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Seattle belts Broncos
Published 12:00 am Monday, February 3, 2014
By BARRY WILNER
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) — Defense wins championships, and the NFL has not seen a defense like Seattle's in a long time.
The Seahawks won their first Super Bowl title Sunday night in overpowering fashion, punishing Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos 43-8. That relentless defense, the NFL's stingiest, never let the five-time MVP get going, disarming the highest-scoring offense in league history.
Seattle (16-3) was too quick, too physical and just too good for Denver, and that was true in all areas. What was hyped as a classic matchup between an unstoppable offense and a miserly defense turned into a rout.
Punctuating Seattle's dominance were a 69-yard interception return touchdown by linebacker Malcolm Smith to make it 22-0, and Percy Harvin's sensational 87-yard kickoff runback to open the second half.
Smith was the game's MVP.
When the Seahawks, up by 29 points, forced a Denver punt early in the third quarter, the 12th Man — and there were legions of them in MetLife Stadium — began chanting "L-O-B, L-O-B."
As in Legion of Boom, the Seahawks hard-hitting secondary, part of young team with an average age of 26 years, 138 days.
"This is an amazing team. Took us four years to get to this point but they never have taken a step sideways," coach Pete Carroll said. "These guys would not take anything but winning this ballgame."
The loss by the Broncos again raised questions about Manning's ability to win the biggest games. He is 11-12 in the postseason, 1-2 in Super Bowls. He never looked comfortable against a defense some will begin comparing to the 1985 Bears and 2000 Ravens — other NFL champions who had runaway Super Bowl victories.
Seattle forced four turnovers; Denver had 26 all season.
The Seahawks looked comfortable and at ease, and not just their defense, which lost All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman to a high ankle sprain in the fourth quarter.
Russell Wilson, who has an NFL-record 28 wins in his first two pro seasons, including playoffs, had a 23-yard TD pass to Jermaine Kearse late in the third quarter to make it 36-0.
Wilson also hit Doug Baldwin for a 10-yard score in the final period in what had become one of the most lopsided Super Bowls. For the fifth time in six meetings between the NFL's No. 1 offense and defense, the D dominated.
"We been relentless all season," Wilson said. "Having that mentality of having a championship day every day. At the end of the day, you want to play your best football and that is what we did today."
Denver fell to 2-5 in Super Bowls, and by the end many of Manning's passes resembled the "ducks" Sherman said the All-Pro quarterback sometimes threw.
The victory was particularly sweet for Carroll, who was fired in 1994 by the Jets, led the Patriots for three seasons and again was canned. After a short stint out of coaching, he took over at Southern California and won two national titles.
But he always felt there was unfinished business in the NFL. Carroll finished that business by lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy, four years after taking charge in Seattle and eight years after the Seahawks lost in their only previous Super Bowl to Pittsburgh.
No Super Bowl had been played outdoors in a cold-weather city before — not that the Big Apple was anything close to frozen Sunday, with a 49-degree temperature at kickoff. And no Super Bowl has started more bizarrely.
Things went sour for Manning and the Broncos from the very first scrimmage play, and by halftime they were down 22-0 — their biggest deficit of the season and the only time they didn't score in a half.
On that first play for the Broncos, Manning stepped up toward the line just as center Manny Ramirez snapped the ball. It flew past his incredulous quarterback into the end zone, where Knowshon Moreno dived on it for a safety.
A mere 12 seconds in, Seattle led 2-0 with the quickest score in Super Bowl history, beating Chicago's Devin Hester's kickoff return to open the 2007 game — against Manning's Colts.
That one ended much better for Manning as Indianapolis won the championship. This one was a fiasco throughout.
Steven Hauschka, who missed only 2 of 40 field goals entering the game, made a 31-yarder for 5-0 and a 33-yarder for 8-0 after Doug Baldwin toasted 15-year veteran cornerback Champ Bailey, in his first Super Bowl, for 37 yards on third down.
Then the Seahawks began scoring touchdowns.
Manning's third-down pass to Julius Thomas sailed way too high and directly to safety Kam Chancellor, giving the Seahawks the ball at Denver's 37. Harvin, finally healthy after a virtually wasted first season in Seattle, sparked the short drive with a 15-yard burst, and a third-down pass interference call on Tony Carter gave Seattle the ball at the 1.
Marshawn Lynch scored to make it 15-0.
Then Smith, with a play emblematic of the best defense the NFL has seen in years, made his second huge play in two weeks.
Cliff Avril got to Manning's arm as he was throwing, the ball fluttered directly to Smith, who took off down the left sideline for a 69-yard interception TD.
Manning trudged to the sideline, a look of disgust on his face.
That look didn't improve when, after a drive to the Seattle 19, his fourth-down pass was tipped by Chris Clemons and fell harmlessly to the Meadowlands turf.
So did Denver's reputation as an unstoppable force.


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The Mother Of Pearl Glow Drops
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The Princeton University Program in Theater, in partnership with Community House and the Community-Based Learning Initiative, is offering the course "Devising Theater With Youth" this semester as part of a continuing effort to expose students to the broadest possible range of performance theory and practice. The class serves as an example of the Lewis Center for the Arts' commitment to encouraging undergraduates to think critically about the role of the arts in community and civic engagement.
The service-learning course, showcased in this video, promotes experiential learning for both Princeton University students and a small group of children from Community House, an on-campus after-school program. Led by Erica Nagel, artistic engagement manager at the McCarter Theatre Center and a lecturer in theater and the Lewis Center for the Arts, this hands-on course provides an opportunity for Princeton students to elicit the voices of children, interweave them into a theatrical performance and participate in a collaborative community event to share what they created. The class will culminate with a performance of the students' work at the Community House holiday party Dec. 9.
Over the course of the semester, the participating Princeton students learned skills such as facilitation, lesson planning, curriculum design, ensemble building, dramaturgical thinking and theatrical composition, as well as the foundational of theory and methods of devised theater practice. For the children of the youth ensemble, the goals of participation were to offer a creative outlet, facilitate their comfort and desire to share to their own stories, encourage collaboration and communication, build theatrical skills such as vocal projection and stage presence, and create a final product of which they felt proud.
The play the group created together is focused on the theme of dreams. It is made up of four scenes in various styles based on dreams that were shared by young ensemble members or that they had collected from friends and family members. The scenes were linked by a framework of movement and sound generated by brainstorms and conversations about dreams and dreaming.


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Dale Carnegie Sales Training: Winning with Relationship Selling
We are uniquely positioned to prepare sales professionals to transition into the new world where collaboration, confidence and credibility are the way to connect with customers to increase business. Today's customers are just too savvy for old tricks. Dale Carnegie's proven selling process includes human relations skills grounded in timeless fundamentals from "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
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Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman has been sentenced to 78 months in prison.
It means Siegelman is headed back to prison after he was freed to appeal his case. The AP gives us some background:
"Siegelman, 66, and former HealthSouth chief Richard Scrushy were convicted in 2006. They arranged $500,000 in contributions to Siegelman's campaign for a state lottery in exchange for the governor appointing Scrushy to an important hospital regulatory board.
"Before his sentencing that his lawyer called 'cruel and unusual,' the 66-year-old Siegelman told a judge that he 'deeply regrets' the things he has done."
According to The Birmingham News, the sentence issued by U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, who originally sentenced Siegelman, was 10 months less than the original one. Fuller also gave Siegelman credit for the 9 months he had already served.
The News recounts the scene in the courtroom:
"As Fuller pronounced sentence on Siegelman, his children, Dana and Joseph, broke into tears. As they put their faces in their hands and wept, the mother put her arms around them.
"Siegelman embraced each of his attorneys and thanked them for their help. He went to try to comfort his family, then shook hands and hugged supporters, some of whom offered words of encouragement, some of sorrow."
The AP reports that Fuller said he understood that Siegelman had done good things, but he "said they did not justify the crimes for which he was convicted."
He said Seigelman — who took the bribe — deserved to serve as much time as the man who paid the bribe.
Siegelman is free until Sept. 11 when he is supposed to turn himself in.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Microsoft FY11Q3 Results
What's on your mind as the Microsoft FY11Q3 results get released? Some things I'm thinking of:
Win7 Business being eaten alive by iPads? Oh, those hungry hungry cannibals eating away the post-PCs for your PC dependent iPad slates. Probably no good news in the Win7 OS business could please people seeing Apple having to buy everyone working at Apple pants with ten pockets so that they can continue stuffing money into them.
Office 14 / SharePoint: continued strength? Leveled? Dip?
Kinect: what are the post-holiday sells like?
Xbox Live security: not that we want to be cocky, but if Xbox Live was broken into like Sony's Playstation Network Microsoft would have a big-black eye. Probably two. How confident is Microsoft in the network's security?
WP7 numbers: how has the trend been in activated phones? How is the Nokia deal shaping up? How will Microsoft not be the weepy little toy of the phone carriers crying over a release chart when the Mango update goes out?
Share price: talk about one dead share. It's a dead fish. That a bunch of hippy dock-workers played hacky-sack with and left to rot out in the sun. So dead that we're shifting budgets around to not award stock but give out crisp, sweet-smelling Benjamins instead to the employees we value most. Microsoft millionaire days? A long, long distant memory. I think of that book Microsoft In The Mirror where a number of interviewees were reluctant to share with outside folks that they work at Microsoft because folks would light up, assuming they were rich beyond words. Today's response? "You work at Microsoft? Well bless your heart."
Keeping employees: seems as though we'll need to justify the extra bucks and effort the company is putting into spreading cash to the section of employees most likely to be recruited (aka poached) or give up on Microsoft. I'm sure that the investors could care less about our performance review system, but it's sad we stuck with a 20th-centry industrial review system for a 21st century Gen.Next workforce. Like many opportunities: buh-lown.
The two pressure points I certainly continue to feel:
WP7: the NoDo update was just a Class-A Cluster-Fuck. And I don't use language like that very often. And the fact that the pre-update bricked phones was inexcusable. The WinMo team has to realize that everything they have to do must be perfect and ahead of schedule (wrt running in customer's hands). Any sort of focus other than that is a recipe for disaster. Mr. Ballmer is a fan of Coach John Wooden. WWJWD? Pound excellence into the team such that releasing an update was the easiest thing they had to do. If you're the kind of person looking for a challenge to fix Microsoft and prop-up its future, look for opportunities to join that team. Less Pink, more you.
iPad: it's pretty. It's slick. It comes from a company where design is realized. It doesn't do as much as a PC, but it does enough. And by now everyone has been able to put together the pieces (e.g., Windows 8 demonstrated running on ARM) to figure out when Microsoft might release something that has similar form factor. But will it have the elegance and cohesiveness of the iPad 2, let alone the iPad 3? Will it be too late?
Should Microsoft release an iPad competitor, it will be THE defining moment for Microsoft's future: back in the game or game over.


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Trying to KILL himself?!
I'm sorry, I didn't include enough punctuation there:
It's mind-boggling: This is sports' ultimate narcissist...
...Trying to commit suicide?
If you thought there were other sports storylines today, you can just forget about that now.
Before we know anything, a few questions:
What were his motivations?
Was it the meds he was on?
And, finally, this one:
Was it the pressure (and result) of being the fans' -- and absolutely the media's -- No. 1-ranked "Bad Guy" that drove him to it?
I'm going to predict this: Fan and media treatment of T.O. will lighten up substantially after this. (Well, maybe except in Philly.)
Update: I'm going to point to the Deadspin coverage, which includes a Comments section to the story that is absolutely NOT for you if you see absolutely no humor in this. But humor is also a way to deal with or filter the news; this just about covers it.
This is a great example of a breaking-news story where bloggers are ahead of mainstream media in terms of offering opinion/reaction/analysis... and blog COMMENTERS are even ahead of bloggers themselves.
When I wrote the Quickie, I always loved it when a story broke in the morning, because I could be first on the site with an opinion take -- even if it was only a place-holder until the appropriate sport columnist came in with a longer opinion. I always felt like I was adding value and taking full advantage of the medium -- even if the opinion was "insta-gut" or half-baked. Readers want their opinion as fast as the story itself is posted.
Mainstream media (even online) is still trying to catch up to consumer appetite -- that's why blogs are so effective (and why comments on blogs are even more effective: The opinion of many, instantly, being even more effective than the opinion of one, instantly.)
That's a lot of "inside baseball" -- the story itself (and everyone's reactions) remains jaw-droppingly fascinating. I mean, of all the possible athletes, it just HAD to be T.O., didn't it?


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Notice: This Wiki is now read only and edits are no longer possible. Please see: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/wikis/Wiki-shutdown-plan for the plan.
STEM Disease Models
New models are continually being added to STEM. Today STEM comes with a variety of basic models which implement algorithms such as those found in Anderson & May's textbook on Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0198545991. STEM also includes more advanced models created by groups investigating current problems in epidemiology. The STEM framework also encourages users to create their own models and to even contribute them back to STEM.
Basic Models
STEM comes with implementations of many standard epidemiological compartment models. These include both Stochastic and Deterministic SI, SIR, and SEIR models as well as models with seasonal forcing and nonlinear interaction terms.
SI and SIS models
The simple two-state SI or SI(S) model is useful in describing some classes of microparasitic infections to which individuals never acquire a long lasting immunity. Certain RNA viruses such as rhinoviruses and coronaviruses (the common cold) mutate so rapidly that individuals recently recovered from a cold will still be susceptible to other strains of the same virus circulating in a population. In a simple model for this process, individuals never enter a recovered state, but rather alternate between being susceptible and being infectious.
SIR and SIRS models
More generally, after exposure to microparasitic infection, individuals who recover from a disease will enter a third state where they are immune to subsequent infection. This Recovered State, R, appears in the SIR(S) compartment models. For infections that confer lifelong immunity in the recovered state, an SIR model is appropriate. Typical examples for which an SIR model is used include Paramyxovirus (measles) and Viral Parotitis (mumps). In cases involving the Orthomyxoviridae viruses (which cause seasonal flu), immunity is not lifelong and may decrease over time. Immunity loss can reflect a decrease in an individual's immune response, or a genetic drift in the circulating strain of virus that diminishes the effectiveness of the acquired immunity. In either case, an SIRS model represents the rate at which people in a Recovered state return to a susceptible state.
SEIR and SEIRS models
Some infectious diseases are also characterized by an incubation period between exposure to the pathogen and the development of clinical symptoms. If the exposed individual is not infectious during this incubation period (e.g., not shedding virus), it is important to model the incubation time explicitly. Note that there is a difference between an incubation time and a period of latency. A virus may or may not be dormant when an individual is in an exposed state. It is important to model the exposed (E) state explicitly when there is a delay between the time at which an individual is infected and the time at which that individual becomes infectious. In this case an SEIR(S) model is appropriate. Smallpox, for example, has an incubation period of 7-14 days
The disease models in STEM are implementations of these compartment models expressed as differential equations. These differential equations have a variety of parameters that are similar to the constants in a chemical rate equation. Users can easily change the basic parameters of any model in STEM with a text editor (called the property editor). This tunes the model based on the particular disease of interest. New models with even more advanced mathematics can easily be added to STEM - but that does take some knowledge of the Java programming language and of Eclipse. Please see the Tutorials and User Guides for detailed information on how to do this.
Once you have put together a model with a geographic region and other data (like transportation, time, and human population) you can easily export your work and share it with other users of STEM. In this way STEM is intended to promote scientific collaboration allowing researchers to build on each others work. See the section on Importing and Exporting Projects for instructions on how to do this and for information on some example scenarios.
Advanced Models
(new) 2019 novel Corona Virus Model
This is an all in one archive containing all the components need to run a global model of 2019-novel Corona Virus (nCoV). nCoV is currently emerging and epidemiological parameters are not certain at this time. Please see the 2019 novel Corona Virus Model page for full documentation on the model.
Ebola Models
The STEM community created several Ebola Models during the recent Ebola Epidemic.
Multi-population Disease Models
In models of human to human transmission between cohorts or demographic groups, transmission may vary significantly between groups. STEM provides the ability to model transmission of the same disease between multiple population groups. Please see the tutorial on multi-population disease models as well as the measles example. STEM comes with several examples of multipopulation disease models including SI(S), SIR(S), SEIR(S) and Measles.
Malaria (MacDonald Ross Disease Model)
Our model for malaria transmission is based on work originally carried out by Ross (1911) and MacDonald (1957). Details can be retrieved from the documentation describing the MacDonald Ross Model.
Dengue Disease Transmission Model
We implemented three different version of dengue model in STEM in order to capture different levels of dengue transmission complexity. The base case model, called M1, only includes host component. Model 2 (M2) captures transmission through a vector by adding susceptible-exposed-infectives(SEI)model explicitly defining transmission through a mosquito population. Finally, the "full model" (M3) addds the exposed compartment to capture incubation period of the virus within the human host. Details can be obtained from journal article in Journal of Theoretical Biology (Hu, et. al. 2013) and the documentation describing the Dengue Fever Models.
Polio Disease Transmission Model
This model mainly focuses on capturing wild poliovirus transmission and modeling the risks of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs) from OPV using nine compartments. Details can be obtained on the introductory page of polio model.
Measles Transmission Model
This model focuses on modeling the measles extended to include maternal immunity as well as a delay in anti-body response after immunization. Details can be obtained from introductory page of measles model.
Avian Influenza Model
A basic model of avian influenza includes transmission pathways birds-to-birds, birds-to-humans and humans-to-humans. More details are available at Avian Influenza Model.
Nonlinear Models
STEM also implements nonlinear versions of the basic compartment models where the bilinear transmission kinetics term (βSI) is replaced with a model of nonlinear transmission [e.g., βSIν, ν > 1 (see Liu, Hethcote and Levin, 1987)]. Dynamical behavior of epidemiological models with nonlinear incidence rates. J. Math. Biol. 25: 359-380). Nonlinear models can be used to model dose response, saturation, or "swamping" of the immune system as a function of disease burden or repeated exposure.
Seasonal Transmission (Forcing Function) Models
Sinusoidal Model
Many diseases exhibit periodic or quasi-periodic epidemics, the most well being seasonal influenza. Recent experiments using guinea pigs suggest that seasonal variations in influenza incidence may be explained by small changes in transmission rate due to changes in temperature and relative humidity (Lowen et al., 2007; Shaman et al., 2009). Since SIR(S) disease models have an intrinsic tendency to oscillate (although with dampened effect), such changes can be further amplified by dynamic resonance caused by the population dynamics of the host-pathogen system (Dushoff et al., 2004).
As defined by Dushoff (2004), a SIR(S) model has a natural frequency
where γ is the recovery rate, α the immunity loss rate, and Ro the basic reproductive number. While a deterministic SIR(S) model with constant transmission will not exhibit sustained oscillations, it can demonstrate "damped" oscillations at this natural frequency, with the epidemic eventually dying out or tending to a fixed point of endemic infection. If the transmission rate includes a periodic excitation term (a forcing function) tuned to the same resonant frequency, seasonal oscillations may be sustained. If the frequencies differ, as is the case for any forced harmonic oscillator, the system may exhibit sustained oscillations with "beats" resulting in some epidemics that are larger than others.
STEM includes advanced models seasonally modulated transmission coefficient β(t). A deterministic SIR(S) model with constant transmission will never produce sustained periodic epidemics or seasonality (Dushoff et al., 2004). The simplest seasonal transmission function implemented in STEM uses periodic forcing function:
β(t) = βo[(1 - x) + x sin(ωt + φ)]
where βo is the(max) transmission amplitude and x determines the periodic part of the excitation function (0<=x<=1).
Gaussian Model
We are also developing a periodic excitation function based on a linear combination of (periodic) Gaussian excitations. This function may be useful in modeling data where the size of the epidemic varies year to year based on known differences in transmissability of a disease (for example variations in the dominant serotype or strain).
We define β(t) as:
where i is the index of the yearly influenza season; βi is the peak transmission coefficient for season i; (1-ρi) is the fraction by which transmission varies seasonally in season i (0 < ρi < 1.0); ti is the day of peak transmission for season i; g(x, σi) is the probability distribution function of a Gaussian distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation σi; and ξ(t,ti) is the mixing function. The day of peak transmission, ti, is defined so that the transmission function has a period of exactly 1 year, with constant phase, φ. That is transmission peaks φ days after January 1 of season i. The joining function, ξ(t,ti), smoothly joins adjacent Gaussians so that β(t) is only dependent upon a single Gaussian during the period of season i when most transmission occur.
Interpolation of Sampling Points
The seasonal variations of the incidence of a disease can be caused by different things. Climate changes can be the reason as mentioned above, but even the beginning and the end of the school year can have an influence on the disease. In order to be able to model all kinds of seasonal variations, the STEM user should be able to specify every possible excitation function, which can be done as shown in the following. The user specifies the transmission rate for several days in the year and interpolation is used to compute the transmission rate for all remaining days. The simplest interpolation method is linear interpolation. To get a smooth function spline interpolation can be used.
Models of Population
STEM also allows users to model populations (human, insect, animal, etc). Please see the page on STEM Population Models for detailed information on the many types of population models available


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Carmelo Anthony scores 28 in return: But everyone knew Melo would score. The real question: How would AI do playing alongside him? The answer: Just fine, thanks. Iverson had 23 pts on 9/16 FG shooting, with 7 assists. You can already tell: They're going to be great together. Not great enough to win the West, mind you, but very entertaining.
Raiders hire Lane Kiffin, who becomes (at 31) the youngest head coach in the NFL and/or the only coach naive enough to take the Raiders job.
This hire shouldn't surprise anyone: Al Davis likes 'em young (yeesh) and, until this weekend, the front-runner for the job was Kiffin's co-worker in the USC offensive coaching staff, Steve Sarkisian (Age 32).
It remains to be seen how the Raiders will respond to a 31-year-old head coach with so little experience, although Jon Gruden did just fine in
Of course, the Raiders would likely respond badly to ANY coach, no matter what age he is.
I say: Good for Kiffin to understand that there are 32 of these jobs in the world, and even if he fails, he'll be seen as having gained "valuable experience" as an NFL head coach, which is a golden ticket to coach again in the NFL *and* college.
SB XLI Watch: Peyton Manning will have an X-ray on his right thumb, but everyone seems to think it'll be fine by game time.
NBA Tonight: It is the Game of the Year (so far) -- Suns at Wizards. The Team Everyone Is Universally Slurping This Season versus the Player That Everyone Is Universally Slurping This Season. Look: You can love both or hate both, but it's a virtual guarantee that this game will be – aesthetically – as awesome an event as you'll see this season.
If you remember, the Suns were riding a sick 15-game win streak earlier this season, and the Wizards (no great road team) came to Phoenix and out-gunned the Suns, partially helping to fulfill Gilbert Arenas' prophecy that he would take his Team USA snub out on the ones who delivered it (54 points).
The rematch is tonight in DC: The Suns are again riding a wild win streak. Perhaps they will be motivated from the loss at home, but the Wizards at home are like a different team. And if the Wiz on the road could beat the Suns, then the Wiz at home have a great shot.
(Is it really true that
Another day, another Bengals arrest: This time it was CB Johnathan Joseph, arrested for pot possession. Anyone want to guess how many Bengals arrests that makes in the last 9 months? NINE. This team is the biggest bunch of criminals in sports history. They make the "Jail Blazers" look like the Portland Children's Choir.
On the one-year anniversary of the "81" game,
Parcells quits Cowboys, retires from coaching (Day 2): I'm already sick of this story. No, I'm not surprised. No, I don't think he's coming back. No, I have no idea who the Cowboys will hire, but I'm quite sure that any coach in his right mind will insist they jettison T.O. before he does.
Michael Vick is off the hook, legally: But that doesn't mean that Bobby Petrino won't give his starting QB job away to Matt Schaub!
Those "evil" college football recruiting sites were taken to task yesterday in front of the NCAA's Knight Commission, which presumably played its usual role of worry-wart. Personally, I love them.
Are they sketchy? Sure. But for all the slop on the message boards, there is a lot of really good info you simply won't get from your local newspaper coverage or ESPN.
Are they professionalizing high school athletes? Sure. But that was going to happen without the influence of Web-based recruiting gossip.
I will say that there is a lack of quality control, and recruiting-site "reporters" have been known to try to steer recruits to certain schools or spread misinformation. (Of course, the "legitimate" recruiting sites are seeping with agendas, too.)
A fix is difficult: How are you going to regulate the skeeves? You could punish the schools if you can find a link, but that's not particularly productive. "Recruiting Web site reporter" is the new "street agent" (if you read "Raw Recruits," which everyone should).
NHL unveils new unis. Only one place to go for answers to you questions: UniWatch Blog.
So you tell me: What day would be most appropriate for my one-day-only NASCAR preview bonanza? (Here's a hint:
Barbaro loses! I presume Eclipse Awards voters know more about horse racing than the rest of us, but how did Barbaro lose out on "Horse of the Year" to Invasor? I guess because it's not a popularity contest.
"Bam Bam" Bigelow dead at 45: I remember when he made his WWF debut. He was such a force to be reckoned with.
The Bloggie Nominations come out today. I have heard rumors that your collective effort put me among the leaders (say, Top 30 or so) in nominations-submitted for Best New Blog of 2006 and, amazingly, Best Overall Blog. At the very least, that moved this blog into the second phase of the process, where individual judges rated this blog against the other high-volume nominees. No matter how it turns out today, I can't thank you enough for the amazing show of support to get this far.


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Washington's restoration of the employee's portion of the payroll tax that funds Social Security may be good news or bad news, depending on your perspective.
But what seems definitely to fall into the latter category is new research indicating that Social Security, even with the fresh funding boost, is on shakier ground than generally thought.
In a Sunday New York Times op-ed, researchers Gary King of Harvard and Samir Soneji of Dartmouth argue that the Social Security Administration is using outdated methods to project longevity and therefore understates the system's shortfall.
The two professors forecast that Social Security's trust funds will be depleted two years earlier than the government's current 2033 estimate, meaning there are just 18 years before a program that Americans across the board support and rely on faces a funding crisis.
The issue comes at a time when discussions of spending and taxation are near on the political calendar, but while partisan rancor and stalemate are unusually high as well. Nevertheless, King and Soneji warn "the longer we ignore the problem, the more disruptive any change will need to be to keep Social Security alive."
The basis for their timeline compression, discussed at length in a longer article in the academic journal Demography, is a finding that the Social Security Administration projections underestimate Americans' longevity and omit significant health trends, like reduced smoking and improved treatment of heart disease.
Specifically, King and Soneji say that Social Security relies heavily on actuaries using 1930s-era forecasting methods, but seem to have missed the revolution in big data and employ few statisticians capable of making accurate predictions. The result, they say, is that "more retirees will receive benefits for longer than predicted, supported by the payroll taxes of relatively fewer working adults than projected."
The two researchers, with the cooperation of the Social Security Administration, examined how the agency made its forecasts and found its methods are prone to error and political interference.
"This may explain why the agency's forecasts have, at times, changed significantly from year to year, even when there was little change in the underlying data," they write.
The authors outline familiar, painful options to save a program they say has "lifted generations of elderly people out of poverty." These include raising the retirement age, now gradually rising from 65 to 67, still higher to 69 or 70; increasing payroll taxes still higher; limiting annual cost-of-living adjustments; reducing benefits; or some combination of the above.
As the public debates these issues, the authors also recommend the Social Security Administration add statisticians on staff to institute up-to-date quantitative methodologies.
The Times article has generated further attention of economic bloggers, in some cases adding to the seeming direness of the problem.
For example, the Daily Beast's Megan McArdle notes that downside surprises have been far more common than upside surprises in Social Security trust fund projections.
She notes that massive economic booms, people delaying retirement and mass unexpected mortality produce upside surprises while slow growth, people retiring early (often because of a slow economy) and people living longer produce downside surprises. She asks: "Which of these sets of things seems more likely over the next ten years?"
The American Enterprise Institute's Andrew Biggs, writing on the conservative think tank's blog on Tuesday, finds the researchers' shortfall worries plausible. But he says they got the politics wrong when they stated that in the recent election both parties agreed that Social Security should not be reformed.
"Romney, in fact, proposed indexing the retirement age to longevity along with reducing the growth of benefits for middle and high earners," he writes. "President Obama, however, to date has made no proposals to fix Social Security."
Brookings Institute scholar Pietro Nivola cites a Pew Research survey he says shows Americans are not keen on raising the Social Security retirement age, a key path to shoring up the retirement trust's finances.
Source: AdvisorOne


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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Barack Obama says he won't go after pot users in Colorado and Washington, two states that just legalized the drug for recreational use. But advocates argue the president said the same thing about medical marijuana — and yet U.S. attorneys continue to force the closure of dispensaries across the U.S.
Welcome to the confusing and often conflicting policy on pot in the U.S., where medical marijuana is legal in many states, but it is increasingly difficult to grow, distribute or sell it. And at the federal level, at least officially, it is still an illegal drug everywhere.
Obama's statement Friday provided little clarity in a world where marijuana is inching ever so carefully toward legitimacy.
That conflict is perhaps the greatest in California, where the state's four U.S. Attorneys criminally prosecuted large growers and launched a coordinated crackdown on the state's medical marijuana industry last year by threatening landlords with property forfeiture actions. Hundreds of pot shops went out of business.
Steve DeAngelo, executive director of an Oakland, Calif., dispensary that claims to be the nation's largest, called for a federal policy that treats recreational and medical uses of the drug equally.
"If we're going to recognize the rights of recreational users, then we should certainly protect the rights of medical cannabis patients who legally access the medicine their doctors have recommended," he said.
The government is planning to soon release policies for dealing with marijuana in Colorado and Washington, where federal law still prohibits pot, as elsewhere in the country.
"It would be nice to get something concrete to follow," said William Osterhoudt, a San Francisco criminal defense attorney representing government officials in Mendocino County who recently received a demand from federal investigators for detailed information about a local system for licensing growers of medical marijuana.
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he was frustrated by Obama's comments because the federal government continues to shutter dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws, including California.
"A good step here would be to stop raiding those legal dispensaries who are doing what they are allowed to do by law," said the San Francisco Democrat. "There's a feeling that the federal government has gone rogue on hundreds of legal, transparent medical marijuana dispensaries, so there's this feeling of them being in limbo. And it puts the patients, the businesses and the advocates in a very untenable place."
Obama, in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, said Friday that federal authorities have "bigger fish to fry" when it comes to targeting recreational pot smokers in Colorado and Washington.
Some advocates said the statement showed the president's willingness to allow residents of states with marijuana laws to use the drug without fear of federal prosecution.
"It's a tremendous step forward," said Joe Elford, general counsel for Americans for Safe Access. "It suggests the feds are taking seriously enough the idea that there should be a carve-out for states with marijuana laws."
Obama's statements on recreational use mirror the federal policy toward states that allow marijuana use for medical purposes.
"We are not focusing on backyard grows with small amounts of marijuana for use by seriously ill people," said Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in Sacramento. "We are targeting money-making commercial growers and distributors who use the trappings of state law as cover, but they are actually abusing state law."
Alison Holcomb, who led the legalization drive in Washington state, said she doesn't expect Obama's comment to prompt the federal government to treat recreational marijuana and medical marijuana differently.
"At this point, what the president is looking at is a response to marijuana in general. The federal government has never recognized the difference between medical and non-medical marijuana," she said. "I don't think this is the time he'd carve out separate policies. I think he's looking for a more comprehensive response."
Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law in 1998, and dispensaries have proliferated across the state in recent years.
Last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed legislation that would have created a state system for licensing medical dispensaries over concern that it would require state workers to violate the federal Controlled Substances Act.
For the most part, dispensaries in western Washington have been left alone. But federal authorities did conduct raids earlier this year on dispensaries they said were acting outside the state law, such as selling marijuana to non-patients. Warning letters have been sent to dispensaries that operate too close to schools.
"What we've seen is enforcement of civil laws and warnings, with a handful of arrests of people who were operating outside state law," Holcomb said.
Eastern Washington has seen more raids because the U.S. attorney there is more active, Holcomb added.
Colorado's marijuana measure requires lawmakers to allow commercial pot sales, and a state task force that will begin writing those regulations meets Monday.
State officials have reached out to the Justice Department seeking help on regulating a new legal marijuana industry but haven't heard back.
DeAngelo said Friday that the Justice Department should freeze all pending enforcement actions against legal medical cannabis providers and review its policies to make sure they're consistent with the president's position. He estimated federal officials have shuttered 600 dispensaries in the state and 1,000 nationwide.
DeAngelo's Harborside Health Center is facing eviction after the U.S. attorney in San Francisco pressured his landlord to stop harboring what the government considers an illegal business.
"While it's nice to hear these sorts of positive words from the president, we are facing efforts by the Justice Department to shut us down, so it's hard for me to take them seriously," DeAngelo said.
The dispensary has a hearing Thursday in federal court on the matter.
Associated Press writers Terry Collins in San Francisco and Manuel Valdes in Seattle contributed to this report.


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100 posts already?I just can't believe I've managed to post 100 times..!!I still remember one evening in December,after drooling enough looking at all the yummilicious blogs around,I finally decided I will start a blog too..but I did just that-registered to blogger and just left it at that.It wasn't until March that I started posting and I realized that I just needed a start coz ever since,I've managed to post regularly,even though not on a daily basis.Its amazing what blogging could do to you..I've made so many friends..just can't describe the joy I feel when the people whom I adored posted comments on my blog.
I crossed the borders I had drawn out for myself and ventured into newer arenas in cooking.I can never imagine myself getting into baking and other fusion cooking,if not for this blog.In fact,now when I make something special,hubby mock-teases me saying that I made it for my blog and not for him!!Menus are planned according to the events going on in blogosphere and same attention is given to posting as is to cooking.Hubby has got used to waiting on the table(and sometimes,helping me too!)while I finish taking the snaps and giving me suggestions whenever he remembers a favorite but long forgotten dish and reminding me to put that on my blog!Thank you dear!!;-)
I thank all my friends in blogosphere for all the love and encouragement you guys have showered on me,which is the sole reason which motivates me to keep going.Thank you guys-We Rock!!!
Now presenting the special dish for a special post-Zebra cake..or was it a Tiger cake..a Leopard cake..??Your pick!!I've been mesmerized by this one ever since I saw my blogger friends posting it on their blog.I never ever thought I could make this,but I did!!All thanks to you guys..!!I thought hard on what to post for my 100th..this one sounded so apt..!!I've been hugely inspired by Deeba,Shyam and Arundhathi and had checked out their posts about a hundred times before making this myself.Do check out Farida's version too.
So applaud please...for the Zebra..!!!
Zebra Cake
Eggs - 4
Sugar - 1 cup
Milk - 1 cup
Oil(I used Sunflower) - 1 cup
Vanilla Essence - 1 tsp
Flour - 2 cups
Baking powder - 2 tsp
Salt - 1/4 tsp
Dark Cocoa Powder - 4-5 tbsp
In a large mixing bowl, combine eggs and sugar until creamy and light in colour.
Add milk and oil and continue beating till well blended.
Add Vanilla.Gradually add flour and beat till the batter is smooth.
Divide mixture into 2 equal portions.
Keep one portion plain.
Add cocoa powder to the other and mix well.(the colour of the batter should be quite dark,so add more if needed).
Preheat oven to 180*C.
Assembling the cake -
Scoop 3 heaped tbsps of plain batter into the middle of the baking pan.
Then scoop 3 tbsps of cocoa batter and pour it in the center on top of the plain batter.
Continue this way until both the batters are finished.
Do not spread the batter or tilt the pan to distribute the mixture. It will spread by itself and fill the pan gradually.Bake for 40 minutes,or till done.


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As with a lot of roasts I sometimes think that I have more fun with the ham leftovers than the initial meal and I always like to start off with that precious ham bone! The ham bone is perfect for simmering for hours in soups and stocks to bring out all of its flavour imparting it into the soup. You can use a ham bone in a lot of different soups but my favourite has to be the classic split pea soup which is a bowl of comfort food on a chilly day. With the days getting colder I knew that I would be using the bone from the gingersnap crusted ham that I made last week and it was the perfect opportunity to update my split pea soup recipe with some new photos!
This split pea soup is super easy to make where you really just need to saute some vegetables, throw everything into the pot along with the ham bone and then simmer for a few hours letting all of the flavours come out while the split peas cook. I like to go with a ham broth for this soup but chicken broth or vegetable broth also work. If you have any leftover ham meat, it makes a great addition and I like to finish everything of with a hit of grainy mustard and lemon juice.
Serve garnished with a bit of ham and grainy mustard.
Split Pea Soup
A bowl of a good split pea soup is pure comfort food and a great way to enjoy that leftover ham bone!
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 carrots, diced
- 2 stalks celery, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped
- 1 teaspoon thyme, chopped
- 6 cups ham broth or chicken broth or vegetable broth
- 1 pound split peas, picked over
- 1 ham bone
- 2 bay leaves
- salt, pepper and cayenne to taste
- 1 tablespoon grainy mustard
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat, add the onions, carrots and celery and cook until tender, about 10-15 minutes.
- Add the garlic and thyme and cook until fragrant, about a minute.
- Add the liquid, split peas, ham bone and bay leaves, bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the spit peas are soft and just starting to fall apart, about 1-2 hours.
- Remove the ham bone and bay leaves, season with salt, pepper and cayenne to taste, mix in the mustard and lemon juice and optionally puree with hand blender to desired consistency.
Option: Add a parmesan rind to simmer in the soup and remove before serving.
Option: Add two cups diced ham at the end and cook for 5 more minutes.
Option: Add one cup fresh or frozen peas at the end and cook for 5 more minutes.
Option: Add 1 teaspoon smoked paprika.
Option: Serve garnished with grainy mustard, sour cream, paprika, ham, etc.
Option: For vegetarian use vegetable broth and omit the ham bone.


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Would you think for a moment that in real life I wear dresses and randomly burst into song? That's what I do in this other world. In the real world, I do things like wear pants, write a blog, and cook.
But some people persist in the notion that virtual world behavior is an accurate reflection of real life. It's not entirely unfounded: at the extremes I think you'll find that assholes are assholes and fire-standing idiots walk in traffic and that calm and steady raid leader is the best manager ever. But you might also find that the calm steady raid leader is actually barely holding himself together in real life and the fire-standing idiot is distracted by thoughts of his incredibly important and profitable job.
It's virtual phrenology.
I want to prove the socials that the M&S is not "unlucky", not "beginner", not "victim of things beyond their control". They are lazy, stupid people because they choose to be one. They are not bad players in a video game, they are scum people in the real world. They deserve no help, no sympathy, no understanding. They deserve exactly what my other project give them: pwnage!
But of course he knows that RL and WoW are different.
But there are friendly, helpful people who prefer "being with friends" over "being with competent people", despite their "friends" are just pixels on a screen without any living connection.
But such lashing out at others seems par for the course for individuals who believe "I deserve more than others". These are the ones who have claimed ninjaing is okay because everyone else is stupid. I love extremists.
What a Wonderful World


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N.T Wright on Women in Ministry
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In view of those suggestions for shaping conversation on our site and in an effort to curate a hospitable space of open conversation, Missio Alliance may delete comments and/or ban users who show no regard for constructive engagement, especially those whose comments are easily construed as trolling, threatening, or abusive.


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LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistan's leading arts college has pushed boundaries before in this conservative nation. But when an uproar erupted over a series of paintings depicting Muslim clerics in scenes with strong homosexual overtones, prompting threats of violence by Islamic extremists, it was too much.
Officials at the National College of Arts in the eastern city of Lahore shut down its academic journal, which published the paintings, pulled all its issues out of bookstores and dissolved its editorial board. Still, a court is currently considering whether the paintings' artist, the journal's board and the school's head can be charged with blasphemy.
The college's decision to cave to Islamist pressure underscores how space for progressive thought is shrinking in Pakistan as hardline interpretations of Islam gain ground. It was also a marked change for an institution that has long been one of the leading defenders of liberal views in the country.
Pakistan is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, and the majority of its citizens have long been fairly conservative. But what has grown more pronounced in recent years is the power of religious hardliners to enforce their views on members of the population who disagree, often with the threat of violence.
The government is caught up in a war against a domestic Taliban insurgency and often seems powerless to protect its citizens. At other times it has acquiesced to hardline demands because of fear, political gain or a convergence of beliefs.
"Now you have gun-toting people out there on the streets," said Saleema Hashmi, a former head of arts college. "You don't know who will kill you. You know no one is there to protect you."
The uproar was sparked when the college's Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture over the summer published pictures of a series of paintings by artist Muhammad Ali.
Particularly infuriating to conservatives were two works that they said insulted Islam by mixing images of Muslim clerics with suggestions of homosexuality, which is deeply taboo in Pakistan.
One titled "Call for Prayer" shows a cleric and a shirtless young boy sitting beside each other on a cot. The cleric fingers rosary beads as he gazes at the boy, who seductively stretches backward with his hands clasped behind his head.
Mumtaz Mangat, a lawyer who petitioned the courts to impose blasphemy charges, argued the image implied the cleric had "fun" with the boy before conducting the traditional Muslim call for prayer.
A second painting shows the same cleric reclining in front of a Muslim shrine, holding a book by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho in one hand as he lights a cigarette for a young boy with the other. A second young boy, who is naked with his legs strategically crossed to cover his genitals, sits at the cleric's feet. The painting has caused particular uproar because verses from Islam's holy book, the Quran, appear on the shrine.
Aasim Akhtar, an Islamabad-based art critic who wrote an essay accompanying the paintings in the journal, wrote that Ali's mixing of images was "deliberately, violently profane," aimed at challenge "homophobic" beliefs that are widespread in Pakistani society.
"Ali redefines the divine through a critique of authority and the hypocrisy of the cleric," wrote Akhtar, an Islamabad-based art critic who is also listed as a potential defendant in the blasphemy complaint.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, widely believed to be a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, issued a statement after the paintings were published demanding the college issue a public apology and withdraw all issues of the journal.
College staff members also began receiving anonymous text messages threatening violence, said a member of the journal's editorial board. They were afraid to push back for fear of being killed, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted.
Extremists gunned down two prominent Pakistani politicians last year for speaking out against the country's harsh blasphemy laws, which can mean life in prison or even death. Human rights activists have criticized the laws, saying they are often used to persecute religious minorities or settle personal scores.
Yahya Mujahid, the spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, denied the group sent any threats but said the state should punish those responsible.
"It's part of Western and American plans to malign Islam," claimed Mujahid.
A court considering whether to press blasphemy charges held its latest session in mid-December, but it has not said when it will rule whether such charges apply in the case.
Shahram Sarwar, a lawyer representing the college's editorial board, said his clients did not intend to hurt anyone's feelings but he was prepared to apologize on their behalf if they did.
Besides shutting down the journal, the college also closed the department where its staff worked, said Sarwar.
The current head of the National Arts College, Shabnam Khan, denied the institution caved to pressure from hardliners, saying the editorial staff quit voluntarily. She said the department was closed because no one was left to run it.
A member of the editorial board disputed this version of events, saying the college administration asked him and his colleagues to resign. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by extremists.
The school has long been a progressive voice. A research project at the college in 2008 focused on the idea that rising Islamic conservatism and violent religious fanaticism was a fundamental threat to peace and democracy in Pakistan. In the 1980s, when former dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, a notorious Islamist, ordered all female students and teachers to cover their hair, the college pushed back.
Individual graduates have pushed the envelope with their work. Amra Khan's latest work, which was exhibited at the college and a gallery in Karachi this year, included Muslim veils embroidered with a pink Playboy bunny and The Rolling Stones' big red lips logo.
Evidence of the growing influence of Islamic hardliners abounds in Pakistan. In September, clerics wielding sticks forced their way into a wedding reception in the southern city of Ghotki to stop the guests from singing and dancing. A different set of clerics forced a five-star hotel to cancel a planned concert in August in the northwest town of Bhurban because they argued the music was counter to Islam.
Hardliners have had success influencing Pakistani institutions as well. The Supreme Court ordered the country's media regulatory body in August to look into blocking "vulgar" and "obscene" content on TV in response to a petition filed by conservative Islamists.
In November, the government's telecommunications arm banned late-night cell phone call packages, saying they encouraged immoral behavior by young people. The government banned YouTube earlier this year because of an anti-Islam video posted on the site, and one of the country's highest courts has blocked access to Facebook twice because of material considered anathema to Islam.
Khan, the head of the college, refused to discuss the case in more detail because of the court proceedings, but said that people across the political spectrum were becoming more alarmed by the use of violence to enforce views.
"I have heard recently even from conservative people that enough is enough," said Khan. "It is wrong that people interfere in others' lives, that people interfere in others' beliefs."


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Green Tea
Green tea, also known as unoxidized tea, is made solely from the leaves of the camellia sinensis plant. The leaves are plucked, slightly withered, then immediately cooked to preserve the green quality and prevent oxidization. As a result of these methods, green teas have a much higher concentration of chlorophyll, polyphenols and antioxidants than other tea types.


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Holocaust items put on display for international remembrance day
JERUSALEM (AP) — When Stella Knobel's family fled World War II Poland in 1939, the only thing the 7-year-old girl could take with her was her teddy bear. For the next six years, the stuffed animal never left her side as the family wandered through the Soviet Union, to Iran and finally the Holy Land.
"He was like family. He was all I had. He knew all my secrets," the 80-year-old said with a smile. "I saved him all these years. But I worried what would happen to him when I died."
So when she heard about a project launched by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial and museum, to collect artifacts from aging survivors, she reluctantly handed over her beloved bear Misiu, Polish for "teddy bear," so the memories of the era could be preserved.
"We've been through a lot together, so it was hard to let him go," said Knobel, who was widowed 12 years ago and has no children. "But here he has found a haven."
The German Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews during World War II. In addition to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps, the Nazis also confiscated their possessions and stole their valuables, leaving little behind. Those who survived often had just a small item or two they managed to keep. Many have clung to the sentimental objects ever since.
On Sunday, Knobel's tattered teddy bear was on display at Yad Vashem, one of more than 71,000 items collected nationwide over the past two years. With a missing eye, his stuffing bursting out and a red ribbon around his neck, Misiu was seated behind a glass window as part of the memorial's "Gathering the Fragments" exhibit.
The opening came as other Holocaust-related events took place around the world.
In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 60 years to the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Israel's main Holocaust memorial day is in the spring, marking the anniversary of the uprising of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, against the Nazis.
To coincide with the international commemorations, Israel released its annual anti-Semitism report, noting that the past year experienced an increase in the number of attacks against Jewish targets worldwide, mainly by elements identified with Islamic extremists.
At Sunday's weekly Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned. He accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons with the goal of destroying Israel.
"What has not changed is the desire to annihilate the Jews. What has changed is the ability of the Jews to defend themselves," he said.
Yad Vashem showcased dozens of items, each representing tales of perseverance and survival. They included sweaters, paintings, diaries, letters, dolls, cameras and religious artifacts that were stashed away for decades or discarded before they were collected and restored.
Yad Vashem researchers have been interviewing survivors, logging their stories, tagging materials and scanning documents into the museum's digitized archive.
Aside from their value as exhibits in the museum, Yad Vashem says the items are also proving helpful for research, filling in holes in history and contributing to the museum's huge database of names.
"Thousands of Israelis have decided to part from personal items close to their hearts, and through them share the memory of their dear ones who were murdered in the Holocaust," said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev. "Through these examples, we have tried to bring to light items whose stories both explain the individual story and provide testimony to join the array of personal accounts that make up the narrative of the Holocaust."
For 83-year-old Shlomo Resnik, one such item was the steel bowl he and his father used for food at the Dachau concentration camp. His father Meir's name and number are engraved on the bowl, a reminder of how hard they had to scrap for food. "We fought to stay alive," he said.
Approaching the glass-encased display, Tsilla Shlubsky began tearing. Below she could see the handwritten diary her father kept while the family took shelter with two dozen others in a small attic in the Polish countryside. With a pencil, Jakov Glazmann meticulously recorded the family's ordeal in tiny Yiddish letters. His daughter doesn't know exactly what is written and she doesn't care to find out.
"I remember him writing. I lived through it," said Shlubsky, 74. "Abba (Dad) wasn't a writer, but with his heart's blood he wrote a diary to record the events to leave something behind so that what had taken place would be known."
She said it pained her to part with the family treasure.
"I know this is the right place for it and it will be protected forever," she said. "Now is the time and this is the place."


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Firefox for Android supports the accessibility features built into the Android operating system, so people with visual impairments can browse the web on their devices. This includes exposure of all UI elements as well as web content to TalkBack, which is used to generate speech output, in essence reading the content out loud. Basic navigation using a directional controller or virtual directional pad is supported. In addition, the browser UI can be explored and interacted with using the Explore By Touch feature built into Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich".
The following sections describe the different supported features in detail. If you are a blind user, you may want to read this to get started more easily. If you are not blind, much of the following probably will not mean much to you, unless you are familiar with the Android accessibility features.
Table of Contents
There are no extra steps to take to make Firefox for Android work with TalkBack. If your phone is already set up to talk to you, you can just install Firefox for Android from the Google Play store and start surfing the web right away.
Firefox supports both devices that have hardware keyboards and a hardware directional controller as well as devices that only have touch screens and use a software on-screen keyboard and a virtual d-pad for directional navigation. For best results, we recommend that you install and use the Eyes-Free keyboard for typing and navigation.
Basic navigation and usage
Screen Layout
The screen of Firefox for Android is laid out in the following way:
- In the upper left corner, there's the awesome bar. This is initially a button that expands to a text field when you tap or press Enter on it. TalkBack either says "Enter search or address" or speaks the name of the currently displaying website.
- If your device does not have a hardware button for opening a menu, the item next to the awesome bar is the "Menu" button. This opens a menu that is arranged vertically top to bottom. Not all items may fit on the screen, so you might have to use the two-finger push upward gesture to show the remaining items. Use your hardware directional controller to navigate the items. On the Eyes-Free keyboard, switch off the D-Pad and use the touch screen, since the virtual D-Pad cannot interact with menus very well in general. This is a system-wide limitation of the Eyes-Free keyboard.
- In the upper right-hand corner, there's the "Tabs" button. It tells you the number of currently open tabs. If you tap or press Enter on it, a new screen will open showing the currently open tabs from top to bottom. Each tab has a "Close tab" button to the right of them which will close the tab. To switch tabs, simply tap or press Enter on the desired tab text.
- Below this bar of controls, the rest of the screen is used to display web content, or a switchable display of either top sites, recommended add-ons, bookmarks or browser history. Using your d-pad, navigate down into this area, and then swipe right or left to switch these displays. Swipe down and up to hear content from the selected area of items. Enter will activate (load) the selected page. If web content is displayed, see below for instructions on how to navigate it.
- Below that, your usual "Back", "Home", "Recent apps", and if present, "Menu" hardware buttons will be shown, as in most other Android applications.
Basic Web Content navigation
To navigate web content, do the following:
- Open a page using the awesome bar at the top. Either enter an address or search, or choose from your bookmarks, history, or top sites.
- Navigate down once. This will focus the web content.
- Use your Right and Left directional navigation to sequentially navigate web content. TalkBack will announce links, headings, list items, form field elements, and other semantic information as it reads the text of pages to you.
- To activate a link or place focus in a form field, toggle a checkbox etc., press down on your controller, Enter, or tap in the center of your D-pad. This will result in a new page loaded, focus to be placed inside a text field where you can switch to Typing mode and enter text, toggle a checkbox etc.
- To return to the awesome bar, use your Up arrow or upward directional swiping. The position in the current web page is remembered, so when you navigate downwards again, you will start navigating where you left off. This is, of course, unless you loaded a new page, in which case, navigation will always start at the beginning.
Awesome bar
To use the awesome bar, follow these steps:
- Find and tap the button in the upper left corner of your screen, right below the status bar. TalkBack will either say "Enter search or address", or speak the name of the currently loaded web page.
- Tap this button, or press Enter on your directional controller or keyboard to activate it.
- Switch to your typing mode, or use your hardware keyboard to enter an address, page title, or search term.
- Press down arrow, or touch in the area below the awesome bar to find out if there are any suggestions.
- If there are and it shows the one you want, tap or press Enter on it.
- If not, continue typing.
- If you enter a full web address, simply press Enter or "Go" to open the page.
If instead you want to browse your bookmarks, or history, do the following:
- Find and tap the "Enter search or address" button.
- Navigate down into the content that is displayed along with the text field. You will land on your most visited sites.
- Navigate up and down to choose from your most visited sites. Or navigate Right to switch to the Bookmarks view. Use Up and Down to navigate your bookmarks. Navigate Right again to go to the History view and use Up and Down to browse your last visited sites.
- Once you found what you were looking for, press down on your D-Pad or Enter to activate the item.
Setting Up Sync
The setup process for Firefox Sync states that you should enter a sync code your mobile device displays when pairing it with your desktop version of Firefox. This code is fully accessible, it is displayed in 3 chunks, each on one line, in the center of the screen. Enter the code starting from the top of the three lines and moving downwards.


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text:
A court in Milan has convicted former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on a charge of tax evasion and he's been given a 4-year prison sentence, The Associated Press and Reuters report.
But whether he will ever actually go to jail on the charge isn't yet known.
In a preview of today's news, the AP wrote that "the statute of limitations in this case is set to expire sometime next year. In Italy, cases must pass two levels of appeal before the verdicts are final." So Berlusconi might stretch things beyond the statute of limitations.
As the AP reminds us, the 76-year-old Berlusconi "also is on trial in Milan on charges of paying for sex with an under-age teenager and trying to cover it up."
Berlusconi, who has always said he's innocent of any wrongdoing, announced earlier this week that he won't try to return to office.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


text:
Good morning, I'm David Greene.
Dating can be tough in a small country like Iceland. There are only 320,000 people and many of them are distant relatives. So the government came up with an idea. They created a genealogy Web site. There's even a Smartphone app. Just tap phones with your date. And if you happen to share a grandparent, you'll get an alert. If a date is out of the question, the app does also track relatives' birthdays and so you can send them a card.
It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


text:
Scientists from Colombia believe they have pinpointed the origin of the giant meteor that smashed into a remote region of Russia earlier this month, injuring more than 1,000 people.
Using some of the dozens, if not hundreds, of videos that captured the once-in-a-century event, the scientists have calculated the Chelyabinsk meteor's trajectory, tracing it back to a group of Earth-crossing objects known as Apollo asteroids. Unlike objects in the Asteroid Belt, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, Apollos sideswipe Earth's orbit, posing a risk of collision. According to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, more than 4,800 Apollo "close approachers" have been identified to date.
The BBC reports that the Colombian researchers used video of the fireball taken from camera phones, car-dashboard cameras and CCTV footage, including traffic cams that contained precise time stamps:
"Using the footage and the location of an impact into Lake Chebarkul, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, were able to use simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed and position of the rock as it fell to Earth.
"To reconstruct the meteor's original orbit around the sun, they used six different properties of its trajectory through Earth's atmosphere. Most of these are related to the point at which the meteor becomes bright enough to cast a noticeable shadow in the videos."
The team then plugged the data into astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Early estimates of the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor put it at about 10,000 tons, but NASA later estimated the object at between 7,000 and 10,000 tons. The energy released by the event was estimated at about 500 kilotons, or 30 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


text: July 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of TU's founding on the banks of the Au Sable River near Grayling, Michigan. The 16 fishermen who gathered at the home of George Griffith were united by their love of trout fishing, and by their growing discontent with the state's practice of stocking its waters with "cookie cutter trout"—catchable-sized hatchery fish. Convinced that Michigan's trout streams could turn out a far superior fish if left to their own devices, the anglers formed a new organization: Trout, Unlimited (the comma was dropped a few years later) dedicated to ensuring that wild and native trout populations were allowed to thrive, as nature intended. From the beginning, TU was guided by the principle that if we "take care of the fish, then the fishing will take care of itself." And that principle was grounded in science. "One of our most important objectives is to develop programs and recommendations based on the very best information and thinking available," said TU's first president, Dr. Casey E. Westell Jr. "In all matters of trout management, we want to know that we are substantially correct, both morally and biologically." In 1962-63, TU prepared its first policy statement on wild trout, and persuaded the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to curtail "put-and-take" trout stocking and start managing for wild trout and healthy habitat. On the heels of that success, anglers quickly founded TU chapters in Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania. From its hundreds of local stream restoration projects, to helping lead the way to remove the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine, to compelling Congress to strengthen the Clean Water Act, TU has a strong 50 year track record of conservation achievements. Perhaps TU's greatest strength is that it works at multiple levels of society and government to achieve its mission. From the landowner on the stream bank, to the state fisheries agency, to the Halls of Congress, TU is working to achieve its vision. Today, the National Conservation Agenda of TU is set by the National Leadership Council, a body of TU volunteers and leaders from the grassroots.


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So today -- November 4th, for those of you who wonder how far in advance I write these things -- is the best day of my life. Not because it's a Friday, although that's part of it. But because I woke up this morning and realized that in addition to being behind schedule in NaNoWriMo, I also needed to come up with a Thursday one-off deconstruction for next week (and yes, that is "behind schedule" in Ana's mind).
You know what? Let's talk about NaNoWriMo. This is hard. Seriously hard. I mean, you people who do this every year, how do you do this? And November?? November I-have-to-get-a-turkey-on-the-table-or-my-year-is-ruined-and-oh-yeah-I've-got-to-embroider-the-Christmas-presents-that-I've-been-putting-off-since-May that November are you kidding me? And you are going to say, "But, Ana, NaNo is only 1,700 words a day and your blog posts are longer than that," to which I will laugh bitterly and say, "Kind Reader, you are kind to say so, but I feel compelled to point out that my blog posts would make crap books." Seriously, this right here is stream of consciousness stuff. This is not book stuff. Book stuff is hard.
NaNoWriMo Novelists: My personal heroes. Seriously, just... wow.
So anyway, today is an awesome day because do you know why? I will tell you why. I am now so famous on the internet that my readers are doing my job for me. This is the happiest day of my life.
A reader named Justin (a.k.a. The Mad Latinist) was awesome enough to send me this Cracked.com article: 6 Obnoxious Assumptions Hollywood Makes About Women. It's awesome, go read it.
Okay, Thursday post done! See you in the comments!
No, wait. Sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't be a talentless hack about this. I'm instead going to be a semi-talentless hack and talk about the awesome article that is awesome in the hopes that I might add more awesome to it. And since I'm running entirely on caffeine and NaNo-related guilt, this is going to be largely stream of consciousness gibberish. So let's look at the Cracked run-down:
#6. Worrying About Being Fat When You're Not
#5. Getting Angry For No Reason
#4. Conflicts Between Family And Six-Figure Job
#3. Cattiness
#2. A Token Weakness
#1. Women Be Shopping
Now let's take the awesome Cracked article that Justin was kind enough to email to me and talk about it in more depth because if there's anything I like more than trying to eke out 1,700 words a day for a novel, it's hearing myself talk about other artists' fictional people, because I am living the English major dream, folks.
6. Body Acceptance and Associated Struggles With.
Body acceptance is hard. I've been a proud member of the Health At Every Size community for over a year now, I fully understand the pitfalls of the Fantasy Of Being Thin and why it's fallacious and damaging, and I completely 100% understand that beauty is not dependent on dress size.
Do I still think I would look prettier as a smaller woman? Unfortunately, yes. My intellectual embracing of body acceptance in the last almost-two-years has not yet undone cultural training that bombards me constantly with the message that Thinner Is Better. Heck, even the Cracked.com article is guilty -- it says at least twice that nobody wants to go see fat people in movies. Hey, Cracked? I do.
I freaking loved Hairspray for having a fat protagonist who doesn't "learn a valuable lesson" or otherwise have a big deal made out of her weight. She starts the movie loving herself and nothing in the movie changes her mind from being 100% "I love my sexy self" love-fest. That is freaking awesome. More, please.
So the problem here to me is not so much that we need less "OMG FAT" in movies (although we do need less, because the aggregate effect normalizes the idea that all women do and should worry about this all the time) but more that if a character is going to worry about her weight then in addition to the "you're beautiful as yourself" message, she also needs to hear a "the cultural standards of beauty are deliberately unreachable because otherwise the diet and beauty industries would dry up entirely, so why spend your life miserably chasing an unattainable fantasy" message. Well, I'd like to hear more of that in movies, anyway.
Also, we need more women (and men) of all sizes enjoying food in movies without being demonized for it. Enjoying food is a good thing.
5. Violent People Should Not Be Idolized.
Thank you Cracked, for taking on a film scene that made me want to scream -- the Jennifer-Garner-attacks-a-blind-man-because-she's-a-Strong-Woman-natch scene in Daredevil. This, thank you, this. This is not something that I idolize. This is not something that makes feminists pump their fist in the air and go yeeaaaaahhhhhhwwwwOOOOooooohhh! This is something that makes me cringe because are you kidding me Jennifer Garner is attacking a blind man.
And then the next time the subject of domestic violence comes up, someone will say, "Oh, but no one complains when women hit men for no reason, like in Daredevil." DO YOU HEAR ME, INTERNET? I AM COMPLAINING. I do not like it when women hit men for no reason. I do not like it when anyone hits anyone for no reason. I do not like the glorification of violence-for-violence's-sake in our culture.
I do like a beautifully choreographed fight scene, but for goodness sake, let it have some kind of justified meaning behind it besides Strong Wimmins Kick Peoples. The Matrix had Carrie-Anne Moss kicking butt and taking names and I don't think I ever once thought my god this woman is a danger to society someone stop her. I'm pretty sure I've thought that about every Jennifer Garner character ever. (No, wait, I just looked her up on IMDB to refresh my memory and I liked her in Juno. So really, I just think that about her Elektra character. Phew.)
4. Competing Cultural Expectations a.k.a. Heads-I-Win-Tails-You-Lose.
Sweet googly-moogly, has Cracked.com always been progressive and I just never noticed? They're bringing up the taboo topic of the working poor and how hard it is to make a living wage in an article about female stereotypes? THANK YOU. In addition to the women who need to learn how to Find A Man in spite of their six-figure dream job, there's the flip side of the single working mom who is tired and impoverished... and it's a tragedy for her children.
I don't want to be insensitive here. It probably is hard on a child to grow up in an environment where their parents aren't around as much as they need them to be. (I say "probably" because I do believe this, but I don't have any studies handy, so I don't want to present this as Unvarnished Fact when it's really just my unsupported opinion, but now I'm worried that the "probably" will water it down and make me sound like a terrible person.) I fully support high-income, low-hour weeks for everyone so that parents of all genders can spend more time with their families and can nurture and emotionally support themselves and their loved ones. This seems like a hallmark of a healthy society, and I continue to be surprised that anyone would find this view controversial in any way.
However, there's that aggregate effect we're always talking about in terms of women and how their lives are portrayed in the media. If a woman's crappy, demanding, wearisome job keeps being shown solely in terms of how it's taking a toll on her child, and we only ever see the situation from the child's point of view, we run the risk of obscuring the woman's pain from the equation. And every time she manages to drag herself through a sleepless night to miraculously sew that Halloween costume or bake those classroom cupcakes or help on that important science fair project, we're seeing the child's happiness and triumph without considering that oh my god that woman needs a rest break and society has failed her. And the unfortunate implication is that women need to be superhuman or their children will suffer. Bootstraps!
And god forbid that a loving, caring mother might not see the Vital Importance of staying up all night sewing the magic Halloween costume.
3. Women Fighting Women.
Dear Hollywood: I really don't want to go back to the classic days when James Bond beat up girls on his own while grinning like it was the funnest thing since they invented water slides, but there must be a better solution than having the Bond Good Girl and the Bond Bad Girl tear each other's hair out. Please hire Jessica Valenti and Melissa McEwan to solve this problem.
1. Materialism, see also Diet and and Beauty Industries above.
Yes! We just skipped out of order!
I really wanted to like "Sex in the City" but I couldn't get on board with all the shopping. I love that the Cracked article makes the Playstation comparison and in doing so eschews the children starving in China argument, because as much as I'm sympathetic to the argument I also recognize that it tends to be pulled out to justify why women can't have nice things far more often than it's used to justify why men can't have them. So avoiding the obvious charity high horse, I'll say that I can totally get behind a story with a woman who loves brand names and enjoys shopping and has a lovely time lavishing gifts on herself... but I had a hard time when it seemed like all the characters were that way.
I don't know if the stereotype was that all women should and do love those expensive designer shoes and handbags or just that all women in The City should and do love those expensive designer shoes and handbags, but it just wasn't doing it for me. I hate shopping and my purse brand is eBags because they have a nice pouch for my eReader. So, long story short, if we must talk about shopping in a movie, TV show, or other forms of entertainment, let's have more diverse interests represented than just Shoes and Handbags. How about a gal who shops for video games or likes imported cheeses?
2. They Tip Over.
This is the best one, and it's the reason Justin-who-is-awesome sent me this awesome article.
But if you make your lady character too perfect, nobody in the audience can identify with her. You can't compromise on the looks or the weight, obviously. You can't compromise by giving her a realistic job. She can't be a jerk, or the audience won't root for her. If you're doing one of those career vs. personal life plots, then her flaw is that she loves her career too much, so you got that cut out for you. Any other plot, the only option you've got left is to make her clumsy.
That's why pretty much all romantic comedy women are clumsy. Like Jessica Alba in Good Luck Chuck, Amy Adams in Leap Year, Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality... oh hell here's a montage.
I had never realized this before, but it's not just Bella Swan.
The clumsy thing? The she-falls-over-and-it's-hilarious thing? The informed flaw that lets Edward and Co. pick Bella up and carry her around like a toy doggie and additionally acts up to put her in implausible danger as needed? This thing is a trope.
It's a perfect-pretty-women-need-something-wrong-with-them trope. It's a trope to make them less perfect, more flawed, more accessible. It's a trope to make them more likeable by the women in the audience and more attainable by the men. It's a trope to make them less competent, less frightening, less intimidating.
Let me just repeat that. In order for a woman to be more likeable and less intimidating, she has to hurt herself a lot. She has to nearly die because of her clumsiness, as with Jennifer Lopez and the shoe and Random Actress I Don't Recognize in the tree. The on-screen shorthand for "approachable woman" is someone who falls over frequently to the point of seriously injuring herself or even dying.
Stephenie Meyer didn't come up with this. Society did.
I don't know what else to add to this. I'm not sure I can. I really can't believe I hadn't noticed this before, that all the times I was railing against ableism and Unfortunate Implications and everything else in Twilight over Bella's chronic clumsiness, I never realized that I've seen this a hundred times before. I was just noticing it in Twilight because it's taken up to 11, like so much else that is problematic in that series. I'm not sure what else to say except to thank Justin for pointing this out to me.
Wait. I can think of something else. Cracked.com missed something. There's a seventh obnoxious assumption that Hollywood keeps making about women, and you can see it in the montage above in addition to all the falling over: we're not all white, thin, cis-gendered, and white. You might want to work on that, Hollywood.