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Here are the final numbers for my Energy Upgrade California home retrofit.
Table 1. Air Leakage (CFM50)
Test-in air leakage
Test-out air leakage
Table 2. Duct Leakage
Test-in duct leakage
*Test-out duct leakage
(*Note: The duct leakage is a percentage of the rated flow of the air handler. The measured air flow at the return grill was somewhat lower, so the percent leakage was actually higher.)
According to the EnergyPro software used in the Energy Upgrade California (EUC) program, the air sealing, insulation blown into our exterior walls, and the duct sealing achieved a total of 23% energy savings; this was enough to quality for a rebate from PG&E that covered 40% of the costs for our project. I have been assured the check is working its way though the system to our mailbox.
Jason Deshasier from Stewart Heating and Air (see photo) did the duct sealing and installed the bathroom fan. Jason spent some time sealing up the plenum by cutting holes in it, brushing on a lot of mastic on the inside leak areas, and then sealing the access holes. At the Energy Out West conference this year, I learned from Bruce Manclark that sealing leaks in a duct system close to the plenum, where the air flow is the highest, has a bigger pay off than sealing around registers, for example, where the air flows are much diminished.
I did the air sealing, and was a little disappointed that I only shaved of 320 CFM. I think most of that was due to my installing a Chimney Balloon in our fireplace. Brian Stevens, our test-out auditor from Energuy, pointed out some leaks that I missed: the cabinet and vent pipe above the kitchen range hood that connects to the attic and at the doorway to the dining room there was a gap connected to the crawlspace where a door used to hang.
Michele and I are very happy with the work done on our house, and working with Bill Stewart and his crew; our energy advisor Scott Mellberg of Populus, LLC; and Energuy's Richard Cunningham (test-in auditor) and Brian Stevens (test-out auditor) was a pleasure. Bill, Scott, and Brian were all at our house for the test out, along with our dog Cooper, Tom White, Home Energy publisher, and Kate Henke, our designer. Kate took lots of photos that we will use in an article early next year. The atmosphere was festive, and it was great to see the contractor, auditor, and advisor all getting along and respecting one another. And when Brian pointed out a new rule requiring a two-inch clearance around gas water heater flues, Bill got on top of the water heater closet with a hand saw and cut out a bigger hole for the flue.
Bill shared some horror stories—bucket of mastic falling through the ceiling onto a brand-new white carpet and antique table, for example—from past jobs and Brian kept things light with his good humor and some auditing horror stories—somehow this involved his young children at home. Brian was very thorough. He documented every measurement and test with an iPad Mini.
Michele and I were happy that 40% of the costs of our retrofit was covered through EUC. But if I were a typical homeowner and not the editor of Home Energy, it would have been difficult for someone to convince me to put in the time and the inconvenience and the 60% of the cost not covered in the rebate for a tighter, more efficient house. Plus, we were living pretty efficiently already, in a climate with hot summers but mild winters. Our gas and electric bill last month was only $38.75. It gets over $100 for a few months and peaks at about $150 mid-December to mid-January—more than $100 for heating—and we are looking forward to seeing how much we've cut our gas use for heating. The idea of an energy upgrade should be much more appealing though to the homeowner, perhaps with a few teenagers at home, who uses a lot more energy.
Wearing my homeowner hat, I'm happy about the new bathroom fan that is very quiet and automatic, and it felt good seeing the crawlspace covered. When we get our first heating bill next winter that will also make me happy. And the house is quieter. Jason moved the furnace filter from the air handler to the return plenum, so it is much easier to change the filter and much less likely that I'll come crashing through the ceiling. Now that I don't have to get up there to change the filter I may never see the inside of the attic again—until the day when we swap out our ducted system for a mini-split heat pump, anyway.
The whole process of our retrofit took several weeks and Michele or I had to be home several days during the week all together. It was noisy at times and disruptive. The wall insulation made a bunch of drywall nails pop inside! The guys from McHale's Environmental Insulation, who sealed our crawl and blew in our wall insulation, are coming out next week to fix the nail pops. But that's another day one of us has to be home.
As an energy geek, I love the fact that our walls are now totally insulated and our duct system is more efficient. And I'm one of those people who feel some responsibility to the community and the planet to live more sustainably.
I am really pulling for contractors like Stewart Heating and Air and other businesses marketing, selling, and doing the often dirty and difficult work of home performance. Bill's company is doing well, but we need more of them.
I understand the frustration that business owners have with the amount of paper work and the changing rules for energy efficiency programs. Policy makers and program managers have their jobs to do as well. Not much would happen in the home building and renovation industry without some push from a higher authority—and I don't mean the market. But we have a ways to go to make home performance work easy for the homeowner and the home performance contractor. I think that should be a goal at every level of our industry.
Addendum: During a recent hot spell I measured temperatures inside and outside of our house every hour or so over the course of three days. One day it reached a high of 103 degrees F outside (around 5 pm), from a low of 63 degrees F (around 7am) and only reached 83 degrees F inside (around 7 pm). We open the windows at night and close them when T inside equals T outside. Not exactly "beating the heat" but learning to get along.
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Jim, Glad to help! OK, a touch of soap box. So long as we don't tell people EE is free and 'payback' is not the primary reason people do it, that's great. We REALLY need cheap financing to make EE work. I'm thrilled Matt is working on this, it needs to be done. So is AFC First Financial. Cheap financing comes from confidence both in savings and that the loans will be repaid. Accurate modeling is an important piece of this, we can't have 34% realization rates like in CA. Modeling will only get accurate if there is an incentive to do so, and having your results published is about the best way to do that. The good will be shown to be good and the ones who don't do as well will know it and have incentive to improve (it shouldn't be punitive, that is counterproductive.)
You hit on a very important point as well - contractors need to know there is profit there. Right now that's debatable at best. If there isn't money in it, we won't attract the business talent we need to scale. And we haven't scaled... Ely Jacobson just wrote about that in his last update, it's surprising we haven't gotten here earlier, but at least we're getting here! Thanks so much for writing and responding.
Thanks Nate for more good stuff to chew on—and nutritional! We may be running out to Home Depot in September, when it can get really hot in the Bay Area, for a couple of window units.
I don't think modeling is useless either. I think in the right hands it can be a good guide to setting priorities. I'd love if our community got to the point where we could predict pretty well energy use after a retrofit. I know some builders of new homes who guarantee energy use for heating and/or cooling for a number of years after move in. With older homes there is so much behind the walls, in the attics, and in the crawl spaces that a contractor can't control—including of course the buyers!
Matt Golden and others are working very hard to build confidence in modeling as a tool to predict aggregate energy savings to attract investors in energy efficiency. They want to know they are getting a return on their dollar and contractors need to know that their chosen business model will result in profit over time—or at least enough to pay salaries and overhead with a little left over.
I also agree that some times it is better to leave a house be and wait for a better opportunity. We push retrofits as much as possible at Home Energy, but I have to admit that sometimes it might be better to build new, or just move on to a better opportunity.
Tom, thanks for chiming in and for your kind words. If and when we decide to go with mini-splits or some other system for heating and/or cooling our house, we will definitely look for multiple bids. Am I courageous enough (and will anyone remember this) to let this forum know how much my energy bills are this coming winter, compared to last winter? To be determined.
I just got around to re-reading your four-part series and I think this is a really interesting case study, especially for other dry-climate Californians who start out with bills in the same modest range as yours. I especially enjoyed your Addendum where you describe monitoring indoor and outdoor temperatures and managing your overnight (free) ventilation accordingly. We need to teach more people how to do this.
I share your disappointment, particularly when I know you started out thinking furnace/duct replacement with VRF (mini-splits), and you still have that old fossil unit in place. Did you ever consider getting multiple bids? $20k for a mini-split job sounds high to me.
I'm eager to hear how your bills turn out. If you really save 23% weather-adjusted this winter, then -- as my grandfather used to say -- "I'll eat my hat on Market Street at five o'clock".
Thanks for taking the plunge with EUC, and for documenting your experience so well.
$50 in health ain't much... not with my crappy high deductible plan. It buys half of a cold treatment. I'd want a lot more savings than that to give up humidity and IAQ control. In fact, I'm looking to move because I can't control them in my home right now, and retrofitting it is too expensive - I could fix another home much more cheaply.
If you can't predict health care costs, you CAN fairly precisely predict energy savings with a good energy model, so you could figure out if it is $25 or $50 or $200/year in savings between different units. It takes someone who has actually gone back and checked afterwards to see what happened with usage, and those are few and far between (once again, Dan, Gavin, and MacFarland, and Ted Kidd. I expect there are others, and please speak up, I want to know who you are!)
Don't let people tell you modeling is worthless and you can't really predict usage. It's like people saying Harry Potter is evil without reading it - don't knock it 'til you try it. It's scary as anything hanging out there in the beginning (that's frankly where I am) but if we were ALL predicting energy savings and tracking the results, and results were public, we'd get pretty good pretty fast. I'd bet as an industry we could get from 50% to 85-90% realization rate in less than 5 years. The guys that predicted poorly would have to get better, get more honest, or price accordingly. But I digress...
One last point you made, this may not be your last house. That does determine how far you go. Right now, my process in my area isn't cheap, but housing and gas/electric are. So somebody has to be digging in for 10-15 years to pop on a $20-30K project. I can still do something for short termers, but it won't be as good of a result. That's a question for you to decide as well, perhaps a couple window units for occasional use is good enough. Yes, there's a major energy penalty, but mini splits are pushing $5K each vs. $100-150 for a window unit - that buys a lot of electricity if you aren't certain of getting your money back. More to chew on, just what you wanted, right? =)
Yep, this thread has some good discussion.
Back to dehumidification. This may be counter-intuitive, but dehumidification CAN be a problem in dry climate. For dry climate it's a problem not because you need it, it's a problem because you have it and don't want it (this was one of many "ohhhh" dot connecting moments association with Gavin Healy, Dan Perunko, Mike MacFarland and all the Dry Climate guys has given me).
It happens when you have Air Conditioning, particularly oversized Air Conditioning on undersized duct.
If you don't have fast airflow across your AC coil, moisture condenses on it and is removed from your air. In a dry climate this represents not only wasted energy (state change takes a lot of energy), but also it means you are dehumidifying when you don't want to be. You using energy to remove something from the air that you want left IN it.
Thanks for the clarification Nate.
If I had the ability to precisely measure what $50 of health might be than I could make the decision. Mostly what we depend on is educated guesses. (As opposed to wild-ass-guesses, or wags!)
I think there may be another home in our future as well. We only have one bathroom! That's something an energy audit can't address.
Jim, Just a clarification, it's not DEhumidification I'm worried about in your climate, it's humidification - adding moisture. It's a problem here in Cleveland in the winter, and likely year round for you. Your skin and throat can get really dry.
AGreenSpeed is a really advanced heat pump from Carrier. No one else has one like it on the market presently. I'm out of my pay grade here, but it has much more flexibility for load matching than other systems. Rather than just 2 stages, it has infinite stages between two loads. The 3 ton unit can go all the way down to 1.25 tons. A typical 3 ton 2 stage unit might do 3 tons and 1.75 tons, or 60% ish of total load. Since it is also a communicating model, it 'listens' to what the house needs and supplies exactly that, no more, no less. It is capable of running all the time, which is actually the goal. This makes sure air is well mixed in the house, you can attach an ERV/HRV to it at the same time, humidification/dehumidification are easily managed, and the house temp is really even and comfortable, it helps even out mean radiant temperatures.
The GreenSpeed also has some of the highest efficiency ratings of any unit on the market. They aren't cheap, though, as you might expect, but if you are doing multiple split systems it may not be that different.
Minisplits only blow from one point (unless you duct them, of course) and don't offer these abilities.
Ted and I's point is to have an integrated plan for the future that matches what you want and need. It shouldn't be driven by what rebates there are or what contractors want to sell.
If you give up some health in your home to save $50/year in energy, is that an ok trade for you? (It could be, no judgement here.) And I really appreciate your openness! Right now I'm a hypocrite, my house needs a lot more work, but it is too expensive to do to this one, so I am hoping to move. I just have to get my wife on board, which is tricky since our house is awesome.
Hi Nate, I'm glad this post has generated so much good discussion, since that is its main goal.
Dehumidification is not a problem in our climate. We have good ventilation and made sure there are no cold spots in the house where condensation could occur and maybe mold growth. The north side wall of the house was insulated while the other sides were not when we moved in. One reason may have been to eliminate condensation, but I'm not sure.
As for the ducts, I'm thinking very long term—maybe in ten years we'll switch out heating systems and add cooling. So not wasting energy and having decent air flow all over the house is a priority right now. We had some air sealing and insulation done in the attic shortly after we moved in, so I didn't make that a priority this time.
I'm beginning to understand why some contractors always answer questions with "It depends..." I want the best performing house within our budget: that is, efficient, healthy, comfortable, sustainable—even livable in the case of a disaster when the power from the grid is out for a few weeks or more. But I also want a high performing house because I'm into high performing homes. It's not just about the money. I like knowing that now all our walls are insulated and that our duct system is optimized. My wife and I try to eat right and sometimes that means paying a little more for fresh food (living in California makes that relatively easy). Can I translate that directly into living a certain amount of days longer than I would have otherwise? Not really. I could be shot out of the air tomorrow by Southern California Separatists!
I don't believe there is ever one answer for any house throughout it's history. You just have to make the best decision you can given your limits of time and resources and move on. Later you can re-evaluate. You know what would be awesome? Getting a heat pump that heats and cools the house, creates hot water, and with an energy recovery ventilator built in—that fits in a shelf in a closet.
But.... I am curious about GreenSpeed since both you and Ted Kidd mentioned it and I value both your opinions. What the heck is it?
Jim, one thing that jumped out to me is how the duct sealing was largely paid for by rebates, yet you would like to abandon the duct system. That sounds like a poor rebate structure if you did it only to get a rebate, not for a better reason.
I'm with Ted, abandoning the duct system severely limits your filtration and humidification options. Your house already gets the equivalent of 50 mpg. If a mini split gets you to 56, but a GreenSpeed gets you to 54 yet adds filtration and humidification capabilities, would that be useful to you? Do you notice dry skin or allergies (both would likely be helped with those capabilities.)
It strikes me that the program prescribes 'solutions' without really taking into account your goals. Jeremy Begley just posted an article where the author states 'Prescription without proper diagnosis is malpractice.' That sounds like what's going on with EU CA. I need to know your goals before I can design a solution, like we talked about at ACI.
A chat with the Dry Climate guys could really be useful to you (I think I mentioned them at ACI too.) Thank you for writing about this and giving us a view into the program!
To all, one thing I don't lack is advice from the experts! Thanks for the input, challenges, food for thought.
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Informed Consent
Patients and their families are key partners in their health care. When you go for medical care, you usually get recommendations about needed treatment. Most people follow these recommendations, but you don't have to. If you are an adult and you're able to make your own decisions, you are the only person who can choose whether to get treatment and which treatment to get. This is done through a process called informed consent.
All medical care requires the consent of the patient (or someone who is authorized to consent for the patient) before care is given. In some cases, you approve or agree with the doctor's plan by simply getting a prescription filled, allowing blood to be drawn for lab tests, or seeing a specialist. This is called simple consent, and is OK for treatments that carry little risk for you. Many times, though, the more careful process of informed consent is needed.
- What is informed consent and what does it mean?
- Why does the doctor need me to sign a consent form?
- What are the legal requirements of informed consent?
- Who besides the patient is allowed to consent?
- Are there times when the usual consent requirements do not apply?
- How will I be given information for informed consent?
- What questions should I ask during informed consent?
- Can I change my mind after I've signed the consent?
- What if I don't want the treatment that's being offered?
- How is informed consent for a clinical trial or research study different from consent for standard treatment?
- How is shared decision-making different from informed consent?
- What if I want my doctor to make the decisions about my care, and I don't want more information?
- How can I find out more?
- References

subset: commoncrawl


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Gluten is a type of lectin, a carbohydrate-binding protein found in most grains. The problem is that some lectins mimic the glycoproteins on red blood cells, thus triggering immune reactions in sensitive individuals. The problem appears to be less with the lectins themselves than with the ability of the digestive tract to fully break down the lectin-proteins in the food.
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Here are the organic benefits of Gluten free foods
October 15, 2012 by admin / 3 Comments
Filed Under: *Articles by Jon Barron*, General, Good Bacteria, Healthy Lifestyles, Kidney Health, Natural Health, Organic Cooking, Organic Foods, Organic Recipies / Tagged: autoimmune disorder, Baseline of Health, Beth Levine, carbohydrate-binding protein, Celiac Sprue Disease, cereal grasses, Cheetos, Chemicals, Digestive Enzymes, Doritos, enzymes and digestive juices, Flavorings, Food And Drug Administration, Food Conglomerate, Food Manufacturers, Frito Lay, gluten content, Gluten Free Foods, gluten sensitivity, Grains, jonbarron.org, Lay's, lectin, lectin-proteins, Niches, OIT.com, organic benefits of Gluten free foods, organically in tune, organicallyintune.com, pectinase, Potato Chip, Potato Flour, Potato Snacks, Preservatives, Pringles, Rice Flour, Ruffles, sensitivity to gluten, Small Intestine, Snack Food, Snack Foods, sprouted grains, Thin Slices, Tostitos, Wheat Starch


text: > > I'm only partially interested in the thread "Cooling vs HW replacement" but > > the problem with drive failures is a real pain for me. So, I thought I'd > > share some of my experience. > > i'd add 1 or 2 cooling fans per ide disk, esp if its 7200rpm or 10,000 rpm > disks I'm pretty dubious of this: adding two 50Khour moving parts to improve the airflow around a 1Mhour moving part which only dissipates 10W in the first place? designing the chassis for proper airflow with minimum fanage is obviously smarter and probably safer. > - if downtime is important, and should be avoidable, than raid > is the worst thing, since it's 4x slower to bring back up than > a single disk failure eh? you have a raid which is not operational while rebuilding? > - raid will NOT prevent your downtime, as that raid box > will have to be shutdown sooner or later > ( shutting down sooner ( asap ) prevents data loss ) huh? hotspares+hotplug=zero downtime. but yes, treating whole servers as your hotspare+hotplug element is a nice optimization, since hotplug ethernet is pretty cheap vs $50 hotplug caddies for each and every disk ;)


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4. Will they look to add a top-of-the-rotation starter?
This is a tricky one. It all depends on the interpretations of "look" and "top-of-the-rotation starter." And when some of these guys are actually going to sign. The Orioles have been interested in several available free-agent starters, including right-hander Bronson Arroyo and four who haven't signed yet: right-handers Ervin Santana, pictured, Ubaldo Jimenez, A.J. Burnett and Suk-min Yoon. It's arguable, however, if any qualify as top starters -- though they were among the best available this offseason and would, in most cases, be considered a rotation upgrade for the Orioles. The Orioles did not really pursue the two most intriguing free-agent pitchers, right-handers Masahiro Tanaka and Matt Garza. They had their sights on Arroyo, the most consistent of the group, but he signed for a slightly more lucrative package from the Arizona Diamondbacks. They also wanted Burnett, a Monkton resident, but that doesn't seem like it is going to happen. Santana and Jimenez are still in play, but they both will receive lucrative contracts and are tied to draft-pick compensation. Despite how late it is the offseason, the Orioles still could end up with a lesser-tier starter to join Chris Tillman, Wei-Yin Chen, Miguel Gonzalez and Bud Norris. But that would be more of a back-end starter and not someone to help anchor the staff.
Ed Zurga, Getty Images
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I've always wanted to message board, where fans could interact and newbie writers could ask questions.
My new website will launch soon, but in the meantime feel free to play on the board--it's awful lonely being the only one there.
As expected, I'll be answering questions, holding contests, dishing out advice, and goofing off.
Hope to see you there, and please spread the word.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
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The Elite Model Look is the biggest and internationally most prestigious model scouting contest. It opens the door for young girls and boys to build a long lasting professional career in modeling.
Your vision is our challenge.
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I am hugely indebted to Emma for putting this forward in a petition. I am still getting to grips with the IT of this site and will put this in my side bar when I can.
Click here to go to the petition
But for now if you wish to put your name to a worthwhile cause then hop over to Emmas blog and sign up.


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HIGH POINT, N.C. - Coker College senior women's soccer players Jamie McCoy (Sumter, S.C.) and Mandi Warner (Walterboro, S.C.) have been named to the 2010 Conference Carolinas Women's Soccer Academic All-Conference Team.
Conference Carolinas member institutions stress the role of "Academics and Athletics Working Together" and each sport's Academic All-Conference award winners exemplify this continued league-wide commitment.
The 2010 Conference Carolinas Women's Soccer Academic All-Conference representatives are junior and senior student-athletes with a cumulative grade point average of 3.25 or higher on a 4.0 scale in all work completed at their member institution that have played in a conference sponsored sport. The GPA is calculated based on the student-athletes cumulative average through the previous semester and each student-athlete must have attended their member institution for at least one academic year.
Each year the Academic All-Conference Team is released while closing out each regular season before starting the tournament championships. Women's soccer will begin tournament play on Monday, November 1, while the men kick-off on Tuesday as all quarterfinal games will be played at the higher seeded team. Semifinal and final matches are also at the higher seeded team with the women playing that following Thursday and Saturday and the men playing on Friday and Sunday.
Keep up with all the Conference Carolinas fall tournament action on the league website Fall Championship Central link (or at www.conferencecarolinas.com/Championships/2008-09/20082410_08-09ChampionshipsLinks )


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realpitbull wrote:Well, I'm thinking about it. I may agree with you. I mean, I agree with what you've said above, I'm just not 100% sure I agree they should be a seperate variety. This is interesting, I'm going to have to ponder this, 'specially since the red/rednoses are my main squeeze in the breed.
Romanwild wrote:I'm sorry but "type" isn't our main problem right now.
BSL and the extiction of the breed is.
I don't like the muggelstons of the world either but they aren't in the show ring either. If you do manage to change the standard they'll just start their own (which they have the begininings of now) or just stop registering all together. Most of the Pits out there aren't papered anyway.
I don't have a problem joining forces with the "enemy" if it mean saving the breed so we can argue later over how the byb's aren't breeding to standard. We need money right now.
My breed club will not allow litter postings or adds but we try hard to keep the byb's invloved. I don't want to exclude them . I want to change their thinking.
We might have lost one breeder but another is spaying his bitch and joining the fight. He and I just rescued 6 puppies from a mentally handicapped owner.
All I'm saying is that messing with the standard, although important, is not urgent. BSL is.
Emi wrote:Well Karen , I have seen some tell people that have dogs to start off with that are like Dottie was , tell the people to have them put down , and they actually use the words "Shy & timid" ...
That's what i'm talking about ... you've miss some crap
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Pramipexole for Binge Eating Disorder
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01106053
Recruitment Status : Withdrawn (No participants were recruited and study has been closed.)
First Posted : April 19, 2010
Last Update Posted : May 6, 2013
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- No Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
|Condition or disease
|Binge Eating Disorder
|Drug: Pramipexole
|Phase 3
|Study Type :
|Interventional (Clinical Trial)
|Actual Enrollment :
|0 participants
|Intervention Model:
|Single Group Assignment
|None (Open Label)
|Primary Purpose:
|Official Title:
|An Exploration of the Effects of the Dopamine Agonist Pramipexole on Binge Antecedants, Binge Frequency, and Weight in Binge Eating Disorder
|Study Start Date :
|April 2010
|Actual Primary Completion Date :
|July 2011
Experimental: Pramipexole
Open-label trial of pramipexole.
Drug: Pramipexole
Pramipexole tablet titrated up to a maximum dosage of 0.5 mg three times daily (1.5 mg/day).
Other Name: Mirapex
- Frequency of binge eating [ Time Frame: Baseline followed by weekly during the seven week protocol ]
- Body weight [ Time Frame: Baseline followed by weekly during the seven week protocol ]
- Frequency and extent of craving for food using validated instruments [ Time Frame: Baseline followed by weekly during the seven week protocol ]
- Assessment of mood ratings using a validated instrument [ Time Frame: Baseline followed by weekly during the seven week protocol ]
Choosing to participate in a study is an important personal decision. Talk with your doctor and family members or friends about deciding to join a study. To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contacts provided below. For general information, Learn About Clinical Studies.
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|18 Years to 50 Years (Adult)
|Sexes Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
Inclusion Criteria:
- Male or female
- Age 18-50 years
- Women of child-bearing potential and males must agree to practice an accepted method of birth control. All women must have a negative pregnancy test at baseline.
- Good general health as demonstrated by history and physical examination.
- Body mass index of 30 kg/m2 or higher at the screening visit.
- Meet criteria for binge eating disorder as assessed through the SCID-1 and EDE.
Exclusion Criteria:
- Subjects with any unstable medical condition, or any current or past medical condition which in the opinion of the study physician and/or the principal investigator may increase the risks associated with pramipexole and study participation. Medical appropriateness will be determined through history and physical exam.
- Subjects with any current Axis I psychiatric diagnosis as determined through the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV for Axis I disorders (SCID-1) interview (aside from BED).
- Subjects with a Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score greater than or equal to 12 at the screening visit.
- Subjects who report any history of hallucinations or delusions.
- Participants taking an antidepressant or other regularly used psychotropic medication which may confound the study results
- Subjects with any current or history of an impulse control spectrum disorder, other than binge eating disorder,(such as pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, etc.) at screening as determined by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Impulse Control Module.
- Subjects with any history of suicide attempts or current suicidal ideations.
- Subjects that have used tobacco products on a routine basis within the past six months.
- Subjects enrolled in any formal treatment programs or research protocols for binge eating disorder at present, or within the past 30 days.
- Subjects routinely taking any medication known to produce weight change (ex. olanzapine, amitriptyline, steroid medications, etc., other than oral contraceptives, stable thyroid replacement drugs, etc.), or medications with drug-drug interactions with pramipexole.
- Subjects who are currently breast-feeding.
- Subjects who have participated in an investigational drug trial in the past 30 days.
- Subjects who meet DSM IV-TR criteria for alcohol or drug abuse in the past year.
- Subjects with an allergy to pramipexole or tablet constituents.
- Subjects with hepatic dysfunction as determined through a hepatic panel obtained at the screening visit.
- Subjects with an elevated blood pressure or pulse at screening (140/90 mmHg or above or pulse of greater than 100 beats/minute after being seated and stationary for at least five minutes, or as determined at the discretion of the study physician and/or principal investigator) or history of serious cardiac events (myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, stroke, etc).
- Subjects with a history of renal dysfunction or with a creatinine clearance of less than 60 ml/min based upon a serum creatinine obtained during screening and as calculated with the Cockroft and Gault equation.
- Subjects with a positive urine drug screen.
- Any participant with Parkinson's disease or symptoms suggestive of probable Parkinson's disease.
- Subjects who have an Epworth Sleep Scale (ESS) score of >7 at screening. ESS scores > 7 have been associated with an increased risk of sleep attacks (Plowman et al., 2005).
- Any participant who demonstrates clinically significant orthostatic blood pressure changes or is symptomatic during the screening visit, as defined under "orthostatic blood pressure monitoring."
- History of bariatric surgery.
- Participants who report a history of obstructive sleep apnea, excessive fatigue, or any sleep disorder which in the opinion of the principal investigator or study medical personnel would increase the participant's risk of experiencing excessive somnolence with pramipexole.
- Participant has had a change in medication regimen in the last month (dose, starting a new medication, or stopping a medication).
- Participant is employed by, or has an immediate family member employed by NRI.
- Participant has participated in a formal weight loss program in the last month (e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.)
To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contact information provided by the sponsor.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier (NCT number): NCT01106053
|Principal Investigator:
|Kristine J Steffen, PharmD, PhD
|Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, Fargo, ND
Additional Information:
|Responsible Party:
|Kristine Steffen, Reseach Scientist, Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, Fargo, North Dakota
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT01106053 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|First Posted:
|April 19, 2010 Key Record Dates
|Last Update Posted:
|May 6, 2013
|Last Verified:
|May 2013
Keywords provided by Kristine Steffen, Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, Fargo, North Dakota:
Binge eating disorder
Food craving
Additional relevant MeSH terms:
Feeding and Eating Disorders
Binge-Eating Disorder
Mental Disorders
Pathologic Processes
Signs and Symptoms, Digestive
Signs and Symptoms
Molecular Mechanisms of Pharmacological Action
Protective Agents
Physiological Effects of Drugs
Antiparkinson Agents
Anti-Dyskinesia Agents
Dopamine Agonists
Dopamine Agents
Neurotransmitter Agents


text:
Joe sez: Go and join the fun over at www.authorearnings.com if you want to see Hugh Howey blow the lid off of Amazon author earnings. To say it is a revelation is putting it lightly.
I've also duplicated the entire report here, with comments by me and my imaginary Big 5 gatekeeper buddy, Legacy John.
Hugh Howey: It's no great secret that the world of publishing is changing. What is a secret is how much. Is it changing a lot? Has most of the change already happened? What does the future look like?
The problem with these questions is that we don't have the data that might give us reliable answers. Distributors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don't share their e-book sales figures. At most, they comment on the extreme outliers, which is about as useful as sharing yesterday's lottery numbers [link]. A few individual authors have made their sales data public, but not enough to paint an accurate picture. We're left with a game of connect-the-dots where only the prime numbers are revealed. What data we do have often comes in the form of surveys, many of which rely on extremely limited sampling methodologies and also questionable analyses [link].
This lack of data has been frustrating. If writing your first novel is the hardest part of becoming an author, figuring out what to do next runs a close second. Manuscripts in hand, some writers today are deciding to forgo six-figure advances in order to self-publish [link]. Are they crazy? Or is signing away lifetime rights to a work in the digital age crazy? It's hard to know.
Anecdotal evidence and an ever more open community of self-published authors have caused some to suggest that owning one's rights is more lucrative in the long run than doing a deal with a major publisher. What used to be an easy decision (please, anyone, take my book!) is now one that keeps many aspiring authors awake at night. As someone who has walked away from incredible offers (after agonizing mightily about doing so), I have longed for greater transparency so that up-and-coming authors can make better-informed decisions. I imagine established writers who are considering their next projects share some of these same concerns.
Other entertainment industries tout the earnings of their practitioners. Sports stars, musicians, actors—their salaries are often discussed as a matter of course. This is less true for authors, and it creates unrealistic expectations for those who pursue writing as a career. Now with every writer needing to choose between self-publishing and submitting to traditional publishers, the decision gets even more difficult. We don't want to screw up before we even get started.
When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn't long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].
This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it's online for anyone to see—but until now it's been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I've been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.
When Amazon reports that self-published books make up 25% of the top 100 list, the reaction from many is that these are merely the outliers. We hear that authors stand no chance if they self-publish and that most won't sell more than a dozen copies in their lifetime if they do. (The same people rarely point out that all bestsellers are outliers and that the vast majority of those who go the traditional route are never published at all.) Well, now we have a large enough sample of data to help glimpse the truth. What emerges is, to my knowledge, the clearest public picture to date of what's happening in this publishing revolution. It's a lot to absorb, but I believe there's much here to learn.
The Value Ratio
I'm going to start with some of the smaller lessons to be gleaned from this data. We'll conclude this report by looking at author earnings, but I don't want that bombshell to drown out these equally important observations.
The first thing that jumped out at me when I opened my email was these next two charts, which our data guru had placed side-by-side. What caught my eye was how they seem to be inversely correlated:
On the left, we have a chart showing the average rating of 7,000 bestselling e-books.1 On the right, we have a chart showing the average list price of the same 7,000 e-books. Both charts break the books up into the same five categories. From the left, they are: Indie Published, Small/Medium Publisher, Amazon Published (from imprints like 47North), Big Five published, and Uncategorized Single-Author.2
It's interesting to me that the self-published works in this sample have a higher average rating than the e-books from major publishers. There are several reasons why this might be, ranging from the conspiratorial (self-published authors purchase their reviews) to the communal (self-published authors read and favorably rate each-others works) to the familial (it's friends and family who write these reviews). But the staggering number of reviews involved for most of these books (over a hundred on average across our entire sample) makes each of these highly unlikely. As I've seen with my own works—and as I've observed when watching other books spread organically—the sales come before the reviews, not after. There are a number of more plausible explanations for the nearly half a star difference in ratings, and one in particular jumped out at me, again from seeing these two charts next to one another.
Note the shortest bar in one graph correlates to the tallest in the other. Is it possible that price impacts a book's rating? Think about two meals you might have: one is a steak dinner for $10; the other is a steak dinner that costs four times as much. An average experience from both meals could result in a 4-star for the $10 steak but a 1-star for the $40 steak. That's because overall customer satisfaction is a ratio between value received and amount spent. As someone who reads both self-published and traditionally published works, I can tell you that it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two. Most readers don't know and don't care how the books they read are published. They just know if they liked the story and how much they paid. If they're paying twice as much for traditionally published books, which experience will they rate higher? The one with better bang for the buck.
This raises an interesting question: Are publishers losing money in the long run by charging higher prices? Are they decreasing the value/cost ratio and thereby creating lower average ratings for their authors and their products? If so, this might have some influence on long-term sales, and keep in mind that e-books do not go out of print. What if in exchange for immediate profits, publishers are creating poorer ratings for their goods and a poorer experience for their readers? Both effects will hurt a work's prospects down the road (a road with no end in sight). And since ratings on e-books also apply to the physical edition on Amazon's product pages, this pricing scheme ends up adversely affecting the very print edition that higher e-book prices are meant to protect [link].
It is common these days to hear that the quality of self-published work is hurting literature in general. I counter this notion with one of my own: Pricing e-books higher than mass market paperbacks used to cost is having an even more deleterious effect on reading habits. Books are not only in competition with each other, they compete with everything else a reader might do with their time. Creating a poor experience is a way to lose readers, not a way to protect a physical edition or a beloved bookstore. And high prices are a quick and easy way to create a poor reading experience, harming everyone.
High prices are also a way to drive customers to other, less expensive books. Rather than serving to protect print editions, publishers are creating a market for self-published works. And harmful price practices is not the only way the Big Five are powering the self-publishing revolution.
Joe Konrath: "And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw, and behold a white horse"
Welcome to the Book of Revelations.
The shadow industry of self-publishing now has a tiny bit of light shed on it, and it's blinding.
Many worried about the Tsunami of Crap, bringing down the overall quality of books. I countered that argument in 2011 using common sense. Now here are the facts to back it up.
But how will the industry react to this news? Let's ask Legacy John, an imaginary amalgam of gatekeepers created by me from the nonsense they continually spout.
Legacy John: This data doesn't reflect our own data. Readers are continuing to pay higher prices for what they consider to be premium material, and overall gross is what ultimately matters, not average reviews that are only differentiated by a fraction of a percent.
Readers recognize the imprimatur that comes from our brand, and will pay what we want them to pay. In fact, if we controlled the retail price, we could make them pay even more.
Joe: Uh, LJ. You tried that. It was called the Agency Model. And the DOJ filed suit for collusion. And you lost.
Legacy John: Listen to me! Readers WANT to pay more! Watch and see how the data confirms this.
Joe: Okay, let's watch...
Hugh: Next, we're going to look at some sales numbers within these genre bestseller lists to see how underserving a high-demand market has resulted in the creation of a brand new supply of books.
Listening to Reader Demand
The next chart shows the percentage of genre e-books on several Amazon bestseller lists according to how they were published:
The bestseller lists used were Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance. All of the subcategories within these three main genres were also included. Why choose these genres? Because they are the most popular with readers. Our data guru ran a spider through overall bestseller lists and found that these three genres accounted for 70% of the top 100 bestsellers on Amazon and well over half of the top 1,000 bestsellers.3 Future earnings reports will look at all of fiction4, but for now, we started with a simpler data set that captured the vast majority of what readers purchase.
What this chart shows is that indie and small-publisher titles dominate the bestselling genres on Amazon. We can clearly see that the demand from readers for more of these works is not being fully met by traditional publishing. Among the advice given to aspiring writers, you'll often hear: "Write in the correct genre." And here we see the sales-potential of that advice.
Looking back to the price/review comparison and also to the chart above, we can surmise that major publishers would be well-served by publishing far more titles in these genres and also by charging less for them. This is wisdom the indie community knows very well. Publishers must be tuning in, as prices began to decline last year [link], and publishers such as Simon & Schuster have announced new genre imprints [link]. Hopefully this data will help accelerate these trends, for the benefit of both the reader and the newly signed author.
Now take a look at this chart:
Again, daily unit sales are estimated by sales ranking, using publicly shared data from dozens of authors who have logged the correlation between rank and daily purchases (included among those authors are the two involved in this study).5 Some obvious things immediately jump out. The first is that Amazon has an incredible ability to market their own works, which shouldn't be too surprising, considering it's their storefront. We see from this and the previous chart that their 4% of titles command an amazing 15% of the sales. That's impressive. It's nearly 4 times the average unit sales volume per book. Now look at the Big Five, who with all their marketing efforts and brand recognition actually end up with pretty average per-book sales: a mere 1.2 times the overall average.
The other eye-popper here is that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. That's the entire Big Five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the e-book sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon.
Joe: "Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword."
Legacy John: Why do you keep quoting scripture?
Joe: Because your ass is getting kicked in biblical proportions.
Legacy John: Maybe you and I are reading different data, but this is based on unit sales, not gross sales.
Joe: So?
Legacy John: Since we price our books higher than you do, we make more money than you do. And people are still willing to pay the prices we charge. So who's looking stupid now? If we charged $3.99 for an ebook, we'd be leaving money on the table.
Joe: Whose money?
Legacy John: Come again?
Joe: Whose money would you be leaving on the table?
Legacy John: Our money, of course. We make 75% of net on ebooks. Why would we want to lower prices?
Joe: Because authors are only making 25%, which translates to 12.5% royalties of the Digital List Price you set. Why do you think authors are going to continue accepting 12.5% when they can get 70% by self-pubbing, and also outsell you in units? Your average book price was $7.00, which means $0.88 goes to the author. The average self pubbed book price is $3.25, which means $2.28 goes to the author.
Authors make almost three times as much when they self-publish.
Legacy John: The data is cherry picked. It only counts a few bestsellers.
Joe: The royalties remain the same. On average, self-pubbed books earn authors more money, and with the genre bestsellers they sell more copies than the books you publish. I'd guess the long tail will concur, but we'll know when that data comes out.
Legacy John: Well, we can always lower prices. Then we'll outsell indies and make it up in quantity.
Joe: Do you really think if you lower your prices from $7.00 to $3.25 your sales will triple in volume?
Legacy John: It could happen.
Joe: Then why haven't you done this sooner?
Legacy John: We've lowered prices on select titles.
Joe: And those titles are no doubt included in this data. Know what I think? I think if you lower prices, you'll gain a bit in volume, but not enough to overcome the overall loss of income. On a $3.25 legacy book, the author only earns $0.41.
Legacy John: Why do you keep bringing up how much the author earns?
Joe: Wrong question. The question is, "Why don't you care how much the author earns?"
Legacy John: Look, we do more than simply push a button to publish books. We edit, provide art, proofread…
Joe: Self-pubbed writers can hire professionals to do that. For sunk, fixed costs that don't require giving up royalties for the term of copyright (death plus seventy years.)
Legacy John: We have whole divisions devoted to marketing, advertising, and publicity…
Joe: How do you advertise ebooks?
Legacy John: Excuse me?
Joe: I know you spend a lot of money on Amazon. According to the New Yorker, you have to give Amazon a percentage of your annual gross sales, from 5%-7%. That's what you pay for various Amazon promotions, right?
Self-pubbed authors pay Amazon nothing, and those in KDP Select get Countdown Deals and free days. Amazon-published authors also get these services (email campaigns, Kindle Daily Deal, Gold Box, banner ads, etc.) for free, and A-Pub pays a minimum of 35% royalties off list compared to your 12.5%. Do the promotional fees you pay Amazon come from your royalties, or off the gross so the authors have to bear the expense too?
Legacy John: Huh? I… uh…
Joe: As a self-pubbed author who made $1M last year, I paid about $10k in various promotions. About 1% of my income. Sounds like you're paying quite a bit to sell as well as you're selling. And that doesn't even include all the money you must spend through your marketing, advertising, and publicity divisions that do… what exactly do they do for your average author?
Legacy John: Well, we do print ads.
Joe: Uh-huh. How effective are those?
Legacy John: We're not really sure. And we've never tried to figure it out.
Joe: Sounds smart.
Legacy John: We also get reviews.
Joe: I have 10,000 reader reviews on Amazon.
Legacy John: And we... we give away galleys and advance reading copies! Yeah! Because print is still 70% - 75% of the business, haven't you heard?
Joe: I've heard. But I've found that data to be lacking because it doesn't account for Amazon and the shadow industry of self-pubbing.
Legacy John: Well, the data is true. It certainly is. Maybe self-pubbed ebooks cost less, and outsell our ebooks, and earn the author more, but the big money is still in paper.
Joe: Really? Let's look at some more data.
Hugh: Instead of feeling any sort of confirmation bias, my immediate reaction was to reject these findings. Surely they weren't accurate. And so I complained to our magical data snoop that we were only looking at e-book sales. What percentage of the overall reading market does this represent? Our data guru said this was a question we could easily answer. You won't believe what he found.
Everything You Know About E-Books is Wrong
The experts? They have no idea. It's not entirely their fault; it's just that the data they're working with is fundamentally flawed.
You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don't reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%.
Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon's publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They're just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops. Every pronouncement about e-book adoption is flawed for the same reason. It's looking at only a small corner of a much bigger picture. (It's worth noting that our own report is also limited in that it's looking only at Amazon—chosen for being the largest book retailer in the world—but we acknowledge and state this limitation, and we plan on releasing broader reports in the future.)
There's a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children's books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren't the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as "trade" publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it's quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much [link]). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I've seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can't be possible, right?
I asked our data guru if we could find out. Could we look at the bestseller lists and tally by format? Of course, we would be looking only at Amazon, which might skew toward e-books—but to reiterate, we are looking at the largest bookseller in the world, digital or print. To do a first study of this sort on a smaller distributor would be less than ideal. Still, keep this caveat in mind.
We analyzed the overall Amazon bestseller lists for several categories and used the web spider to grab the text description of format type: paperback, hardback, e-book, or audiobook. This is what we found:
Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!
I know, right? Allow that to soak in for a moment, and then let's look at author earnings. Here, we will see that publishers should cross their fingers and hope that the share of e-book sales increases rather than flattens. Because they are doing quite well on the backs of their authors. Major publishers are taking in record profits [link], but they aren't the big winners to emerge from this report. Read on. The real story of self-publishing is up next.
Joe: Hmm. That kinda blows your "paper accounts for 75% of sales" theory all to hell.
Legacy John: That doesn't count all paper sales! That data is just looking at Amazon, not B&N or libraries or other places paper books are sold.
Joe: Last year Bowker estimated that online retail accounts for almost half of total book sales, and that 30% of that was ebooks. Now, I don't know where they got their data, because Amazon doesn't reveal it. But according to Hugh's data, of the Top 2500 bestsellers, only 5% sold on Amazon were paper.
I'm no math whiz, but your paper sales must be astronomical outside of Amazon. If that's the case, you certainly have nothing to worry about. Your robust paper industry will no doubt endure forever.
Or at least until B&N closes. I heard they just fired a lot of their Nook engineers. But that probably doesn't mean anything…
Hugh: Writing Doesn't Pay?
This is a story that has been sensed by many. The clues are all around us, but the full picture proves elusive. It is being told in anecdotes on online forums, in private Facebook groups, at publishing conventions, and in the comment sections of industry articles. Authors are claiming to be making more money now with self-publishing than they made in decades with traditional publishers, often with the same books [link]. I've personally heard from nearly a thousand authors who are making hundreds of dollars a month with their self-published works. I know many who are making thousands a month, even a few who are making hundreds of thousands a month. But these extreme outliers interest me far less than the mid-list authors who are now paying a bill or two from their writing.
My interest in this story began the moment I became an outlier. When major media outlets began asking for interviews, my first thought was that they were burying the lead. My life had truly changed months prior, when I'd first started making dribs and drabs here and there. And I knew this was happening for more and more writers every day. But that inspiring story was being buried by headlines about those whose luck was especially outsized (as mine has been).
Before we reveal the next results of our study, keep in mind that self-publishing is not a gold rush. It isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no short cuts, just a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Those who do well often work ludicrous hours in order to publish several books a year. They do this while working day jobs until they no longer need day jobs. This is also true of the writers earning hundreds or even thousands a month. Please keep this in mind. The beauty of self-publishing is the ownership and control of one's work. You can price it right, hire the editor and cover artist you want to work with, release as often and in as many genres as you want, give books away, and enjoy a direct relationship with your reader. It isn't for everyone, but you're about to see a good reason why more authors might want to consider this as an option.
Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data5 and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today:
Looks good for the Big Five, doesn't it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon's platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.6 Let's now look at revenue from the author's perspective:
It's a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why:
Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks [link]. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.
Before we move on, take another long look at this chart. Here you find everything that needs to change in the publishing industry. Readers and writers alike should take note.
A quick note on how we calculated author earnings for the Big Five publishers in the above graphs. These numbers are based on estimates of wholesale pricing for e-books (publisher's net was modeled as 80% of Amazon price). That estimate could be off by 10% either way, but even if we adjusted it to assume a wholesale price of 120% of retail (which would mean Amazon is taking a loss on every traditionally published e-book sold), indie authors would still come out on top. Also interesting is the observation that for the top-selling genres, Amazon is currently making nearly as much profit from indie e-books as from Big Five e-books.7
It's also worth keeping in mind that this graph ignores the long tail of publishing. We're just looking at the top 7,000 genre e-books. This represents the most popular offerings from both self-published authors and their traditionally published counterparts, which makes it an extremely fair comparison. Other surveys have compared all self-published works to only those in the traditional route that made it past agents and editors. That is, they compared the top 1% of traditionally published titles to the entirety of self-published works. Looking at bestselling charts avoids that mistake. Here we have 7,000 e-books as they are selling on any given day, which also serves to move the discussion away from misleading outliers and into the more interesting midlist. Now let's see how Uncle Sam feels about all of this.
Tax Brackets
We've seen that self-published authors are earning more money from genre e-books than traditionally published authors. But how much more? The next thing we wanted to do was estimate yearly e-book earnings for all of these authors based on their daily Amazon sales. We ran this report and put each author into one of seven income brackets. The results, again, were startling:
Indie authors outnumber traditionally published authors in every earnings bracket but one, and the difference increases as you leave the highest-paid outliers. But even these extreme outliers are doing better with their self-published works. The scale is difficult to see, but the breakdown of authors earning in the seven figures is: 10 indie authors, 8 Amazon-published authors, and 9 authors published by the Big Five. The much higher royalties and other advantages, such as price, seem to counterbalance the experience and marketing muscle that traditional publishers wield. This is something many have suspected to be true, but which now can be confirmed.
Of course, we still doubted this even after seeing the results. Our first thought was that top self-published authors can put out more than one work a year, while Big Five authors are limited by non-compete clauses and a legacy publishing cycle to a single novel over that same span of time. Indie authors are most likely earning more simply because they have more books for sale. Was this skewing our results? We ran another report to find out, and to our surprise, it turns out that only the handful of extreme earners have this advantage. Most self-published authors are, on average, earning more money on fewer books:
This suggests that the earnings discrepancy will grow greater over time, as self-published authors develop deeper catalogs. We hope to answer questions like this as we run reports every quarter to track shifting trends. For now, the full data set for this study has been anonymized by removing the title and author info, and is available for download below this report. By tweaking the values in the yellow areas of the spreadsheet, you are able to play around with the data yourself. Our aim here is complete openness and to invite community discourse. It is also worth remembering that all of our base data comes from publicly perusable bestseller charts, so there's an added layer of transparency and reproducibility. The information was there all along; grabbing a useful quantity of it simply required someone like my co-author to come along and snag it.
Joe: So remind me again why I should take a legacy deal?
Legacy John: We, uh... we nuture.
Joe: Nurture how? With unconscionable contract terms?
Legacy John: This data could be entirely incorrect. We don't know exactly how it was acquired. No one knows how much we're actually making. There are other polls and surveys that show quite the opposite is happening.
Joe: Those polls and surveys don't include Amazon, where many authors, both legacy and self-pubbed, make the majority of their income. By the looks of these numbers, authors are much better off avoiding legacy publishers such as yourself. So I ask you, what do you have to offer authors? I'm guessing your paper sales don't account for much for the majority of authors you have under contract. The services you provide can be hired out for a one-time fee. The massive amounts you pay Amazon for marketing don't seem to have much effect compared to the tiny amounts the average indie author spends on marketing. Your royalties, and contracts, suck wheelbarrows full of ass.
Hugh Howey and his programming guru friend have just turned a bright light on the shadow industry of self-publishing, and revealed that the legacy industry is in Big Fucking Trouble.
Legacy John: Neener neener neener! My fingers are in my ears and I'm not listening!
Joe: You never did. I've been telling you this shit for years. Does this sound familiar?
Publishers should stop trying to convince themselves and others that they're relevant, and start actually being relevant. Here's how:
1. Offer much better royalties to authors.
2. Release titles faster. It can take 18 months after a book is turned in to be published. I can do it myself in a week.
3. Use up-to-date accounting methods that are trackable by the author, and pay royalties monthly.
4. Lower ebook prices.
5. Stop futilely fighting piracy. Hint: all such fighting is futile. Piracy can only be made redundant with cost and convenience.
6. Start marketing effectively. Ads and catalog copy aren't enough. Neither is your imprint's Twitter feed. Especially if your author has more Twitter followers than you do.
That was from a post of mine from 2011. You've had years to figure this out.
Instead you spent those years colluding with each other, screwing authors, and thinking you were the invincible masters of your domain.
Hugh: An Easier Choice?
Choosing which way to publish is becoming a difficult choice for the modern author. This choice has only grown more challenging as options have expanded and as conflicting reports have emerged on how much or how little writers can expect to make. Our contention is that many of these reports are flawed, both by the self-selected surveys they employ, the sources for these surveys, and, occasionally, the biases in their interpretation. Our fear is that authors are selling themselves short and making poor decisions based on poor data. That is the main purpose for fighting for earnings transparency: helping aspiring writers choose the path that's best for them. A secondary goal is to pressure publishers to more fairly distribute a new and lucrative source of income. Operating in lockstep in offering authors only 25% of net is not just unfair but unsustainable, as more and more authors are going to jump to self-publishing.
Of course, self-publishing isn't for everyone. There is no absolute right or wrong way to publish; the path taken depends entirely on what each author wishes to put into their career and what they hope to get out of it. But as marketing falls more and more to the writer, and as self-published authors close the quality gap by employing freelance editors and skilled cover artists, the earnings comparison in our study suggests a controversial conclusion: Genre writers are financially better off self-publishing, no matter the potential of their manuscripts.
Consider the three rough possibilities for an unpublished work of genre fiction:
The first possibility is that the work isn't good. The author cannot know this with any certainty, and neither can an editor, agent, or spouse. Only the readers as a great collective truly know. But what we may simplistically, and perhaps cruelly, call a "bad" manuscript stands only a slim chance of getting past an agent and then an editor. To the author, these works are better off self-published on the open market. They will most likely disappear, never to be widely read. But at least they stand a chance. And those who fear that these titles will crowd out other books are ignoring the vast quantities of books published traditionally—or the fact that billions of self-published blogs and websites don't impede our ability to browse the internet, to find what we are looking for, or to share discovered gems with others.
The second possibility for a manuscript is that it's merely average. An average manuscript might get lucky and find an agent. It might get lucky a second time and fall into the lap of the right editor at the right publishing house. But probably not. Most average manuscripts don't get published at all. Those that do sit spine-out on dwindling bookstore shelves for a few months and are then returned to the publisher and go out of print. The author doesn't earn out the advance and is dropped. The industry is littered with such tales. Our data shows quite conclusively that mid-list titles earn more for self-published authors than they do for the traditionally published. And the advantage grows as the yearly income bracket decreases (that is, as we move away from the outliers). It is also worth noting again that self-published authors are earning more money on fewer titles. Our data supports a truth that I keep running into over and over, however anecdotally: More writers today are paying bills with their craft than at any other time in human history.
The third and final possibility is that the manuscript in question is great. A home run. The kind of story that goes viral. (Some might call these manuscripts "first class," but designations of class are rather offensive, aren't they?) When recognized by publishing experts (which is far from a guarantee), these manuscripts are snapped up by agents and go to auction with publishers. They command six- and seven-figure advances. The works are heavily promoted, and if the author is one in a million, they make a career out of their craft and go on to publish a dozen or more bestselling novels in their lifetime. You can practically name all of these contemporary authors without pausing for a breath. We all like to think our manuscript is one of these. And from this hubris comes a fatal decision not to self-publish.
Why is that decision fatal? Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published. These outlier authors are already doing better via self-publishing, when compared one to one. Now consider that the authors with the greatest draw, the most experience, and possibly the best abilities, are not yet a part of the self-publishing pool. What will our graphs look like once more up-and-coming authors skip straight to self-publishing? What will they look like when self-published authors have a decade or more of experience under their belts? What about when more authors win back the rights to their backlists? Or when top traditionally published authors decide to self-publish, as artists in other fields are doing? [link] [link] [link] What will these graphs look like then? We look forward to finding out.
Joe: I love it that Hugh posed these questions already knowing what the answers will be.
Legacy John: Are the answers that gatekeepers are going to continue to reign?
Joe: I don't think so.
Legacy John: So... what do indie authors pay freelance editors? Do you give them $70k a year, a 401k, an office in Manhattan, and an unlimited expense account?
Joe: No, we don't. But if you send me a two page query letter, detailing your experience, I'll try to respond within 6-12 months. And don't forget that SASE.
Hugh: Final Thoughts
What is presented here is but one snapshot of the publishing revolution as it stands today. That revolution isn't over. These reports can be run so long as books are ranked. Our hope is that the future brings more transparency, not less. Other artistic endeavors have far greater data at hand, and practitioners of those arts and those who aspire to follow in their footsteps are able to make better-informed decisions. The expectations of these artists and athletes are couched in realism to a degree that the writing profession does not currently enjoy.
Our ambitious goal is to help change that, but we can't do it alone. And so we hope others will run their own reports and analyze our data. We hope they will share what they find and that this will foster greater discourse. We also hope publishers and distributors will begin sharing their sales figures. We expect many to disagree with our analysis. We expect flaws will be found in our reasoning and our sampling methodologies. Discovering those flaws will lead to better data, and we look forward to that process.
If I had to guess what the future holds, I would say that the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead. That we have come so far in such a short period of time is revealing. We take for granted changes in other mediums—the absence of that tall rack of CDs beside home stereos, the dwindling number of people who watch live TV, that missing thrill of opening a paper envelope full of printed photos. There will be casualties in the publishing industry as the delivery mechanisms for stories undergo change. There already have been casualties. But there are opportunities as well. And right now, the benefits are moving to the reader and the writer. Speaking as both of these, I count this a good thing. I marvel that there are so many who fight for higher prices for consumers and lower pay for authors, all to protect a legacy model. That model needs to change.
Publishers can foster that change by further lowering the prices of their e-books. The record margins they're currently earning are certainly seductive, but taking advantage of authors is not a sustainable business model. Hollywood studios had to capitulate to their writers when a new digital stream emerged. Publishers will likewise need to pay authors a fair share of the proceeds for e-book sales. 50% of net for every author is a good start. If they do this, they will stop losing quality manuscripts, back catalogs, and top talent. If publishers nurture their authors and work hard to satisfy their customers, they will see those average ratings go up and sales increase. They will see more people spending time with a book rather than on a video game or on the internet. And then the entire publishing industry, as well as those who love to read and those who hope to write for a living, will benefit.
Joe sez: In 2011 I wrote a blog called The End of the Bestseller. I said:
The Big 6 can't publish ebooks priced low enough to compete with me. They have fancy NY offices, lots of employees with benefits and expense accounts, and a whole industry to support.
With print, they know how to create a bestseller. They buy it.
They buy the real estate. They buy the advertising. They buy the discounts.
But in an ebook world, their money offers no advantage. They can't get more shelf space or a longer shelf life than I can, and they can't discount for less than I can.
With print, they know how to create a bestseller. They buy it.
They buy the real estate. They buy the advertising. They buy the discounts.
But in an ebook world, their money offers no advantage. They can't get more shelf space or a longer shelf life than I can, and they can't discount for less than I can.
The stranglehold NY publishing has had on the US, forcing people to read what they decide to make available, is loosening up. When given a choice, readers will buy books other than those vetted by NY. The Kindle bestseller lists prove this. My sales prove this.
And now, Hugh's data proves this.
If legacy publishers drop their ebook prices, I don't think they'll see a proportional rise in sales to make up for the lower price. Which means legacy publishers, and their authors, will be earning even less. And I doubt publishers will ever do this, because they'd be cannibalizing their paper sales even more, and paper sales are all their only monopoly.
If legacy publishers offer authors higher royalties, they won't be able to support their infrastructure, and authors still won't be earning as much as they do by self-pubbing.
The power has shifted. Gatekeepers aren't in charge anymore. Authors are. And authors can now reap the rewards the gatekeepers used to reap—a higher share of the profits.
No matter how you publish, it's still a lottery. I knew this back before the Kindle came out, and the Kindle didn't change anything. You have to get lucky in order to find readers.
But now there are no barriers to entry. It's a level playing field. You don't need to hope some gatekeeper recognizes your potential, and then hope they do a good job publishing you while they keep your rights forever under terrible contract terms and shitty royalties.
You don't have to let someone else gamble with your money. You can do it yourself. And this data proves that many authors are doing it themselves, and succeeding.
What path you choose is up to you. But one choice gives you full control, and the other takes all of your control away, without—according to these numbers—any benefit at all.
Legacy John: But you don't understand! We've been in business for decades! We know what the readers want! You can't do this without us!Joe: We just did.
Addendum Deux
The authorearnings.com website is now up and running again.
Even if you've read the info here, I encourage everyone to visit authorearnings.com and take the Author Survey and sign the Petition.


text: Steve Sando, bean impresario behind Rancho Gordo, outlines the steps from beans in a bag to glorious pot o' beans. Dried beans may not be fresh, per se, but the ones you're using shouldn't be more than two years old. Soak them first, and then use the soaking water to cook them. A quick, hard boil followed by a long, slow simmer will get them cooked up right. (Click here for Steve's bean-cooking recipe.)


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Christina Aguilera Offered Big Money to Represent Plus Size Dating Site
Raise your hand if you've heard this story before: Popular female celeb either gains a little bit of weight or refuses to lose what she's got already. Celeb gets called out for her weight. Then, celeb gets offered to be the face of a plus size dating site.
Christina Aguilera is the latest celeb who refuses to conform to size 0 standards, and now she's the latest to be offered a spokeswoman gig for TheBigandTheBeautiful.com. The site's founder, 'America's Next Top Model' alum Whitney Thompson (have any truly "top models" actually come from that show? Just asking!) is offering Aguilera a whopping $3 million to be the face of their brand.
TMZ reports that Thompson sent Aguilera's agents a letter asking for her services. TheBigandTheBeautiful.com is "specifically designed for women with curves," and they want XTina to put hers to use. Thompson said in exchange for the cold hard cash, Aguilera would be asked to do one television commercial, one radio commercial, two photo shoots and four public appearances in support of the brand. Additionally, she wants Aguilera to use not just her curves, but her cords — the vocal cords, that is, to sing a jingle for the website.
If this all sounds familiar, it should. New mom (or as she'd say, "mum") Adele was previously offered $1 million to be a spokesmodel for the site, but she declined.
Aguilera's weight has been a target of a ton of speculation and criticism, but we think she looks great — and so does she (and her boyfriend, Matt Rutler, too!). "I'm very confident in my body," she said earlier this year. "I think my video works over the years have spoken to that … I've been no stranger to being very comfortable in my own skin." Amen, sister!
Watch the Christina Aguilera 'Your Body' Video


text:
State withdraws permit for expansion of nuke dump
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico regulators have withdrawn a preliminary permit for an expansion of the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico.
Citing recent back-to-back incidents that included a radiation release that contaminated 17 workers, the New Mexico Environment Department on Friday notified the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) that it has withdrawn a pending draft permit.
"NMED cannot move forward on the WIPP's request to open additional underground storage panels and for the other requested permit modifications until more information is known about the recent events at the WIPP," Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said in a statement. "Just as NMED needs more information to make informed decisions on permit modifications, the public also needs more information about the radiation release in order to provide informed input during the public comment period. Once NMED has all of our questions answered, we will proceed with consideration of a revised draft Permit."
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation's only permanent underground repository for low-level radioactive waste, including things like plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools and protective clothing, from nuclear weapons facilities.
The plant near Carlsbad stopped taking all waste shipments after a Feb. 5 underground truck fire. Nine days later, a radiation release shuttered the plant.
Officials have yet to get underground to figure out what caused the radiation release. A series of shortcomings in maintenance safety training, emergency response and oversight were cited by a team that investigated the truck fire.
It is unclear, however, if the fire and leak are related.
No one has yet been inside the half-mile deep mine since the leak to begin a probe or make estimates on how long the plant might be shuttered for cleanup.
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Stuxnet Infected Chevron's IT Network
Stuxnet, a sophisticated computer virus created by the United States and Israel, to spy on and attack Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities in Natanz also infected Chevron's network in 2010, shortly after it escaped from its intended target.
Chevron found Stuxnet in its systems after the malware was first reported in July 2010, said Mark Koelmel, general manager of the earth sciences department at Chevron. "I don't think the U.S. government even realized how far it had spread," he told CIO Journal. "I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished," he said.
Chevron was not adversely affected by Stuxnet, says Chevron spokesman Morgan Crinklaw. "We make every effort to protect our data systems from those types of threats," he said.
Chevron's experience with Stuxnet appears to be the result of the unintentional (and perhaps, inevitable) release of malware upon a larger network, much like an experimental virus escaping from a medical lab. But many companies are also being specifically targeted, sometimes by less sophisticated actors attempting to retaliate against perceived U.S. cyber-aggression. Although they have fewer resources behind them, those guerrilla campaigns are nonetheless capable of doing real, physical damage to targeted plants.
Chevron is the first U.S. company to acknowledge that its systems were infected by Stuxnet, although most security experts believe the vast majority of hacking incidents go unreported for reasons of security or to avoid embarrassment. The devices used in industrial equipment and targeted by Stuxnet are made by huge companies, including Siemens (whose devices were in use at Iran's facility). Millions of these devices have been sold around the world, so potentially every industrial company that uses these devices, called programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, are at risk of being infected.
U.S. officials blame Iranian hackers with government ties for the so-called Shamoon virus that destroyed data on 30,000 computers belonging to Saudi Arabian Oil Co. in August. A Qatari natural gas company called Rasgas was also attacked in August. The Shamoon virus is likely the work of a single individual who lacked the sophistication of state-sponsored hackers, according to a Bloomberg report.
Aramco said it quickly recovered from the August attack, but expects more attacks in the future. Rasgas says the August attack had no impact on its operations.
"The real worry that a lot of us have been talking about for a year or so is that instead of just stealing information, [hackers are] gaining control of target systems so that they can cause kinetic impact," said Ed Skoudis, an expert who teaches cybersecurity classes at SANS, an organization that trains cybersecurity experts and conducts information security research.
"All told, the Shamoon virus was probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date," said U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in an October 11 speech at a Business Executives for National Security dinner. The virus is an example of an escalation that has happened in the scale and speed of cyber attacks during the last few months.
Employees who have a deep understanding of cybersecurity and the company's systems are the only defense against a virus like Stuxnet that often target vulnerabilities that haven't yet been identified by security researchers or patched by the software vendor, says Alan Paller, founder of SANS. Those employees need to understand malware and techniques like deep packet inspection, and have a deep knowledge of what the network traffic should look like. "There are probably only 18-20 people in the country who have those fundamental skills," he said.
Unleashing potent cyber weapons points to the larger problem of blowback, where "somebody could recover malware assets, tweak them and use them," said SANS' Skoudis. He said portions of the Stuxnet code have already been reused in financial cybercrime to steal credit cards and bank account information.
The tacit acknowledgement by U.S. government officials that they created Stuxnet makes U.S. companies an even bigger target, said Paller at SANS. He says hackers last summer went from stealing information to using cyber attacks to cause destruction. Stuxnet "opened Pandora's box," he said. "Whatever restraint might have been holding damaging attacks back are gone."
In the end, companies are left to clean up the mess associated with viruses such as Stuxnet. "We're finding it in our systems and so are other companies," said Chevron's Koelmel. "So now we have to deal with this."
Write to firstname.lastname@example.com


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Browsing Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) by Author "Braun, Sebastian"
Now showing items 1-1 of 1
Braun, Sebastian (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The paper presents first empirical evidence on the effect of foreign ownership on the union wage premium. Using matched employer-employee data for Denmark, the positive effect of plant-level unionisation on wages is found to vanish in foreign-owned firm. While the estimation establishes a positive wage effect of foreign ownership of between two and four per cent for workers employed in non-unionised firms, the foreign ownership premium is close to zero for workers in highly unionised enterprises. This result might help to understand why trade unions frequently resist foreign take-overs even though the existence of a positive foreign ownership wage premium is widely acknowledged in the literature. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7715
Files in this item: 1dp 2008-07.pdf (181.2Kb)
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Organ transplantation is often the only treatment for end state organ failure, such as liver and heart failure.
Transplantation is the transfer (engraftment) of human cells, tissues or organs from a donor to a recipient with the aim of restoring function(s) in the body. When transplantation is performed between different species, e.g. animal to human, it is named xenotransplantation.
Although end stage renal disease patients can be treated through other renal replacement therapies, kidney transplantation is generally accepted as the best treatment both for quality of life and cost effectiveness. Kidney transplantation is by far the most frequently carried out transplantation globally.
The procurement of organs for transplantation involves the removal of organs from the bodies of deceased persons. This removal must follow legal requirements, including the definition of death and consent.
Kidney donation by well selected living donors with good health coverage carries negligible risks. This can only be ensured through rigorous selection procedures, careful surgical nephrectomy and follow up of the donor to ensure the optimal management of untoward consequences.
The Transplantation Society adopted a consensus statement on the care of the live kidney donor, prepared by a forum involving over 100 experts from more than 40 countries from around the world, in which representatives of WHO participated. This consensus statement addresses the responsibility of communities for living donors.
In particular it defines the responsibilities of the transplant centre which is charged, inter alia, with facilitating the long-term follow up of living kidney donors and, if need be, their treatment, with identifying and tracking complications that may be important in defining risks for informed consent disclosure on the care of the live kidney donor).
The welfare of the live kidney donor is largely neglected in schemes where disadvantaged individuals are exploited and encouraged to sell their kidneys.
Resolution WHA57.18. (2004) acknowledges the risk of exploitation of live kidney donors and urges Member States to "protect the poorest and vulnerable groups from transplant tourism and the sale of tissue and organs" and requests the Director-General to provide support for Member States in this endeavour.
-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0311-1361252.Xml


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Mickey Mantle Signed Gold Hall of Fame Plaque PSA Authentic. Fine condition gold HOF plaque postcard has been signed in 10/...Click the image to load the highest resolution version.
DescriptionMickey Mantle Signed Gold Hall of Fame Plaque PSA Authentic. Fine condition gold HOF plaque postcard has been signed in 10/10 blue sharpie by the great Mickey Mantle and encapsulated in one of PSA's protective holders.
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In LR girls basketball: Six players gone; overall outlook still good
by Harris Kinsey
copyright the Chronicle 12-5-2012
With six of last year's players graduated, the Lake Region Union High School girls basketball team is younger this year, but the outlook for the season is still good, said Coach Mark Tinker.
"We have a lot more youth, but we still have some good players on the team," he said. "The only real difference is that we're younger."
The team has four seniors, three juniors, and two sophomores. With some good talent on the junior varsity, the future also looks good.
"If we're going to be successful, we need contributions from everybody," Coach Tinker said. "Drew Neal, Ashley Locke, and Sarah Burnham are the three with the most varsity experience. As seniors, they need to prove leadership and contributions every game."
The season hasn't officially started yet, so it will take a while before each player discovers her role on the team. The question mark this season is how they will mesh. Coach Tinker suggested it's his job to figure out successful groupings.
"Each of the players needs to learn their roles and how they can contribute to this team," he said. "I need to juggle the lineups to see which players play the best together out on the floor and be successful."
There are some similarities to last year's team. "We're not very big," said Coach Tinker, "This is nothing new. Our tallest player is about five-foot, eight, so we need to play with attitude, but the players on this team are capable of playing bigger than they really are."
The team also has girls who can play at different tempos. Some can run the floor and be a fast-break team, and some can slow the game down into a half-court set.
"It all depends on who is on the floor and how we play," Coach Tinker said. "We have a little more quickness than we did last year with sophomore Tyra Urie, but we still have the ability to slow the game down if we need to. It all depends on who is on the floor."
Asked if there are any real starts on the team, he said, "We don't have one person on the team that can be counted on to go out there and score 20 points every game. It's more important this year than in the past years that we play as a team. Winning will really need to be a team effort this year. We have a tough schedule, but if we play as a team I think we can be very competitive."
Lake Region has switched to Division II this year, so the girls will have a tougher schedule than in recent seasons. The girls will play their first two games away — against relatively new Division II rival Oxbow on December 11, and at traditional rival Lyndon on December 14, before coming home to play against Oxbow in front of home fans on December 21.
"Our future teams look good," Coach Tinker said. "We have some players on junior varsity that could get called up for the playoffs. The season is only a week old so I'm still going to evaluate our younger players to see who is ready for playing on the varsity."
Coach Tinker has high expectations again this year for his team.
"We may have a tough schedule ahead, but I have a lot of confidence in my team," he said. "We still have the ability to go out there and win games. As long as we play as a team, we will be successful."