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Islamic extremists today set ablaze more than 50 houses and a church in this town in northeastern Pakistan following an accusation of "blasphemy" of the Quran, leaving at least 14 Christians dead, sources said. (Other news reports say six were killed and another ten injured.)
The dead include women and children, with several other burn victims unable to reach hospitals for medical care, according to the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS). The attack came amid a protest by thousands of Muslim Islamists – including members of banned militant groups – that resulted in another six people dying when participants shot at police and officers responded with tear gas and gunfire.
The same rumor of desecration of the Quran that led to today's massive protest and attack in Gojra, 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Faisalabad, also prompted an arson assault on Thursday (July 30) by Islamic extremists on the village of Korian, seven miles from Gojra, that gutted 60 houses.
Punjab Minister for Law Rana Sanaullah reportedly said an initial investigation of allegations of the Quran being blasphemed indicated "there has not been any incident of desecration."
Because of the earlier assault in Korian, Pakistani officials were already in the area and had sought reinforcements to help control the 11 a.m. demonstration today in Gojra, but security forces were slow to respond, according to CLAAS.
"There were unaccountable people in the mob and they were out of control because only four police constables were trying to stop the mob of thousands of people," a CLAAS report said.
Crowd size and attacks grew, and Islamists managed to block main roads and railways to keep fire brigades from fighting the house fires, according to CLAAS.
With authorities also blocking roads to keep more Muslim extremists from entering from neighboring villages, clerics at local mosques broadcast messages that those "who love Muhammad and Islam should gather with them to defend the Islam because it is in danger," according to CLAAS.
In response to the police road closures, Islamists became more aggressive and began burning property using firearms and explosives in nearby hamlets where primarily Christians live, according to CLAAS.
"About 20 houses have been burnt in Chauck No. 424, and valuable things have been stolen from about 100 Christian houses," according to the CLAAS statement.
Asam Masih, a Christian in Gojra, said that that women and children were severely burned and had no way to get to a hospital, according to CLAAS, which was helping to transport victims for medical care.
Islamists set on fire a Catholic church on Sumandri road and destroyed it using firearms and explosives, according to CLAAS.
"50 houses are burned and totally destroyed," the CLAAS statement read. "14 people including children, women and men are expired."
Wedding and Funeral
As Christians have begun defending themselves against the onslaughts, mainstream media have already begun referring to the overwhelmingly Islamist aggression as "Christian and Muslim rioting."
Compass investigated the facts of the trigger incident in the village of Korian, where more than 500 Muslims, responding to calls from a mosque, attacked Christians in Toba Tek Singh district. Local sources said nearly all village Christian families fled. The fires destroyed their homes – collapsing their wooden roofs or melting T-iron roofs – and all belongings within that the attacking Muslims had not first looted.
"Our house is burnt and everything is gone, but Muslim neighbors around are not willing to give us a loaf of bread or a sip of water to us," 80-year-old Baba Sharif Masih told Compass.
He and his wife Hanifa Bibi, 73, were the only Christians left in the village in the northeastern province of Punjab. Masih, who is paralyzed, said the attackers let them live when they pleaded that they were unable to run away.
Two church buildings were ransacked but not burned, Compass sources said.
One Christian resident of Korian identified only as Shabir said the blasphemy accusation grew out of an incident at a wedding on Sunday (July 25). During the ceremony, Christian wedding guests tossed currency notes and coins into the air according to custom, with children catching most of them as they fall. Shabir told Compass a Muslim funeral was taking place at the same time, however, and that mourners told wedding celebrants to stop their music; they apparently declined.
The next day, Muslims met with the parents of the bride, Talib and Mukhtar Masih, and told them that their sons had cut pages of the Quran the size of currency notes and had been throwing them in the air the previous night, Shabir said.
"Talib said that nothing like this has happened, but that if there was anything, "'I'll call my son and he will definitely apologize for it,'" Shabir said. "But then they immediately began beating them and left Talib when he fell unconscious."
Shabir said that afterward when Christian women went to the Muslims and told them that they were wrong to beat Talib Masih, the assailants yelled at them and tried to attack them, but they were able to flee to their homes.
On Thursday (July 30), Shabir said, Muslim clerics announced from the village mosque that "if any infidel Christian wanted to save his or her life, then get out of here or they would be killed."
As the Muslim mobs gathered, he said, Christians immediately fled – leaving their meals prepared and fires burning in stoves.
"These assailants first looted these houses and then set them on fire and closed the door," he said. "Since then, not a single Christian is left there except a very old couple."
Islamist's Version
Village Muslims declined to open their doors when Compass reporters called on them.
But one of three Muslim leaders standing with a crowd of turban-clad Islamists at the entrance to the village, Qari Noor Ahmed, told Compass the story of the alleged cut pages of the Quran at the marriage ceremony.
"Because it was night, no one noticed, but in the morning we saw that the pages of the Quran had been cut to currency note size, and they were trampled under people's feet," he said.
Ahmed said that village authorities later met and called in Talib and Mukhtar Masih. He said that council authorities decided that their son should apologize.
"But when his son came in the meeting, he by no means seemed apologetic, rather he was aggressive," Ahmed said. "This was the root cause, and we told Talib and Mukhtar to tell their children to apologize."
Ahmed said that afterwards they searched for Talib and Mukhtar Masih and their sons but could not find them.
"Then Muslims became furious that first they had profaned the Quran, and now they had fled and were not apologizing," Ahmed said. "Then the villagers attacked their houses. All the Christians who are visiting here are armed, and we are sitting here to avoid any untoward incident. It is better for you to leave now or you may be attacked."
Munawar Masih, a 20-year-old Christian in Korian, said that he was preparing supper around 7 p.m. when he heard the announcement from the mosque that "infidel Christians had profaned the Holy Quran, and let's teach them exemplary lesson."
He looked outside as his family was about to sit down to dinner and saw a large mob approaching.
"We just fled from there to save our lives, and since then we are hiding in Gojra," he said.
Private TV channel reporter Ghulam Muhauddin told Compass that after the Korian houses were set on fire, the Islamic extremists blocked the Faisalabad-Gojra Highway to keep firefighters from arriving.
"When the attack was unleashed, several people were injured and even some domestic animals were killed," he said.
Muhauddin said that after negotiations between the District Police Officer and the protestors, Station House Officer (SHO) Jamshed Iqbal Nasir was suspended for not properly handling the incident.
Christians Accused
Officials at the Sadar Police Station, in whose precincts the attack took place, were not available for comment, but a deputy called Imam Din said that a First Information Report (FIR) had been filed under Section 295-B, or blasphemy of the Quran, against Talib and Mukhtar Masih.
He said that the complainant in the case was Muhammad Ashraf, and that police had possession of the alleged burnt or cut papers of the Quran. Din said that after SHO Nasir was suspended and Ashiq Hussein replaced him, Hussein was willing to file an FIR against those who had ransacked and burned houses of Christians. He said the accused were still at large and that police would arrest them after Christians returned to their homes.
Asked if police were under pressure from Islamists or the government, Din declined to comment.
Advocacy group Community Development Initiative (CDI) field officer Napoleon Qayyum said that the group had informed high officials about the Korian attack, including the presidency, and that soon afterward the president issued a notice. Qayyum noted that the Korian and Gojra attacks follow a July 1 attack in Kasur, where swarms of Islamists ransacked and damaged 110 homes.
"It is a clear sign that violent attacks against Christians have dramatically increased in recent days," he said, adding that CDI would provide legal help to victims. CDI works with assistance from the American Centre of Law and Justice.
Muhauddin of the private TV channel added that Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had taken the notice of the attacks and was forming a an investigative team comprising the Faisalabad Regional Police Officer and Faisalabad Commissioner, which will send a report to him.
A spokesman from the Pakistani president's office, former Sen. Farhatullah Babar, told Compass that President Asif Ali Zardari had taken a notice of the attack and had asked the provincial government to investigate. He said the president has condemned the attack and that there was no justification for anyone taking the law into their own hands.
Asked why the committee constituted by the provincial government did not have any Christians on it, he responded that it was the discretion of the provincial government to determine the make-up of the panel and that the federal government was concerned only about the report. Asked why an FIR had been filed against Christians and not Muslims for ransacking and vandalizing, he said only that appropriate action would be taken after the inquiry.
Member of National Assembly Farahnaz Ispahani, wife of Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani, told Compass that President Zardari had directed Federal Minorities Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti to visit the area and "express sympathy with the victims."
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This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. Coming up, the sweeping move to modernize the Catholic church known as Vatican II turns 50. We'll talk about that in Faith Matters in just a few minutes.
But, first, it's still all about the economy. The economy is still center stage this election season. This morning's jobs numbers are providing fresh material for the ongoing contest between the candidates and their philosophies and records.
In September, the country added 114,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate is now 7.8 percent. That is the first time it has been that low since President Obama took office in January 2009.
Now, one thing both presidential candidates agree on is that there is still work to do, but the agreement seems to end there. Mitt Romney's campaign released a statement saying this is, quote, "not what a real recovery looks like," unquote.
Meanwhile, the White House Council of Economic Advisors says the report proves the economy is heading in the right direction. Now, NPR is hosting a series called Solve This and we're taking a closer look at what the candidates are promising to do about economic issues, especially jobs. So, joining us now are NPR senior business editor Marilyn Geewax and also with us, economics reporter, Sudeep Reddy from the Wall Street Journal.
Welcome back to you both. Thank you both so much for coming.
MARILYN GEEWAX, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.
SUDEEP REDDY: It's great to be here.
MARTIN: So, Marilyn, let's start with you. The latest jobs report seems to have surprised analysts. That's the impression I get. Tell us more about it. What did it reveal about hiring? What does it say about the economy?
GEEWAX: In one way, it didn't surprise people in that most economists had been predicting about 114,000 jobs would be created and that's what we saw. What was really a little shocking is that the unemployment rate - that is, you measure how many people are looking for work and how many actually have jobs. The rate dropped to 7.8 percent. It had been, all year long, trading in this - or moving in this very narrow range between 8.1 percent and 8.3 percent, so for it to drop a lot is kind of surprising.
But what that really reflects is that this is a very big economy. There's lots going on. The economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics went back and looked at what happened this past summer and what they found was that, actually, job growth was stronger than they had thought, so they revised some numbers. And it seems like a jump because of these revisions, but really it's pretty much normal for the economists to go back and re-measure things.
You know, when you're in a country with 313 million people, there are lots of numbers to look at and, sometimes, there are these revisions.
MARTIN: Now, Sudeep, you're an alumna of the Wall Street Journal and a former White House correspondent and, you know, we've been looking at these jobs reports for quite a long time and I - forgive me. I may be wrong, but I don't remember the kind of immediate response that we are seeing from some quarters about these job numbers.
I mean, one of the things that's attracting a lot of attention is the former CEO of GE, Jack Welch, tweeted that the numbers were cooked, essentially, saying these Chicago guys will stop at nothing. I wanted to ask you, you know, about that.
First, tell me about the reaction. Do you agree that this seems rather extraordinary? And, secondly, is that possible? Is it possible to manipulate these numbers politically?
REDDY: What Jack Welch said is a lot of nonsense and he knows it. He was being ridiculous in trying to incite people and it worked. There were a lot of Republicans who came out and denounced him for saying something like that.
If an administration could cook the books on the job numbers, they'd produce a lot better numbers than this and you would have seen that late in the Bush Administration when the bottom fell out of the economy and you can see that now and you certainly wouldn't see an administration wait 'til this point.
So it's just kind of the same kind of nonsense that comes up a lot. We are, obviously, 33 days from an election and a lot of people get more heated at a time like this. What is important to understand, though, in these numbers is that there is a huge amount of statistical noise in this data. And we put a lot of weight on a specific number and what it means and what really matters are the trends, because there is no way to know when you have payrolls of $130 million across the country whether 100,000 is really that close to - when you're doing a survey - to what really happened.
So you have to look at the trends over time and the trends are showing that we're seeing some slow progress, but when you look at just the payroll numbers, the number of people employed by businesses, it really hasn't improved that much over the last two years. We're basically treading water in the labor market and we're not making the kind of progress you would need to see a sustained recovery.
MARTIN: Well, that's the news of the day, so let's focus a little bit more on the bigger picture. What are the economic plans of the presidential candidates? And, if you're just joining us, we are with NPR's Marilyn Geewax and the Wall Street Journal's Sudeep Reddy. We're talking about what the candidates say they're actually going to do about the economy and other important problems.
So let's talk about the basic elements of the candidates' plans and how are they different. Marilyn, do you want to start?
GEEWAX: Yes. The thing that's kind of interesting about the two sets of plans put forth by the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign is they're really - they're kind of similar. There's - in terms of the goals, everybody wants the same thing, a more balanced budget, more domestic energy production, a better education system, more trade with the world.
These are goals that, really, everyone agrees on, including the two campaigns. What's different is not the headlines, but the details. And, for example, to achieve - let's say - a balanced budget, the Romney plan focuses more on cutting taxes to spur growth to boost revenues in that way. The Obama plan relies more on taxing the wealthiest Americans more heavily to try to get things into balance.
Romney's plan would cut more in government spending. The Obama plan would call for more government spending to boost jobs through creating jobs for infrastructure, roads, bridges, hiring teachers.
So, really, you couldn't find anyone who would disagree with the goal of balancing the budget. The question is, how do you get there?
MARTIN: Well, Sudeep, it would seem that the devil is in the details, so pick up the thread there, if you would, and again, just add to what Marilyn just said about what the differences are. And did the debate Wednesday night illuminate those differences? I mean, that was one of the core subjects. You know, Mitt Romney spent a lot of time denying the Democrats' charges that his plan either doesn't make sense economically, that the math does not work and that it would largely benefit the rich and disadvantage the middle class.
REDDY: I actually think we've learned a lot about the differences between the two candidates in one key area and that's the role for government. They both are arguing for a different role for government in achieving, in many cases, the same ends. They both want stronger employment growth. They both want a stronger education system. They want a lot of things that presidents have always wanted.
But what they're saying is they're coming from it from different ends. President Obama is trying to make the case that the government can help achieve these goals. The government has a role when you look at the creation of the Internet, when you look at the national highway system, when you look at a lot of the achievements we've made as a country. The government had a role in those and it's important for the government to step up and play that role.
Governor Romney is making the case that the government should actually step aside, that it's the private sector that is actually doing the heavy lifting and that is why we should pull the government away from this. There's actually a lot of nuance in both of those positions. Governor Romney said on Wednesday night that regulation is essential, which is probably not what you would expect him to say for somebody who's going around beating up on regulation. And President Obama said, very clearly and very openly, the genius of America is the free enterprise system and he understands that businesses are at the core of the country and what he just wants to do is provide some nudges along the way.
And, if you look at energy, for instance, that's one area where the Obama Administration wants to push renewable energy and wants the government to play some role and the Romney camp is saying, pull back and let energy just develop by market forces.
GEEWAX: You know, Michel...
MARTIN: Marilyn?
GEEWAX: One of the things that's so strange about this whole election cycle is, if you look at their plans, as I say, the goals are very similar. As Sudeep has just noted, they even concede points to each other. Yes. We need some regulation. Yes. We need free enterprise.
So, if we all agree, I mean, there's sort of this broad-based understanding of what the economy needs and yet you look at Congress and it's complete gridlock. It's like as if we were talking about, you know, people from Mars and others from, you know, Saturn or something. I mean...
MARTIN: But that speaks to...
GEEWAX: It's just amazing.
MARTIN: That speaks to a very different belief in the proper approach to get to that point. And one of the questions I had was, was there any clarity on the facts? I mean, there was a big dispute about whether either party - either candidate's actual plan - whether the basic math actually works. Can you achieve the goal that they set out, using the methods that each of them describes? And would you - Sudeep, was there any clarity on that point?
REDDY: I actually don't think there was that much clarity on those points. We got a lot of understanding of their philosophical approach, but for instance, Governor Romney has made a big deal about how he would cap deductions, tax deductions, and he's used three different numbers in where he would put the cutoff, $17,000, $25,000, $50,000 in total amount of deductions.
And what he's showing is that he's thinking more about the approach rather than the specific numbers and, on one level, we shouldn't expect a presidential campaign to have to come up with numbers across the board on every one of their policies. But if you're going to make a pitch based on something like that, then you need to actually make the math work out if you want your pitch to be believable, and we haven't quite seen that.
MARTIN: But, before we let you go, Sudeep, I have to ask. There are some third party candidates who haven't gotten a lot of traction in the polls and have not been invited to participate in any of these foray, so do they have any plans that are getting any attention? Remember, a third party candidate, you know, some years ago did actually have an impact on the race. That was the business tycoon, Ross Perot. We've got the former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson. We've got the Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein. Did either of them offer a detailed plan?
REDDY: All of these - many of these big third parties have offered detailed plans. There are actually 140 candidates running for president, nationwide, something you wouldn't know watching just the two on the debate.
But the two get the most attention because they're probably closest to the center, and if you were to look at the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, they actually - when you look at their platforms, they're very interesting. There's a lot of thought that goes into them. The Libertarian Party platform is, of course, rather short because it calls for limited government, no foreign intervention in other countries, no foreign aid.
And the Green Party platform is really extensive in terms of what they want for the government role in the economy. For instance, they want to reduce the work week to 30 to 35 hours because it would actually create more jobs when you need more workers and so that's one example.
MARTIN: Big smiles all around here.
GEEWAX: Especially on a Friday.
MARTIN: That's right. Especially on a Friday.
GEEWAX: That's a great idea.
MARTIN: Sudeep Reddy is an economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Marilyn Geewax is a senior business editor or NPR and they were both kind enough to join us once again in our Washington, D.C. studios.
Thank you both so much.
GEEWAX: You're welcome.
REDDY: Thanks, Michel.
MARTIN: Coming up, Nicholas Vreeland used to be a New York-based world traveling photographer until he shifted gears and changed his life.
NICHOLAS VREELAND: To devote my life to a spiritual path was the most valuable thing I could do.
MARTIN: Now, he is the first westerner to lead one of the most important monasteries in Tibetan Buddhism. We'll find out more about him. That's just ahead on TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

subset: commoncrawl


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Yesterday's post prompted a number of comments about top tube pads. Along with the front Aerospoke, the top tube pad has come to symbolize the more vain aspects of the fixed-gear trend. So much so, in fact, that there is now a backlash, as evidenced by this listserv post which was forwarded to me by a reader recently:
Someone put a cigarette butt out on my frame pad.
Last night at BAR. I hope for the sake of New Haven's burgeoning and welcoming "cycling community",that this wasn't an act performed by someone I know. Because I have to look down at that whenever I'm riding now, and know that someone in this world is a selfish dick who isn't down with OPP. However, when you see people fucking with other people's shit as a joke, and then your shit gets fucked with, the pranksters are the easiest and first to blame.
While such a backlash is inevitable, acts of top tube pad violence are totally inexcusable. Before hating, I think it's important we try to understand the origins of the top tube pad, as well as its functions. Based on feedback from readers over the past few months, it would seem the main purposes behind the top tube pad are as follows:
--Protects the frame when locking bicycle to a pole
--Protects the top tube from getting dinged by handlebars (in the same manner as, though distinct from, a top tube protector)
--Protects the groin and inner thigh when skidding
--Protects the frame when resting mallet on it during bike polo matches
--Is aesthetically pleasing to certain people
Okay. But where did top tube pads start, and how did they go from being functional add-ons to being accessories? Admittedly, I still have a lot to learn, but here's what I've uncovered so far. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.
The obvious common ancestor of the top tube pad as we know it and hate it is the BMX pad. Rules required that top tubes, stems, and handlebars had to be padded during races, presumably so that young racers would one day grow up and be able to reproduce. In this prescient photo, however, only the top tube is padded.
The top tube pad proved to be quite adaptable, and was able to evolve to accommodate a number of unorthodox frame designs. It is most likely this adaptability which made its longevity as a species possible, and which is why it is still so common today.
But what about the crucial leap from BMXs to adult bikes, and particularly fixed-gears? It has been suggested that today's top tube pad has its origins in the messenger community. Messengers have always wrapped their frames in inner-tubes or tape to both protect them and disguise their manufacturers. But was it a messenger who first made this leap from wrapping to padding?
This amazing photo, which I uncovered while Googling in a pith helmet, could very well be the missing link between BMX top tube pads and adult top tube pads. The neon knickers and jacket, mullet, and aero water bottle indicate that this man lived sometime during the late 1980s or early 1990s. And if you'll look closely, you'll see that the top tube is either wrapped or padded, though it is difficult to tell exactly which. The downtube, however, remains bare.
It should be noted though that there are also some things about this photo which indicate it may be a hoax. For example, why would a messenger choose road shoes and pedals? And aren't the Campy components a bit lavish for a work bike? Scholars will no doubt debate the validity of this photo for years to come. Some day, maybe we'll know for sure whether this is in fact Lucy, or Piltdown Man.
Regardless, at some point somebody made the decision to use a top tube pad on an adult bike. But was it a messenger? This photo indicates it was. The pad is clearly a BMX top tube pad (as evidenced by its length) that has been retrofitted to an adult bike. And the Wings of Hermes would imply that this bicycle belongs to a messenger. However, there is the question of the date. While the Rolls is an older saddle, the "One More Bike" sticker is an evolution of the "One Less Car" sticker, indicating the vintage of the bike may be more recent. Still, the value of the photograph is indisputable--somewhere, at some point, a messenger decided to use a BMX pad on his or her bike.
But one thing is certain. Top tube pads became fashionable. The famous Cyndi Lauper bike gives every indication that the owner chose the top tube pad as much for aesthetic reasons as for practical purposes. And its reasonable to surmise that this fashion came from the messenger community, as the popularity of messenger bags, fixed-gears, and front Aerospokes owes much to them. Therefore it stands to reason the top tube pad would come to be similarly embraced--and embellished--as well.
And evidence remains that they continue to be employed by messengers. The STI lever shape and outboard bearing crank place this messenger squarely in our present day.
(At least, I think it's a messenger. So hard to tell these days...)
And what of tomorrow? Well, this new offering from Felt, as seen at Interbike, should help provide an answer. (Thanks to the reader who forwarded this.) Like the BMX pads of yesteryear, they will now be sold as integral parts of the bike. We have come, for better or for worse, full circle.


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Despite a violent criminal history, a man wanted in connection with an assault and attempted rape in September is not considered a threat to public safety, Alexandria police say.
Authorities have been hunting for Shaun Carlan, 44, since about September 14 when city detectives identified him as the man who allegedly took a woman into a park between the 4600 and 4900 blocks of Eisenhower Ave. and assaulted her three days earlier.
The pair knew each other before the attack, said Det. Victor Ignacio, who is spearheading the investigation into the incident.
After meeting for drinks earlier in the evening, Carlan offered to give the woman a ride home on his moped, Ignacio said. The two stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy more beer and made their way to the park to continue drinking about 2 a.m., according to authorities. When Carlan made an unwanted advance, the woman refused him and "he lost it and he beat the living daylights out of her," Ignacio said.
Suffering non life-threatening injuries, the woman was able to get free from Carlan. She contacted police shortly after fleeing. Authorities have been trying to track Carlan down ever since.
It's not his first brush with the law. Carlan was about three months into a three-year period of supervised release when the incident occurred. He pleaded guilty in October 2010 to assault and battery and unlawful wounding for attacking two individuals in August of that year.
A judge sentenced Carlan to three years and three months of jail time, though all but nine months was suspended. He was released in June.
Police say Carlan's criminal history is closely linked with alcohol. He is a bigger threat to his friends than the public, Ignacio said.
"I don't think [Carlan] is going to go out there and rape somebody and beat somebody he doesn't know," he said. "He's not a person we'd consider to be going out there and grabbing people."
Deputy Chief Cleveland Spruill echoed Ignacio's assessment of Carlan. Had police considered Carlan a danger, they would have alerted the public long before October 13, when the department released his description and called on residents for their help in finding him.
"There was no reason to think he was angry or was going to do anything to anyone else," Spruill said. "Our policy is [whenever] we have a case where we feel like an individual who is at large is a threat to the community, we release that information."
As to why authorities didn't turn to the public for help locating Carlan earlier, it's because they were running down "solid leads," Spruill said.
Carlan, who listed Arlington as his place of residence when authorities busted him on the August 2010 charges, was staying at Carpenter's Shelter in Alexandria when the incident occurred. Staff there said he vanished after September 11, according to court documents.
The last time law enforcement heard from Carlan was on September 13, when he phoned his therapist and said he was leaving the area. His probation officer last saw Carlan on September 9.
Detectives felt they could capture Carlan without the public's help, Spruill said, but when leads dried up, officials turned to residents for assistance.
"The rush for us to get information out would be tempered by [whether] we have other, active investigative leads that we're following up and we're confident we're going to get him," he said. "Sometimes that doesn't work out."
Carlan is described as a white man, about 5-foot-11 and weighing roughly 200 pounds. Anyone with information regarding Carlan's whereabouts is urged to contact the police department's criminal investigations section at 703-746-4711 or the nonemergency line at 703-838-4444.


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Cowboy Bronzes: Icons of the West
Towards the end of the 19th century, America's westward expansion was nearly complete. Aided by the sensational stories of life in the American West by writers such as Owen Wister and Teddy Roosevelt and before them, James Fenimore Cooper and Francis Parkman fascination with the West, the land, the Native Americans and those who explored and settled there had never been greater. By 1900, popular illustrated magazines such as Harper's Weekly, were foremost in promoting the excitement and drama of frontier life.
Artwork by some of the greatest illustrators of the period frequently accompanied serialized stories of cowboys and cavalry, settlers and Indians. Perhaps more than any other artist or illustrator, Frederic S. Remington (1864-1909), was able to capture in art a view of the American West that thrilled the readers of the many publications in which his images and stories appeared. When Remington turned to sculpture at the urging of a fellow artist, it was no surprise that the "authenticity" of his illustrations was also evident in his bronzes. Remington's sculptures were acclaimed almost immediately.
The public's embrace of the Western genre would continue throughout the 20th century through film, comic strips and later television. By 1953 when the abstract expressionist artist Harry Jackson (1924-2011) walked away from a short but successful career, the love of the West was at fever pitch. Though critics would wonder whether Jackson would be as successful as he had been previously, figurative art was his calling and since he was a child, the West was the subject he knew the best. This small exhibition features some of the most iconic bronze works by Jackson and includes a rare "heroic bronze" of the Bronco Buster, 1909, by the artist whose work inspired him most, Frederic S. Remington.
On view October 10, 2015-January 31, 2016
Frederic Remington, Bronco Buster, modeled 1894/cast before 1918, bronze, City of Davenport Art Collection, Gift of Mrs. Alfred C. Mueller in memory of her husband, 1963.1071


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text:
42 USC § 12102 - Definition of disability
The table below lists the classification updates, since Jan. 3, 2012, for this section. Updates to a broader range of sections may be found at the update page for containing chapter, title, etc.
The most recent Classification Table update that we have noticed was Tuesday, January 15, 2013
An empty table indicates that we see no relevant changes listed in the classification tables. If you suspect that our system may be missing something, please double-check with the Office of the Law Revision Counsel.
42 USC | Description of Change | Session Year | Public Law | Statutes at Large |
This is a list of parts within the Code of Federal Regulations for which this US Code section provides rulemaking authority.
This list is taken from the Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules provided by GPO [Government Printing Office].
It is not guaranteed to be accurate or up-to-date, though we do refresh the database weekly. More limitations on accuracy are described at the GPO site.


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Red Sox - 000 040 015 - 10 15 0 White Sox - 000 000 110 - 2 5 1Jon Lester allowed only five base runners in eight innings (8-4-2-1-8, 98) and the Red Sox batted around in both the fifth and ninth innings.
Phil Humber retired the first eight Boston batters (and 12 of 14), but he encountered some rough water in the fifth. Crawford singled, stole second, went to third when A.J. Pierzynski's throw bounced into center field, and scored on Saltalamacchia's double. Reddick singled and Scutaro's sac fly made it 2-0. Ellsbury singled and promptly stole second. Pedroia's sac fly to right brought in Reddick and after Gonzalez was intentionally walked, Youkilis singled home Ellsbury.
With two outs in the eighth, Reddick walked and Scutaro singled to right-center. When CF Alex Rios took his time getting the ball back to the infield, Reddick tore around third and scored. Rios -- who had been pulled in mid-game about a month ago for lack of hustle -- was loudly booed, both after the play and again when he led off the bottom of the eighth.
Facing the bearded Brian Bruney in the ninth, Pedroia singled, Gonzalez homered (7-2), Youkilis homered (8-2), Ortiz popped to CF, Crawford singled, Saltalamacchia doubled (9-2), Reddick fouled to third, and Scutaro singled (10-2).
Six Boston players had at least 2 hits, with Gonzalez reaching base four times. ... Scutaro drove in three runs. ... The 6-9 spots in the order reached base 10 times in 20 plate appearances, stole two bases, scored six runs, and had five RBI.
The Yankees swept a day-night doubleheader from the Orioles: 8-3 and 17-3. In the nightcap, New York scored 12 runs in the first inning, batting for 40 minutes and seeing 70 pitches! They are 2 GB the Red Sox in the East.
Jon Lester / Philip Humber
Humber started against the Red Sox on May 31, allowing only one run through seven innings, before giving up three runs in the eighth (two of which scored on a home run given up by a reliever).
AL East (Red Sox 2.5 GA): Orioles/Yankees at 1 PM and 7 PM.


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Working with schools to test new ideas, products and services targeting the education market can be a rewarding experience for all involved. One of the key challenges, however, is often how to find and motivate schools to participate in school pilots and to work with them in a way that fits with the day to day pressures faced by busy teachers.
To support ICT companies, start-ups, and research projects interested in carrying out school pilots, European Schoolnet has developed a Future Classroom Validation Service. It is based on European Schoolnet's extensive experience in running small and large-scale school pilots, and on research carried out in the Living Schools Lab project.
The service consists of:
1 - Free, comprehensive Validation Manual - Download here (PDF)
- Including the validation methodology, operational process, validation scenarios to help you consider different types of validations.
- Free tools and templates to use and adapt to fit different validation requirements.
2 - Consultancy services from the European Schoolnet validation experts
- To design and scope school validations on-demand.
- To understand the results that can be expected from using different types of evaluation methodologies and instruments.
- To decide how best to motivate teachers to participate in the planned pilot.
3 - Access to the network of validation schools
- Possibility to run a customised validation, including consultancy and operations, using a pan-European network of schools.
If you want further information, please contact us at email@example.com
Video: Chromebook pilot
EUN validation pilots
- Triseum validation pilot of learning games (2017-2018)
- Texas Instruments DLP® Products Pilot Program (2016)
- Chromebook Teacher Professional Development and Evaluation Programme (2015)
- Samsung Professional Development Programme (2014-2015)
- Acer Netbook and Tablet pilots (2010-2011; 2011-2012)
Validation Manual: Appendices
The following templates and forms are used within the Future Classroom Lab validation service. They are provided under a Creative Commons license and can be freely reused or adapted by any organisation wishing to design and run its own school validation pilot. All the files are provided in .DOCX format. Download all the files here (.ZIP)
1. Model Contract for National Coordinators - Detailed description of the role and responsibilities of National Coordinators that are appointed in each country to provide training and support to teachers in larger validation pilots.
2. Evaluation Terms of Reference - Checklists to help you gather the information about what will be evaluated and to defi ne the purpose of the evaluation and the expected outputs.
3. Validation Pilot Work Plan - Features of an operational work plan that should apply to any school pilot.
4. Invitation to schools/teachers to participate in a validation project - Document inviting schools to participate in a validation which specifi es the scope of work; level of commitment and outputs expected from teachers; incentives or rewards for carrying out the work etc.
5. School data form - A form to be completed by each school participating in a school pilot.
6. School Pilot Memorandum of Understanding with Schools - A simple cooperation agreement outlining what teachers/schools are expected to do in small validation pilots.
7. School Pilot Model Contract - A more formal and detailed contract outlining what teachers/schools are expected to do in larger validation pilots involving the payment of an honorarium or financial reward.
8. School Pilot Model Cooperation Agreement - An example of a cooperation agreement made with a school that receives equipment from the initiator of an evaluation.
9. Photo and Video Permission Form - A form to be used when permission is necessary from participants for the use of photos and/or video, related to data privacy. Particularly important when recording classroom observations or interviews with teachers and where this material may be used for dissemination purposes).
10. Lesson Observation Record - A template that can be used by an evaluation expert to record information when carrying out a classroom observation.
11. Code of conduct for school-industry collaboration - Guidelines on how industry partners and schools should cooperate within a validation pilot.
12. Certificate of Participation for Teachers / Schools - A model certificate which recognises that a teacher or school has participated in a validation pilot


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Annual ridership counts provide one way of planning your timetable: simply add more service to the stops that get a lot of ridership. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with ridership patterns becoming distorted by the timetable, as observed with the Baby Bullet Effect. Teasing apart the timetable-induced distortion from the underlying (and often untapped) ridership demand is impossible, so it is necessary to go back to the raw population and jobs data to build the full picture. That is where the census really delivers.
Where People Live
Figure 1 |
Observations on the population numbers:
- The new Oakdale station long proposed by San Francisco (with little support from Caltrain) could tap into more residential population than just about any other stop along the peninsula, or even 22nd Street.
- The population density doesn't suddenly drop off at the southern end of the Caltrain-owned right of way in San Jose, where service suddenly drops off. There are large concentrations of under-served population within a mile of the Tamien and Capitol stops, accounting for more than 3 times as many people as live within a mile of the San Jose Diridon station.
- A stop like Broadway (Burlingame) with zero weekday rail service has more people living near it than Millbrae, site of the all-important BART intermodal station. Other stations with poor Caltrain service (San Antonio, Cal Ave, San Bruno, Burlingame, Belmont, Santa Clara) have more people living nearby than stops with the best service, such as Palo Alto.
Figure 2 |
Figure 3 |
Observations on the jobs numbers:
- Not so surprisingly, there is a concentration of jobs in the vicinity of the future Transbay Transit Center, adjacent to the financial district. What is more surprising is just how massive that concentration is: Transbay has more jobs within a half-mile radius (over 100,000) than all the other Caltrain stations combined, from 4th & King all the way down to Gilroy!
- Job sprawl shows up in Santa Clara and southern Palo Alto (and most of Silicon Valley, really) in the form of few jobs near stations but many jobs within a mile or two. Mountain View, despite its status as a major Baby Bullet stop, and home of Google, is not a particularly large job center.
Figure 4 |
Since 86% of riders during the weekday peak are commuters, the distribution of population and jobs can be used to construct a relative weight for the ridership that could potentially be generated between any given origin and destination (O&D) pair. This is the ridership potential matrix. The eventual purpose of this matrix is to help derive a single figure of merit for timetables, on an apples-to-apples basis, for how much of the potential ridership is tapped based on the service metrics for each O&D pair. When considering any given timetable, this weighting scheme ensures that O&D pairs that have a lot of population and jobs at each end (such as 4th & King and Palo Alto) are given more importance compared to O&D pairs with lower population and fewer jobs (such as Atherton and Bayshore).
It is important to note that this ridership potential matrix is completely independent of how each O&D pair is connected by rail service; it holds true for any timetable. It is solely a product of census data and the geographic location of each station. A timetable must then be designed to unlock the maximum potential ridership.
The ridership potential matrix works like this: take for example station 1 and station 2, with respective population and job weights P1, P2, J1 and J2. The weight for morning peak trips from origin 1 to destination 2 is P1*J2 (for people living near station 1 and working near station 2). Conversely, the weight for morning peak trips from origin 2 to destination 1 is P2*J1 (for people living near station 2 and working near station 1). When you multiply all the population weights from Figure 2 by all the job weights from Figure 4, you get a basic ridership potential matrix. But there's a bit more to it than just people and jobs.
Distance Considerations
Regardless of where people live and work, there are upper and lower limits to how far they will typically commute by rail. Extremely short trips are less likely because of the overhead of access and egress to and from the station, at each end of the journey. Conversely, extremely long trips are less likely because of their sheer duration; regional commute patterns are not just a factor of train service considered in isolation, but also driving times. That's why we will make the assumption that the distance distribution of commutes, generally speaking, is independent of the quality of train service--and that no foreseeable rail service pattern could significantly alter it. Good service might lead to greater market share for rail, but the underlying distance distribution will be assumed not to budge. This allows us to apply a (timetable-independent) distance distribution to the ridership potential matrix.
Figure 5 |
Each element of the ridership potential matrix is now the product of three factors: the distance weight based on the distance between origin and destination; the population weight at the origin station; and the job weight at the destination station. This simple formulation yields the morning peak values shown in Figure 6 as a bubble graph (numerical values are available as a tab-delimited text file). The evening peak is described by the transpose of the matrix, i.e. origin and destination switch places. The distance-weighted ridership potential matrix is now ready for use in the quantitative analysis of past, present and future timetables, a topic that will be covered in upcoming posts revisiting the topic of service metrics.
Figure 6 |
Figure 8 |
Figure 7 |
Key conclusions:
- Access to Transbay would provide a step-change improvement in Caltrain service, with probable ridership gains of more than 25%. Terminating any weekday peak train at 4th & King, as is inexplicably planned by Caltrain, is a huge mistake. Agency turf battles with BART and the CHSRA regarding whether or how to pay for the downtown extension tunnel, and how to share platforms at Transbay, must be fought and won.
- Underlying ridership demand is not accurately reflected by realized ridership, which suffers from severe timetable distortion. Future service planning, and in particular the timetables assumed for the ongoing 'blended' operations analysis, must be based less on realized ridership and more on fresh census data--even if not using the simplified approach described here.
- For the same reason that every Caltrain should serve Transbay (the huge concentration of jobs in San Francisco), HSR service that does not provide a one-seat ride into Transbay is a non-starter.


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Jr/Sr High School Menus
The HealthierUS School Challenge (HUSSC) is a voluntary initiative that recognizes schools participating in the National School Lunch Program that have created healthier school environments through promotion of nutrition and physical activity. Sodexo has helped 111 schools across the country earn this prestigious certification.
We offer a minimum of 6 sides daily with lunch choices: fresh garden salad greens plus fruits and vegetables in an inviting variety. Additionally, we offer locally-grown items whenever seasonally available. All meals include low-fat or fat-free milk.


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I have had a few weeks off of work , so, that means more time in the kitchen. That doesn't mean that I want to be a slave to the kitchen... so I opted for this quick and easy recipe today for lunch. I am off to join a friend and head for a walk to enjoy the sunshine!! This pesto is a delicious rendition of pesto to make this time of the year when broccoli is readily available and basil is not. Serve it over your favourite hot pasta...or perhaps make a pesto pasta salad... next time!!
**Broccoli Pesto Pasta**
2 cups fresh broccoli florets
1/2 cup fresh Italian parsley or perhaps cilantro
1 - 2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts or walnuts(toasted)
1/4 cup shredded fresh Parmigiano Reggiano cheese ( I know I use more...just eyeball it)
1/2 cup part-skim ricotta cheese ( I use more here too :D)
2-4 T extra virgin olive oil
sprinkle of red pepper flakes
Fill a medium saucepan three-quarters of the way full with water. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Add the broccoli and cook for 3 minutes or just until slightly tender, but still with a bit of snap. Drain and immediately immerse the broccoli in ice cold water to retain the bright green color. Drain again, and transfer the broccoli to the work bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade.
Add parsley, garlic, pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and ricotta cheese. Pulse 6-8 times, until the mixture forms a chunky paste. Do not puree! Pulse again, drizzling in a few tablespoons of olive oil at a time. When the mixture reaches the desired consistency, stop and serve immediately, or store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to one week.
Makes about 2 cups of pesto.
Per 1/4 cup serving: 97 calories, 9 g fat (2 g saturated fat), 3 mg cholesterol, 55 mg sodium, 2 g carbohydrate, 0 g fiber, 3 g protein, 18% vitamin A, 37% vitamin C, 6% calcium, 4% iron


text:
- Do the following:
- Briefly discuss the historical origin and domestication of the dog.
- Describe some common characteristics of the dogs that make up each of the seven major dog groups.
- Tell some specific characteristics of seven breeds of dogs (one from each major group), OR give a short history of one breed.
- Point out on a dog or a sketch at least 10 body parts. Give the correct name of each one.
- Do the following:
- Explain the importance of house-training, obedience training, and socialization training for your dog.
- Explain what "responsible pet ownership" means.
- Explain what issues (including temperament) must be considered when deciding on what breed of dog to get as a family pet.
- For two months, keep and care for your dog.* Maintain a log of your activities during this period that includes these items: feeding schedule, types of food used, amount fed, exercise periods, training schedule, a weekly body weight record, grooming and bathing schedules, veterinary care, if necessary, and costs. Also include a brief description of the type of housing/shelter arrangements you have for your dog.
- Explain the correct way to obedience train a dog and what equipment you would need. Show with your dog any three of these commands: "come", "sit", "down", "heel", "stay", "fetch" or "get it", and "drop it".
- Do the following:
- Discuss the proper vaccination schedule for a dog in your area from puppyhood through adulthood.
- Discuss the control methods for preventing fleas, ticks, heartworms, and intestinal parasites (worms) for a dog in your area from puppyhood through adulthood.
- Explain the importance of dental care and tooth brushing to your pet's health.
- Discuss the benefits of grooming your dog's coat and nails on a regular basis.
- Discuss with your counselor any seasonal conditions (like hot summers, cold winters, or extreme humidity) where you live that need to be considered for your dog.
- Discuss with your counselor the considerations and advantages of spaying or neutering your dog.
- Do the following:
- Explain the precautions to take in handling a hurt dog.
- Show how to put on an emergency muzzle.
- Explain how to treat wounds. Explain first aid for a dog bite.
- Show how to put on a simple dressing and bandage the foot, body, or head of your dog.
- Explain what to do if a dog is hit by a car.
- List the things needed in every dog owner's first-aid kit.
- Tell the dangers of home treatment of a serious ailment.
- Briefly discuss the cause and method of spread, the signs and symptoms and the methods of prevention of rabies, parvovirus, distemper, and heartworms in dogs.
- Visit a veterinary hospital or an animal shelter and give a report about your visit to your counselor.
- Know the laws and ordinances involving dogs that are in force in your community.
- Learn about three career opportunities for working with dogs. Pick one and find out about the education, training, and experience required for this career, and discuss this with your counselor. Tell why this profession interests you.
* The activities used to fulfill the requirements for the Dog Care merit badge may not be used to help fulfill the requirements for other merit badges.
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Page updated on: May 08, 2022


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40th Rock Island Art Guild Fine Arts Exhibition
Since 1955, the Rock Island Art Guild, a volunteer-run organization, has supported the arts in the Quad-City region through exhibitions, educational programs and scholarships. This year, the guild's 40th juried exhibition will be installed in the Figge's third floor gallery.
The exhibition is open to artists within a 150-mile radius of the Quad Cities, and is juried from online submissions.
"The Rock Island Art Guild began with a single purpose of bringing artists and the public together 'to cultivate an active interest in local art talent,'" said Holly Sparkman, president. "The first juried fine arts exhibition in 1977 was a big undertaking for the guild. It set the tone for the health and wellbeing of the arts in the community and gave local artists a needed showcase.
"Now, 39 fine arts exhibitions later, the guild is still made up of dedicated longtime volunteers, and the same integrity and dedication to helping artists achieve their potential remain intact. The guild is proud to be connected with the Figge Art Museum for this benchmark exhibition and looks forward to many more fine arts exhibitions to come."
This year's exhibition juror is Dr. Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum. Prior to joining the Wichita Museum in 2012, Dr. McDonnell served as director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University. She was chief curator at the Tacoma Art Museum, and worked as a curator at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Brown University, with a focus on 20th-century American art and the painter Marsden Hartley, about whom she has published numerous books and articles.
Dr. McDonnell selected the artworks for the exhibition from online entries, and selected the award-winners after seeing the works in person.
First Place: Glenn Bodish, Grey Matter
Second Place: Joan Webster-Vore, Targets
Third Place Founders Award in Honor of JoAnn and Italo Milani: Paul Scott Page, Rosco Discount Cincinnati Ohio
Sally MacMillan Watercolor Award: George Olson, Leaf Study: Wild Lettuce
Three-dimensional Entry Award in Memory of Zeivel Harris: Judy Bales, Yugen: A Mysterious Grace
Honorable Mentions:
Fred Easker, Autumn Along Village Creek
Jan Rockwell, Best Foot Forward
Eric Wolever, Lapse
Paul Eshelman, Double Tray With Ripple Cups
People's Choice TBA
Children's Award TBA
Sponsored by the Rock Island Art Guild
On view January 27-May 20, 2018
Companion Events
Thursday, February 1
5:30 p.m. Opening Reception
7 p.m. Exhibition Remarks
Celebrate the opening of the 40th Annual Rock Island Art Guild Fine Arts Exhibition alongside many of the included artists, who have been selected for participation from throughout the region.
Thursday, March 22
5:30 p.m. Performance: Jazz Combo, Western Illinois University
6:30 p.m. Artist Talks
Featured artists from the Rock Island Art Guild Fine Arts Exhibition as
they speak about their artworks.
Thursday, April 12
5:30 p.m. Brand Boeshaar Scholarship Reception
6:30 p.m. Artist Talks
Join in the celebration of high school art student scholarship winners and view their portfolios before heading up to the Rock Island Art Guild Fine Arts Exhibition to hear from exhibiting artists about their works on display.


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Haskell Performance Resource
Constructs: Techniques: |
Laziness: Procrastinating for Fun & Profit
To look at how laziness works in Haskell, and how to make it do efficient work, we'll implement a merge sort function. It will have the type:
merge_sort :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a]
We'll also need a function to split the list in two, I'll call this cleaving, and it will look like this:
cleave :: [a] -> ([a],[a])
Let's start by implementing the cleaving function. The conventional way to split a list in merge sort is to take the first half elements off the front, and the remaining half elements after that. The problem is that finding the length of a list means additional traversing of the whole list. So instead, we'll take pairs of elements off the front. Define two functions:
evens [] = [] evens [x] = [x] evens (x:_:xs) = x : evens xs
odds [] = [] odds [x] = [] odds (_:x:xs) = x : odds xs
and use them to implement cleave
cleave xs = (evens xs, odds xs)
Experience in a strictly evaluation language like SML or Objective CAML may lead you to write alternate versions using an accumulating parameter. Assuming that reversing the order of the elements doesn't matter, you could use this function to split the list into even and odd elements and implement the cleave
function as follows:
cleave = cleave' ([],[]) where cleave' (eacc,oacc) [] = (eacc,oacc) cleave' (eacc,oacc) [x] = (x:eacc,oacc) cleave' (eacc,oacc) (x:x':xs) = cleave' (x:eacc,x':oacc) xs
This initially appears to be a better implementation. It's tail recursive, and by either strictness analysis or explicitly making the accumulating parameters strict, it won't blow the stack up... Believe it or not, our first implementation was better.
Why? In order to produce the first element of either list, the second version needs to process the entire list. In a non-strict language, we could encounter an infinite list, and we'd like our function to work nicely on them. Consider the effect of:
head . fst $ cleave [0..10000000]
With our first definition, we'll get in constant time. But with our second, we'll get it in time, and our calculation will diverge on an infinite list like [0..]
Let's look at how evens
works and how lists are represented in Haskell. Lists are represented as either an empty list, or a "cons" cell that consists of an element and the remaining list. In pseudo-Haskell, we might write:
data [a] = [] | a : [a]
In a lazy language, an expression is only evaluated when needed, and (:)
, a.k.a. "cons", is a lazy data constructor. The machinery used to implement this is called a thunk. It's essentially a value with two possible states: either a computed value, or the process to compute that value. When we assign a value in Haskell, we create a thunk with the instructions to compute the value of the expression we've assigned. When this thunk is forced, these instructions are used to compute a value which is stored in the thunk. The next time the value is required, this computed value is retrieved. Lazyness can be implemented in languages like SML using this method together with mutable references.
So in the recursive case of evens
, we produce a thunk that contains a list cons cell. This cons cell contains two thunks, one of the element value, and one of the rest of the list. The thunk for the element is taken from the list the function is operating on, and the thunk for the rest of the list consists of instructions to compute the rest of the list using evens
. We'd say that evens
and odds
are lazy in their input: they consume only enough value to produce the value. As an example of how lazy functions work, consider:
head ( 5 : undefined ) tail [undefined, 5] evens (5 : undefined : 3 : undefined : 1 : undefined : []) take 3 $ evens (5 : undefined : 3 : undefined : 1 : undefined : undefined)
Despite how all the inputs contain partially undefined values, all the values of the function applications are valid values. A lazy function will only diverge when a required value for its computation diverges. If you're wondering why we have two undefined
s at the end of the list, recall how evens
was implemented. We need two undefined
s to make sure the third case is selected: the one with two elements followed by a remainder list (though undefined, but needed because of the take 3
call). Having only one undefined
means that pattern matching (1:undefined)
against either (x:[])
or (x:(_:xs))
(to choose between the 2nd and 3rd cases) will fail.
Now let's look at what happens with lazy evaluation and diverging values. Consider:
tail (5 : undefined) head [undefined, 5] odds (5 : undefined : 3 : undefined : 1 : undefined : []) take 4 $ evens ( 5 : undefined : 3 : undefined : 1 : undefined : undefined)
So the application of evens
to a non-trivial list results in a thunk being returned immediately. And when we ask for the first element of the list evens
produces, we only evaluate the value thunk as much as needed for it to produce its first cons cell, of which the tail is itself a thunk too. This is why we can apply evens
or odds
(and cleave
for that matter) to an infinite list. We'll implement merge_sort
using cleave
merge_sort [] = [] merge_sort [x] = [x] merge_sort lst = let (e,o) = cleave lst in merge (merge_sort e) (merge_sort o) where merge :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a] -> [a] merge xs [] = xs merge [] ys = ys merge xs@(x:t) ys@(y:u) | x <= y = x : merge t ys | otherwise = y : merge xs u
You can see that this function isn't lazy. It begins by cleaving the list recursively until it is left with trivial lists, i.e. the lists with zero or one elements. These are obviously already sorted. It then uses the nested function merge
, which combines two ordered lists while preserves the order. (this function doesn't have to be nested as it does not refer to anything in the outside scope) The act of partitioning the list into trivial lists before the reassembly can begin means that the entire list needs to be accessed before we can begin merging and assembling the output lists on each recursion level. In this case, we can't make a lazier solution, one that would work on an infinite list. This shouldn't be surprising, as in sorting a list, the first element out should be the least (or greatest) of all. We say that merge_sort
is strict in the array to be sorted: if an infinite list is supplied, the computation will diverge - no output will ever be produced. There are some operations that cannot be done lazily, for instance, sorting a list.
But lazyness still comes into play with the definitions like min xs = head . merge_sort $ xs
. In finding the minimal element this way only the necessary amount of comparisons between elements will be performed ( a.o.t. comparisons needed to fully sort the whole list).
We've seen the difference between a lazy function and a strict function. Lazy computing has two major appeals. The first is that only the necessary work is done to compute a value. The second is that we can operate in the presence of infinite and undefined data structures, as long as we don't examine the undefined parts or try to process the infinity of values.


text:
Wednesday, October 27
Book Review and Giveaway: Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
37 comments:
Well, I dont have any interesting stories to tell about laundermats except that I never liked using them. I guess this summer when we were in Minnesota, we used the laundermat because they had free internet access and I felt guilty about just using the access and not doing laundry. Do you know it costs $2.50 to wash a load of clothes and that is not a huge load either? The book sounds most interesting and I will check it out for my Kindle as I know I wont win. It does seem a bit short though at 304 pages and I like them a bit longer as it is hardly enough time to tell the story I think. I do like thoughts of tropical plants and places with white beaches, the ocean and cabana boys to bring you cool drinks. Thank you for sharing the book.
ReplyDeleteThe book sounds pretty cool!
Two things about laundromats. One is that in my hometown there is a laundromat that has tropical birds in a cage up high that runs the length of the building.
The other is that I always like to see what people are wearing in laundromats, because you know more than likely it is the last clean thing they could find and sometimes is pretty funky.- Anonymous10/28/2010 6:13 AM
One of the most magical places I've been to was this large pond right across the country road from the house where I grew up. It was located in this expanse of empty rolling fields of alfalfa and smattered with large oak trees. Every evening blue herons would land in the pond with the sun setting against their blue-gray silhouettes with cat-tails all around the pond's edge. I will always think of that place and my old home whenever I see a blue heron.
ReplyDelete I had to use a laundromat in the winter to dry our clothes up until three years ago, which is when the first clothes dryer to ever live at Blackrock--a 20-year-old propane one that our friends found in the basement of their old farmhouse and didn't want--was installed. Hated the laundromat. Especially because it's 10 miles away.
But what I REALLY wanted to comment on . . . "country-sexual"? Really? There's a term that comes from a diehard city person.Oh boy, do I have a laundromat story. When I lived in Syracuse, I went to the laundromat to do my laundry (duh) by myself, which I don't really like to do because it's in a sketchy area. I walk in, and this guy goes to walk out, then turns around and is like "Hey there good looking". I was like "Ummm, hi." And I'm pretty sure he asked if I had a boyfriend "YES!" and I remember he asked my name and I totally lied. He was pretty sketchy! That's the first, and hopefully last, time someone tries to pick me up in a laundromat!
ReplyDeleteDaffodils in the woods... My daughter knows how I long for daffodils in the middle of winter. She found a secret clearing in the woods at Point Reyes Natl. Seashore along the California coast where daffodils bloom early in the spring. While on a visit from cold, snowy Pennsylvania she took me to see the magic.
ReplyDeleteLaudromats have never been one of my favorite places, and this was reinforced when I had to use a laundromat while waiting to have a new washer & dryer delivered. Just after finishing a load of laundry, a cute little boy went running by with a chocolate ice cream cone and . . . yup! you guessed it . . . dropped it right on my laundry basket of clean clothes!! Honestly, a true story!!
ReplyDelete- Anonymous10/28/2010 9:01 AM
hahaha laundromat story. the best one i have is when i was an american student abroad in Poland (and had never visited a laundromat before). my polish roommates were washing their clothes in a bucket in the bathroom and hanging the clothes out to dry in the hallway of the apartment building(yes really) but i flat-out refused to do that. guess i've been too spoiled all my life? so, I had to carry my laundry about 2 miles to a little hole in the wall that was advertised as being the first and only laundromat in the city. the lady wouldnt speak english to me and my polish was horrible...but somehow everything worked out. she was kind enough to offer me tea while my clothes washed. many homes in poland (and throughout europe) dont seem to have dryers, but thankfully this place did have one, so i didn't have to carry wet clothes all the way back home.
it was an experience to be sure! :-) The only time I really used a laundrymat was right after my son was born, 18 months ago.
We use cloth diapers, but we were newly wed and all the extra money went to crib and stroller as opposed to a washing machine.
So, every 2 days newborn baby and I would walk the rather pleasant mile or so to the laundrymat to do his diapers. We were usually there in the mornings, which lessened the creepy lurkers significantly. It was great easy exercise for me, and baby boy never complained.
There were never any plants there though, just a loud tv playing soap operas. :-P
jennie.erwin at gmail.com
-JennieOooh! How about a laundromat AND a travel story?
Back in 2008, my boyfriend and I had embarked upon an epic camping trip around southern Africa. It was summer and a wet summer. By the end of three weeks all our clothes and our towels were, shall we just say a little worse for (constant) wear? We found ourselves in the tiny Namibian town of Tsumeb; and decided that, as we were heading futher into unpopulated areas, it would probably be a good idea to get some laundry done now, rather than hand-wash our unmentionables under the next available camel-thorn tree (not that there's anything wrong with that). So we proceeded to drive around Tsumeb looking for a laundromat. Turns out, they're not that common in tiny Namibian towns. We eventually found a 'Wash Shop' tucked away down a side road. It was tiny. 2 plastic chairs, a big wooden counter and a doorway leading out the bag. Tacked to the wall was a hand-written price list. No washing machines to be seen. Filled with trepidation, we handed over the most critical items (towels, t-shirts & underwear). In return, we were given a meticulously handwritten receipt, and told to come back tomorrow, 11am. This was a little later than we'd hoped as we had a long drive the next day but eh, what can you do right? We left, had a wonderful braai (BBQ) and a sound sleep.
The next morning we returned. The shop looked completely different. There were drying rack standing on the pavement, colourful ladies folding, ironing, laughing talking. A HUGE ancient washer gurgling and thrashing. And, tucked in the corner, two neatly stacked black garbage bags. We stepped in side and presented out ticket. We were handed the garbage bags. Inside we found out laundry. Folder and dried. Clean (but not for long!).
What an amazing experience. Funny how something as mundane as doing the laundry can become such a social event.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, but we never did see another laundromat. Unmentionables were indeed washed under the tap under the next available camelthorn tree!
I thought I should also share; I live in South Africa and I regularly pick Strelitzia flowers from the two bushes in my garden. They are gorgeous centrepieces!- Anonymous10/28/2010 10:23 AM
Along the same lines as r0ck0n, my husband and I went on vacation for 2 weeks in England, but only had enough luggage for 1 weeks worth of clothing. We believed we could just find a laundromat in one of our stops to refresh our wardrobe. Our first day in Glasgow, Scotland, we decided it was time to hunt down said laundromat. We were staying at an Americanized hotel in an very urbanized part of town and we looked up the nearest laundromat in the phone directory. Armed with a local map from the front desk, we wheeled our luggage out the front door for the fourteen block walk to the laundromat. It was the smallest space, about 200 square feet, packed with machines. No need for trolleys to get your laundry from washer to dryer, because there was barely any room to walk. We had to walk next door to a small dank pub (read dive bar in the States) to wait for the laundry to finish because there were only two seats and they were filled. The trip was a great success and I haven't thought about that part of the experience until reading these comments.
Susan, I love your blog and I am generally not a blog reader. Thanks for opening up a portion of your life to us and in such an deeply personal way.
-Laura This book sounds really neat.
My fiance and I just moved to a small town in kansas, we didn't have a washer/dryer upon move in and used the laundromat a few times before we got our own.
This laundromat had huge washers which was nice, but only about 4 of the 12 dryers worked, we started out wasting a bunch of quarters on the broken (unlabeled!) machines and finally a local gal came in and kindly showed us the only working machines.When I travel, I use the "Eiffel Tower" rule. I pick one thing (like the Eiffel Tower) that I must see, and then I let myself discover the rest of the city, without an agenda or a list of sites that I must run to, take a picture, and then run off to the next place. Using the "Eiffel Tower" rule, everything else becomes a wonder and more special. I used this rule when I traveled to Rome. I saw the Coliseum, and then just started walking. It was becoming evening, and I turned the corner and saw the most breathtaking fountain. I found out that it was the Trevi Fountain. A couple dressed in wedding garb was being photographed in front of the fountain, and the bride especially was the focus of everyone's attention. It was wonderment to have stumbled upon the perfect moment.
ReplyDelete- Anonymous10/28/2010 11:26 AM
The only thing about going to laundromats I can recall from my childhood was the interesting people watching. We went only on rare occasion, mostly to use the giant washer for big comforters and rugs, but oh was it fun to observe the customers. Sometimes hysterical, sometimes mundane, sometimes downright scary. What a place to be and be seen, right? Ha.
*Heather* - dara Ickes10/28/2010 11:58 AM
I think the last time that all of my laundry was ever truly finished - washed, dried, folded, and hung on hangers was when I had to go to the laundromat. It had to be before leaving...Now, it is in a constant state of being completed because it is convenient to just grab what is needed.
ReplyDelete - jennybee10/28/2010 1:58 PM
my earliest laundromat story is from when I was a wee child in Pomona, CA in the 1970's. I just remember being there with my mom and having fun on those HUGE baskets that stood tall on wheels, with a shallow, square and yellowish plastic basket. Then the basket cascaded high up with the metal bars for hanging laundry on. As a child, it was a magical place, lol :) email@example.com
ReplyDelete - Anonymous10/28/2010 2:25 PM
A magical place is much more fun to talk about than the laundromat! By my old apartment I found an old stairwell in the woods. Just concrete stairs and the most magical and inspiring place to sit and think and be surrounded by nature.
ReplyDelete My most favourite and magical place in the world is Loch Lee at the top of Glen Esk in Scotland.
Wild deer, foxes, rabbits and snakes roam the land. The sunset is magical and it's so quiet and peaceful.
Having hiked up there nearly every weekend in the summer of 2007 I didn't think anything different when my boyfriend wanted to go walking up it one evening in July.
He proposed to me on the evening of 20th July 2007 and we were married in July 2009. Although we now live 3 hours away, we still like to visit it.
It's beautiful.A long time ago in a land and life far away in Hawaii, I didn't have a washer and dryer. In the little town next door was a tiny laundromat run by an even tinier little Japanese lady. After using her laundromat for several months and exchanging polite small talk, she offered me a strange fruit, prickly on the outside and sweeeeet on the inside... my first lychee! It grew on a twisted, lovely tree just outside the back door of her laundromat... I took home a whole bowl full! The memory is vivid to this day.
ReplyDelete- Anonymous10/28/2010 7:35 PM
no good laundermat stories - so i could dearly use this book to take me on that adventure.
jacquieastemborski AT comcast DOT net I just remember not liking laundromats much. I used them frequently years ago as a college student. One time at the apartment complex I lived in, someone took all of our clean laundry out of the dryer and just threw the whole load on the floor! Very rude.
I've been to many magical places. Forests and beaches are magical for me. My mother's garden was always a peaceful and magical place too.
jennifer AT nobletouch DOT comI rarely used a laundromat but I did this last Saturday. I had to wash a lot of scatter rugs, pillows, and bedding for the cathouse we construct every fall in case a stray cat comes along during the winter. Since my washer cannot handle large loads, I went to the local laundromat with my book, with the intention of reading while waiting for the wash. To my surprise, there was a tv there and it was blaring. Since I was the only person in the place that early in the morning and could find no way to lower the volume, I unplugged the tv. Shortly after, a lady came in and proceeded to plug in the tv, use a screwdriver to change the channnel, but DID NOT reduce the volume although she could clearly see that I was reading and that I obviously had unplugged the tv. At that moment, I secretly wished to be Samantha in Bewitched so I could vaporize the harlot.
Please enter my name in the giveaway for the book. Thanks!
pboylecharley AT hotmail DOT com- Anonymous10/29/2010 8:37 AM
When I lived in some apartments in Arcadia, California, I used to go to the laundromat a lot. I noticed that there were a lot of short men coming in and was puzzled by that. Then it struck me, the race track, Santa Anita was just a few blocks from here, they were jockeys! Have another true story but I have saving that for the next time!
CarolNWong(at)aol(dot)com - Roberta10/29/2010 9:53 AM
When I was 25 I went to France and Italy by myself - was'nt planned that way - but that's what happened. Remember landing in Paris thinking what the heck am I doing!!!The lovliest place I saw on my travels was the back gardens at Versailles. I remember walking into part of it and being enveloped in a green fog - it doesn't sound that nice- but it was truly magically. I took many pictures but none captured the magic. Still have it in my minds eye though :) email@example.com
ReplyDelete In the mid 90's, my best friend in college and I took a roadtrip around the US. That included lots of visits to different laundry mats along the way. Some very nice ones, some in some very tranistional parts of town. Great for people watching, that's for sure. We saw everything from moms reading books to her children, to fighting couples, to sleeping homeless folks. The other memory I have about laundromats is using them in college and alway hoarding the quarters when I got change so I would have them when it came time to do the laundry on the weekends.
ReplyDeleteI stopped for the night in Austin Minnesota (home of Spam, the kind some people eat, not the electronic kind). I asked the lady at the front desk if the motel had laundry facilities and she said in a heavily accented voice, "give me your clothes." Conversation was difficult because of her limited English, so I gave her a bag full of dirty clothes. In the morning, she brought me my clean folded clothes and when I checked out I asked her how much for the laundry. She said, "no charge!"
ReplyDeleteWhen I first moved to Brooklyn, I didn't have laundry in my apartment but my building had laundry in the basement. Of course there were just a few washers for the many tenants in the building. One day when there was a long wait to do laundry in the basement, I took my laundry down the block to the neighborhood laundromat. And what a find it was! At about one'oclock, the laundromat seemed to get pretty crowded. The owner set out a long table in an area where people sat and read magazines & the paper while waiting for their clothes to finish washing & drying. On this table, the owner put out coffee and cookies, cakes, pie, cupcakes & pound cake, all homemade by various people in the neighborhood. People helped themselves and then sat and talked, getting to know each other! It was a wonderful afternoon and a terrific way to get to know my neighbors.
After that day, I took my laundry to that laundromat every Saturday morning and then spent the afternoon having coffee and cake with my neighbor-friends! In a city as big as Brooklyn, this was a great way to feel like I lived in a neighborhood.
I've since moved from that area, but I will always have fond memories of that laundromat!
Thank you for a wonderful giveaway!
~ Amy
Aimala127 AT gmail DOT comNot much of a story, but I sure was pleased in grad school (when my credit card and I were just barely getting by) to find a laundrymat with a trick dryer. The trick being that if I jiggled the start knob just right, the dryer would go forever without needing coins. I admit that I do feel a little bit guilty about it now, but at the time, I felt like I'd hit the million dollar jackpot in Vegas. I still think my washer and dryer have been one of the best purchases I've EVER made. Do not miss my laundrymat days.
ReplyDeleteNo good laundromat stories as it's been over 20 years since I've been to one. The story of the plants in the laundromat in "Hothouse Flower" reminded me of a magical place in a town near us. The town has a community college which has grown and sprawled and overtaken much of one end of town. In the middle of campus, though, is a shoe-repair shop with a yard full of tropical, vining, wild-looking, beautiful, lush plants. The man who owns the shop (he calls himself a "cobbler") has planted and tended the plants for over 40 years and will not sell his property to the college. They've left him alone, for some strange (magical?) reason, though they've used eminent domain to take over all the other nearby businesses and homes. We live in rural southern Indiana, so these kinds of gardens are not very common, which makes it all the more magical. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Susan - whatta fun bunch of reads! I will offer a magical moment - I was 17, an exchange student living outside of Paris in a teeny town and I went into the big city one day, just wandering about near the then new Pompidou Centre. I turned a corner and stood stock still as I stared with my mouth hanging open no doubt into a huge open courtyard filled with children and harlequins all dressed in white with amazing makeup and whirligigs, magic wands, fairy wings, organ music, and so much more and they were making art - glitter and glue, blowing bubbles - indeed, every possible imaginative gesture on earth, all utterly un-selfconscious and sweet and real. And it was as if I was invisible - they did not stop me from walking thru the crowd, they didn't speak to me or pay me any mind. It was like a total fairy fun zone and then I left! I had forgotten about this until reading some of these comments - so thanks for the memory! LOL
ReplyDeleteMy laundromat (across the street) from my 4 floor walk up was plant free and relatively boring. I always longed for one that was exotic, where you could haul your laundry in and some laundry fairy would do all the work for you and you could shop for a bit and come back and it would be all done. Sadly I used to perch on an extremely uncomfortable bench against a steamy window and try and read a book while watching that someone didnt' dump my laundry and steal my dryer time.
December 2015 update: Hi! For some reason I can't figure out, Blogger hasn't been letting me leave comments on my own blog (!) for the last several months, so I've been unable to respond to your comments and questions. My apologies for any inconvenience! You're always welcome to email me: farmgirlfare AT gmail DOT com.
Hi! Thanks for visiting Farmgirl Fare and taking the time to write. While I'm not always able to reply to every comment, I receive and enjoy reading them all.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated, and I especially love hearing about your experiences with my recipes. Comments on older posts are always welcome!
Please note that I moderate comments, so if I'm away from the computer it may be a while before yours appears.
I try my best to answer all questions, though sometimes it takes me a few days. And sometimes, I'm sorry to say, they fall through the cracks, and for that I sincerely apologize.
I look forward to hearing from you and hope you enjoy your e-visits to our farm!


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2011 may go down as the year of the retraction in the scientific world.
Among the highly publicized discoveries that got debunked this year: a genetic basis for longevity; a new form of life; an explanation for autism; and a link between a virus and chronic fatigue syndrome.
All of these non-discoveries have something in common: They involved findings that both scientists and the public badly wanted to believe.
One thing most people would like to believe is that science can help us live to be 100. So it was no surprise that people got pretty excited about a 2010 studyin the journal Science that offered a genetic explanation for long life.
The study identified 150 clusters of genes that seemed to be common in centenarians.
"The genetic control was very strong and allowed some prediction of who would live a long time," says David Goldstein, a professor of genetics at Duke University.
But as appealing as that idea was, Goldstein says he had major doubts.
"Everybody that does a lot of genome-wide association studies not only knew that there was an issue, but worked out what the issue was more or less immediately," he says.
The issue had to do with the specific devices, known as gene microarrays, used to identify and sequence the genomes of these centenarians, Goldstein says. For certain gene variants, he says, the devices are known to produce misleading results.
"At least some of the conclusions in the paper were due to this source of artifact," he says, which led the authors to retract their paper.
An Arsenic-Based Life-Form?
Another study based on an appealing idea described a bacterium that appeared to defy the rules of nature. This bug, from a lake in California, seemed to use the poison arsenic in place of an element thought essential for life.
NASA held a big press conference late last year to announce the finding, which provoked a lot of talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But many experts in the field were unimpressed by NASA's event.
"It took five minutes to decide it really shouldn't have happened," says Simon Silver of the University of Illinois, Chicago, who is an expert on organisms that can tolerate high levels of arsenic.
Critics said the study's data failed to back up its conclusion that this organism was incorporating arsenic into its DNA. Eventually, the journal Science published some of these criticisms online.
Then, just a few weeks ago, Silver's lab published a sequence of the organism's genome. The genome showed nothing that would suggest the organism is using arsenic in a unique way.
"It's not a bizarre bug at all," Silver says. "It has the normal range of genes, and there's just nothing surprising in its genome at all."
Even so, the authors stand by their study. And so far, the journal Science hasn't retracted it.
Autism And Vaccines
Parents of children with autism have long hoped for a better explanation of the disorder. So many of them embraced a 2005 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that suggested a government cover-up of a link between autism and the vaccine preservative thimerosal. The piece was published in the online magazine Salon and in Rolling Stone.
Scientists soon pointed out major errors in the piece, and Salon published a number of corrections.
Then this year, the writer Seth Mnookin published a book called The Panic Virus, which included a thorough dissection of the Kennedy piece.
"When my book came out, Salon used that as an occasion to sort of revisit the entire controversy and said publicly that it had been a mistake to publish it, and retracted the piece, and actually pulled it off of their website," Mnookin says.
Rolling Stone, though, hasn't followed suit.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
One of the most prominent retractions this year involved chronic fatigue syndrome, a mysterious problem that patients and scientists have been trying to understand for many years.
The mystery seemed like it might be solved in 2009 when a study in the journal Science linked chronic fatigue to a mouse retrovirus called XMRV. That study was a big deal for people with chronic fatigue.
"This is a group of people that initially were basically told by a lot of doctors: 'You're not sick, get over it,' " says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of a blog called Retraction Watch, and the executive editor of Reuter's Health.
At first, the study seemed to confirm that chronic fatigue was caused by a virus. But Oransky says the results haven't held up.
"Now it's become clear that that was a house of cards," he says. "There was something wrong with those results, and therefore there was something wrong with the conclusions."
Oransky says this particular house of cards seems to have been built using contaminated samples, poorly designed experiments, and scientists who desperately wanted to believe their own results.
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