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"Nobody's on top always. We're up one day, we're down one day, and that's just the nature of life. And when they see me, they can really relate."
Two consecutive losses. For some it's the beginning of the end. For others, it's a challenge. BJ Penn had his back against the wall as his return to welterweight against Matt Hughes approached last November, but he knew that no matter what happened in the Octagon, he would always have his family around him. So during the time in the locker room when the doubts and questions inevitably appear, he turned to his brother JD.
"JD, you know what, times have been tough lately for us, but I don't care if I win or lose, I just want to show everybody why I started doing this," said Penn to his older brother.
"BJ, I could care less if you win or lose too," JD responded. "Go show everybody who you are.'"
Following that brief moment between siblings, BJ Penn, "The Prodigy", one of only two men in UFC history to win titles in two weight classes, began yelling for UFC site coordinator Burt Watson to unleash him on Hughes.
"Call me, call my name. Come on Burt, call my name.'"
Penn laughs about it now, saying "Even people in the locker room were getting scared."
The UFC Hall of Famer never had a chance as Penn ended their trilogy with a 21 second knockout. As pure shock value goes, it was Penn's most spectacular win since he knocked out Caol Uno in 11 seconds in November of 2001 and followed it up by immediately running out of the Octagon and back up the ramp to his locker room. Nine years later, after a long quest to capture that lightning in a bottle again, he knew what to do.
"I've been trying to do a fight like the Uno fight for the last nine years and it just never came out that way," said Penn. "So when this fight ended up ending very quick with a knockout, I was pumped up, I started screaming in the ring for a little bit and I was like 'here it is, here's my chance. I'm gonna get out there and I'm gonna do it – Elvis is gonna leave the building.'"
Penn laughs, recalling what happened next as he was stopped near the press table by his cornermen.
"A couple of my cornermen were like 'wait wait, you gotta run back in there and say your sponsor's name.' And as soon as they said that, of course that's something that I have to uphold as being one of their fighters, and also I had to show Matt Hughes the respect. You don't walk out of the ring on someone who's done so much for the sport. You go back in and you show him respect. So as bad as I wanted to leave the building, I'm very happy that I came back."
It shows you how much things have changed since Penn first arrived on the UFC scene as a precocious 22-year old. Not the respect part, because that's always been there, but the fact that mixed martial arts has become big business. Sponsors, advertisers, major media conglomerates, and television networks are part of the game now, and fighters have had to evolve in the Octagon as well as outside of it. Penn has done his part, and he's got the championship belts to prove it, but like Vitor Belfort, he will always have a diehard fanbase that points to the 22-year old Penn as the definitive version of "The Prodigy," with everything that happened in the ensuing nine years just gravy.
"I think they buy the Pay-Per-View when I fight and I think they're constantly looking for that same kid that got them excited about the sport, who came out and said all these things, and maybe it didn't go his way every time, but he tried as hard as he could to back up what he said," said Penn. "They see they guy who knocked out Din Thomas and knocked out Caol Uno and that's their guy, that's their favorite fighter, and maybe they see some of him in their lives or maybe he's someone that inspires them."
Penn, now 32, has earned that fanbase and level of respect, and yes, he's had his ups and downs, but he always comes to fight. So even when arrows were being shot at him after his back-to-back losses to current lightweight boss Frankie Edgar last year, he still had a core group of fans that were always there to rush to his defense. What's the secret? Why BJ Penn and not someone else?
"I'm still wondering about that myself," he smiles. "I've just been so blessed with these fans that always have my back. When I've lost and I've come back, I think they know my story so well and they relate to it in their lives. Nobody's on top always. We're up one day, we're down one day, and that's just the nature of life. And when they see me, they can really relate. People like to follow that storyline and sometimes they like to see people fall but climb back up again."
Right now, with a UFC 127 headlining gig against Jon Fitch approaching this weekend, Penn is on the upswing, but all it takes is one loss to start the whispers again. So to keep the naysayers at bay, Penn switched things up a little bit in camp, bringing in Hughes – yes, the same Hughes he just finished a trilogy of fights with – to help him prepare for the wrestling of Fitch. That move came as a shocker, almost on the same level as Penn training and burying the hatchet with old rival Jens Pulver after their 2007 rematch.
"I could see it surprising a lot of people, but honestly, I consider myself a people person," laughs Penn. "One minute I could be pissing you off, the next minute you could be hugging me, and that's me and part of why people love me or hate me. I'm just blessed to get to run into these people later on and really get to apologize for some of the things that I've done. And I'm lucky that these people have welcomed me with open arms."
Hughes' presence in this camp provided Penn a master class in what is finally getting some recognition as the toughest part of mixed martial arts to master – wrestling. And for Penn – one of the game's best over the years - to admit to needing some extra work in that department shows you just how important it is to ensure continued success in the modern game.
"The thing about wrestling is that it's very rough," said Penn. "I don't want to say it's not technical because it's just as technical as jiu-jitsu is, but it's something that has to be hammered into a human being from a young age and you keep going from there. It really is a hard thing to pick up. Wrestling is not easy. In jiu-jitsu, it's everything that wrestling is not, and so is kickboxing. And wrestling is everything that jiu-jitsu is not and so on. It's a tough sport, you've got to be a tough guy to wrestle, and it's tough to learn. If you don't start it from a young age, you don't have the right muscles built up to be able to do the positions. You've got to have a strong back and a strong neck, so if you didn't build those up while you were doing jiu-jitsu and building your flexibility and your legs and moving different, by the time you go and try to start wrestling, your body's not gonna be conditioned to do the movements and you'll get burned out and beaten mentally from it, and you just won't have a good time."
That's probably the key right there. Wrestling is not a good time. It's a grind, it's hard work, and unlike jiu-jitsu, where you can tap somebody out, or striking, where you can knock somebody out, there's no obvious payoff at the end other than knowing after a hard session that you're better now than you were yesterday. Penn agrees.
"Some people just don't want to deal with all that. It is a grind; it's a grind on your lower back, it's a grind when someone's pulling your head down a thousand times and messing your neck up, it's a grind on your arms, and it's a grind when you grab a guy for a single leg and he's fighting you off. It's very technical, but people get disheartened by the whole thing and they try to look for other ways around it."
Against Fitch, there is no way around it. You can bet the house that the former Purdue wrestler will try to take you down and pound you out. If you can't stop that, you'll be in for a long – and losing – night. But if Penn has done his homework and can hold Fitch off and get the win this weekend, he'll have a shot at the welterweight title staring at him. That announcement from UFC President Dana White came as a shocker to the Hawaiian.
"I had no clue that Dana was gonna say that, but I think inside Dana's heart, he wants me to be the champ," said Penn with a smile. "No matter what problems me and Dana have had over the years, and he'll never admit it, but he wants me to be the champ."
So do Penn's legions of fans. But whether he gets there again or not, people will always tune in to see him fight, and every fighter wants to have his name on their resume. Being the center of attention and a consistent target would break lesser fighters. Not BJ Penn.
"If I'm not in that position, I'll be bummed out," he said. "If someone says 'you know what, I don't care about fighting BJ Penn,' that would hurt my feelings."
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Amid the economic downturn, companies are searching for every opportunity to cut costs. IT represents an important part of total spending—5 percent or more in some industries—and its direct contribution to revenues and profits is often difficult to assess. As an unsurprising result, many CEOs and CFOs are eager to squeeze their CIOs' budgets.
But finding substantial savings isn't easy. Many CIOs have already spent years reducing costs in operations, procurement, and outside services. Among many other things, they have consolidated data centers and help desks, virtualized servers instead of buying more expensive new ones, rationalized procurement processes, postponed upgrades, and outsourced services to less expensive offshore providers.
Nonetheless, significant additional reductions and efficiencies are possible if companies take a broader look at the way they manage the IT architecture as a whole. The key to these economies is bringing business and IT leaders together in a combined effort to rationalize not only business applications and processes but also the core IT infrastructure and operations. At one large consumer products company, for example, such a joint initiative to combine, consolidate, and rationalize disparate IT systems across business units led to a drastic reduction in the size of the IT staff (by more than 50 percent in the application-management area) and inventories of spare parts, increased leverage in negotiating discounts with suppliers, and the faster completion of new IT initiatives.
The complexities of IT architecture
The IT architecture of a company is a formal description of its business operations (processes and functions), the business applications and databases that support them, and the equipment and services that run the applications. A complete IT architecture has six layers (Exhibit 1). In the best cases, companies codify it in a compendium—a blue book—that details the workings of the six layers, as well as the processes, roles, and responsibilities for managing the whole. This document should also provide a road map and rules to guide upgrades and additions.
Mapping IT architecture
Most companies have an IT architecture, but few control it. Instead, it grows organically, and the result is often duplicated systems, proliferating and inconsistent data, and makeshift integration. To make matters still more complicated, at most large companies, even within divisions, many IT initiatives are driven as much by short-term business wants and needs as by any long-term blueprint. That operational reality is especially evident for applications software and the business processes it supports. Such software is usually designed and deployed to suit the needs of one division or business unit, with relatively little regard for the impact on a company's overall IT architecture.
CIOs at the corporate or division level generally do have substantial control over the core IT infrastructure components: servers, storage systems, and the associated infrastructure software. But the business applications, processes, and business model sitting atop the IT infrastructure often reflect the wants of the leaders of business units and functions, who understandably focus more on their own needs than on overall IT efficiency. Across a global company, the result is often an unwieldy, heterogeneous IT environment where incompatible (and often duplicative) hardware, applications, and processes sprout year by year, in every corner of the organization, in response to specific near-term needs.
At a large financial-services company, for example, we recently found seven different payments systems with 20 custom-built applications, which mostly undertook the same functions for purposes such as payroll, taxes, and suppliers. The company had gradually created the systems and applications to meet its major needs, and the outcome was a complex, inefficient, and expensive operation. The IT architecture team had little influence over many ongoing IT projects, so only a small fraction of them were fully in line with corporate standards and guidelines.
Similar inefficiencies characterize the IT operations of companies in every industry. These patchwork systems require substantially more time and money for development, support, and maintenance—at the expense of budgets, new IT capabilities, and business innovation. At large companies, eliminating these duplications and inefficiencies can reduce IT spending by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars while improving the quality of the IT operation and the satisfaction of those who rely on it. The CIO alone, however, cannot reduce these costs; business leaders too must sponsor and participate in the transformation.
Reducing costs and complexity: An integrated architectural approach
Today's global economic crisis has created a golden opportunity to make order-of-magnitude reductions in IT costs by modifying the corporate IT architecture. What's needed is a clearly defined IT blueprint with organization-wide guidelines for the most appropriate and efficient systems, applications, and processes. Developing and enforcing these guidelines helps companies to create a consistent and standardized infrastructure and to minimize unnecessary complexity, duplication, and costs (Exhibit 2).
A clean-system landscape
That's why CEOs must engage a cross-company team of business unit and IT leaders in a no-holds-barred program of architectural review and transformation. We have found that a phased joint approach, focused on a series of cost reduction levers, can reveal and realize substantial savings far beyond the norm for IT-only initiatives. In fact, companies that take this route can also create more flexible and efficient architectures that will help them thrive when the downturn ends.
To create an efficient IT architecture, business leaders and the CIO must jointly evaluate the business requirements and processes that underlie the existing architecture and then explore more efficient alternatives; without a high degree of collaboration, companies probably won't adhere to even the best architectural designs. In our experience, the right starting point is a high-level business–IT task force that provides cross-organizational governance and accountability. This team's main responsibilities are to review the existing IT architecture and create a baseline for the new initiative, to define a process ensuring that systems and projects comply with the desired architecture, and to identify short-, mid-, and long-term opportunities for savings and improvements. The team should include all key stakeholder groups, with representatives at a sufficiently high level to make strategic decisions on their behalf.
In the interest of minimizing disruption and maximizing benefits, we suggest a three-phase approach, beginning with the easier changes and working gradually toward more substantial ones (Exhibit 3). Staging them carefully makes companies far more likely to build internal collaboration at an appropriate pace, to generate early gains that can finance subsequent initiatives—and to avoid the significant risks of an all-at-once, "big bang" approach: excessive up-front investment, an internal backlash, or system-wide failure, for example.
A three-phased approach
Phase 1: Immediate cleanup
In the first phase, the team's task is to identify obvious targets and generate quick wins through cost reductions that help build momentum for larger initiatives. In our experience, three levers are important at this point.
Rationalize software licenses. An inventory of licenses should uncover idle, underused, and even incorrect ones. When business managers participate in the review, CIOs can determine how many licenses are truly necessary, retire those that aren't, and then negotiate deeper discounts by consolidating licenses.
Cancel noncompliant projects. An assessment of the degree to which ongoing projects support both the business and IT strategies can reveal candidates for continuing support, revision, or termination. In ordinary times, this type of review often highlighted projects that business leaders regard as important enough to justify exceptions to architectural rules. The exceptions bar should now be set much higher. Together, the team can segment projects into four groups: (1) projects that have high business value and directly support the IT strategy ought to continue; (2) those that have high business value but don't comply with the IT strategy should be reshaped; (3) those that comply with the IT strategy but have little business value ought to be delayed; and (4) noncompliant projects with low business value ought to be cancelled.
Decommission little- or never-used applications. Candidates for retirement include business applications that have rarely or never been used over the past year. Different approaches may be required: depending on usage and need, some may be retired immediately, others replaced by newer applications, and still others phased out gradually.
A telecom operator, for example, recently observed that violations of its IT architectural guidelines were rising sharply because managers of business units—who weren't directly affected by the failure to comply with the guidelines and had little incentive to do so—demanded that IT support new business initiatives quickly. The violations usually made the IT operation more complex and therefore raised its long-term costs.
The company decided to focus on potential IT architecture violations at the start of any IT project or the release of a new application. The new approach—which involves assessing the overall implications of violations, including their possible additional cost—enables the company to support new business requirements quickly but requires any violations they create to be fixed in a later phase. The company can therefore assess the business and IT cost–benefit trade-offs in each case before moving ahead with projects.
Phase 2: Reducing complexity
In the second phase, the team should focus on making the whole IT architecture less complex. This more ambitious undertaking is essential to reverse the ad hoc expansion of customized systems, applications, and processes and to begin enforcing a more complete adherence to the desired architecture. The main objective now is to decide if different pieces of the existing IT setup are truly needed rather than trying to optimize them. Often, the team will find that simpler off-the-shelf systems and the reuse of existing components can support business requirements. Companies can use a number of levers during this phase.
Enforce out-of-the-box solutions. Too many projects adopt customization as a first rather than last option. A company can't make all its business units embrace standard, completely uncustomized applications immediately, but given limited resources the team should require out-of-the-box solutions in the vast majority of cases, allowing customization only when absolutely necessary to meet legal requirements or provide meaningful competitive advantages. Functions such as finance and accounting, human resources, and purchasing, which typically don't play a role in direct competition with other companies, are prime candidates for savings in this phase. It's hard to change organizational mind-sets and behavior, but many IT projects fail because of excessive customization, so its end can make companies substantially more efficient and effective.
Encourage reuse. Too many companies spend precious IT resources reinventing the wheel. A serious review of the existing project portfolio will probably uncover a number of opportunities to reuse existing solutions and build a common repository of services and solutions. The move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA)—which describes a system in terms of the business capabilities it requires and a uniform way of accessing and interacting with them—is an important part of this shift.
Consolidate databases and develop an integrated data model. As companies grow, they add new databases and applications for online sales, customer relationship management, and billing to support business units and functions whose needs actually don't require different databases. In fact, nonintegrated databases greatly raise costs and result in inefficient processes, duplicative development efforts, longer times to market, business errors, and missed opportunities.
Standardize technologies. In many companies, the great diversity of technologies—including programming languages, operating systems, and integration tools—creates tremendous inefficiencies. A careful review will point out redundant versions, unsupported technologies, and nonstandard tools that should give way to fewer, more standard systems. The cost savings come from simpler and consolidated procurement, as well as lower support and maintenance expenditures.
Reduce interface complexity. An IT staff can spend as much as 30 percent of its development time on applications making all of their interfaces work, largely because customized applications have so many point-to-point interfaces. Standardized interfaces, such as the enterprise service bus (ESB), can greatly ease the burden of system integration and minimize the chore of dealing with local changes. The team should start by identifying and focusing on the key interfaces driving most of the effort.
Consolidate systems that do similar things. Different business units in the same company often have their own versions of essential systems, such as payments and Internet applications. Consolidating these systems at the corporate level can bring substantial savings and make processes simpler and more efficient.
In addressing each opportunity, the CIO and business leaders must look hard at trade-offs between short-term convenience for business units and short- and longer-term costs and complexity for the company as a whole. Facing such realities isn't easy, but the economic crisis should create a sense of urgency. Some of these cost-cutting opportunities will call for investments, and every one of them will demand a solid business case.
At one retail bank, for example, a comprehensive assessment to reduce architectural complexity identified major cost savings in most areas. A team of business and IT executives helped the company find more than 50 unused applications to decommission, 150 redundant applications to consolidate, 800 point-to-point interfaces to put on an integration platform, and 400 applications to connect with a data integration platform.
Most of these changes required near-term investments—in several cases, such as eliminating or consolidating larger redundant applications, fairly substantial ones. Not all consolidation proposals showed a positive return. What mattered most was the team's decision to insist that the leaders of projects prove the business case for each of them. In all, the effort is on track to provide a return on investment of more than 50 percent, a reduction in time to market of at least 30 percent, and additional organizational benefits, including better alignment between business and IT.
Phase 3: Business innovation
In times of crisis, companies must consider transforming or even completely reinventing themselves. IT can play a central role in implementing big changes in the way they operate and bring products or services to market. The third and most ambitious phase of architectural transformation is about making these bold changes. As companies look beyond the downturn, they should consider changing their IT in more radical ways that can drive or support strategic innovation and fundamentally new areas for growth. Two levers are relevant.
Assess alternate operating models. Most companies have a global business, but far fewer have developed a truly global IT operating model that supports the corporate strategy. A comprehensive review of the IT value chain should identify the level of sourcing, harmonization, consolidation, governance, and IT enablement necessary for each essential business capability. This review can lead to a new, more effective blueprint and architecture model for IT.
For example, managing and minimizing risk, which is especially important in downturns, depends heavily on getting the right data from the entire business to support timely decision making. Business and IT leaders must work together to design the data-management model that promotes the most effective data-driven decision processes.
Shape the future. Business leaders should work closely with IT to explore investments in a wide range of emerging technologies that support new ways of working, such as using the Internet to cocreate products with customers and suppliers, online collaboration among employees, and data-driven management. New tools and processes can accelerate globalization in product development, find profitable niches in declining markets, and increase productivity.
The triggers for this more ambitious approach to architectural transformation can vary. At one manufacturing company, it was an acquisition. The company had just purchased another international business, vaulting the combined entity into the top five in its industry, with more than 20,000 employees and more than $13 billion in annual revenue. Looking to capitalize on this enhanced position, the company's leaders realized that they couldn't succeed with two different operating models relying on archaic information systems.
After defining a new, integrated global operating model for sales and distribution, the supply chain, product-life-cycle management, and postsales service, the company implemented it with a streamlined IT architecture. The impact was substantial. Among many other benefits, the company reduced the time required to quote special-bid prices by 90 percent and to create custom products by 80 percent.
The architectural transformation at a national oil company was sparked by its management's desire to turn it into one of the world's top oil and gas businesses. The company's IT systems couldn't support such growth. Too many systems were customized to local needs. Too few business processes were in compliance with company standards. Data were inconsistent from one business unit to another, so cross-divisional collaboration was arduous. And IT rarely matched best industry practices.
With a clear mandate from top management, IT and business leaders focused on core business objectives requiring a reformed architecture. Under the new plan, IT would support world-class processes, facilitate corporate-wide decision making by supplying better data, help the company develop better insights about customers, and provide an accurate and up-to-date view of its financial, managerial, and logistics position. The company is developing a unified information system to link all divisions and reviewing with greater discipline all requests for new IT projects. IT is exerting more control over critical functions such as finance, human resources, and sales.
The downturn gives IT and business leaders an important opportunity to collaborate in reducing costs and reshaping the IT architecture for competitive advantage. When companies look solely to the IT function to find savings, the results are often limited. A joint IT–business team can achieve much more.
Bringing IT and business leaders together can also help IT create new ways to make the business grow. Greater flexibility, faster times to market, and more efficient and effective business processes will outlast the downturn. For companies that see the present troubles as a chance not only to control their costs but also to reposition themselves for faster growth once the turnaround begins, restructuring the IT architecture can be among the most valuable moves.


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Kitchen Remodeling 101: Making the Space Your Own BPT—There is a lot to think about when remodeling your kitchen. You want to design a kitchen that reflects your taste and style, which you'll love for years to come. Whether you're designing for yourself or for resale, the key to success is to embrace timelessness. That doesn't mean sacrificing personality for a neutral palette, though. Quite the opposite. Here are five creative, thrifty and helpful tips from Summer Baltzer, interior designer and former host of HGTV's Design on a Dime, to send you well on your way to a kitchen design that not only looks great in the long term, but also reflects you. Tip one: Know your style. Design your kitchen around colors and objects that make you feel great. This is the room you probably spend most of your time in whether you're cooking, entertaining or just doing homework with the kids. Loving the look is important. Make your design meaningful and something you'll want to see every day. Look for inspiration from a pottery collection, a piece of artwork, or even the food you love. Tip two: Get creative on a budget. A great way to save money is to repurpose found items for your accents where you can. Frame pictures from favorite recipes, use inexpensive flower pots or mason jars to store utensils and cutlery, repurpose an old console table as a center island. You might even want to spray-paint the old dining table and give it a new life. Look for salvaged floors, pallets or pottery to create new furniture pieces or accents. This approach not only saves you money, but also makes your kitchen enviably unique. Tip three: Develop your vision. Keep your ideas on track by collecting loose drawings; they can become your own personal design board. They don't have to be professional or even exactly like the finished product - just enough to make your point and start to envision what the finished product will look like. Seeing your ideas come together before taking a sledgehammer to your old tile not only gets you excited about your project, but can also save you from making design decisions that don't fit your vision. If you're hiring a professional, plans for the kitchen should be included in the cost. Make sure that they fit your vision and that you're getting everything you need from your new space before demo and installation begin. Tip four: Create timeless beauty. When focusing on your large installed items, don't just concentrate on what's popular now. Instead, take a look at the items that have been relevant for more than a decade. If you're designing a kitchen for a home you plan on living in for the next 20 years, by all means, go crazy and embrace colors and patterns that make you happy. But if you don't plan on staying there forever, give yourself room to grow. Look to classic color combinations like white, black or gray cabinets; stone countertops with white or walnut cabinets; or butcher block with just about any cabinet color you can imagine. Tip five: Start with simplicity. Keep the lines of your installed, more permanent items clean and simple. To add style and versatility, get creative with your accents. For instance, try going Shaker with your cabinets. Traditional cup pull handles will move them in a more classic and traditional direction and linear pull handles will take you down a modern road. By keeping your appliances and more permanent items simple, and using your accents to create a sense of style, you'll open up tons of design doors for yourself, creating a kitchen that transitions easily, keeps up with your style and has staying power. With this timeless know-how and creative inspiration, you're ready to create a kitchen you'll love both now and a decade down the road. Source: www.wilsonart.com. |
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You might be surprised at how powdered milk, dehydrated kelp and shelf-stable chorizo can come together in ways that taste good — especially if you've been cooped up for a few months on a mission with five strangers on a desolate lava crater in Hawaii.
The mission, dubbed HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), is part of a NASA study to figure out how to keep astronauts well fed during multiple-year missions to Mars or the moon. It's being run by a collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
NASA makes an excellent apricot cobbler and a sweet and sour pork in ready-to-eat pouches, says Jean Hunter, a food engineer at Cornell. But "on a planetary surface mission, the timeframe is long enough that the astronauts will have time to get tired of their menu, no matter how good it is," she tells The Salt.
That menu fatigue could affect the quality of the other aspects of a space mission, like gathering data on planetary surfaces and atmospheres, she says. So the volunteers in Hawaii will be turning space fare standards into home-cooked meals to add variety to their lives. With any luck, the volunteers will also benefit from the socialization that comes with creating meals and eating together as a family, she says.
They will "demonstrate caring for each other they way people do on Earth," Hunter says. And that could make a years-long mission to Mars more tolerable for the human brain.
Oleg Abramov, a research space scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, is one of the volunteers. He usually cooks at home, but nothing fancy — omelettes, stir-frys, grilled steak or chicken with a simple vegetable side.
Volunteer "astronauts" will begin inhabiting a simulated space station full-time in early 2013. But they've already started their culinary preparation. The training session Abramov attended a few weeks ago "really impressed me with how much is possible without fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy. We made sushi, paella, pizza and apple pie, among many other things, and all were quite good," he says. "If I were presented with the apple pie that we made, for example, I would never have guessed that it was made with dehydrated apples."
On the Hawaii "astronaut" menu will be peanut butter, chiles, and lots of Asian spices and food items, since many of these are already freeze-dried or preserved. Off the menu, Hunter says, are things like fresh mint and hops. "NASA doesn't permit alcohol," she says.
Cooking and eating food on Mars will likely present a host of scientific challenges. For one, low-gravity makes your head feel stuffy, dulling your sense of smell and taste. That, as our colleague Joe Palca reports, makes astronauts reach for the hot sauce.
The galley on the space station will have a rehydration station, a food warmer, and a two-burner induction cooktop (no open flame cooking in space, people), as well as a small fridge for leftovers, Hunter says.
Will everyone cook? "Just as in Survivor, one or two people will most likely end up doing the cooking," Hunter says. "Just like a family, they'll gravitate towards the chores they like, or can at least tolerate."
Abramov says he can tolerate shelf stable foods, but he's going to miss fresh fruits and veggies. But he has hope: "I was told that we should be able to grow sprouts, which only takes a few days and should provide a quick fix for our veggie cravings."
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Oddly, the story fails to mention the crucial role the law school transparency movement, to which the Times gave such valuable attention in 2011 in a series of prominent stories, has had in all this. It's hardly a coincidence that most of the collapse of the applicant pool has taken place over the last two years, which happens to be when something resembling accurate employment and salary statistics have been extracted from law schools via political pressure.
The story also features this strange claim:
This is a very peculiar use of the word "demand." Big corporations have put the squeeze on BigLaw, because they've decided they will no longer subsidize the training of junior associates to do work people trained to be lawyers should do. Even more problematically for the Cravath model, they've also decided they won't pay BigLaw rates any more for essentially clerical work. So firms can't bill out a lot of what first and second year associates do, and a lot of other work that such people did is now outsourced to the document review mills and to non-lawyers."We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply," said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. "It's not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones."She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see as the overly academic training at elite law schools.
In other words, client demand for various services that used to fatten the bottom lines of the big firms has imploded, not exploded, because it has been shifted to other service providers, or is no longer billable when performed by the firms themselves. This is a structural not a cyclical shift: it's not as if GCs are going to decide that when and if more deals are being done it'll be OK for firms to bill out monkey work at $300 an hour again.
The "overly academic training" at law schools has nothing to do with this. That's an issue about failing to train people to do legal work. The collapse in demand from BigLaw clients is a product of the realization that a large amount of work traditionally done by lawyers can be done by non-lawyers with either no loss of quality, or not enough loss to make it worthwhile to pay the added cost of having lawyers do it.
The claim about "ordinary folk" is even stranger, but it's one that's being made a lot these days by legal academics desperately searching for a raison d' paycheck. The argument goes something like this:
(1) Many people in this country who could benefit from legal services aren't getting those services because they're too expensive.
(2) Those services are too expensive because law school costs too much.
(3) If future lawyers could go to law school without incurring so much debt, they could afford to offer legal services at a price that far more people could afford to pay.
(1) is certainly true. (2) and (3) are just wrong, and obviously so.
The cost of legal services has almost nothing to do with the cost of law school. Why would it? No client cares about how much it cost you to get a law degree, which means that no client is willing to pay more for legal services because a lawyer has a lot of educational debt. This theoretical claim is confirmed by empirical observation: there are literally hundreds of thousands of lawyers in America who went to law school when it was radically cheaper than it is today, and it's not as if they charge lower rates than recent law graduates (if anything they charge on average more more, because clients will to some extent pay for experience as a proxy for competence).
There are also hundreds of thousands of people with law licenses who are barely making a living by practicing law (A 2009 survey of Alabama lawyers found that 23% of the respondents with active law licenses had an income of less than $25,000 in the previous year). Such people are charging the absolute minimum they can charge while still maintaining an ongoing business.
The notion that the hundreds of thousands of lawyers in solo or very small practices in this country could somehow operate by billing out their services at X dollars per hour (with X being a figure that lots of "ordinary folk" currently priced out of the market for legal services could pay) if only law school didn't cost so much is one of those ideas that sounds intuitively plausible until you actually think about it for three minutes, which is apparently why people in legal academia don't.
The reason ordinary folk don't pay for legal services even when in theory they could benefit from them is exactly the same reason they don't pay for a lot of things they could in theory benefit from: because they don't have any money for those things after paying for more pressing needs like food, shelter, clothing, medical expenses, transportation to work, etc.
Comments such as Hadfield's indicate the lengths that legal academics will go to in order to talk themselves into believing that the basic problem isn't really the basic problem. And that problem is that the economic demand in this country for people with law degrees will employ (at best) half the people who are paying us to grant them law degrees.


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By YOUKYUNG LEE
FILE – In this Jan. 9, 2013 file photo, North Koreans work at computer terminals inside the Grand People's Study House in Pyongyang, North Korea. Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit behind a synchronized cyberattack in South Korea last week. But in Seoul, the focus remains fixed on North Korea, where South Korean security experts say Pyongyang has been training a team of computer-savvy "cyber warriors" as cyberspace becomes fertile battlegrounds in the standoff between the two Koreas. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit behind a synchronized cyberattack in South Korea last week. But in Seoul, the focus is fixed on North Korea, which South Korean security experts say has been training a team of computer-savvy "cyber warriors" as cyberspace becomes a fertile battleground in the nations' rivalry.
Malware shut down 32,000 computers and servers at three major South Korean TV networks and three banks last Wednesday, disrupting communications and banking businesses. The investigation into who planted the malware could take weeks or even months.
South Korean investigators have produced no proof yet that North Korea was behind the cyberattack. Some of the malware was traced to a Seoul computer. Without elaborating, police said Monday that some of the malicious code also came from the United States and three European countries, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. But South Korea has pointed the finger at Pyongyang in six cyberattacks since 2009, even creating a cybersecurity command center in Seoul to protect the Internet-dependent country from hackers from the North.
It may seem unlikely that impoverished North Korea, with one of the most restrictive Internet policies in the world, would have the ability to threaten affluent South Korea, a country considered a global leader in telecommunications. The average yearly income in North Korea was just $1,190 per person in 2011 — just a fraction of the average yearly income of $22,200 for South Koreans that same year, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul.
But for several years, North Korea has poured money into science and technology. In December, scientists succeeded in launching a satellite into space aboard a long-range rocket from its own soil. And in February, North Korea conducted its third nuclear test.
"IT" has become a buzzword in North Korea, which has developed its own operating system called Red Star. The regime also encouraged a passion for gadgets among its elite, introducing a Chinese-made tablet computer for the North Korean market. Teams of developers came up with software for everything from composing music to learning how to cook.
But South Korea and the U.S. believe North Korea also has thousands of hackers trained by the state to carry its warfare into cyberspace, and that their cyber offensive skills are as good as or better than their counterparts in China and South Korea.
"The newest addition to the North Korean asymmetric arsenal is a growing cyber warfare capability," James Thurman, commander of the U.S. forces in South Korea, told U.S. legislators in March 2012. "North Korea employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyber-infiltration and cyber-attacks" against South Korea and the U.S.
In 2010, Won Sei-hoon, then chief of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, put the number of professional hackers in North Korea's cyber warfare unit at 1,000.
North Korean students are recruited to the nation's top science schools to become "cyber warriors," said Kim Heung-kwang, who said he trained future hackers at a university in the industrial North Korean city of Hamhung for two decades before defecting in 2003. He said future hackers also are sent to study abroad in China and Russia.
In 2009, then-leader Kim Jong Il ordered Pyongyang's "cyber command" expanded to 3,000 hackers, he said, citing a North Korean government document that he said he obtained that year. The veracity of the document could not be independently confirmed.
Kim Heung-kwang, who has lived in Seoul since 2004, speculated that more have been recruited since then, and said some are based in China to infiltrate networks abroad.
What is clear is that "North Korea has a capacity to send malware to personal computers, servers or networks and to launch DDOS-type attacks," he said. "Their targets are the United States and South Korea."
Expanding its warfare into cyberspace by developing malicious computer codes is cheaper and faster for North Korea than building nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destructions. The online world allows for anonymity because it is easy to fabricate IP addresses and destroy the evidence leading back to the hackers, according to C. Matthew Curtin, founder of Interhack Corp.
Thurman said cyberattacks are "ideal" for North Korea because they can take place relatively anonymously. He said cyberattacks have been waged against military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions.
North Korean officials have not acknowledged allegations that computer experts are trained as hackers and have denied many of the cyberattack accusations. Pyongyang has not commented on the most recent widespread attack in South Korea.
In June 2012, a seven-month investigation into a hacking incident that disabled news production system at the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo led to North Korea's government telecommunications center, South Korean officials said.
In South Korea, the economy, commerce and every aspect of daily life is deeply dependent on the Internet, making it ripe grounds for a disruptive cyberattack.
North Korea, in contrast, is just now getting online. Businesses are starting to use online banking services, and debit cards have grown in popularity. But only a sliver of the population has access to the global Internet, meaning an Internet outage two weeks ago — which Pyongyang blamed on hackers from Seoul and Washington — had little bearing on most North Koreans.
"North Korea has nothing to lose in a cyber battle," said Kim Seeongjoo, a professor at Seoul-based Korea University's Department of Cyber Defense. "Even if North Korea turns out to be the attacker behind the broadcasters' hacking, there is no target for South Korean retaliation."
Associated Press writer Jean H. Lee contributed to this story with reporting from Pyongyang, North Korea; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul also contributed to this report. Follow AP tech writer Youkyung Lee at


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Children's Center
Tricks, Treats & Halloween Safety
Whether children are old enough to go out for Halloween trick-or-treating on their own or you're going with them, Dr. Joseph Behn, M.D., a family practice physician at Mayo Clinic Health System in Onalaska, Wis., recommends reviewing safety tips with them:
- Food poisoning is always a concern when it comes to Halloween treats. Don't leave perishable goodies out of the fridge for more than two hours (one hour in temperatures above 90°F). Cold temperatures help keep most harmful bacteria from multiplying. Food poisoning symptoms vary with the source of contamination.
- Children with diabetes can eat candy, but the carbohydrates the treats contain should be factored into the child's meal plan for that day and the child's insulin level adjusted accordingly.
Dr. Behn also recommends parents inspect candy before allowing children to eat it, Have children wear reflective strips on clothing, stick to familiar neighborhoods, set rules about where children will go, when they'll return and to carry a cell phone in case of emergency.
To interview Dr. Behn contact:
Rick Thiesse
Mayo Clinic Health System
608-392-9435 or email@example.com
More saftey tips:
- Read candy and food labels carefully. On Halloween, children with allergies to foods need to be extra careful. Consuming items that contain nuts or peanuts may result in a trip to the emergency room. Other common sources of food allergies in kids include milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat. Ask your doctor for a prescription for an epinephrine pen — used in emergency situations to treat food allergy reactions — so you're ready if your child consumes something he or she shouldn't.
- Children with asthma should avoid entering people's homes when trick-or-treating because the presence of pets or smokers can cause an asthma attack. Kids should keep a rescue inhaler in their pocket or trick-or-treat bag in case they experience trouble breathing.
- Look for the warning label to avoid juice that hasn't been pasteurized or otherwise processed, especially packaged juice products that may have been made on site. When in doubt, ask! Always ask if you are unsure if a juice product is pasteurized or not. Normally, the juice found in your grocer's frozen food case, refrigerated section, or on the shelf in boxes, bottles, or cans is pasteurized.
- Ration the collected candy to avoid cavitities and the "pig out" stomachache. To help prevent children from snacking on treats, give them a light meal or healthy snack before they head out.
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TOKYO (AP) — An investigation into a lithium ion battery that overheated on a Boeing 787 flight in Japan last month found evidence of the same type of "thermal runaway" seen in a similar incident in Boston, officials said Tuesday.
The Japan Transportation Safety Board said that CAT scans and other analysis found damage to all eight cells in the battery that overheated on the All Nippon Airways 787 on Jan. 16, which prompted an emergency landing and probes by both U.S. and Japanese aviation safety regulators.
They also found signs of short-circuiting and "thermal runaway," a chemical reaction in which rising temperature causes progressively hotter temperatures. U.S. investigators found similar evidence in the battery that caught fire last month on a Japan Airlines 787 parked in Boston.
Photos distributed by the Japanese investigators show severe charring of six of the eight cells in the ANA 787's battery and a frayed and broken earthing wire — meant to minimize the risk of electric shock.
All 50 Boeing 787s in operation are grounded as regulators and Boeing investigate the problem. The Japanese probe is focusing on flight data records and on the charger and other electrical systems connected to the damaged battery.
Lithium ion batteries are more susceptible to catching fire when they overheat or to short-circuit than other types of batteries. Boeing built in safeguards to gain safety certification for use of the relatively light and powerful batteries to power various electrical systems on the 787, the world's first airliner made mostly from lightweight composite materials.
Investigators earlier said they found no evidence of quality problems with production of the 787's batteries by Kyoto, Japan-based, GS Yuasa, whose own aerospace ambitions are on the line.
Yuasa said Tuesday that its April-December net profit fell 3.6 percent to 5.5 billion yuan ($59.6 million) from a year earlier, as demand for batteries lagged due to sluggish demand in Japan and overseas.
The company has struggled to turn its lithium ion business to profitability. In April-December its lithium ion business posted a 7.2 billion yen ($78.2 million) loss, it said, compared with an operating loss of 3.26 billion yen in the full-year that ended March 31, 2012.


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A national discussion about race continues in the wake of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's death last month in Sanford, Fla.
To recap: Martin, who was unarmed, was shot by a a 28-year-old man, George Zimmerman, who claimed self defense. Martin's family and supporters — and now a growing number of people across the nation — say it was a case of racial profiling and that Zimmerman only assumed Martin was "suspicious" and followed him through the neighborhood because the teenager was black.
On Wednesday, our colleague Corey Dade wrote about something that many African-American families have long dealt with — "The Talk:"
"I am a black man. This is one of the realities I have lived. My parents prepared me for it. To be sure, my parents taught me to transcend matters of race, interrogate them when necessary, and even ignore them where possible. However, they also gave me 'The Talk.'"For other boys coming of age, parents may end 'The Talk' after a lecture about sex, drugs, alcohol or Internet porn. The rite for black boys often is more rigorous: We're also drilled on a set of rules designed to protect us against suspicions too often associated with the color of our skin."
Today on Morning Edition, writer Donna Britt and her sons, Justin and Darrell Britt-Gibson, added to our understanding of "The Talk" during a conversation with host Steve Inskeep.
"It's a preparatory explanation and a warning to let them know what's out there for them," Britt said of the discussion many black parents have with their children, especially sons. For her, "The Talk" was especially meaningful because as a young man her brother Darrell was shot and killed by a white police officer in Gary, Ind., "under circumstances that were inexplicable and that to this day don't make sense to me."
That loss, she told Steve, "taught me in a very deep and profound way the dangers that could take my sons from me."
Those sons told Steve of what it's like to be young black men and feel the need to deal with police officers and others in authority in a much different way than white friends might. "They don't know the reality that we lived," Darrell said, of how his white friends feel they can speak up and challenge authority in a way he can't.
There is only one "light at the end of the tunnel" after Trayvon Martin's death, Justin Britt-Gibson said, and that is the national conversation it has generated.
"I go on Facebook," he said, and "everyone, white, black, Asian, Latino; is talking about this. And everyone is equally as mystified. ... And outraged.
"We're all having 'The Talk.' "
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.


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Liver: Anatomy and Functions
Anatomy of the liver
The liver is located in the upper right-hand portion of the abdominal cavity, beneath the diaphragm, and on top of the stomach, right kidney, and intestines.
Shaped like a cone, the liver is a dark reddish-brown organ that weighs about 3 pounds.
There are 2 distinct sources that supply blood to the liver, including the following:
Oxygenated blood flows in from the hepatic artery
Nutrient-rich blood flows in from the hepatic portal vein
The liver holds about one pint (13%) of the body's blood supply at any given moment. The liver consists of 2 main lobes. Both are made up of 8 segments that consist of 1,000 lobules (small lobes). These lobules are connected to small ducts (tubes) that connect with larger ducts to form the common hepatic duct. The common hepatic duct transports the bile made by the liver cells to the gallbladder and duodenum (the first part of the small intestine) via the common bile duct.
Functions of the liver
The liver regulates most chemical levels in the blood and excretes a product called bile. This helps carry away waste products from the liver. All the blood leaving the stomach and intestines passes through the liver. The liver processes this blood and breaks down, balances, and creates the nutrients and also metabolizes drugs into forms that are easier to use for the rest of the body or that are nontoxic. More than 500 vital functions have been identified with the liver. Some of the more well-known functions include the following:
Production of bile, which helps carry away waste and break down fats in the small intestine during digestion
Production of certain proteins for blood plasma
Production of cholesterol and special proteins to help carry fats through the body
Conversion of excess glucose into glycogen for storage (glycogen can later be converted back to glucose for energy) and to balance and make glucose as needed
Regulation of blood levels of amino acids, which form the building blocks of proteins
Processing of hemoglobin for use of its iron content (the liver stores iron)
Conversion of poisonous ammonia to urea (urea is an end product of protein metabolism and is excreted in the urine)
Clearing the blood of drugs and other poisonous substances
Regulating blood clotting
Resisting infections by making immune factors and removing bacteria from the bloodstream
Clearance of bilirubin, also from red blood cells. If there is an accumulation of bilirubin, the skin and eyes turn yellow.
When the liver has broken down harmful substances, its by-products are excreted into the bile or blood. Bile by-products enter the intestine and leave the body in the form of feces. Blood by-products are filtered out by the kidneys, and leave the body in the form of urine.


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Doomsday Asteroid Officially Upgraded in Size
An asteroid that scientists said could threaten Earth's atmosphere in 2036 is now believed to be substantially larger than previously stated. In fact, astronomers currently studying the dreaded, potential doomsday rock say asteroid 'Apophis' has officially been supersized by about 20 percent.
Apophis, which gets its name from the Greek word for an ancient, evil Egyptian god, initially had scientists concerned due to data showing that there was nearly a 3 percent chance that the asteroid would make impact with the Earth in 2036. However, the initial threat level has since been reduced, and astronomers are starting to relax, even though the latest data shows that the asteroid will still come within 22,364 miles of our planet in 2036.
That is quite a bit closer than the 9.3 million miles away it was when it passed by Earth late last year. Still, scientists say that the only way Apophis will pose a risk to Earth in 2036 is if the rock happens to pass through a small 'slingshot' once it shuttles into our orbit.
If that happens, Apophis may not cause mass extinction, but it certainly will not be good for Earth. Scientists at NASA predict that if Apophis does crash into Earth, it will produce a blast equal to over 500 megatons of dynamite, which has the same damage potential as nearly a dozen nuclear weapons.


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Charlotte Preparatory School
Quick Facts About the School
- Ages: 2 - 6 years
- Type: Private
- Number of Students: 112
- Open: August - June
- Summer Program: Yes
Programs Offered
- Music
- Spanish
About AMS Member Schools
While every AMS member school operates independently of our organization, by joining, it becomes a part of the larger Montessori community and can take advantage of the services we offer. Each member school is unique and will vary, from program levels served to curricular and extracurricular offerings, and more. We encourage you to visit and see for yourself.