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Metallurgical Test Work
In August 2006 the Company commissioned a Sonic drill rig program to recover full core samples through the 1% nickel envelope. A total of sixteen drill holes were located over the Hepi and Mt Kilkenny resources to provide representative sample of the ore types in each resource.
The core samples were then cut, assayed, agglomerated and loaded into four separate four metre column. The column leach tests, which, commenced in November 2006 were undertaken at SGS Lakefield Oretest laboratories in Perth.
The column tests exceeded the targeted Nickel extraction rate of 70% and were decommissioned (March 2007) in preparation of Geotechnical work to confirm the strength of the agglomerates. Details of the metal extraction results from the column tests are shown in the tables below.
Throughout the test duration all columns maintained consistently high leach solution percolation rates. The percolation rates confirm that the Hepi and Mt Kilkenny agglomerates have remained stable throughout the test period, with minimal slump observed. This is a significant step forward as the stability of the agglomerate is a fundamental aspect in achieving a successful Heap Leach operation.
|4 Meter Column Tests
|Number Days
|Extraction % Ni
|Rate % Co
|Column Head Grade % Ni
|Hepi #1
|MK North #1
|MK Central #1
|Mk North #2
Metallurgical test programs have been a feature of ongoing work since 2007. In December 2013 two patents lodged by the Company over its Acid Regeneration and Ore Pelletisation process were granted. Both of these important innovations will be utilised in the NiWest flow sheet.
The acid regeneration process is designed to reduce acid consumption by regenerating a significant proportion of the acid for re use in the heap leach stage. Test work to date indicates that up to 30% of the consumed acid can be regenerated.
The pelletisation process is designed to stabilise the ore and commence the leaching cycle prior to the pellets being stacked on the heap. Both leach cycle and stabilisation of the heap is a critical aspect in any heap leaching operation. Further refinement of the acid regeneration process is planned and is expected to lead to a greater percentage of acid regenerated.
From the Scoping Study 2014, it was recommended that the Company proceed with a high level metallurgical test program to validate the "Proof of Concept" test work. To this end, the Company recently completed a Sonic Core drilling program that generated over five tonnes of sample to be used in the test program which is designed to cover all aspects of the flow sheet and provide engineering data required to feed into a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS). The test work to be covered in the program includes:
- Bottle roll tests to determine the extent and variability of typical leach kinetics and acid consumptions.
- Crushing, agglomeration and heap stacking/height optimisation test work including hydrodynamic and geotechnical work to be undertaken at HydroGeoSense laboratory in USA.
- Large scale column test that will generate up to eight tonnes of pregnant nickel solution.
- Conduct both batch and continuous pilot plant tests for solution neutralisation/iron removal and Direct Solvent Extraction (DSX).
The final stage of the NiWest flow sheet, which has been developed along similar lines to a copper processing plant, includes an Electrowinning (EW) refinery that will produce LME grade nickel cathode and a high grade cobalt carbonate concentrate.
Completing the current test program which is expected to take twelve months will be a major milestone for the Company in its aspiration to move the NiWest Project forward to development. The test program is expected to deliver a number of key outcomes that will allow the project to continue seamlessly into a DFS.
During the Sept 2014 quarter, a detailed Metallurgical Sonic Drilling programme was completed at the Mount Kilkenny and Hepi ore bodies. The geological logging reflected consistency and robustness of these two significant Ni laterite ore bodies. The metallurgical samples divided into separate 1m intervals were then delivered to Hydromet Research Laboratories in Brisbane.
The laterite ores have a naturally high moisture content. As a consequence, it was necessary to partially dry the laterite samples prior to sample preparation to ensure that subsequent representative sampling could be achieved. The air drying was conducted under controlled conditions to ensure minimal sample degradation occurred.
The partially dried samples have now undergone sample preparation and subsamples have now been submitted in for detailed chemical analysis.
Preliminary bottle roll characterisation testing has been conducted and a further 200 bottle rolls will be completed over the next month. This will provide a detailed metallurgical understanding of the two ore bodies and allow the metallurgical characteristics to be captured within the future resource modelling. This will allow for further project resource optimisation based on Ni grade, impurity concentrations and acid consumption characteristics.
An example of the results obtained from the preliminary testing is provided below showing the excellent performance characteristics of the saprolitic laterite ore type with +90% Ni recovery at an acid consumption of 500kg/t. This graph also shows the tests allow for a clear determination of the poorly performing non – saprolitic materials. The differentiation of the non saproltic ores types which form a minor proportion of total resource (generally located in the top one to two metres of the mineralised profile) is a key to the future resource optimisation.
Good progress continues to be made in relation to the large scale metallurgical test work being undertaken at HRL laboratory in Brisbane. The aim of the program is to refine the proposed NiWest flow sheet that is based on the development of a nickel heap leaching operation coupled to a Direct Solvent Extraction – Electrowinning (HL-DSX-EW) processing facility.
Status of Program
- 17 hole Sonic drill core program generated approximately eight tonnes of nickel laterite ore - completed
- Head grade assay on 240 samples - completed
- Average Grade - Mt Kilkenny ore – 1.29% Ni
- Average Grade - Hepi ore – 1.95% Ni
- 140 seven day bottle roll tests - completed
- Composite samples selected for Mt Kilkenny and Hepi geotechnical test work and bulk column leach program - completed
- 200kg sample received at HydroGeoSense in Tuscon USA for agglomeration and stacking tests – in progress
- Moisture and acid optimisation tests - in progress
- Construction of bulk columns - in progress
- Metallurgical simulation model to establish bulk column heap leach and Fe removal/neutralisation testwork conditions - completed
- Modeling simulation for SX –EW processing - in progress
To date the program has been focused on establishing the leach kinetics of the various ore types located through the resource profile. Every 2 metres of ore has been subjected to bottle roll testing to determine the criteria for sample selection in the column test program.
With this stage of the program now completed the focus moves to geotechnical testwork to establish the optimal acid addition for the agglomeration process and stacking height for the heap leach. This work is being undertaken by HyrdoGeosense based in Tuscon USA. The geotechnical work is expected to completed in late February and will be applied in the agglomeration process for the column tests.
The column test stage is scheduled to commence in March and will run for 2-3 months. Once sufficient pregnant solution has been produced Fe removal/neutralisation and SX piloting will commence.
The Company has elected to increase the scope of the SX program to include separate piloting on Hepi and Mt Kilkenny ore types. The program will also be increased to test an alternate SX flow sheet that utilises non-proprietary chemicals so that a comparison can be measured against the Bateman Tenova proposed Nicksyn based SX process. The new scope of work will extend the program by approximately two months and is now expected to be completed by October 2015.
The column test stage is scheduled to commence in March and will run for 2-3 months. Once sufficient pregnant solution has been produced the most significant stage of the metallurgical program, the Fe removal/neutralisation and SX piloting will commence.


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Myths and Legends
Beowulf Fights the Three Monsters of the Far North
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Listen! This is a tale from England's earliest days. When warriors from the frozen lands of Northern Europe first came to farm the gentle green fields of England, they brought stories about the terrible monsters of the jagged landscape they had left behind.
The warriors who protected the lands of King Hrothgar lived for safety in a great fortified hall, named Heorot. They made life good, and Hrothgar thanked them with gifts of gold.
Then disaster struck them in the darkness of the night; the huge door of the hall was suddenly smashed to splinters and, as the warriors woke, one by one, they were gripped in a gruesome fist and torn apart! The monster Grendel lifted up a man, pulled him to pieces....and drank his blood! The ogre brought this agony to thirty men, then, just as suddenly, Grendel was gone!
In horror, the men of Heorot mourned their dead heroes. But the next night, as they slept nervously with their swords nearby, they were woken again by the shriek of a man in the grasp of Grendel. Before their swords had been drawn from the scabbards, more men lay scattered across the floor and the demon ogre had disappeared.
Young Beowulf arrived as an adventurer from a neighbouring country. His family was famous for its brave fighters, and Hrothgar welcomed him to Heorot – but warned him of the recent sadness and danger of the place. Every night now, men died defenceless in the hands of Grendel – no sword could pierce the thick skin of this monster. Bravely, Beowulf volunteered to sleep by the door of the hall.
That night, once again, the hall awoke to the cry of a man being bitten in half. But as Grendel reached out for his second victim, he felt his wrist held fast by the two hands of a young man whose smell he did not know – a stranger to Heorot – it was Beowulf, whose fingers gripped the flesh of Grendel's arm....
The ogre pulled against the strong young warrior's grip, but could not move. Then Beowulf gave an almighty heave....skin split, muscles ripped apart, bone-tendons tore open, and the whole arm of Grendel was wrenched out of its socket at the shoulder! The monster howled in pain and surprise, and ran staggering into the dark, to die.
The men of Heorot rejoiced all day at the defeat and disappearance of Grendel. The hall-poet sang the stories of the old heroes, like Sigemund who had killed a dragon and, in the same breath, praised the strength of Beowulf (the Shield of his People!), giving his listeners the most golden words from his treasure-store of poetry.
Hrothgar rewarded Beowulf with gold rings for his heroic deed; and the severed arm of Grendel was nailed high up in the hall, as a trophy to remember the end of the terrible tragedy Grendel had brought to Heorot. But Grendel was only the first of three great monsters Beowulf was forced to face.
That night as all the warriors slept in Heorot, Grendel's grieving mother came searching for revenge. This she-demon lived in a dark lake in the high wilderness. The great ogress slunk from her swamp. Down, out of the moorland mists came Grendel's mother, hunting.
She sniffed at the gate of Heorot. She reached in with her claws and snatched the King's closest adviser, Ashere, carrying him helplessly back to her home. The warriors awoke in panic. They followed the trail of slime back to the lake.
There they saw the severed head of the wise man Ashere. The body had been eaten. The lake bubbled with blood. The surface of the water writhed with slithering reptiles, eels lashed about at the lake-edge.
Only Beowulf dared to dive into that black depth. He felt himself dragged down and down. Just when he thought his lungs would burst, he saw a cave above the level of the water.
He crawled into a den of treasures the ogres had gathered. He saw the dead body of Grendel, and drew his sword. Suddenly Grendel's mother slashed at him with her talons. Beowulf stabbed, but the blade melted on her skin. He flung away the useless sword. He was not worried, he still had the strength of his own hands. He hauled the foul monster to the floor, but she tripped him, and he fell.
On the wall hung a huge sword that had been made for Giants in the Ancient Days. Beowulf grabbed the hilt and pulled with all his might. The sword came down and fell across the neck of the ogress – she was killed. Beowulf cut off the great head of the Grendel, and swam with it to the surface, taking it in triumph to Heorot.
He was welcomed as a glorious hero. He was given rings of gold, and fast horses with the finest saddles. When he finally travelled home, he was welcomed by his own people, and became their King for fifty years. In his old age, he was to face a final test.
There came a day when a servant stumbled into a cleft in the rocky coast, and discovered a pile of buried treasure. He stole a goblet and took it to King Beowulf for a reward. But this ancient treasure was guarded by a dragon. Furious at his loss, the fire-breathing fiend looked for his goblet by burning down every house around.
Beowulf knew what he must do. He was not greedy for gold – he was always a generous giver of rings; but the treasure-hoarding dragon was so jealous, its very breath burned. So Beowulf had a long shield specially made of iron, and went willingly to fight the flying Worm.
The other Earls stood far off as Beowulf approached. The dragon slowly unfurled its writhing coils. Beowulf brought his sword down on its bony head – and the blade broke! Beowulf's arm was too strong for the sword and now he stood without a weapon.
Only one Earl, Wiglaf, came forward to help his king. This youth had never faced a fight but his sense of honour forced him, today, to earn his right to wear a sword. The Dragon spat fire...Wiglaf's wooden shield was withered into ashes. He sheltered behind Beowulf's iron shield, and his sword-hand was scorched in the flames.
The Dragon swooped...its red-hot fangs sank into Beowulf's neck. As the hero desperately wrestled for his life, Wiglaf struck at the underbelly, and the monster weakened. The King staggered. With the last of his strength, he drew a dagger, stabbed, and the dragon fell dead.
But poison was boiling in Beowulf's blood. Wiglaf helped him to unbuckle his helmet, and the old king's eyes at last grew dim.
"Bury me on the brow of the cliff, and build a barrow-mound over me, so home-coming ships may see it from far off, and be guided safely to harbour. My father and grandfather were great warriors; fate took them to their deaths, and now, I follow."
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By: Ray Daudani
While Virginia Republicans hold a commanding lead in the House of Delegates, the margin is just two seats in the State Senate. If Democrats can pick up just one seat to force a 20-20 tie in the Senate, the party would effectively have control with Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam casting a tie-breaking vote.
Both parties will be watching several key Senate races which could turn the tide on Nov. 3.
District 10
The key race will be in Central Virginia as four candidates are vying to fill the seat vacated by Sen. John Watkins who is retiring after 27 years in the district. While Republicans have controlled the seat for nearly three decades, Democrat Dan Gecker holds a fundraising lead with more than $500,000 in contributions -- more than the other three candidates combined. Republican Glen Sturtevant will try and take the seat for the GOP, but like Gecker, Indpendent Marleen Durfee and Liberitarian Carl Loser, he has never served in statewide office.
District 6
Perhaps just as intriguing is the race in Accomack for the 6th District between Democrat incumbent Lynwood Lewis and Republican challenger Richard Ottinger. While Lewis won the seat in 2014, it was an 11 vote victory in a special election. Still, Lewis has outraised Ottinger $270,000 to $151,000 and the district leans left.
District 1
John Miller (D- Newport News) should have little to fear is defending his seat against first-time challenger Mark Matney. Matney was a late fill-in after John Bloom missed filing a candidacy form. Still, Miller has never enjoyed a large margin of victory in his two previous elections for the seat.
District 21
The best chance for a Republican upset may be in Roanoke where Independent Donald Caldwell may help unseat incumbent Democrat Sen. John Edwards. Caldwell is a long-time Democrat and could steal enough votes to help Republican Nancy Dye take the seat back for the GOP. After 20 years in the seat, Edwards will remain hard to beat.
District 29
Another GOP opportunity lies in the open seat out of Northern Virginia where Manassas Mayor Hal Parrish holds a lead over Democrat Jeremy McPike. While the seat was most recently held by Democrat Charles Colgan for nearly 40 years, Parrish could help Republicans take the district for the first time since 1976.
District 17
Republican Bryce Reeves flipped this seat for the GOP by taking out Edd Hock in 2011, but he did it by only 226 votes and Democrats hope Ned Gallaway will win the seat out of Albemarle back for the party.
District 20
The contest between Republican Bill Stanley and Democrat Kim Adkins is expected to be tight, as well. Stanley holds a substantial fundraising lead and is the incumbent, but won in 2011 by around 1.26 percent.


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Biological Sciences
X-ray Duo's Research Helps Launch Human Trial for Treatment of Arsenic Poisoning
Graham George and Ingrid Pickering, a husband and wife X-ray research team, are co-leading a new study in Bangladesh to test whether selenium supplements can protect people from arsenic poisoning.
Long-sought Discovery Fills in Missing Details of Cell 'Switchboard'
A biomedical breakthrough reveals never-before-seen details of the human body's cellular switchboard that regulates sensory and hormonal responses.
New 'Molecular Movie' Reveals Ultrafast Chemistry in Motion
Scientists for the first time tracked ultrafast structural changes, captured in quadrillionths-of-a-second steps, as ring-shaped gas molecules burst open and unraveled.
Researchers Watch Protein 'Quake' after Chemical Bond Break
An experiment at SLAC's X-ray laser provides new insight into the ultrafast motions of a muscle protein in a basic biochemical reaction.
New Tool Shrinks Big Data in Biology Studies at SLAC's X-ray Laser
A team led by Stanford University scientists is using software to breathe new life into results from past biological experiments at SLAC's X-ray laser.
X-ray Study May Aid in Designing Better Blood Pressure Drugs
An experiment at SLAC's X-ray laser has revealed in atomic detail how a hypertension drug binds to a cellular receptor that plays a key role in regulating blood pressure.
New 2-Color X-ray Laser Technique Could Reveal Atomic Detail of Medically Important Proteins
Developed at SLAC's LCLS, it could also yield new information from hard-to-study samples in materials science, chemistry and other fields.
Giant Virus Revealed in 3-D Using X-ray Laser
For the first time, researchers have produced a 3-D image revealing some of the inner structure of an intact, infectious virus.
Study Could Pave the Way for Painkillers with Fewer Side Effects
An X-ray laser experiment could lead to new drugs that lessen the side effects caused by powerful painkillers like morphine.
Scientists Take First X-ray Portraits of Living Bacteria at the LCLS
Researchers working at SLAC have captured the first X-ray portraits of living bacteria.


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Are you sure you want to play in Google's sandbox? Google Sandbox is a theoretical purgatory where a certain business under manual penalty sits until a review. Unfortunately, many companies are playing around in the Google sandbox and most of them are sitting there because of bad black hat link strategies. For example, Dave Davies mentioned that a client recently reported of sitting in purgatory over unnecessary and malicious link building. A horrible thing but most of the work done today is spent on disavowing backlinks for clients than progressive strategy. This is more likely the given state of affairs until this monster transition settles down.
Too many robots in the kitchen already! From self-driving cars to roaming vacuums Google has now entered robotics with the help of Android developer Andy Rubin. This lifestyle product will be dedicated to making day to day activities easier; catered to save you time by connecting your home to you. The artificial intelligence is built to know each and every user on an individual base far ahead of earlier model concept such as Microsoft once proposed. Google has made advances to where the robot adapts to individuals rather than stick to a ridged non-responsive software.
Yucky things can be found in the sandbox
Your best friend will be a robot (if he isn't already)
Get your Christmas website prepared well in advance
Darth Vader is replacing Mickey Mouse
Find out more on Webcology


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Another major winter storm is headed toward Topeka, which could find itself digging out from under as much as 6 to 8 inches of sleet and snow on Sunday.
Bands of even heavier snowfall are possible in some areas.
Because of the nature of the storm, which will result from two separate systems converging from the north and south, forecasters late Friday morning were reluctant to be too specific with their predictions.
Brian Barjenbruch, a meteorologist and lead forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Topeka, said northeast Kansas residents are unlikely to see any freezing rain over the weekend but should see significant amounts of snow.
Barjenbruch said some light sleet or flurries are possible Saturday morning, with more of the same in the afternoon. Sleet should change over to snow as night falls, with the main precipitation occurring after 6 p.m. Saturday.
The heaviest amount of snow is expected to fall between 9 p.m. Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday. Snowfall should taper off between 4 and 11 p.m. Sunday, from west to east.
Heaviest sleet amounts are expected south of Topeka, in an area roughly from Ottawa to Emporia along Interstate 35. Heaviest snowfall, meanwhile, should develop along Interstate 70 west and east of Topeka.
Total moisture from the sleet and snow should be somewhere between 3/10 of an inch and up to 1-inch.
Accompanying the sleet and snow will be extremely cold temperatures and strong winds, which are expected to last for the duration of the storm.
Barjenbruch said it is very "abnormal" to have this kind of weather in early March. He said some of the lowest high temperatures ever seen in March are possible this weekend, as Sunday's high should top out around 10 degrees.
The National Weather Service in Topeka issued a winter storm watch Friday afternoon that will be in effect from Saturday evening through late Sunday.
Though forecasters are confident a storm will move into northeast Kansas on Saturday, Barjenbruch said there was "a lot that could change in the forecast."
The weather system from the north will bring with it cold winds and lower temperatures. The front from the south, meanwhile, will bring moist air to northeast Kansas.
"It's going to be a strong cold front," he said. "It's going to be very cold."
Snow should be of the wet variety when it begins to fall, then should become light and fluffy, making it more susceptible to blowing and drifting.
Wind chills Saturday night into Sunday morning are expected to drop to the minus 5 to minus 20-degree range, while Sunday night into Monday morning the wind chill could be as low as minus-15 to minus-25.


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Ms. Mell, who was
She will report to Gail Berman, president of Fox Entertainment.
Ms. Mell been responsible for HBO campaigns for programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon.
Fox has been without a head of marketing for almost 18 months. Senn Moses previously had the job, coming to Fox from Sony Pictures Entertainment.


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How many interceptions has Donovan McNabb, star quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, thrown so far this year? When sports junkie Jeff Kingston, 24, wanted to know the answer, he skipped the Web and opted to use his America Online instant messenger (IM) program instead. Kingston opened the IM window and began corresponding with a "buddy� known as "TheSportingNews.� In seconds, he learned that McNabb had thrown only three interceptions. An accurate answer to the question, but one that didn't come from his sports-obsessed friends. Instead, it came from a robot.
Kingston is one of 60 million Americans — about half of all Americans online — who use IM services provided by industry leaders AOL, MSN and Yahoo! or other smaller players. Kingston, who works in the front office of the San Diego Padres, has been using IM since college, and now relies on it to keep in touch with friends. "IM is a great place for us to come together,� he says. Recently, a new member entered Kingston's conversations: a robot automated by software and an underlying database that can answer football questions on demand, acting much like a human sports savant.
Conventially known as a "buddy bot,� "TheSportingNews� is the invention of ActiveBuddy, a New York City-based company that's trying to find commercial uses for IM services. So far, buddy bots are emerging as the most promising and least intrusive way marketers have found to tap in to the widely popular IM world, which despite its large user base, has yet to succeed as a viable advertising medium. These bots have been used to raise awareness of certain brands or products: They have promoted albums and movies, acted as customer service reps and offered sponsored services such as interactive databases. "Bots are the most interesting thing going on, commercially, in the Instant Messaging world,� says Marissa Gluck, advertising analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix.
Two companies, ActiveBuddy and Foster City, Calif.-based FaceTime, are the biggest players in this new field of IM-based consumer communication. Their innovative use of "bots� is helping these companies receive wide attention in the IM marketing world. ActiveBuddy first released a bot to the public last April, called GooglyMinotaur, a funny name perhaps, but one that resonated with teenage fans of the band Radiohead because it's their animal mascot. Fans could type "GooglyMinotaur� into an AOL, Yahoo! or Microsoft IM buddy list and then get information about concert tickets, song samples and band member trivia — or even play Radiohead hangman.
Capitol Records hired ActiveBuddy to develop a robot to create advance buzz for the band's newest album, "Amnesiac,� which was released in June. Peter Levitan, ActiveBuddy's CEO, says he doesn't know how many album sales can be attributed to GooglyMinotaur because direct sales conversion is difficult when "only 1 percent of all record sales take place online.� However, according to ActiveBuddy spokesperson Emily Lenzner, GooglyMinotaur received 10.5 million messages from an undisclosed number of users during its first seven weeks of existence.
Despite the lack of sales creation data, another record company, Warner Brothers, has followed suit by commissioning "LindsayBuddy,� to promote the debut album of singer Lindsay Pagano. "Instant messaging is the fastest growing segment of the Internet, and we want to offer Lindsay content to her demographic, which has a very high user rate of instant messaging,� says Robin Bechtel, head of new media at Warner Brothers Records.
More recently, ActiveBuddy has developed an all-purpose IM buddy called "SmarterChild� that runs on AOL and does not limit itself to spitting out specific information related to one artist. SmarterChild users can get local weather, movie times, headlines, stock quotes and horoscopes. It's much like an Internet portal, in the way that it connects a user with desired information. (See screen shot, page 30.) But it can also be tailored to specific promotions and be used to create brand awareness. Sprint, for example, ran a baseball pennant race promotion that included a buddy bot called "AgentBaseball,� which, like TheSportingNews, provided player stats and other trivia. If IM users like a particular bot, they can direct their friends to it with a quick "add this buddy to your list� message.
FaceTime, the other bot company, has been playing the IM space a little bit differently, though many of the guiding principles are the same. Instead of engineering fully automated buddies that sit waiting for an inquisitive IM user, FaceTime builds customer service bots. These connect the user with a customer service representative — one who is often able to handle multiple conversations at the same time and thereby speed up what would have been a slow phone queue. The company has built such bots for Chicago-based Bank One and Lincoln, R.I.-based Amica Insurance. Craig Phelps, who oversaw the rollout of a customer service bot for Amica's 500,000 policy-holders says the bot "works for those who want to get questions answered quickly.� FaceTime CEO Glen Vondrick sees this trend turning into a common commercial use of the medium. Customers in any industry could bounce questions off these bots, receive alerts about shipping, monitor inventory and order products.
But before marketers jump on buddies like they once jumped on banner ads, they should reflect on the reasons that IM, despite its popularity, and despite the introduction of the bots, has largely failed as a marketing channel. At first glance, this is a puzzling situation because IM demographics seem so desirable: young, affluent, well-educated and online for long periods of time. For instance, of the 18 million teens who are online, 74 percent or 13 million are IM users, according to Pew. (See chart, above.)
So why hasn't IM gone the way of radio, TV and the Internet by aggressively advertising to its audience? One reason is fear that marketing may interfere with signing up new users and retaining old ones. The fierceness of the competition over registering new users consigns even the least ambitious marketing goals to the back burner. Though AOL spokewoman Jane Lennon declined to confirm this information, Glen Vondrick says that the company employs a sales force dedicated to encouraging people to adopt its free service. If IM carriers start interrupting IM conversations with too many marketing messages, there could be mass migration to another Internet company, such as Yahoo!, Vondrick says. "Pop-up ads would cause a customer revolt,� agrees Jupiter's Marissa Gluck.
Fear that they will lose users by incorporating ads into the IM system, or by "monetizing� the user base — to use Internet jargon — may be what keeps the carriers from converting it into a business, at least in the short term. AOL's CEO Steve Case testified to a congressional committee last September that he views IM purely as a bonus feature. "It's not really a revenue-generating business for us,� he said. On AOL's IM system, the only ad present is usually one for the company's ISP service. This suggests that the service functions best as a branding vehicle for its parent company, or even as a loss leader.
The self-advertising (which Yahoo! does as well) points to the other historical factor behind IM's advertising idleness: no banner ad strategy has panned out so far. "It's not premium ad space by any stretch,� says Gluck. MSN's rate card provides evidence of this. (MSN includes all of Microsoft's Web content, chat sites and messaging applications.)
The space on the MSN Messenger window is just one of 900 placement options throughout the portal, according to marketing manager Mike Siegenthaler. MSN charges $15 CPM (cost for 1,000 ad impressions) for the messaging window space. Meanwhile, their small business, personal finance and car site each charge $45 CPM. And banner ads, no matter what the price, have not succeeded in attracting many big-money advertisers. Gary Miller, director of the e-Marketing strategy practice for IBM, pointed out during a recent advertising panel that "the Global 1,000 has not embraced digital advertising — only three: Kmart, Disney and Microsoft spend more than 1 percent of their ad budgets online.�
Carriers, which also sell banner ads for their related portals, seem similarly uninterested in prioritizing messaging. An AOL spokesperson says the company has nothing new to unfurl. Jane Lennon simply says, "we're always experimenting.�
In July, Yahoo! announced a new marketing program: the portal began using the messenger to sell Logitech brand Webcams that can be used to add video images to messaging. The banner ads click to Yahoo! Shopping. "This kind of advertising makes the most sense,� says Yahoo! Messaging Group head Lisa Pollock. However, television ads don't just market television components.
At some point, the medium may have to market something other than itself. Buddy bots aim to break out of that mold. Although Microsoft's Siegenthaler admits that when it comes to IM, "we have more questions than answers,� there are some marketers, like those at Capitol Records, who have at least found one answer. Just send an instant message to Jeff Kingston, and ask him.
Of the 60 million instant messaging users, 47 million are adults.
|Don't know/refused
|Less than high school
|High school
|Some college
|College degree
|$30,000 or less
|More than $75,000
|Don't know/refused
|Note: Percentages do not all sum to 100 percent due to rounding.
|Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, March 2001
The incompatibility of various instant message carriers has long frustrated users who can't chat with their friends who happen to use different carriers. It's a problem that the carriers themselves — except for AOL — are interested in resolving to enable the medium to evolve. This goal of achieving compatibility among carriers, known by techies as interoperability, is a push toward standardization that many technologies — from long-distance carriers to Internet service providers — have already addressed. For example, even if you and your friends use different local or long-distance carriers, your telephone can connect with their telephone. But the same is not true for would-be instant messenger buddies who use different carriers. AOL subscribers can't chat with their Yahoo!-using friends, essentially because AOL, the leader of the pack, refuses to open up its network to other companies. An AOL spokesperson said that the company supports the idea in theory, but has "security concerns� that prevent AOL from conducting interoperability testing with other consumer IM carriers. Meanwhile, the No. 2 and 3 players, MSN and Yahoo!, have joined smaller industry players to form a group called IMUnified that advocates standardization. It's one of these smaller fish, Odigo, that has been the first to take action. While Yahoo! and MSN have amicable working arrangements that allow Odigo users to communicate with their users, AOL does not. Odigo engineers try to facilitate communication between their customers and AOL users by breaking into the AOL network, when they can. "AOL has tried to block us in the past,� says Alex Diamantis, Odigo's vice president for sales and marketing. Until instant message users can freely communicate among all carriers, marketers say their efforts will be limited. According to the IMUnified group's Web site, "The sooner we achieve interoperability, the sooner we can develop the next step in personal communications.�


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Going Medieval On Your Axe
Some say the old ways are the best ways. Apparently, a group of men from Cologne agree.
Early Monday morning a fight broke out in the city center. It began as a heated argument. Four men got into a verbal spat with a fifth one. When words were no longer enough, the men broke out axes.
Yep. Axes. Talk about taking it old school. These guys went positively medieval.
After suffering a wound to the thigh, the victim tried to escape. He attempted to hobble to his vehicle. That is when the axe- wielding assailants produced more modern weapons. They tried shooting at the escaping man and hit his car. Witnesses stated that the windows were shot out. (It's possible their inaccuracy with firearms is the reason they each carry an axe in the first place.)
The suspects fled the scene.
Police arrived and took statements. Crime scene techs found shattered glass and what is believed to be blood at the site of the attack.
Officers confirmed the event to reporters. They established that the axe fight had, in fact, taken place. They revealed that one male had been taken to the hospital. Neither his identity nor the extent of his injuries was released.
Shortly after, two of the suspects were taken into custody. The other two men are still on the loose.
German officials have found no, apparent, links to terror with this incident. Evidently, this is just a random group of medieval- minded men. I guess that is supposed to make their citizens feel better. These guys may chop your head off if you argue with them, but at least they won't target arbitrary people in the name of Allah, right?
We will just have to chalk this incident up to another win for German society under the ever-impressive Angela Merkel.
© 2016 Vianna Vaughan
source: Fox News


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I love this line and this product!
This product is pricey but wonderful. It's so moisturizing and I am absolutely loving it. I've been using it for about a week and a half and it is starting to de-puff my eyes. I am looking forward to a reduction in my fine lines ;)4


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Download Martin Scorsese's Hugo for free today only
It may be December 30th, but there are still Christmas presents to be had! Apple is giving away, as part of their holiday promotion, a free item every day for twelve days. Today's gift is a free copy of Martin Scorsese's 2011 film HUGO. Nominated for a bunch of awards, including Best Picture, HUGO is one of Scorsese's best movies as well as his first to be shot digitally and 3D. Featuring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Richard Griffiths, and Sacha Baron Cohen, HUGO is a must see.
I recently ranked HUGO as one of the top five movies in Scorsese's filmography and for good reason. It is his most ambitious and gorgeously filmed movie to date. It is an epic adventure appropriate for all ages and is an ode to the movies of George Melies, one of the directors who revolutionized the art form.
Whether you have an iPod or iPad or not, download iTunes now and get a copy of HUGO. At the very least you can watch it on your desktop and bask in Scorsese's ode to the magic of film.


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There are those people who (surely without too much justification) have surrounded the fritillary with an air of sadness. Perhaps they have overreacted to the shadowy maroon of its flowers - which can also be a happy cream-white - or to its hung head. Admittedly these small lanterns do not suggest a carnival exuberance as much as a secretive and reticent fragility; but such gloomy local tags as ''Doleful Bells of Sorrow'' or ''Drooping Tulip'' hardly seem fair to its peculiar beauty. And to call it ''Widow Wail,'' as they do in Shropshire, is a positive insult to its light graces.
However, as Geoffrey Grigson has pointed out in The Englishman's Flora, the Elizabethans, who could be heartily morbid when they chose, found fritillaries to be only ''pleasant'' and ''beautiful.'' They planted them in their gardens and wore them on their bosoms. They were charmed above all by the patterning on the petals to which both of the plant's Latin names - ''Fritillaria'' and ''meleagris'' - allude. The first, according to Gerard (although it literally means ''dice-box''), seems to refer to ''the boord upon which men plaie at chesse, which square checkers the flower doth very much resemble.'' The second name means ''guinea fowl,'' and points to a similarity between this eccentric domesticated bird's speckled feathers and the fritillary's petal markings.
I had to wait, this spring, to see our fritillaries come into flower to convince myself that this delightful tessellation really is the geometry of nature and not the simplification of art: but the delicate bells certainly were covered with minutely precise rectangular mosaics, just as Charles Rennie Mackintosh depicts them.
The best name of all for this flower is surely ''snake's head,'' because it describes the shape and inclination of the flowers (just before they open fully) and also their ''scaly look,'' as the poet Hopkins phrases it. The plant as a whole has also, in its disposition, something of the enigmatic quality of a snake. It belongs, in a way, to the decorative and fanciful world of ''art nouveau.'' The exquisitely controlled sinuosity of the tall green stem as it supports the head must have had an instant attraction for an artist-architect of Mackintosh's turn-of-the-century sensibility.
This imaginative Scottish designer of buildings and furniture has tempted more than one historian to call him a ''genius.'' The inventiveness of his work, an amazing mixture of restraint and excitement, of downright practicality and decorative invention, looks in two directions with a sense of vision which doesn't allow for conflict. It looks towards the ornate vegetation of ''art nouveau,'' and it looks towards the severe rectangularities of Modernism. It is simultaneously sensuous and puritanical, organic and geometrical.
If there is a perfect flower for Mackintosh to have painted, it must be the snakeshead fritillary. With his architectural practice run down, and having left his native Glasgow, where his outspoken modernity and originality were none too popular, his affection for flowers prompted him to work on a book of flower paintings. Though World War I apparently made its publication out of the question, many of his studies of wild and garden plants survive. They are elegant, assured and scrupulous. They have the detail of botanical drawings, the economical flattened design of old herbal woodcuts and the nicety of fine architectural draughtsmanship. With a hint of Cubism, he shows the outlines of leaves and petals as uninterrupted: crossing over but not effacing each other. In this way he suggests their transparency, and the traceable completeness of their structure.
I would love to know what Mackintosh thought when he first saw a fritillary. The slender verticality of its stems, the flexuous interlace and arabesque of its leaves - the way they touch and separate - and of course the minute checkerboard of the petals: all are pure ''Mackintosh.'' His architecture had been for years displaying his delight in just these things. Did he come across the unpretentious meadowflower only in 1915 and see then for the first time how exactly it was his flower? Or had he studied it carefully years earlier and consciously based his architectural details, his stylized curves and verticalities, his accumulations of squares, little and big, on this modest work of nature? I prefer the first theory.
If I am right, the encounter in 1915 at Walberswick in Suffolk (where the drawing was made) between architect and flower must have been a sudden, quiet recognition of similar aims. Mackintosh must have found in this wonderful flower the same natural qualities he had achieved by ''art.'' Both knew the mystique and significance of restraint, both knew the aesthetic finesse of slender elongation, both knew the energy and charm of checks and squares. Both could be praised - as a contemporary of Mackintosh's praised his thin shafts of white wood embellishing a bedend or supporting a lean mantelpiece, his decorative ironwork, or his tall, fantastic standard lamps - for their ''lines of a shy elegance.''


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Things are always better in pairs. Peanut butter and jelly, Simon and Garfunkel, the bow and arrow, unicorns and glitter, the list goes on. So when the opportunity came up to create yet another amazing pair, well we just couldn't miss the opportunity.
Photoflex has joined forces with our friends over at Lowepro, and we have come together to give you the chance to win some pretty sweet gear.
This week we are giving away a LowePro Pro Roller x100, a very cool piece of equipment. What makes it so stunning? Well it has…
Exclusive Lock & Go System
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Wheels with custom housings
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Hideaway prop foot
This is a great bag that will give you a fantastic way to transport you cameras, lenses, and Photoflex gear wherever life's adventures take you.
See full product specs and info here-
What does it take to win? Just tell us what you would do with this bag if you won it (either in the comments section below or on our facebook page), and you just might get to make that dream happen.
But this dynamic duo isn't done with the gear giveaways just yet. Check out the Lowepro blog at blog.lowepro.com for some details on how to win a gaggle of Photoflex gear.
If you like Lowepro bags, follow them on facebook. They have an excellent program called Free Bag Fridays where they give away a bag every week. Pretty slick deal!
This giveaway will be open until Monday May, 23 at which point the winners will be announced on our Facebook page, so if you are not yet a fan, make sure to "Like" us.
Best of luck!


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Facebook's Beacon/
Facebook is still the site everyone loves to talk about. According to Techcrunch, themselves quoting Comscore, Facebook received 32 million unique views against 71 million for MySpace. So while Facebook has not caught up, it is still catching up, growing 118% in the past year, the result being Facebook continues to attract the most commentary. Facebook hit a wave of negative publicity when they were accused of ruining Christmas. In short their new Beacon ad system incorporates certain purchases into the newsfeed: if you mention to me that you'd like, say, a new Aston Martin for Christmas, and then on your newsfeed appeared "Michael has bought a new Aston Martin", some of the surprise, the glee, might be taken out of the (large) equation.Many saw it as an intrusion too far, an entangling of business interest and personal financial transaction in a sphere supposedly dedicated to social interaction. However fighting the hysteria was read/write web who argued that no one really cares, at least compared to the way people cared when the newsfeed was first released. Even they thought that without a clear opt out Beacon could seriously missfire. In the end Facebook has baulked at a blanket publishing of user activity on third party sites and has incorporated an opt in function, the catch being that you will keep being pestered by Facebook until you have actively logged in or out of Beacon postings.
The whole issue is caught up with the wider debate about Facebook privacy. Accusations that Facebook are doctoring search to suit their own nefarious ends have also hit the networking site. People are increasingly worried that Facebook has amassed a dangerously detailed and complete data reservoir to the extent that the Information Commissioner will step in to provide guidelines for young people. There has been a backlash against the ad program from not only users but also advertisers who argue that paid for ads simply do not garner enough interest (a pathetic click through rate of 0.04%)- unlike on Google people are not looking (in the main) for anything specific on Facebook other than to generally follow what their friends are up to, say hi etc. Newly released corporate pages, part of the recent overhaul in their ad program, have not gone down well either, and even Penguin, who have created one, admit that there are some issues with the whole concept of Facebook and corporate identity. It appears then that Facebook is increasingly imbricated with third parties, mostly unknown to casual users, who can then use the site in both obvious and ever more subtle ways, a shift that has lead Bokardo to call the design "Brilliant but Evil" and demand an opt in for any corporate programs or knowledge sharing. For example you can now get involved with SpriteSips, as in the soft drink, which offers a host of content and activities from videos to music and "mobile refreshment". For a while Facebook has been talked up as a business network, largely over the heads of its core (or original) users who just carried on posting drunken pictures, stupid comments and pointless messages. Now the boundaries between the social content and the box ads has broken down, a breakdown that was inevitable at some level once the site was opened to developers.
Earlier this year, in a controversial and highly publicised paper by Danah Boyd, Facebook and MySpace were depicted in class terms- baldly speaking Facebook is middle class, in conception, design and userbase, a fact unsurprising given that it all began in the Ivy League. Far from dampening the hype that led to Microsoft paying $240m for a relatively small stake in the company this probably only exacerbated it as the research confirmed that Facebook's ever expanding demographic is a marketer's dream. If Facebook is the site everyone loves to talk about it is also the site everyone also loves to hate. A nexus of Google style approachability and high powered, half obscured corporate deals involving the privacy of millions has lead to Facebook being an easy target for abuse, as well as the latest promised land of web marketing. Of course Facebook's ubiquitousness means it will inevitably get savaged just for being everywhere. It is the mainstream and as such will attract attention from the margins. The same element that so appeals to companies- the wide group of users from affluent teenagers to cash rich time poor young professionals and the clean set up to suit them all- is the element that detractors so love to hate.
Publishing 2.0 argues that Beacon is likely to fail because Facebook does not have a monopoly on social networking. While acknowledging that the barriers to changing a social networking site are extremely high the fact that they are not absolute means that people will change. Shifting such a distributed yet embedded network is in itself so hard as to effectively institute a monopoly. Yes, there are other sites out there. But how are you going to convince even a third of your network to move unless they really want to? If people are sufficiently exercised by Facebook then maybe, just maybe, you could replicate the set up, with the kind of perfect organisation that never seems to happen. However I think they are not.
Attacks on Facebook are pretty pointless. Leaving aside the more general issues and focusing on those of privacy and corporate penetration of the network booktwo has recently argued that "it's people not marketers who are commodifying their spaces. People prefer to feed on this stuff than build their own [spaces]. A colossal failure of imagination is occuring, but its in our heads, not in that of some ingenious, impersonal, infernal marketeer". I think this is right- up to a point. Living in London one is under almost perpetual surveillance, being watched by more security cameras than any where else on earth. Shops and banks track credit card spending. The Congestion Charge and Oyster track movements. Notionally GCHQ can monitor your phone calls and emails. Privacy is rare. Equally London is a rampantly commercialised space, ad hoardings screaming from every wall. Very little comes for free and when it does there is usually an agenda, in which the user is fully complicit, behind the non-monetary transaction. This is what we have come to accept, have grown up with. What I am suggesting is that the issues of privacy and the tie in to commerce that has excited this latest round of condemnation are ultimately irrelevant to the mass of Facebook users: for many of them this is just the default state of things. Booktwo is correct, in that people seem quite happy to adorn their sites with any amount of corporate, largely trashy, paraphernalia. However this is really no different from walking down a street wearing a Nike top and drinking Coke. In both you are exist in a conversant relationship with a brand- you gain at some level, and in turn serve to market that brand through your day to day interactions with it. The failure of imagination didn't start with Facebook; it has just migrated onto it. One argument against Facebook is that it contains masses of useless information. Aside from the question of whether people want useless information, and I would suggest that they do, alot, Facebook actually contains a mass of useful information, and more importantly a useful communications network that allows people a one-to-many asynchronous communication with a dispersed group of friends, acquaintances etc, the result being an enormously practical reification of what previously existed as loosely lived experience. Because Facebook has this utility value people are likely to accept a degree of advertising or partnership, if it continues to have that utility, the value of which lies in the number of people you can usefully communicate with, a value only likely to rise as the user base grows. People invested in the web care about it and the almost limitless possibility it represents. For most users of Facebook though it is just another resource, another plaything, another aspect of life to be blinged out.
Against this whole train of thought is the idea that there are people, often like myself amongst the first wave of Facebook adoptees, who resent that the purely social aspect of the site has been diminished. This keys in with the a whole attitude of resenting (and critiquing) the business networking aspect of Facebook that has become increasingly apparent, an argument that would ring fence Facebook for "life" and sites like LinkedIn for work. Its an attitude that I have much sympathy for. The Facebook as a platform application boom largely passed me by as I reserved my page for purely social concerns, using it more as place to store photographs and keep up with old friends. This kind of attitude seems increasingly rare as the average profile page is filled with more and more apps, many of them fun, some of them probably commercial at some level- just as the social spaces of our lives, from cafes to bars, even libraries, have become more commercialised, dominated by both highly visible and more obscure conglomerates, so are the newer social spaces of the internet. Connecting the two is a casual attitude from the user, who is as likely to drink branded vodka from a high profile night life chain as add a playful soft drinks cartoon on their social networking space. Companies, lives and brands exist in a co-extensive space both epitomised by, but also symptomatic of, the Facebook Beacon initiative.
One way of looking at this is to contrast it through Google and the Google founders. Both Facebook and Google are, unsurprisingly, aggressively pursuing policies to ensure maximum ad revenue from their sites in the ever expanding online ad space. However Google subsumes ads to itself- they run through its searches and remain in its agreed design and font parameters. This austere and functional advertising seems to cohere with both the high minded, academic credentials of Larry and Sergey while also fitting into with the hardcore business mindset of Eric Schmidt. Mark Zuckerberg, lampooned here as "the Zuckster", is the archetypal Gen Yer, at ease with, even a product of, technology and the highly mediated, commercialised environments of modernity. Ok so he did go to Harvard, and Facebook's whole model requires a totally different conception of advertising anyway, but there is a clear generational gap between the two, a gap that can be seen manifesting itself in the approach to ads. Google and privacy is a topic that can be saved for another time.
So, eventually, we get, inevitably, to publishing. The collapse of reading amongst youth demographics, as highlighted in the recent report To Read or Not to Read, is often blamed on the concurrent rise of new media entertainment. This line of syllogistic thinking roughly runs: people are reading less, they are spending more and more time on social networking sites, therefore social networking sites are killing reading. Perhaps this is partially true. Whatever the truth of why people, and as the report indicates its not just teenagers who read less than ever, aren't reading books it seems that without getting involved in social networking sites publishers will miss out on a new way of engaging readers There are I think a number of important parameters inherent in the platform that allows companies to successfully enter Facebook and not alienate users or become a casual irrelevance like the current ads. Firstly Facebook is still largely democratic in that I am not coerced to add any applications other than those needed for establishing a profile- no one is therefore being forced to corporatise their site anymore than seeing the bar ads at the screen edges. Now that Beacon has also been democratised and chastened to some extent then Facebook is an advertising space largely as much as one wants it to be. This means that a firm has to do something that people actually, really, genuinely want if they are to get things to work. On the one hand we get a profusion of largely crap company stuff- you might also get some cool things as well. If a publisher creates a group that people want to join then everyone wins. Secondly unless a brand has enough cache for people to get involved then its hardly worth using that brand. From a publisher perspective this pretty much translates as- talk about your writers, not yourself. Company involvement with Facebook need not be a negative thing from a user perspective.
In short then Facebook may work as an advertising platform, against the protestations of privacy activists, users annoyed at the intrusion of their social space, web idealists who see the internet as a possible space to transcend the relentless commodification of everything simply because its ad model is an extension of what already exists. Facebook's ad program breaks more ground in terms of the way companies are thinking about advertising, changing them beyond even Microsoft's parodic video of a advertiser/consumer relationship, than in terms of how people experience their world. In that sense we already live in Beacon.


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Facebook mums' groups get thumbs down on health advice
18 May 2016
Michael Woodhead
Pregnant women and new mums are turning to Facebook mums' groups for medical information, but the advice they receive is occasionally dangerous, a study shows.
Peer-to-peer sharing of health information is a growing trend on social media and many women are using Facebook mothers' groups as a source of support and advice, according to Sarah Smith, a pharmacist at Calvary Hospital, ACT.
In a study of the quality of health advice provided on 5 local Facebook mothers groups, Ms Smith and colleagues analysed 59 group posts that included 681 Facebook responses to women seeking health-related information.
The most common health advice sought by mothers was treatment for coughs and colds in infants (31%), teething (8%) and nappy rash (7%).
Discussions about medications most often related to painkillers (36%), cough and cold medications (20%) and antibiotics (8%).
However, the healthcare advice provided via mothers' groups was predominantly anecdotal and one in 5 responses was inaccurate, the study found.
Worryingly, one in 50 of the responses included advice that would be harmful if followed.
Women who asked for healthcare advice online were only rarely advised to seek help from their GP or a pharmacist, and likewise there was seldom advice to refer to reputable online sources of health information.
Last month, it was reported that mothers' groups on Facebook were being targeted by big business as a way of marketing childcare products direct to consumers.
According to Fairfax, companies such as Kimberley Clark spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote products such as Huggies to suburb-specific Facebook groups


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So instead I figured I would share links to some of my other relevant posts along with some of my thoughts.
This blog is all about teaching your children the Wheel of the Year and raising them as Pagans, so there is an abundance of info on how to do just that. But that material is not enough. What is lacking is parents taking the first step and just including your children in your spirituality.
Over the last year I have had many parents (either through FWTI or through this blog) ask me on how to teach their children their faith. And while my answers have been vague and very general this is done with a purpose. Wicca and Paganism is not about dogma or "right or wrong". Rather it is more about intuition and emotion.
So my advice to all Pagan parents is to just start. Whether it is just lighting a candle with them or telling them stories and the myths of the Old Gods. Or other simple activities to celebrate the Sabbats, all the way up to full fledged rituals.
In my family we try to do the Family (Full) Moons and to at least commemorate the Sabbats if we can't do ritual. With conflicting schedules my wife and I can't always be there to do a ritual with the whole family. But this doesn't make us bad parents or bad Pagans, our intent is good and that is all that matters.
Over the last few months I have picked up many subscribers and I want to say Thank You for all the comments, either here or on Facebook or email. And I hope that you continue to stay with me in the years to come as I continue this blog. After Thanksgiving (can you believe it is less then a week away?) I will start on the Yule Season. So if you haven't already please subscribe.
Blessed Be!
You may also want to check out these posts:
- Role of the Mother Priest
- Role of the Father Priest
- Pagan Prayers for Children
- Teaching Meditation to Children
- Teaching Elements to Children


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most recent updates
How to Unlock Secret Stages and Create Passwords in Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2?
There are plenty of goodies, characters and stage unlockables for Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2. Here are some character unlockable passwords and unlockables for secret stages.
Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit Unlockables
Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is an impressive fighting game released for two popular consoles, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008. Here are some top unlockables, including character unlockables, difficulty settings and other goodies.
DragonBall, Arcade Fun for Windows Mobile
DragonBall is a fun Windows Mobile arcade game in which a series of dragons with colored balls for tails must be destroyed. Keep reading to find out if this game is a winner...
Review of Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3
Dragon Ball Z fighting games have gotten a lot of acclaim from fighting game fanatics and Dragon Ball Z lovers alike. What makes the third Budokai Tenkaichi stand out over the rest?
Best Dragonball Z Games for the PS2 Platform
Dragonball Z PS2 games are known for their excellent fight moves and pyrotechnics. With excellent cel-shaded visuals, numerous fight moves and anime look and feel, the best Dragonball Z PlayStation 2 games have become a cult- favorite among many DBZ and non-DBZ fans.
Top Dragonball Z Action Games That Won't Cost You a Penny
These free games feature your favorite DBZ characters including Goku, Vegeta, Cell and Frieza. Online flash games such as Dragonball Z: Earth Defender and Flash Dimension are pure fighting games with loads of action and entertainment.
Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast Cheats and Unlockable Content
Best Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast cheats and unlockables including character unlockable content in What-If stories and Dragon Ball Raging Blast Super titles.
Dragon Ball: Raging Blast Xbox 360 Review
Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is the latest button masher from Namco Bandai. It features a lengthy story mode and excellent mini game modes for both Dragon Ball Z fans and gamers. The game is certainly one of the best Dragon Ball Z Games on the console.
Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit: Pure DBZ-Styled Fighting Game
Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit was the first game released by Atari for the PlayStation 3 platform. The game's popularity graph soared high, courtesy of some excellent graphics, cool animated styles and sound effects. The game is still played by most DBZ fans.
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- applecat
- 5 years ago
- Wedding: November 2014
So I have never considered myself even remotely crafty. But I fell in love with the combination silk flower/brooch bouquets on Etsy, and was heartbroken to find how expensive they were. So I decided to make my own! It's not totally finished…I hope to add more broaches as I collect them, and I will probably wrap the stems in satin so that it looks more polished. But so far, I'm pretty pleased! Tell me what you think!! 🙂 This is really my first attempt at any "craft," so be gentle. 😉


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Property ID : 10290438
For Sale $740,000 - $785,000 - House, Residential
An absolutely outstanding property
There's something here for all the family whether it be indoor or outdoor living, it's perfect for the growing family.
Situated on a quiet street this modern home is finished to a high standard with quality fittings and fixtures throughout.
Walking through the home you will feel space and quality; the open plan kitchen family and dining room are spacious with gourmet kitchen with all stainless appliances, quality cabinets made from Tasmanian Oak, complimented with 40 ml dark stone bench tops. Moving around the home there's plenty of space featuring formal dining room, separate games room or formal lounge, separate closed in theatre room with feature ceiling and surround sound perfect for a quite night in watching a movie.
The Master bedroom has of storage opening out onto decking, ensuite with double basins, corner spa bath with floor to ceiling quality Italian tiles.
Further 4 bedrooms are all doubles with storage
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Workshop- Poesis
Sixth International Political Anthropology Workshop in Ireland on
Poesis: The ambivalent creation of truth.
29th & 30th of November, 2013
Waterford Institute of Technology
Organised by the Department of Applied Arts, Waterford Institute of Technology, the Journal International Political Anthropology, and the School of Sociology & Philosophy, University College Cork
Friday Programme, Venue- C002 College Street Campus
14.15 Introduction
- Poesis: Theorising through metaphors Tom Boland, WIT
- Ambivalence: On the history of philosophies of truth. Michel Bonazzi, Bolognia
- Love and Poesis: The Ambivalent Creation of a Haunted truth Noel Kavanagh, Carlow College
15.45 Break
16.15 Plenary
Theatropoesis and novels of truth Arpad Szakolczai, UCC
18:00 Close
19:00 Conference Dinner; venue tbc.
Saturday: C002 College Street Campus
09.30: Poesis and Creativity
- Theorizing Creativity: Poesis and the Aesthetics of Orality.
Tríona Ní Shíocháin, UL
- And it is written . . . : History and anti-History in the Gospel according to Hollywood
Paul Clogher, WIT
- Poetry, meaningful existence and the potential of the abyss
Jill O'Mahony, WIT
11.30: Poesis and Organisations
- The Poetics of Administration Ray Griffin, WIT
- Stories of Play and the Panopticon Aisling Tuite, WIT
- The Vanishing Stars Paul O'Connor, UCC
13:00 Lunch Cork Road Campus: F02
14:00 Poetry &Society
- Austere Beauty: The Aesthetics of Privilege and Underprivilege in the Built Environment in Contemporary Ireland.
John O'Brien, WIT
- Poesis of everyday life: the creation of young female identities
Irena Lovikatie, WIT
- From Persian epics to Ta'zieh: A sacred theatrical mourning ritual and the public sphere in Persia [Iran]
Amin Sharifi, UCC
- Critiquing the Truth: Joseph Ratzinger and the Critique of Christianity
Philip Cremin, WIT
16:00 Coffee.
16.30 Closing Plenary
Liminal Algebra: Counting Nil in Poetry Agnes Horvath, CU
Final Reflections / Conference closes.
Please notify the convenors of your intention to attend as the event is limited to 30 participants. A special conference lunch at E10 and conference dinner at E20 will be held, but are fully optional – there is no charge to attend the conference itself.
Poesis, from the Ancient Greek (ποίησις) means production or composition. This creativity is central and vital to humanity; from language, story and song through objects, homes and art to political and social institutions. To study society and culture separately is scarcely tenable: this conference concerns the centrality of meaning, narrative and even beauty to human life. Yet, in modernity poesis and culture are often relegated to being little more than entertainment or even frothy ideology which distorts 'real' social processes. Furthermore, for academics oriented to investigating, interpreting or even measuring social forces, how poesis creates truth is a matter of deep ambivalence.
There is nothing more poetic than the sense, or even the sensation, of moving through fiction towards the truth. As Nietzsche pointed out, all of our truths are fictions which we have ceased to recognise as creative poesis: the foundational concepts of philosophy, theology and all the modern disciplines emerge from stories. Inevitably, we live culturally within one fictional world or another, or even in many worlds that overlap in complex ways. Yet, we are ambivalent about this poesis: Whose fiction is it? Does fictional mean false, ideological and erroneous? And what might happen if the fiction starts to wear thin – will there be disenchantment, alienation or renewal?
The intersections of culture and society are no narrow specialism, but increasingly a concern common to many disciplines. Cultural anthropology, at least since Geertz, has taken the meaning-making practices of human societies as a central area of inquiry. Cultural sociology has grown from a minor field to a central paradigm. Literary and performance theory, musicology and cognate disciplines have become increasingly concerned with culture and context, from new historicism to reader response theories. This conference will bring together papers concerned with poesis and culture from all of these areas which engage with the ambivalent status of truth after the cultural turn, the historical turn and the performative turn.
The question of poesis and truth cannot be confined to the sepulchral realms of high art or the distracting froth of popular culture. Despite the dominance of technocratic discourse, the political world is animated by fictions, from universalising utopian visions to images of the nation. Ultimately politics is a contest over meaning. Similarly that thing which we sometimes call 'economic reality' is also a storied world, with confidence, booms and busts the material of our contemporary morality tale. The tale of technological world domination, the bildungsroman of entrepreneurial success, the Faustian pact of progress and the carnival world of the market are all fictions. And of course, culture is now an industry, so that tourism, advertising and education are sites of the production and consumption of poesis and truth.
However, this brings us to problems of distinction: Are all societies alike in creating meaning? Modernity is associated with a dearth of meaning, a decline of poesisand truth becoming singular and univocal – but is this our near-sighted parochialism? Are all elements of society meaning-making? Every human action exists in a nexus of meaning, but it is hardly an undifferentiated continuum, and surely there are particular sources of meaning which deserve academic attention, from poetry, to religion, to authority, to ritual and beyond.
We invite plenary and session papers on:
- Poetry and truth, theory and meaning.
- Society as a fictional world: in modernity and beyond.
- Politics as the contested field of meaning.
- Poesis and everyday life.The marketplace for meaning and productive poesis.


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Best River Town
By Asheville
Asheville Makes Outdoor Magazine's List of Best River Town.
|Experience fall color by boat.
Two things stood out among Asheville commenters: water and beer.
"Time to marry Beer City USA with the Best River Town Ever," says local Julie Mayfield.
|Stand-up Paddle Boarding along the French Broad River.
"There's a national park—the Blue Ridge Parkway—and two world-famous trails, Mountains-to-Sea and the Appalachian, that run through the city or nearby," notes Chris Cavanaugh, president of Magellan Strategy Group.
|Bellyaks: Photo by Effort.tv
And the recreational opportunities are only getting better: in March, the city will debut its new marathon, which runs through the meadows and gardens of the 8,000-acre historic Biltmore Estate.
Read the full story here.
September 12, 2012


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How I lead a green and frugal life by Lily-dog
It's two years to the day since we brought Lily-dog home so I asked her to put some words together about how she leads a simple, green & frugal life with us.
Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Sorry, got a bit overexcited there, I do like meeting new people. Would you like me to bring you a shoe? Because I can go and get one if you like? Here! Here's a shoe. I hope you like it. It's my shoe. Don't try to take my shoe! I like shoes!
Ok, ok, I'll put the shoe down and start telling you what you want to hear. I'm not quite sure what the female feedy-huggy one has asked of me because I am a dog but I'll try my best and will try very hard not to randomly woof. Although I am told I enunciate my woof splendidly, with a proper "wuh" at the beginning and everything. Wuh-oof.
So, yes, I have lived here for two years now and I think I lead a pretty green & frugal life. Well, a white-and-brown frugal life.
I grow my own fur so I don't need clothes – 12 items in '11? Pff! I had less that 12 items of clothing in 11 years! – and my fur can be composted when I don't need it any more. I am also more than happy to snuggle underneath a duvet or a blanket too for extra warmth, no need for gas-guzzling central heating.
I do not – NOT!NOT!NOT! – like going in the car because they are expensive and noisy and sometimes involve journeys to the vets which are expensive, noisy and sometimes involve injections. If I had my way the tail-less ones would get rid of the car and we'd just walk everywhere we needed to go. Because the only place we need to go is the woods, right? Definitely NOT the vets, just the woods.
I like the woods. They are at the bottom of my garden. Walking in the woods is my favourite hobby and it makes me happy that we go there every day. If I wasn't such a scaredy dog, I'd probably run around the woods on my own all day, making sure I'm instantly aware of any changes in smells and to check that those squirrels aren't up to anything. Those squirrels are always up to something. That's why they need barking at. "What are you up to, squirrels?" I say with one single well-enunciated woof. They know I'm onto them, that's why they run.
I like eating things I find in the woods. Once I found a tuna sandwich. That was a good day. I carried it for about a minute to really savour it before I ate it. It was good. Mostly I just eat green things. My favourite green things are those sticky bud things which the curly haired one calls "cleavers" but I also like some bits of grass. The curly-haired one calls this "foraging" and says it's a green and frugal thing but I just think of it as walking snack time. The curly-haired one is good and puts green things in pots for me to snack on in the garden too. They're at dog-mouth height so they must be for me.
Inside the house, I am the good one. I'm the one that helps reduce food waste by SELFLESSLY cleaning up any scraps of food that drop on the floor, any food the cats might leave, and any eggs that get dropped or cracked. It has been said by a certain curly-haired person who shall remain nameless (because I don't understand the concept of names really) that I sometimes cause the eggs to get broken by nudging them off a table or trying to trip up one of the humans when they're carrying them up from the chickens but THAT IS DOWNRIGHT LIES. I am a good dog, I tell you.
Speaking of the chickens, they're fascinating, aren't they? Their home smells of such amazing things, as do their bottoms. I must admit that I did try to eat them at first (the whole chickens, not just their bottoms) but now I am just happy to watch them. Watch them and sniff them. Mmm, sniffing.
I like sniffing the cats too and they generally sniff back although I think their "eeeuggh!" faces are at least sometimes uncalled for. I do have soaks in the stream as often as I'm allowed so in my humble opinion, I'm very very clean and delightfully fragrant. And the curly one makes me have showers inside the bathroom rain box sometimes too. I prefer showers to baths, which I hear is a green thing: I like that they are shorter and don't use as much water and that sometimes I can lick the water from the water thing. And after I've had a shower and am nice and clean, I help the two-legs clean the bathroom floor by wriggling on every single bit of it. No need for chemical cleaning gunk or even a mop. I'm such a helpful doggy.
I am also good at helping sort the rubbish. They sort it into "recycling", "compost" and "rubbish" but they seem to miss that a lot of the so-called "rubbish" is actually perfectly reusable. No, I don't mean reusable … what do I mean? Oh yes, chewable. I am very good at taking things out of the office or living room bins and "reusing" them into little tiny pieces. Sometimes it takes ages for the feedy-huggy people to get the picture: they put the perfectly chewable thing in the bin, I take it out again, they put it in again, I take it out again, they put it in again … I mean squirrels learn faster than these people. Wait… squirrels can learn things? Then they might get the better of me with their scheming ways! Oh no! I should go woof at them to make them forget!
To celebrate her two year anniversary with us, I made her a party hat – with brown-paper spaniel ears.
Some bribing with treats may have been necessary to get her to wear it.
Quite a lot of bribery ;)
12 Comments
Join the conversation and post a comment.
Awww bless. The things dogs will do for a treat. Happy second anniversary of living The Really Good Life to Lily.
I laughed out loud at this post. Mainly because my son and his girlfriend has a spaniel Sage. She also enjoyed foraging the pots of plants so much that the strawberries have had the shortest haircut ever! She is older and a little wiser now (and most of the pots are behind a fence which she can jump but knows not too) most of the time!.
Congratulations, Lily-Dog! You are a very good writer for someone who speaks in well enunciated woofs. Perhaps you've been reading Spaniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (it's a book about the original Really Good Life).
Hello Lily-dog, my name is Mabel and I live with a family of 2 legged ones, their cats, chickens, ducks and Stan. Stan is curled up fast asleep, so I'm posting the comment. (He's part Saluki which means he is either curled up in a ball pretending we're not here or he is lying next to me using me as a pillow. Dad says he's sensitive but Mum says he's high maintenance and sometimes threatens to swap him for a goat which would be far more green and frugal but I think that's mostly to tease Dad. I just know he doesn't always eat all his food…)
Anyway, you sound just as green and frugal as me. I'm actually ginger. I match the floorboards, which means people sometimes don't see me and I get tripped over (like you I will very helpfully lick up whatever food they spill) but it does mean my hairs don't show on the floor! Less hoovering! (I'm not keen on the hoover. Noisy and expensive like the car. Stan hates it and runs to the next room if anybody moves it. But he doesn't like the broom either, which is green and frugal and not noisy. Mum rolls her eyes and calls him a 'fruitbat'.)
I will happily eat scraps to make sure there's no waste. Apparently I'm a bit too enthusiastic about this and will have no waist if I don't share with Stan. I'm part Lab, so it's not my fault.
I keep my feet clean by walking in puddles. I don't like baths or showers (I'm also part Whippet!) so that saves lots of water.
I keep the house tidy by collecting things and putting them in my basket. You know, toys, pencils, knitting (that did get a bit messy, actually), wooden darning mushrooms, logs, plastic tubs (I can reach up quite high on my back legs), the mixer paddle from the bread machine (I can even reach the draining board) and things like that.
I like sniffing chickens too. And cats. Two of ours come and curl up next to me, but I'm scared of the old one, she has very sharp claws. I'd quite like to be a cat, so I sit on people's laps to keep them warm. Very green and frugal!
Happy "Gotcha Day" to Lily Dog from me and Lou Pine.
(He is going to be celebrating his first soon!)
Betty Noodle
Hello Lily and Mabel and Stan too!
I'm Betty also known as Betty Noodle or just plain Noodle, I have a friend in the park called Noodle too. I live with the mother & daughter team, aka my 'slaves'. I'm not keen on men so this all woman household suits me. I have only lived here for 5 months but I think I've trained them very well. My main green credential is energy conservation, mainly my own energy, though I do, selflessly, take the slaves out three times a day. Just so they get some exercise you know. Honestly, without me I don't think they would get any exercise! But, I do draw the line at taking them out in the rain, wind, snow or worst of all hail, a girl has to have standards after all. I am always available for snuggling duties, preferably under a duvet or blanket,
My slaves say that I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but I don't know what they mean, I don't have any tools & I don't have a box, I think they are getting a bit confused!
I'm with Lily, those squirrels need a constant eye keeping on them, don't trust them. Might I suggest Lily, that you climb the tree to get to them. I haven't quite managed to climb ALL the way up the tree yet, but when I do those squirrels had better watch out!
My slaves feed me well, so in return I don't bother much with their food, even if they drop it, since the old one doesn't eat meat, most of it doesn't interest me anyway.
Anyway I think I need to go and lie down again now. Bye.
Hi, Lily….hope you are doing well! Dog days of summer will be coming soon….will that make you happy? Love and kisses from Scout and JoJo (rescued Schnauzer dogs)…..


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Check out the huge list of freebies and discounts for Teachers! With teacher appreciation next week, be sure to share this with your favorite teachers!
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I originally started writing this post before Christmas but then lost the near-completed version with the death of my laptop. However, I recently found some old backups and decided to finish it up and put it online for your enjoyment. Have fun!---BRSM.
Total Synthesis of (+)-Crotogoudin
S. Breitler and E. M. Carreira*, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2013, 52, 11168; [PDF][SI][GROUP]
As the name implies, crotogoudin is another natural product from the goldmine of bioactive compounds that is the Croton genus of flowering trees. Seeds of these plants have been used for hundreds of years to produce the famous croton oil, a violent emetic and purgative used in early medicine across the globe before anyone realised just how bad it really was. Now, the notorious extract is mostly used as a source of various natural products, a reproducible way of inducing pain and/or irritation in animal experiments and a case in point that things described as 100% natural can still be extremely bad for you. It also serves as the major source of the important natural product phorbol, and gave its name to crotonic and tiglic acid (and thus crotonaldehyde).[1] Along with a number of other natural products isolated from this genus, crotogoudin displays promising cytotoxic activity, which, coupled with the rare 3,4-seco atisane skeleton, was probably one of the reasons that the Carreira group recently embarked on its total synthesis.
The group envisaged the use of a radical cyclisation as the key step to form the final ring in the natural product, the required radical generated from the reductive opening of a cyclopropyl ester as shown below. The precursor to this reaction could be prepared from the simpler chiral β-hydroxyketone, a building block that could be easily obtained in enantiopure form by enzymatic desymmetrisation of the corresponding meso-diketone. Although the use of enzymes to produce chiral starting materials is by no means a recent development, it remains a fairly uncommon sight in total synthesis,[2] possibly because such reactions are limited to the preparation of a relatively small number of simple building blocks—desymmetrisation works best for diols, diesters and diketones, for example—and it's not always easy to design efficient routes around these starting materials. Additionally, large amounts of substitution around these motifs is often not well tolerated as the enzyme's active site is just not able to fit such unnatural substrates in; unlike new catalysts promising implausible substrate scope and generality, enzymes usually have evolved to be very fussy about what molecules they'll accept. Of course, with the advent of synthetic biology, it's becoming increasingly possible to retool enzymes for our own purposes, and I think that this approach become a lot more popular over the next decade (especially in industry, where it's more reasonable to spend huge sums of money to find a way of optimising a single step to perfection).[3] Anyway, that's probably the subject of another blog post, and—at least in the case of this synthesis—Nature's capabilities are adequate, and the reaction is a good fit for the route!
And Now For Something Completely Different 10: Don't Buy Your Undecacycloicosane From Sigma-Aldrich
A funny thing happened the other day: I went onto the Sigma-Aldrich website to order some undecacyclo[10.8.0.0(2,11).0(3,6).0(4,9).0(5,8).0(7,10).0(13,16).0(14,19).0(15,18).0(17,20)]icosane, and was amused to notice a rather M. C. Escher-like rendering of the structure:
Looking for alternative suppliers on Chemspider, I noticed it too had depicted the molecule in quite a strange way (although interestingly their 3D view of the molecule is spot on):
I guess that both these structures were probably drawn by computers, so I decided to see how Chemdraw's name-to-structure function would deal with such a complicated case. I was certain that the name would either be rejected or that some kind of tortuous hydrocarbon Gordian knot would result, but to my surprise Chemdraw emerged as the clear winner in this bizarre and impromptu competition:
More serious posts soon!