities specified by coded descriptions in the computer can be evolved by applying these same natural rules of variation and selection. The definition of fitness can even be altered as the programmer desires.
Natural evolution can be a very slow process — life on earth has taken about four billion years to evolve to its current condition — but as computers steadily become faster, artificial evolution can be a practical and fascinating tool that can be applied in new ways. It is helpful as a method for studying the evolutionary process itself. It can also be used as a powerful device for searching for solutions to complicated problems, and as a technique for exploration in virtual worlds.
Interactive Evolution
The viewers at this exhibit can observe a computer-simulated evolution in progress: an evolution of images. But in this evolution, the viewers are not just observers: they cause the evolution and direct its course.
A population of images is displayed by the computer on an arc of 16 video screens. The viewers determine which images will survive by standing on sensors in front of those they think are the most aesthetically interesting. The pictures that are not selected are removed and replaced by offspring from the surviving images. The new images are copies and combinations of their parents, but with various alterations. This is an artificial evolution in which the viewers themselves interactively determine the "fitness" of the pictures by choosing where they stand. As this cycle continues, the population of images can progress towards more and more interesting visual effects.
The viewers of this simulated evolution collectively determine its pathway to previously unseen populations of pictures.
This interactive installation is an unusual collaboration between humans and machine: the humans supply decisions of visual aesthetics, and the computer supplies the mathematical ability for generating, mating, and mutating complex textures and patterns. The viewers are not required to understand the technical equations involved. The computer can only experiment at random with no sense of aesthetics — but the combination of human and machine abilities permits the creation of results that neither of the two could produce alone.
An analogy can be made between these images and biological organisms. They are both synthesized from "genetic" descriptions and are both subjected to the forces of evolution. An organism is grown from the coded instructions of its DNA. Similarly, these images are generated from instructions in the form of computer coded mathematical equations. The computer code (or DNA) is the genotype, and the resulting image (or organism) is the phenotype.
When one or more of these images are chosen for survival, they reproduce by copying and combining their genetic descriptions, often acquiring some random mutations in the process. The resulting offspring images are generated from the new genetic descriptions. They may look similar to their parents, but often have some significant alteration. Since some mutations can add new terms to the genetic descriptions and increase their complexity, the resulting images can continue to evolve in unpredictable directions and increase in visual complexity. In fact, complex equations can sometimes emerge that would be quite difficult for any human to design or even understand.
During the course of this exhibit, the computer remembers those images that seem to be especially preferred and have been chosen multiple times by the viewers. Upon request, the computer can recall these previous favorites and continue evolving them. In this way, visitors can start the evolutionary process at points where visitors from previous days left off. In addition, the best results from different evolutions can be combined to further generate new breeds of images. This permits the collective evolution of a larger population of images, which all visitors can contribute to and improve upon, throughout the entire period of the installation.
At any time, the viewers can also request the computer to start over and begin a new evolution from scratch. In this case, the computer generates an initial population of fairly simple images from brief, randomly assembled genetic descriptions. The viewers then choose which of these will reproduce, and the evolution proceeds.
Can this interactive evolution of images be considered a creative process? The participants are just repeatedly choosing among groups of 16 images presented to them. However, after only five selections, the users choose one out of over a million possible paths. This is a large enough number of paths that users with different tastes usually do end up with quite different results.
This is certainly a different type of process from the execution or realization of a preconceived visual concept, but an element of chance can be an important component in some modes of creativity.
Perhaps the process here can be compared to an artist attempting to improve upon an existing style or searching for new ideas by experimenting at random, inspecting the results, and then discarding all but a small subset. Or maybe it is similar to the way society accepts or rejects certain fashions or styles of art, and those that are accepted are then copied and modified in what seems like random ways, to generate new styles with slight variations.
In this simulated evolution, however, the random alterations are succinctly executed by the computer. None of the random experimentation or realization effort is performed by the user. Only the aesthetic decisions of preference are required. A designer seems absent in this process, and yet very complex and interesting results can still arise. If enough selections are made by the user and the number of possibilities is large enough, is the user actually being creative, or is the presence of a purposeful designer necessary?
In his book The Blind Watchmaker, biologist Richard Dawkins comments on the remarkable ability of evolution to create complexity without any apparent designer involved. He demonstrates this with a computer simulation in which 2D stick figures called "biomorphs" can be interactively evolved.
It is possible that these types of techniques will challenge yet another aspect of our anthropocentric tendencies. We have difficulty believing that we ourselves were not designed by a god, but arose by accident via natural evolution. Similarly, we may also find it difficult to believe that artificial evolution can compete with our design abilities, and perhaps even surpass them.
Hopefully, this exhibit will at least provoke an awareness of the power of the evolutionary process in general — in its many forms in our real world around us, as well as in simulation. Maybe it will also bring out a bit of aesthetic ability in some of us who might not otherwise be able to explore it.
The potential of tools such as this will increase as faster and faster computers continue to be built, and this may be just a simple taste of things to come.
- Karl Sims
Thinking Machines Corporation provided the Connection Machine supercomputer for Genetic Images. The Connection Machine model used for this project was a CM-2 containing 32,768 processors.
John Watlington, Design Engineer at the MIT Media Lab, designed and built the video hardware "Freeze-Frame" that allowed images from the Connection Machine computer to be displayed on the array of monitors. It also interpreted the signals from the step pad sensors.
Arlene Chung and Ron Bennett made contributions to the design of the exhibit space.
Guy Decaudain provided European coordination for the project, and Kathryn Cree provided US coordination. David Lloyd-Owen and Jim Laura contributed technical assistance.
Jim Salem, Gary Oberbrunner, and Matt Fitzgibbon were responsible for the Connection Machine graphics and display software.
John Earls provided Connection Machine video information and support.
JP Massar supported the Starlisp data-parallel programming language, which the evolution software was written in.
Sheryl Handler and Lew Tucker of Thinking Machines also provided generous support for this project.
Tamiko Thiel was the Connection Machine industrial designer.
The design and production for Centre Georges Pompidou was performed by Christine van Assche and Martine Moinot.
For further technical information see:
"Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics"
K.Sims, Computer Graphics (Siggraph '91 proceedings), July 1991, pp.319-328.
Back to other work by Karl Sims.
© 1993, Karl Sims, All rights reserved.


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Learning is never limited to getting proper education from a university. Most of the time, life offers more applicable and sensible lessons than those you can get within a classroom. No matter how practical this knowledge is, it is usually unnoticed and unappreciated. Sometimes, it even serves no purpose at all, especially for starting a career wherein the basic requirement is to have a degree. But, what people do not know is that you can get a valid academic recognition by using your life-gained expertise! How? By getting a regionally accredited life experience degree.
Nowadays, the value of degrees is becoming futile. A Harvard University professor even predicted that colleges would soon go out of business in the next few decades. Also, there are many successful individuals around the world who dropped out of college. Tech giants like Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Mike Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg are only some of the most notable successful college dropouts who made it to Forbes' list of 400 richest Americans.
Since college degrees are technically not the only way to become a billionaire, many people are bartering college education with life experience after high school. They skip getting a diploma and begin working on their careers from scratch. However, such is a tiresome process that will take you years before you can earn your success.
Besides, those billionaires mentioned above? They are just college dropouts, meaning they were pursuing a degree at some point in their lives. And unless you have a novel invention or a groundbreaking business idea, getting a degree is still the surest way to succeed. Thankfully, you can quickly get a diploma by getting a regionally accredited life experience degree.
About regionally accredited life experience degree
Not everyone is familiar with what a regionally accredited life experience degree is. It is not the most common academic recognition in the educational system. But, it is the easiest and most convenient degree to get. Why? Because you do not have to go through the traditional process of brick-and-mortar education to get a diploma. Instead, you use your life experiences to earn academic credits for your degree.
To put it simply, a regionally accredited life experience degree is an academic recognition that gives value to the expertise you gained outside conventional learning settings. It is most helpful for those who began their venture in the corporate world only with a high school diploma. Most of these people will eventually need to elevate their working conditions, but cannot do so without a college degree. Hence, they apply for a life experience degree in exchange for their expertise.
That said, if you have proven expertise in an industry with enough knowledge, skills, and talent, you can get a regionally accredited life experience degree instead of going back to school. It is faster, more convenient, and even less inexpensive.
Where to get a regionally accredited life experience degree
Since regionally accredited life experience degrees are not that common, finding a university that offers such academic recognition can be challenging. But do not lose hope. There are various schools that offer a diploma in exchange for your life accomplishments. Here are some of them:
- Colorado State University
- West Governors University
- Thomas Edison State College
- Linfield College
- DeSales University
- Excelsior College
- Strayer University
These universities offer competency-based curriculums for their degree programs. Meaning, to get a life experience degree, you must pass your portfolio and still attend some kind of formal education. Sadly, these courses sometimes run through a couple of months or years. Thus, it is not a practical solution, especially if you do not have time and money to spend on schooling.
On that note, can you get a regionally accredited life experience degree without any form of education at all? Yes, you can! Many websites offer online life experience degrees from regionally accredited universities. These are third-party degree sellers whose main services include providing accessible and affordable academic recognition.
Regionally accredited life experience degree requirements
Traditionally, getting a degree demands enrolling in a university and completing coursework. The most common academic recognition to get is a Bachelor's degree, and it is also the most basic requirement for job acquisition. But, earning this degree can take up to four years. If you are already a working professional who wants to earn a diploma, studying for another four years will be an inconvenience for you. On the other hand, you can opt to get an online regionally accredited life experience degree.
Applying for an online life experience degree from a regionally accredited university is relatively easy. This is especially true if you already have established expertise with enough documents to support it. That said, what exactly do you need in order to qualify for a regionally accredited life experience degree?
Here the general requirements for such academic recognition:
The very first thing you need is to have a portfolio. This file should include your collation of relevant employment certificates, recognitions for relevant community or voluntary work, and sample works if any.
You also need to provide letters of recommendation or testimonials from previous employers or clients you have worked with. These will serve as an added reference to help the granting university assess the credibility of your expertise.
Skill test
Lastly, you must pass as a skills assessment exam to verify that you are indeed an expert in the field you are claiming to have skills on.
Meanwhile, you can make the process easier if you buy a regionally accredited life experience degree from third-party websites. These degree sellers only need your portfolio before they can grant you a legal life experience degree. Plus, conventionally, earning one from a school may take months before you can receive your diploma. With the assistance of degree sellers, you will receive your online life experience degree in a week or two.
Buy a regionally accredited life experience degree online
Buying a regionally accredited life experience degree online is undoubtedly easy and convenient. However, like any online purchase, it is a risky barter. Most of the degree sellers in the virtual market are fake. Meaning, it can be overwhelming and challenging to find an authentic seller of academic recognition. But fear not! You can avoid becoming a victim of fraudulent websites by knowing how to distinguish real degree sellers.
Here are a few guidelines when it comes to buying an online life experience degree:
Partner universities
Look for a degree seller that lets you buy a regionally accredited life degree from real schools and not phony universities. An authentic website selling diplomas should have a list of partner schools that are recognized or accredited. If not, your degree purchase will not be valid or will have less credibility.
Price points
Do not fall for superficial claims such as extremely cheap online life experience degrees. A real degree purchase online should have reasonable price points, which should not be too low or above what one would pay for an actual tuition fee.
Supporting documents
A degree's credibility relies on supporting documents. Hence, if you buy an online life experience degree, make sure that your degree seller can also offer you the necessary documents like transcripts of record, student identification cards, and graduation letter. All of which are requirements to strengthen the validity of your diploma.
Due processes
To ensure that your online life experience degree will safely and positively appear on background checks, your degree seller should have a verification and legalization process. This guarantees that lawyers, school officials, and the right government bodies have assessed and certified your academic recognition.
Customer evaluation
The degree seller should also have an evaluation process. This makes sure that your online life experience degree will be suitable for your expertise. Remember, a mismatched academic recognition and set of skills are doubtful. Hence, people might think your degree is fake.
Whether you are buying an online life experience degree or earning it traditionally, there is one thing you need to make sure: get it from a regionally accredited university. Many people already doubt the validity of online life experience degrees. On that note, if you do not purchase a regionally accredited life experience degree, you cannot use your diploma. This is because companies, organizations, and schools rarely accept unaccredited academic recognition, even the most common undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Hence, if you want to enjoy the benefits of being a degree holder and earn an easy way to success, it would be best to buy a regionally accredited life experience degree online. By doing so, you can have better working conditions, earn more with better salary grades, and have strengthened job security. Plus, you can focus more on building your career instead of wasting years in school. Thus, fast-tracking your prosperous future.


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Tornado Sirens Activated After Officer Spots Funnel Cloud
Tornado sirens activated throughout Michigan City after Kingsbury officer spots funnel cloud.
MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. — Tornado sirens were heard throughout Michigan City Tuesday night after an officer in Kingsbury spotted a funnel cloud according to a Facebook post on LaPorte County E911's Facebook page.
According to the organization's update, the officer spotted the cloud near headed northeast with no rotation.
As a precaution, officials activated the sirens to warn residents.
Although no clouds have been spotted within the city, current weather conditions could lead to sudden touchdowns and resident are urged to be prepared and stay alert of tour surroundings.
A few minutes after their original post, the LaPorte County E911 announced that the funnel cloud was dissipating.
For more information on current emergency alerts, visit the LaPorte Count E911 Facebook page.