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I like to flatter myself that I've seen a lot of movies. Also, that a large number of those movies involve either directly or peripherally some kind of monster, which more often than not is a metaphor for some larger societal concern or truth. I've seen giant lizards that were metaphors for nuclear destruction. I've seen pieced-together, reanimated corpses that were stand-ins for the terror of science run amok. I've seen wolfmen that subbed for the ugly animal instincts at work in even the nicest of men. And I've seen an awful lot of naked sexy lady-loving female vampires that served as signifiers of the fact that I fucking LOVE to see naked sexy lady-loving female vampires.
And of course I've seen my share of flicks where a body-horror nightmare or bestial transformation is used as a metaphor for the passage from childhood to adulthood. Because let's face it--puberty is scary. You're growing hair where it never was before, parts of your body are changing, expanding, and seeming to take on an intelligence all their own, and you become a slave to forces outside your will. For pubescent boys, anyway, it's a short metaphorical leap from ball-drop to Balrog.
Still, in spite of my vast experience in the world of the Monstrous Metaphor, I was still slightly taken aback by its use in Philippe Mora's 1982 feature The Beast Within. I think I can say quite safely that this film puts the teenage sexual urge in a form I had never seen before and don't expect to see again: that of a mutated Giant Cicada-Man.
So yeah--points for originality at least.
We open, as we so often do, with a pre-credits flashback to a simpler time, when the cars were cooler and the lead actors slathered in pancake make-up. We find ourselves in Nioba, Mississippi, in 1964, following newlyweds Eli MacCleary(top-billed Ronny Cox, star of Deliverance and a buttload of other films) and his blushing bride Caroline (TV veteran Bibi Besch) as they drive through the dark heart of nowhere on their way to who knows what secluded honeymoon spot. Deciding they missed a turn, Eli pulls a u-ie and gets the front wheels stuck on the loose gravel shoulder, then spins his tires till they're buried up to the axle. He decides to walk the three miles or so back to a filling station, insisting that Caroline stay in the car since she's a woman and clearly not up to a leisurely stroll of that distance. After all, she'll only be alone in the woods at night miles from the nearest signs of civilization. What's the worst that could happen?
If you guessed, "She could get attacked and viciously raped by a man-sized monster with a slimy gray exoskeleton," give yourself a cookie! The crime is blamed on local ne'er-do-well Billy Collins, who is quickly shot down by a country posse. The MacClearys leave Nioba, hoping to get on with their marital bliss by never speaking of the wife's horrible rape on their wedding night ever again.
That resolution becomes problematic seventeen years later in Jackson, Mississippi, when Eli and Caroline find themselves at the hospital again, only this time because of a mysterious illness that's plaguing their coincidentally 17-year-old son Michael (Paul Clemens). The doctors are baffled but try to sound like they're not--the chief medical dude calls it "a chemical imbalance--an occult malignancy!" Which has got to be comforting to hear. While his parents worry, Michael has strange, atmospherically filmed dreams about an old house in the woods with something eeevil in the basement. With their son sweaty, rambling, and apparently on death's door, Eli and Caroline decide to go back to Nioba and see if maybe Michael's real father had some kind of condition they should know about.
Things don't go easy in Nioba, however, as the town elders--among them the helmet-haired Judge Curwin (an oddly David Byrne-like Don Gordon), his brother and professional Creepy Old Dude Edwin (Logan Ramsey), and even-creepier town mortician Dexter Ward (Luke Askew)--clearly have something to hide and don't take kindly to outsiders nosing about Nioba's bidness. None of them want to talk about the circumstances around Billy Connors' life or death, a fact that only piques the interest of the MacClearys.
"Curwin" and "Dexter Ward," give yourself another cookie! (But that's the last one--you don't want to lose your girlish figure.) The H. P. Lovecraft nod is intentional, as the rest of the movie plays out as a sort of tonal hybrid of
"Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Dunwich Horror." After another vivid dream about the monster in the basement, Michael wakes up from his coma, boosts an Oldsmobile and heads down to Nioba himself, drawn there like a moth to a flame.
Michael first arrives, sweat-soaked and feverish, at the house of Edwin Curwin, to find the paunchy old man in his pajamas and a wife-beater, waiting for the handsome young delivery boy to arrive with his ground chuck. The delivery boy's apparently been stung by the old perv before, though, and left the groceries on the doorstep sometime before Michael arrives. As a result (what are the chances?) Edwin mistakes Michael for the shop-lad and invites him in for his tip. Some very uncomfortable exchanges follow, with Edwin making eyes and Mike and cooing about his clumsiness, "Boys always droppin' things. I guess you play with you yo-self too much!" He takes the creep factor up a notch when he starts making Mike a burger, kneading sauce into it with his bare hand while leering at his toy-boy and snarling, "I like mine RARE!"
Suddenly the night is filled with the chorus of cicadas, awakening early in the season and startling Edwin so much he barely notices Mike getting even more sweaty and pale. He notices when Mike jumps on him and takes a bite out of his throat, however! This leads to a disquietingly artful shot of the old man's bare feet kicking at the raw hamburger--a sight I remember from seeing the film in the theater in the early 80s, and which has haunted me ever since.
While his parents keep looking for answers, Mike starts making time with local beauty Amanda (Katherine Moffat), daughter of Curwin Cousin and too-demonstrative father Horace Platt (John Dennis Johnston). Love blooms despite or perhaps because of the obstacles Horace puts in Amanda's way. Meanwhile Mike talks to town drunk Tom Laws (Ron Soble) and finds out that Billy Connors was studying ways to become immortal, something to do with the 17-year cycle of cicadas and their periodic "deaths" and rebirths. While this happens Mike takes time out from smooching Amanda to embalm Dexter alive at his funeral home! You know what they say about all play and no work...
As Judge Curwin gets antsier and antsier about the shrinking size of his family reunion guest list, the truth comes out--the Curwins were instrumental in locking the insane Billy Collins in his old house in the woods, wherefrom he escaped one night 17 years ago just as the MacClearys were passing by. Now re-embodied in Mike's corporeal form, Collins is visiting his vengeance upon his killers. Can Collins be stopped? Can Mike be saved? Can Amanda find love outside the vertebrate order?
The film is enjoyable in many ways, not least because of the atmospheric set design and cinematography. Phillippe Mora has come a ways here from his 1976 Australian bush ranger epic Mad Dog Morgan, and the monster attack scenes and episodes in Collins' house are interesting and creepy to look at. The gore scenes are well-handled as well, from the aforementioned arty ground-beef death to the wall-splattering embalming of Dexter Ward. He even gets to use the often-seen-in-the-80s "pointlessly topless corpse in the morgue" trope, which I never fail to make a note of. There's also a nice nod to Kurosawa, though I'm not sure whether Mora would count his samurai epics as an influence on this film.
Designing Women fans can look for Meshach Taylor as the loyal deputy and the only brothah in town.
But the real selling point of this movie--even in the 1980s TV spots--is the show-stopping transformation of Mike into the Cicada Man, which takes place in the Nioba hospital with the young man strapped to a bed and his parents and medical staff watching. Again, I remember being creeped out by this as an eleven-year-old moviegoer, and even though the bladder effects and puppetry are more obvious and cheesy looking now, it is still a standout scene. The final ten minutes of the movie are pretty wild, as Mike sheds his skin (like a cicada!) and then goes on the hunt for Amanda, since the Cicada-Man reproductive cycle is apparently always rape-based. Probably just as well there are so few of them around.
As a slice of 80s movie-monster mayhem, The Beast Within is pretty darned entertaining. It does drag in spots, the acting is somewhat questionable, and some of the plot developments don't make much sense (they have to try REALLY hard to get Amanda into a position to be endangered by BugMike, for instance), and the country songs written and performed by Ronny Cox on the soundtrack aren't really my cup of tea. However, for the transformation, some good gore, a bit of wildness and a creepy pervy old man dying with his feet in meat, I give The Beast Within 2.25 thumbs. Trust me, it's the best Rapey Cicada-Creature movie you'll ever see.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Beast Within (1981): or, I've Got You Under My Skin
Posted by The Vicar of VHS at 12:05 PM
Labels: '80s, 2-3 thumbs, Body Horror, Lovecraftian, Monsters Amok, Rapey Cicada Creatures
7 comments:
A cicada themed film you say? The first time I ever ventured to the east coast was during cicada season. Coupled with the sci-fi sound they make and dead bodies dropping everywhere, it truly made for an altogether creepy experience.
Anywhos, I'll have to check this out. Great review.
- February 8, 2010 at 5:45 PM
P.S. isn't the title of the movie a little deceiving? Shouldn't it be The Insectezoid Within?
- February 8, 2010 at 5:46 PM
- Al Bruno III said...
Another fine article. I remember that as a lad I was fascinated with the wildly inflated bladders and untethered ta-tas.
I can tell you that I saw this film and GALAXY OF TERROR on the same night and my adolescence was never the same.
- February 9, 2010 at 5:59 AM
I make no bones about it, I love this movie! Great acting, great FX, and a wonderfully pataphysical explanation for the monster's creation. Always wanted an extended version to see what may have been left out of the theatrical cut. Highly recommended.
- February 9, 2010 at 11:16 AM
- J. Astro said...
@ Planet Terror: I'm with you. The cover & title for this one makes it totally look like some sort of a werewolf pic.
Nevertheless, it's a great piece of 80's monster sleaze. Nice pick!!
- February 9, 2010 at 8:37 PM
- The Vicar of VHS said...
@Planet of Terror & J. Astro--I guess technically a cicada is a "beast" of a sort, but yeah, you usually think of big hairy monsters rather than buzzing rapey bugmen. Still, maybe the filmmakers were all about subverting expectations!
@Al Bruno III--wow, GoT and TBW make an EXCELLENT double feature! The one-two punch of Cicada/Worm Rape! The mind wobbles. :S
@davidfullam--it's definitely worth seeing, and I can fully appreciate the MAD bits that make up its appeal. I don't know if any deleted scenes exist--the DVD I got from Netflix has a pretty amateurish splash/menu screen and nothing but the trailer for features. Some Cicada-Man enthusiast needs to go hunting! While I wasn't impressed with Paul Clemens in the main role here, I was surprised to see he went on to have a full career in movies and TV, including a part in the Christopher Walken alien flick COMMUNION and in the recent short film/internet sensation "The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon "--watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y
- February 10, 2010 at 9:04 AM
- The Vicar of VHS said...
But here's a bonus feature--the stuff I forgot to put in the original review about the teen sexuality metaphor in the flick. Michael seems like a pretty immature 17 year old with his cherubic face stunted delivery, so it's easy to draw a line from his awakening sexuality to the bestial id impulses of the rapey bugman he becomes. There are also some uncomfortable scenes with Bibi Besch doting over Mike in a very Gertrude/Hamlet sorta way (see Olivier's version), and when Mike gets frisky with Amanda in the swamp, the morbid coitus interruptus seems a foreshadowing of things to come. And finally, the homoerotic subtext (or just TEXT) of Mike's meat-based encounter with Edwin is likely another facet in the whole "confusion attendant upon burgeoning sexuality" gem that's the centerpiece of this flick.
And I'm spent! :P
- February 10, 2010 at 9:04 AM


text:
The New York Daily News has broken with its recent pattern of endorsing Democrats for president, and has come out in favor of George Bush. The paper is "dismayed" by Bush's record on domestic policy, but supports him nonetheless because of the overriding importance of the war on terrorism. The News finds that
Kerry has promised to be tough on terror. His words are resolute

subset: commoncrawl


text: Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad 1975. Compiled and introduced by S Ivanov, photographs by V Stukalov. A set of 47 loose-leaf colour plates, showing a total of 50 masks. 'The first publication of a series of festive, ceremonial and cult masks (including those used in the shamanistic and Lamaistic rituals) of the peoples inhabiting Siberia and the Russian Far East. The use of masks among these peoples goes back to remote antiquity, and the specimens published here, though made in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, are designed in accordance with age-old traditions'. The masks featured come from the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, the Hermitage, and the Museum for the History of Religion and Atheism. Each plate measures 25 by 32 cms, and has a caption on the back in English and Russian. All of the plates are in fine condition. They are accompanied by a large-format, 32-page booklet giving the history and background of the masks and the groups of people who made them, illustrated with two pages of sketches of engravings. Internally fine, the booklet has some light marking to the cover. All these are contained in their original, illustrated card folder which has tears to the corners and edges and has been repaired with tape. Parallel text in Russian and English throughout.


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The Columbus School of Law's Interdisciplinary Program on Law and Religion led a group of American religious leaders on an historic, week-long fact-finding trip to the Kurdish region of Iraq, Nov. 4–10, 2012.
Headed by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, D.C., the group met with Christian leaders and parishioners throughout Iraqi Kurdistan to assess the state of the Christian community in the region and to learn about its efforts to absorb and adjust to a rapidly growing non-Christian population. The thriving Christian community in Iraqi Kurdistan is one of the oldest in the world and one of most diverse in the Middle East.
"The Iraqi Kurdistan Region, an autonomous region within Iraq, embraced the American ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom. Theirs is the success story that we don't hear about," said Rich Gallena (at left, with Cardinal McCarrick), a third-year law student who accompanied the delegation as a research assistant for Professor Robert Destro, founder and director of the Law and Religion Program.
"Many of our meetings began with government officials thanking us for the great sacrifice our country has made," Gallena continued. "And it's true. America paid a very steep price for toppling Saddam, and I think the American people deserve to know that our efforts haven't been in vain." (The deceased dictator's former home sits on the hilltop at left).
In recent years Iraq's Christian region has received thousands of Muslim migrants from elsewhere in the country, and they now constitute a significant minority in the large Christian center of Ankawa near Erbil.
The delegation met with Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda, as well as with regional officials, members of Parliament and others focused on religious freedom issues.
Accompanying Cardinal McCarrick were the Most Rev. Vicken Aykazian, Armenian Orthodox Church of America; Dr. James A. Kowalski, Dean, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; and A. Larry Ross, a well-known advisor to the leadership of the Evangelical community in the U.S. The visit by the American religious leaders opened eyes on both sides.
"Even though many of the figures we met were of different religions, there was recognition and respect shared amongst those who follow and adhere to a belief in a higher being," said Gallena.
The U.S. visitors spent a significant amount of time traveling to schools and churches, absorbing as much as they could about Iraq's Christian culture.
Although Christianity came to Iraq long before Islam, Iraq is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. Though not in danger of extinction demographically, Iraq's Christian population has at times felt the sting of minority status. The Iraqi hosts welcomed their brethren's willingness to listen, learn, and help, said Gallena.
"Once you don the official auspices of a government, people look at you differently, and given our involvement in the region, there's a level of distrust. The independent nature of our delegation allowed us to engage those we met on an honest, common level," he said.
The group will discuss its findings at a conference on December 5, titled "The Status of Christian Communities in Iraqi Kurdistan: Challenges and Opportunities," co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Program in Law & Religion, to be held at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C.


text:
On CNBC yesterday, Mitt Romney said:
What the president should do is say look, we're going to extend for at least a year the–well, I'd like to see it permanent, but at least a year–the current tax environment. This sequestration related to defense spending, in particular, has to be put off … whichever president is going to be elected, at least six months or a year to get those policies in place. So let's extend where we are now as opposed to looking at a cliff in January…
Let's remember what this "cliff" is. It's a two-fold bipartisan agreement.
There's the 2010 bipartisan tax cut deal, which, in exchange for additional middle-class tax cuts and jobless aid, extended the Bush tax cuts until the end of 2012.
And the 2011 bipartisan debt limit deal, which, if no deficit reduction agreement is struck, imposes automatic spending cuts, particularly on the military budget, at the end of the 2012.
The latter deal was made with the clear understanding on all sides that it would put pressure on Republicans to give up their absolutist position opposing any tax increase for the wealthy. Continued Republican obstructionism means deep cuts to another one of their priorities: military spending.
Romney's response to this hard bipartisan bargain in the name of deficit reduction, a policy which Romney argues is essential to prevent America's decline?
Junk it.
Because anything that would change the "current tax environment" so cherished by the most selfish of the 1%, even if it would help achieve Romney's own stated goal of a "balanced budget within eight to 10 years," should be verboten.
Romney is making his priorities clear. We should pay attention.


text:
- Introduction
- Overview
- Prerequisites
- Configuring data activity monitoring
- Hadoop reports included with InfoSphere Guardium
- Install a security policy
- Cool things you can do
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Appendix A: Configuring the Guardium proxy in IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
- Appendix B: Sample GuardAPI command to configure inspection engines
- Appendix C. Using Guardium command line interface (CLI) to filter Hadoop noise
- Downloadable resources
- Related topics
- Comments
Big data security and auditing with IBM InfoSphere Guardium
Monitor and audit access for Hadoop-based systems
The big data buzz has been focused on the infrastructure that supports extreme volume, velocity and variety, and the real-time analytical capabilities enabled by that infrastructure. Even if big data environments like Hadoop are relatively new, the fact of the matter is that data security problems in big data environments are critical to solve up-front. Where there is data, there is the potential for privacy breaches, unauthorized access, or inappropriate access by privileged users.
Compliance mandates should be enforced the same across big data environments and more traditional data management architectures, and there are no excuses for weakening data security just because the technology is young and evolving. As a matter of fact, as big data environments ingest more data, organizations will face significant risks and threats to the repositories in which the data is kept.
If you're responsible for data security at your organization, you may be required to answer questions such as:
- Who is running specific big data requests? What map-reduce jobs are they running? Are they trying to download all of the sensitive data, or is this a normal marketing query to gain insight into your customers?
- Is there an exceptional number of file permission exceptions, perhaps caused by a hacker algorithmically trying to get access to sensitive data?
- Are these jobs part of an authorized program list accessing the data? Or has some new application been developed that you were previously unaware existed?
What you need is to be able to integrate big data applications and analysis into an existing data security infrastructure, rather than relying on homegrown scripts and monitors, which can be labor-intensive, error-prone, and subject to misuse.
This article takes a look at how IBM InfoSphere Guardium V9, a comprehensive data activity monitoring and compliance solution, can be extended to include access monitoring and reporting for the Hadoop ecosystem.
Although this article covers a high-level overview of InfoSphere Guardium, it does not describe how to install and configure the InfoSphere Guardium Collector. It will describe how to configure the InfoSphere Guardium to monitor supported Hadoop activity and send it to the InfoSphere Guardium Collector for reporting by security analysts. You'll see examples of out-of-the-box reports included to help you get started quickly.
InfoSphere Guardium in a nutshell
The IBM InfoSphere Guardium solution continuously monitors database transactions through lightweight software probes, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. InfoSphere Guardium Data activity monitoring
These probes (called S-TAPs, for software taps) monitor all database transactions, including those of privileged users, at the operating system kernel level without relying on database audit logs, ensuring separation of duties. The S-TAPs also do not require any changes to the database or its applications.
The probes forward transactions to a hardened Collector (an appliance) on the network, where they are compared to previously defined policies to detect violations. The system can respond with a variety of policy-based actions, including generating an alert.
InfoSphere Guardium supports a wide variety of deployments to support very large and geographically distributed infrastructures. Because this article has barely scratched the surface of what InfoSphere Guardium can do, you can review the Related topics section for links to more information about the capabilities of InfoSphere Guardium. Note that not all capabilities are available for all data sources.
Benefits of using InfoSphere Guardium for Hadoop monitoring
Using InfoSphere Guardium can dramatically simplify your path to audit-readiness by providing targeted, actionable information. You can imagine that if your current Hadoop audit readiness plan is based on zipping up log data and hoping that you never need it, you will probably not be able to satisfy many audit requirements from a timeliness perspective alone. Forensic analysis would no doubt be time-consuming and require homegrown scripts that are taking away resources you would rather have spending on creating business advantage around Hadoop.
With InfoSphere Guardium, much of the heavy lifting is taken care of for you. You define security policies that specify what data needs to be kept and how to react to policy violations. Data events are written directly to the InfoSphere Guardium collector, leaving no opportunity for even privileged users to access that data and hide their tracks. Out-of-the-box reports get you up and running with Hadoop monitoring quickly, and those reports are easily customized to align with your audit requirements.
The InfoSphere Guardium S-TAP was originally designed for performance with
low overhead; after all, the S-TAP is also used to monitor product
database environments. With Hadoop, you will not likely see overhead above
3%, which for most Hadoop workloads will be
Finally, InfoSphere Guardium provides monitoring capabilities throughout the Hadoop stack, from the user interface through to storage, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Importance of data activity monitoring throughout the Hadoop stack
Why is this important? Even though much of the activity in Hadoop breaks down to MapReduce and HDFS, at that level, you may not be able to tell what a user higher up in the stack was really trying to do, or even who the user was. It is similar to showing a bunch of disk segment I/O operations instead of an audit trail of a database. So by providing monitoring at different levels, you are more likely to understand the activity as well as being able to audit on activities that come in directly through lower points in the stack.
Hadoop activity monitoring
The events that can be monitored include the following:
- Session and user information.
- HDFS operations – Commands (cat, tail, chmod, chown, expunge, and so on).
- MapReduce jobs - Job, operations, permissions.
- Exceptions, such as authorization failures.
- Hive/HBase queries - Alter, count, create, drop, get, put, list, and so on.
The following examples describe how some simple Hadoop commands are shown in InfoSphere Guardium reports.
HBase: The following is a create in HBase:
create 'test_hbase', 'test_col'.
InfoSphere Guardium will show the actual command that flowed to HBase, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. HBase report
HDFS: The following is a simple -ls command in Hadoop:
hadoop fs –ls
Figure 4 is the output in an InfoSphere Guardium report.
Figure 4. HDFS ls command
You can see that under the covers, it was broken down to two different commands to get the listing and the associated file information.
Behind this seemingly simple activity monitoring is a powerful and flexible infrastructure for policy configuration and for reporting. For example, later in this article you will learn how to create a policy that will log an event to alert you whenever an unknown user accesses sensitive data. You can also create an audit report that helps you detect when new or unknown applications are accessing Hadoop data.
Quick start activity monitoring for IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
IBM InfoSphere BigInsights includes an integrated capability called the Guardium Proxy to read and send log messages to InfoSphere Guardium for analysis and reporting. With the proxy, BigInsights sends messages from Hadoop logs to the InfoSphere Guardium collector.
The advantages to the proxy include the following:
- Easy to get up and running. There is no need to install S-TAPs or configure ports. you simply enable the proxy on the NameNode, and you are ready to go.
- Because the proxy uses Apache log data as messages to send to InfoSphere Guardium, there is less noise that is required to be filtered out from those messages, such as status and heartbeat information.
- There is no delay of Guardium support for new releases of BigInsights to take advantages of message protocol changes.
Limitations: Because Hadoop is not logging exceptions to its logs, there is no way to send exceptions to InfoSphere Guardium. If you require exception reporting, you will need to implement an S-TAP. In addition, there is no support for monitoring Hive queries, although you will see the underlying MapReduce or HDFS messages from Hive.
If you are interested in getting started by using the Guardium Proxy in InfoSphere BigInsights, see Appendix A, which has the configuration instructions to enable the proxy for the Hadoop services.
The following section describes the requirements for both InfoSphere Guardium and the Hadoop-based system.
InfoSphere Guardium security and compliance solution
The IBM InfoSphere Guardium solution is available as follows:
- Hardware offering – a fully configured software solution delivered on physical appliances provided by IBM.
- Software offering – the solution delivered as software images you can deploy on your own hardware either directly or as virtual appliances.
To monitor Hadoop environments, you must have an InfoSphere Guardium Appliance V9.0 (hardware or software) with at least Patch 2 and preferably GPU Patch 50. That appliance should be configured as a collector. You will also need the InfoSphere Guardium Standard Activity Monitor for Hadoop software entitlement. Before attempting to monitor Hadoop, please ensure that you check the IBM support site for additional patches that may be required.
As your system grows, you can also obtain appliances configured as a Central Manager and Aggregator, which provides centralized management of multiple collectors via a single web-based console, effectively creating a federated system from multiple collectors. You can use that to centrally manage security policies and appliance settings such as archiving schedules, patch installations, user management, and so on. It also aggregates raw data and reports from multiple collectors to generate holistic, enterprise-level audit reports.
This article does not cover the installation and configuration of the IBM InfoSphere Guardium appliance and assumes that you have at least one appliance connected to the Hadoop cluster on the network.
Supported Hadoop-based systems
See the InfoSphere Guardium system requirements information on the IBM support site for updates to the supported release levels of the supported Hadoop distributions for InfoSphere BigInsights, Cloudera, Greenplum HD, and Hortonworks.
Note: For IBM InfoSphere Big Insights, support of the overlay install on Cloudera is also supported by IBM InfoSphere Guardium.
Configuring data activity monitoring
The steps required to install and configure are as follows:
- Plan – Make sure you have a good understanding of the network architecture of your Hadoop cluster, including IP addresses and the relevant port numbers.
- Install S-TAP and configure inspection engines on the appropriate Hadoop nodes.
- Validate that activity is being monitored, by creating and reviewing activity reports.
- Install a security policy.
The planning step is critical for a successful integration of InfoSphere Guardium with Hadoop. The following section provides a high-level overview of the architecture to provide you with the understanding you need.
Recommendation: For an initial deployment, consider just starting with the simplest configuration that supports a particular business requirement, and then expand from there. For example, start with just the requirements to monitor HDFS and MapReduce, validate the configuration, and then expand to include Hive and HBase as needed.
Figure 5 shows you where the OS-specific S-TAPs are specifically required to be installed in the cluster for complete monitoring coverage as provided by InfoSphere Guardium.
Figure 5. STAPs required for monitoring the Hadoop stack
IBM InfoSphere Guardium provides a centralized solution for installing and updating multiple S-TAPs using the Guardium Installation Manager to make S-TAP management simpler and more automated.
Note: For the slave nodes, S-TAP is only required for HBase Region Servers for monitoring inserts (HBase Puts).
After you install the OS-specific S-TAP on the relevant nodes, you can configure the ports that the S-TAP is monitoring by defining what is known as inspection engines for the S-TAP. These inspection engines also have specific monitoring protocols associated with them. The S-TAP intercepts the network packets, makes a copy, and does some parsing and analysis and sends the information to the InfoSphere Guardium Collector where it is further parsed, analyzed and stored in the InfoSphere Guardium Collector local database.
Before moving to the next step, review the following:
- Ensure that you are running a supported Hadoop-based system.
- Make sure that you know the IP addresses of the InfoSphere Guardium Collector(s) that will be receiving the collected traffic from your Hadoop cluster.
- Make sure that you know the IP addresses of the servers on which S-TAPs are required.
- Write down the ports to be monitored and which hosts they apply to, based on information shown in Table 1 and Table 2. This article based its port setups on the Hadoop default ports, which in general are the same across the distributions. Your configuration may differ.
Table 1. Hadoop service ports to monitor
|HDFS Name Node
|8020, 50470
|HDFS Thrift plugin for Cloudera Hue (NameNode)
|MapReduce Job Tracker
|8021, 9290, and 50030
|HBase Master
|60000 and 60010
|HBase Region
|HTTP port (for WebHDFS)
|HBase Thrift plugin
|Hive Server
|Beeswax Server
|Cloudera Manager Agent
Install S-TAP and configure inspection engines
S-TAPs are operating system specific, so you'll need to install the Red Hat or SUSE Linux S-TAP for each of the appropriate nodes. This process is well-documented in the InfoSphere Guardium S-TAP help book, and can also be done using InfoSphere Guardium Installation Manager or by using a non-interactive install process that lets you install on many nodes with the same command.
Next, you need to configure inspection engines appropriate for the node and services being monitored. Inspection engines are where you indicate which protocol to use for monitoring (Hadoop), and where you define which ports to monitor. Table 1 showed an excerpt of the ports used by default and that InfoSphere Guardium can monitor. Your ports may differ.
Table 2 shows you the information that was used to configure the Hadoop cluster for this article, and is based on default Hadoop ports.
Table 2. Hadoop service ports to monitor to configure Hadoop cluster
|Inspection engine for....
|Port range.
|KTAP DB Real port
|HDFS, Job Tracker, Beeswax server
|MapReduce Master and Thrift plug-in
|Hive Server and HDFS Thrift Plug-in for Hue
|HDFS Name Nodes
|HDFS Name Nodes
|HBase Master
|HBase Region
Recommendation: You can specify multiple inspection engines per server; you should do this when the protocol is the same, and you want to avoid configuring too large a port range for each inspection engine. It is a best practice to not configure many ports you don't need since this places additional overhead on the InfoSphere Guardium collector components, which would need to analyze traffic that is not relevant. However, for simplicity, you may want to include port ranges on some of the inspection engines where it makes sense.
You can add inspection engines from the user interface: Administration Console >Local Taps >S-TAP Control >Add Inspection Engine.
Or you can use an API, create_stap_inspection_engine. See Appendix B for example API commands that you can use to create the inspection engines using default ports.
Figure 6 shows a few examples of some of the inspection engines after they were defined.
Figure 6. A sample of some inspection engines for Hadoop
You can read more about the inspection engine configuration fields in the S-TAP help book, which you can find online. However, the following is a summary of some of the key fields.
- Protocol: The type of data source being monitored (Hadoop). The options are available as a pull-down menu.
- Port Range: The range of ports monitored for this inspection engine. As mentioned previously, keep this range as limited as possible. For this article, The applicable ports were divided up into closely corresponding groups, such as the 9000 range or the 50000 range.
- K-TAP real port: This parameter should just be set as the last port in the range for that inspection engine. If just one port is defined, then set K-TAP real port to be the same.
- Client IP Addresses/Masks: Each inspection engine monitors traffic between one or more client and server IP addresses. This field acts as a filter to define and restrict clients to be monitored. For example, you might have some trusted clients that don't require auditing, and you can filter out those clients ahead of time, which can reduce the overall load on the collector. The IP address is a single location and the mask works as a wildcard to let you define a range of IP addresses. A mask 255.255.255.255 (which has no zero bits) identifies only the single address specified by IP address. In the case of article, it is using 0.0.0.0 for both client and mask so all clients will be monitored.
- Connect to IP: The IP address for S-TAP to use to connect to the monitored data source. For Hadoop, you can use the default, 127.0.0.1.
- Process name: For a Hadoop configuration, you do not need this.
Validate that activity is being monitored
As an Administrator, navigate to the System View tab of the InfoSphere Guardium web console and ensure that the S-TAPs for your Hadoop cluster are active and showing green, which indicates that the S-TAP is connected to the InfoSphere Guardium collector. Figure 7 shows what this might look like for one host.
Figure 7. S-TAP status monitor
After you validate that the S-TAPs are configured properly on all applicable nodes, you should already be capturing any work that is running on the system. You can run a shell command or the sample wordcount job to validate that you are seeing data. In either case, you will need to use InfoSphere Guardium drill-down reports (available from the View tab for users), or create your own reports to view the activity.
More detail on the Hadoop reports is described in the Hadoop reports included with InfoSphere Guardium section. For the purposes of validation, this article will describe how to use the drill-down reports that are available for security administrators who are assigned user roles in the system.
When you log in as a user and click the View tab, you will see a graph much like what is shown in Figure 8. Double-click the graph to drill down into the details.
Figure 8. Drill down into details
There are many paths through the data. Figure 9 shows one sample drill down.
Figure 9. Sample drill down
Whenever you click on a row in the report, you have a menu of options to choose from in terms of the next level of reporting you would like to see.
Hadoop reports included with InfoSphere Guardium
InfoSphere Guardium includes several out-of-the-box reports for Hadoop, including the following:
- MapReduce activity .
- Unauthorized MapReduce jobs.
- Hue/Beeswax activity.
- HDFS, HBase, and Hive activity.
- Exception report.
If you are logged in as a user, you can find the predefined reports by clicking the View tab. From the left navigation pane, click Hadoop, and the reports are listed there.
If you are logged in as an Admin, you will need to add the reports to your console. The following steps assume you have a My New Reports tab already defined on your console, and that you are logged in as administrator.
- Navigate to Tools>Report Building>Report Builder.
- In the report title section, use the pull-down menu to locate one of the reports, such as the Hadoop - Hue/Beeswax report, and then click Search.
- In the report search results window, click the Add to My New
Reports button, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10. Add the report to a pane called My New Reports
- Now you can run a command in Beeswax using Hue and see the report. For
example, in this article, the following Hive command was entered, as
shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11. Submitting a query in Beeswax
- Go to the Hue/Beeswax report, you will likely see
No data found. This is because you need to
specify some runtime parameters to tell the system what to display. To
do this, click on the pencil icon to customize the report query as
shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12. Submitting a query in Beeswax
- Add a time period for the query from and to dates (depending on your
workload, you may want to pick a smaller value, perhaps hours or a
day) and the percent sign or other search parameters for the LIKE
field for the SQL and Table_Name fields, as shown in Figure 13.
Figure 13. Specify runtime parameters for Hue/Beeswax report
- You should now see some data appearing in the report, as shown in
Figure 14.
Figure 14. Hue/Beeswax report
- Now do the same steps for the MapReduce report (if
you are an admin):
- Navigate to Tools>Report Building>Report Builder.
- Search for MapReduce report.
- Add to a report pane.
- Edit the report to add runtime parameters.
- Run a MapReduce job. This article used the sample word count program
in Cloudera. The syntax to run wordcount is:
bin/hadoop jar hadoop-*-examples.jar wordcount in-dir out-dir.
- For this article, the following was run:
hadoop jar hadoop-0.20.2-cdh3u4-examples.jar wordcount /user/svoruga /user/svoruga/wc100. You can see a report much like what is shown Figure 15.
Figure 15. MapReduce report
(View a larger version of Figure 15.)As you can see, for this article, the query parameters were customized to specify that only activity in which svoruga and word%count appear in the message (Full SQL) is to be returned on the report.
The InfoSphere Guardium Hue/Beeswax reports assume the use of the Thrift message format and the MySQL database. If you are using MySQL and your Hue/Beeswax report still doesn't show data, you may need to configure Beeswax to use port 8002 as follows, which was the port used by Thrift for the system example in this article.
- Navigate to the Hue .ini file:
- For CDH3:
- For CDH4
/etc/hue/hue/ini, where the -
hadoop *examples.jar"*is in the
/user/lib/hadoopdirectory. Replace with the correct jar file.
in-dir is the HDFS directory where the input file is.
out-dir is the HDFS directory where the output file will be placed.
- For CDH3:
- Uncomment the following line:
- Stop and restart hue using the following commands:
/etc/init.d/hue stop
/etc/init.d/hue start
Install a security policy
In InfoSphere Guardium, a security policy contains an ordered set of rules to be applied to the observed traffic between clients and servers. One or more rules are combined to create a policy. For the Hadoop security policy in this article, access rules were defined, which are rules to help reduce the amount of traffic to be logged to the InfoSphere Guardium collector.
Recommendation: Do not modify the sample policy. Instead, create a clone and use that as the basis for your modification.
To access the Hadoop Policy and create a clone, do the following.
- Log in as an administrator and navigate to Tools>Config & Control>Policy Builder.
- From the Policy Finder, select Hadoop Policy and then click the Clone button.
- Enter a new name for the policy and then click Save.
To install a policy, do the following.
- Log in as an administrator and go to Administration Console > Configuration > Policy Installation.
- Select the Hadoop policy clone you created and choose the appropriate install action. See the online help for more information about policy installation and the implications of having more than one policy.
The rules for the Hadoop Policy are shown in Figure 16. Click on the plus to see more details. You can edit the rule by clicking on the pencil icon.
Figure 16. Rules in the sample Hadoop policy
The following is a summary of each of the rules in the policy.
- Access Rule: Low interest objects: Allow
Figure 17 shows the rule definition.
Figure 17. Low interest objects rules for Hadoop
The following are the two main items of interest in this policy.
- A definition of a group of objects, such as user preferences,
that is unlikely to be of interest. If you click on the group
builder icon, you can see the objects that are part of the
HadoopSkipObjects group, as shown in Figure 18.
Figure 18. Low interest objects rules for Hadoop
You can modify this group as needed.
- The Allow action means that a policy violation will not be logged for these objects, and they will not be considered for further analysis.
- A definition of a group of objects, such as user preferences, that is unlikely to be of interest. If you click on the group builder icon, you can see the objects that are part of the HadoopSkipObjects group, as shown in Figure 18.
- Access Rule: Low Interest Commands: Allow
Similar to the rule above, but specifically for commands.
- Access Rule: Filter based on Server IP: Log Full Details
This rule enables you to filter out activity from any non-Hadoop servers that are using this same Guardium Collector.
Important: You must modify the Not Hadoop Servers group to include all the IPs of any servers you want to filter out. If there are no such servers, then enter a dummy IP, but not 0.0.0.0. If you do not have something in that group, then your reports will not work.
Cool things you can do
The following are a few key things you can do with InfoSphere Guardium to help you meet your audit and compliance requirements for Hadoop. This section describes ways to answer the questions that were posed at the beginning of the article.
- Is someone who is not previously authorized to do so accessing sensitive data?
- Is there a new application/job accessing the system?
- Is there an exceptional number of file permission errors?
Tell me when an unauthorized user accesses sensitive data
There are many different rules you can use to create policies that can help you enforce your auditing requirements.
Tip: If you add any rules to your Hadoop policy clone, make sure the previous rule has Continue to next rule selected. Otherwise, your new rule may never be evaluated.
Figure 19 shows a rule in which two groups are defined as follows.
- Known Hadoop users
- Known sensitive data objects/files
Figure 19. Example policy rule for access to sensitive files
The rule has a negation for the known users, which means that if a user who is not part of that known group accesses those sensitive files, that information will be logged, and you can see those occurrences in an incident report for further investigation. If it turns out that the access is legitimate, you can add that user to the known group.
Tell me when new MapReduce jobs use the system
Many enterprises are concerned about keeping track of new applications that access their data, and an automated report can help you do that. InfoSphere Guardium provides an unauthorized MapReduce job report that you can customize to help you identify when new MapReduce jobs enter the system.
You can schedule this report to run regularly as part of an audit process that runs in the background. This enables you to be notified when new jobs enter the system, so they can be properly reviewed and added to the authorized job list as appropriate.
Setting up this report takes a bit of configuration. You need to create and customize a group called Hadoop Authorized Job List. You will need to:
- Create and Populate that group with the list of known and approved jobs in your system. (Note:With 9.0 GPU 50, the Hadoop Authorized Job List is included with the system. You will just need to populate it.)
- Assign roles to the group so appropriate people in your organization can see and use that group in building reports.
- Customize the Hadoop-Unauthorized MapReduce Jobs report to include that group as a runtime parameter.
Here are the detailed steps on how to configure the group:
- From the administration console, go to Tools > Config and Control > Group Builder. Or, if you are logged in as a user, go to the Monitor/Audit > Build Reports> Group Builder, and then click Next.
- In the Create New Group fields, specify
Public as the Application Type, give it the name
you want (such as Hadoop Authorized Job List) , and
from the dropdown list for Group Type Description, select
OBJECTS , as shown in Figure 20. Click the Add button.
Figure 20. Naming the new group
- In the Manage Members pane, enter a MapReduce job name in the
Create & add new members field, and then
click Add to add that member to the group. Continue
adding names, as shown in Figure 21.
When you are done adding MapReduce job names, click the
Back button.
Figure 21. Populate the group with authorized jobs
- In the Group Builder, find your group in the Modify Existing Group
list and then click the Roles button as shown in
Figure 22.
Figure 22. Associate roles with the group
- Select the roles you want to be able to use this group. We have simply
selected All Roles, as shown in Figure 23. Click the Apply button.
Figure 23. Indicate which roles can use this group
Now you have finished with the task of creating the Hadoop Authorized Job List group, and you are ready to move to the next task, which is to associate it with the report.
- As described in the Hadoop reports included with InfoSphere Guardium section, if you are logged in as a user, you can find the predefined reports by clicking the View tab. From the left navigation pane, click Hadoop, and the reports are listed there.
- Click on Hadoop – Unauthorized MapReduce Jobs. It
will likely show No data found. Click on the pencil icon to customize
this report, as shown in Figure 24.
Figure 24. Customize the report
- Select the group name from the list, as shown in Figure 25. Make sure the date parameters
cover a time period when you know you will see at least a small set of
results to validate that the report is working. Then click the
Update button.
Figure 25. Add the group to the report runtime parameters
- From the left navigation, click on the Hadoop – Unauthorized
MapReduce Jobs report again. It should be populated with
data from any reports that are not in your authorized job group. An
extract of the report is shown in Figure 26, where you can see that a job named PiEstimator is
shown because it was not on the authorized list of jobs.
Figure 26. Report includes activity from jobs not in the authorized group
Tell me if there is an exceptional number of file permission errors
InfoSphere Guardium includes out-of-the-box exception reporting for Hadoop. For example, if you are logged in as a user, you can go to View > Hadoop > Hadoop - Exception Report to see the out-of-the-box report, similar to what is shown in Figure 27.
Figure 27. Sample Hadoop exception report
You can also create an alert based on the same query that is used for the report. With an alert, you can have an email sent whenever a threshold for a specific condition, such as file permission exceptions, goes above a certain limit.
You can also choose to log the alert as a policy violation, which will put this alert on the Incident Management tab of the InfoSphere Guardium web console.
Here are the high-level steps to create the exceptions query and to enable it in an alert.
- Navigate to the Alert Builder:
- For an administrator, go to Tools> Config and Control> Alert Builder.
- For a user, go to Protect> Correlation Alert> Alert Builder.
- From the Alert Finder, click New.
- In the Query Definition section of the Add Alert screen, select
Hadoop – Exception Report from the pull-down
menu, as shown in Figure 28, and fill out the
rest of the alert requirements.
Figure 28. Use exception report query to build your alert
Figure 29 is an example of an alert that was created for this article that specifies an exception of 101 for file permission exceptions.
Figure 29. Alert builder
Notice that the alerts are logged as a policy violation so that any alerts that are triggered also appear from the Incident Management tab. Also, notice at the bottom of the example, the administrator named David Roz will get at least one email when the alert is triggered.
We hope you've enjoyed this tour through InfoSphere Guardium for securing Hadoop environments. If you are using or evaluating Hadoop and are considering a security strategy around its deployment, we think the information provided in this article can help you think about what you need and how InfoSphere Guardium can help. Existing Guardium users can easily extend their current data security and audit processes to include Hadoop.
The authors would like to extend their gratitude to the following people without whom this article would never have seen the light of day:
- David Rozenblat, for many hours helping us build reports and policies, and for his management support.
- Joe DiPietro, for giving us the example business problems to solve.
- Ury Segal, for technical direction.
Appendix A: Configuring the Guardium proxy in IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
This appendix describes the steps to enable the Guardium Proxy in IBM InfoSphere BigInsights to send copies of relevant log messages to InfoSphere Guardium.
Figure 30 shows you the architecture of the solution.
Figure 30. Log messages are sent to the Guardium Proxy and then forwarded to the Guardium Collector
Enabling the integration between InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Guardium is much simpler as of BigInsights 2.0. You enable the Guardium Proxy at BigInsights installation time (BigInsights 2.0 and later). Logging events are sent over a socket connection. Port 16015 is used for this socket connection. The proxy then forwards those messages to the InfoSphere Guardium collector (default port 16016) which parses and stores those messages in the Guardium internal tables for reporting, alerting, and so on.
The screenshot below is an excerpt from the InfoSphere BigInsights 2.1 installation panel in which you specify the port addresses of the proxy, the Guardium collector, and the host names for the collector and the node on which you run the proxy (usually the name node).
Figure 31. Excerpt from BigInsights installation panel
You can find details of the integration in the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Information Center (see Related topics).
Validate the configuration
You can test the configuration by submitting a job, including a sample wordcount job, and seeing the results in the InfoSphere Guardium reports.
Through your BigInsights web console, submit a wordcount job. See the BigInsights information center in the Related topics section for more information about how to do this.
Log in to the InfoSphere Guardium web console as a user and select one of the Hadoop reports, such as BigInsights - MapReduce. Figure 26 shows you an excerpt from a MapReduce report for BigInsights when the proxy is used.
Figure 32. Partial MapReduce report for BigInsights
(View a larger version of Figure 26.)
You can see information about permissions in the Full SQL section of the report. You can also see that the report includes information about the name of the job, the user name who submitted the job, and even the jar file name of the job. This information is parsed out for you from the full message, and because it appears as a field in the report, you can do things such as create alerts on those fields. See this section of the article for more details on customizing reports.
Appendix B: Sample GuardAPI command to configure inspection engines
The GuardAPI provides access to InfoSphere Guardium functionality from the command line to enable you to automate repetitive tasks. To run these commands you must log in with one of the CLI (command line interface) accounts and have been granted the role of admin or CLI. For more information about the API, see the InfoSphere Guardium Appendices online help book.
Listing 1 shows the commands that were used to create the inspection engines via the API in this article.
Listing 1. Sample grdapi commands to configure inspection engines in our sample environment
#hdfs job tracker, hdfs name node beeswax server grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP ktapDbPort=8021 portMax=8021 portMin=8000 stapHost=<My Hadoop Node IP> #Mapreduce job tracker, cloudera agent and thrift plugin grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP ktapDbPort=9291 portMax=9291 portMin=9000 stapHost= <My Hadoop Node IP> #hive server, thrift plugin grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP ktapDbPort=10090 portMax=10090 portMin=10000 stapHost= <My Hadoop Node IP> #HDFS name node ports grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP ktapDbPort=50069 portMax=50069 portMin=50010 stapHost= <My Hadoop Node IP> #HDFS name node ports grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP ktapDbPort=50470 portMax=50470 portMin=50071 stapHost= <My Hadoop Node IP> #WebHDFS grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HTTP KtapDbPort=50070 portMax=50070 portMin=50070 stapHost=<My Hadoop Node IP> #HBase region servers grdapi create_stap_inspection_engine client=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 protocol=HADOOP KtapDbPort=60010 portMax=60010 portMin=60000 stapHost= <My Hadoop Node IP>
You will need to ensure that your inspection engine maps appropriately to the Hadoop node that has the corresponding services installed on that node. In this case, it was a simple one-node configuration, so the inspection engines were grouped by like port number. Your configuration will likely be more complex than this.
Appendix C. Using Guardium command line interface (CLI) to filter Hadoop noise
InfoSphere Guardium has a rich command line interface. You can use the CLI
to directly configure the Collector's analyzer component to filter out
Hadoop noise rather than using the security policy by using the
gdm_analyzer_rule new
command to specify a specific Hadoop application and pattern to exclude.
The example in Listing 2 shows use of the command to filter out HBase
getServerRegion messages.
Listing 2. CLI command to modify the collector's filtering
store gdm_analyzer_rule new Please enter rule description (optional): HDP Please enter rule type (required): 5 Please enter rule acdtion (optional. Default to 0): Please enter active flag (optional. Default to 1): Please enter DB protocol (required): 25 Please enter server IP (optional): Please enter server IP mask (optional. Default to 255.255.255.255): Please enter service name (optional): Please enter pattern (optional): getServerRegion Please enter format (optional): 1
The options of interest include the following.
- Rule type: Specify 5 for Hadoop exclusion rule.
- Rule action: Keep the defaults.
- DB Protocol: Specify '25 for Hadoop.
- Pattern: Enter the exact name and case of the message pattern you would like to exclude.
- Format: Enter the code for the Hadoop service to
exclude. Values are:
1 - HBase
2 - Hadoop IPC
3 - Job Tracker
Downloadable resources
Related topics
- Visit the InfoSphere Guardium web site for links to white papers, demos, and more.
- Visit the InfoSphere Guardium Information Center to help you make the most of InfoSphere Guardium data activity monitoring solution.
- Read the topic entitled Running applications to learn how to submit a job.
- Read the topic entitled InfoSphere BigInsights installed components for the list of default ports used by components of InfoSphere BigInsights..
- Read the topic entitled Sending auditing information to InfoSphere Guardium for more details on configuring the integration.
- Watch videos on the InfoSphere Guardium YouTube channel, including demos of support for SAP, DB2 for z/OS, and others. Here is a short overview video and a somewhat longer more technical video on the Big Data monitoring solution described in this article.
- For a high level overview of the support for monitoring Hadoop-based in InfoSphere Guardium, read this data sheet.
- Read the ebook entitled Planning a security and auditing deployment for Hadoop for ideas to help you plan a deployment.
- Evaluate IBM products in the way that suits you best: Download a product trial, try a product online, use a product in a cloud environment, or spend a few hours in the SOA Sandbox learning how to implement Service Oriented Architecture efficiently.


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'Pen can't hold pair of leads as Marlins fall to Mets
NEW YORK -- Holding onto late-inning leads has been a problem for the Marlins during their road trip, and suddenly Miami's grip on third place in the National League East is in jeopardy.
Eric Campbell's pinch-hit, two-out RBI single off Mike Dunn in the eighth inning on Saturday rallied the Mets to a 5-4 win over the Marlins at Citi Field.View Full Game Coverage
NEW YORK -- Holding onto late-inning leads has been a problem for the Marlins during their road trip, and suddenly Miami's grip on third place in the National League East is in jeopardy.
Eric Campbell's pinch-hit, two-out RBI single off Mike Dunn in the eighth inning on Saturday rallied the Mets to a 5-4 win over the Marlins at Citi Field.View Full Game Coverage
The Marlins have dropped three straight, and they are a season-most five games under .500 (44-49). New York (44-50) is now a half-game behind Miami for third place in the division.
"That was one we need to be able to lock down," Miami manager Mike Redmond said. "We've had some struggles holding down the lead in the seventh, eighth innings. Sometimes the ninth has been tough for us.
"I thought we put together some nice at-bats to score a couple runs to give us a lead and we just gave it right back. Today, they got two big hits off the bench and we weren't able to match the big hits."
Christian Yelich homered for Miami, his eighth of the season. But the Mets delivered the crucial hits late.
In two of their last three games, the Marlins blew late leads. At Arizona on Wednesday, the D-backs overcame a two-run deficit with three runs in the 10th inning off closer Steve Cishek.
"We've had some big wins," Mets manager Terry Collins said. "That might be the biggest win of the year for us -- for a lot of reasons. No. 1, we talked coming into the homestand about having a good homestand."
New York pieced together a two-out rally off Dunn. Travis d'Arnaud doubled before Campbell delivered his decisive single with the count full.
Twice the Marlins held two-run leads in the game. Chris Young pulled the Mets even in the seventh inning with a pinch-hit, two-run homer off Bryan Morris.
Tom Koehler exited after 6 1/3 innings, allowing just two hits, but he walked four, with the fourth being crucial. In the seventh inning, with Miami ahead 4-2, Ruben Tejada drew a one-out walk, putting the Mets in business.
Koehler shouldered the blame for the Tejada walk, putting Morris in position of inheriting a runner.
"Can't happen. Can't happen," Koehler repeated. "You've got to give yourself a chance to get an out there. Obviously, that led to me having to be taken out of the game. It's just something that can't happen.
"I felt good. But in certain situations, no matter how you're doing, you've got to be able to overcome them. You get a quick out in the seventh, and you've got to be able to get the bats back in [the dugout]. That's all I'm thinking about right now."
Morris had not allowed an earned run in 21 1/3 innings since he joined the Marlins in early June. But that string abruptly came to an end when Young belted the righty's first pitch for a two-run homer to left.
"He's been so good," Redmond said. "Like I said, he just made a bad pitch and he hit out."
Although the bullpen has had its issues of late, it has been pretty solid for much of the first half.
"The 'pen's been great all year," Koehler said. "You throw that same pitch nine more times, who knows what happens. It's just one of those days that they happened to beat some pretty good arms. It's going to happen. It's a long season. I just think it's also tough when you've got to come into a situation with runners on and you have to get through an inning late in the ballgame."
The Mets were able to make the big plays and pitches late.
With the game tied in the eighth inning, New York second baseman Daniel Murphy made a leaping two-out grab to snare Adeiny Hechavarria's liner that would have plated at least one run.
"That was a big play," Redmond said. "You talk about winning games on the road, you got to make plays. You got to get big hits from guys. Today they were able to get a couple big pinch-hits and made a big defensive play there that kept us from scoring and possibly changing the outcome of that game."
Mets right-hander Daisuke Matsuzaka gave up four runs on four hits and he walked four in six innings. The veteran also struck out 10, marking the fourth double-digit strikeout day of his career.
"It's tough because we all know we're a better team than the level we're playing at right now," Koehler said. "We're just, whether it be that big play, that big pitch, that big hit. ... You can see, Adeiny hit the ball on the button, and Murphy makes an outstanding play. For us, we've got to have the tide flip a little bit, and us be the ones jumping through the roof."
Joe Frisaro is a reporter for MLB.com. He writes a blog, called The Fish Pond. Follow him on Twitter @JoeFrisaro.


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|Frequently Asked Questions
We answer e-mails almost every day, and answer many questions time and time again. Please see most of the common questions that we answer in the faq. If your question is not answered here, please contact us!
Can I use the Champion to grind nuts with the blank plate in? I would like to mill dry grains for flour to be used in pancakes, waffles, muffins and any good recipes I can get my hands on. May be even breads. Although I'm leaning much more to sprouted breads. I would also like to mush up raw foods to be eaten. Like carrots, turnips, daikon, and others. What about soaked grains?
Yes, you can put nuts through the champion to make nut butters with the blank plate in. Dry grains for pancakes and waffles, muffins and the such can be made with the grain mill attachment. For sprouted (wet grains) you should use the blank plate. if a finer consistency is desired, you can run it through twice. The champion is great for mushing up foods (with the blank plate) - the blank plate is sure handy! Some people think about "milling" soaked (sprouted grains) it wont work in the champion grain mill (its designed for dry grains).. but can be done with the blank plate that is included with the Champion Juicer.
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Atmospheric Sciences & Global Change
Research Highlights
June 2005
Correction Method for Infrared Detector Confirmed; Error in Clear Sky Bias Condition Remains Unresolved
To obtain accurate, high-spectral resolution ground-based observations of infrared radiation, the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program uses a sensor called an Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI). The AERI instrument uses a mercury cadmium telluride (MCT) detector, which provides excellent sensitivity to infrared radiance from 5-25 μm. The MCT detector, however, has a non-linear response, which means that its output is not linearly proportional in wavelength to the measured radiant energy. A set of experiments conducted by ARM researchers in November 2003 and January 2004 confirmed the accuracy of a nonlinearity correction for calibrating the MCT detector, and also ruled out this procedure as the source of error found in clear, dry conditions calculated by a line-by-line radiative transfer model (LBLRTM).


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Established Credit
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Car Loans in Edmonton | Auto Loans in AB
Financing your next used car should not be a time consuming hassle! Let our online auto finance application reduce the amount of time you need to spend on auto loan hunting. Sitting around waiting on a finance approval at a dealership is stressful! So get your auto loan approved before arriving at our Edmonton dealership.
Lakewood Chevrolet will get you the best available rate on a car loan in the Edmonton area. You can qualify for an auto loan for your used car at an affordable rate, regardless of what your past or current credit situation is. Good credit, no credit or bruised credit, special financing is available for everyone.
Give the finance team at Lakewood Chevrolet a call or visit us at 9150 - 34 Avenue. You can also contact us by filling out our credit contact form and starting your credit application process. We look forward to serving your Edmonton auto financing needs.
We have a dedicated team of long-term finance professionals who offer a wide variety of options to suit your financing needs. They work with you to find the best terms and finance rates available.


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DAVIS, Calif. – Freshman pitcher Shelby Wisdom broke the UC Santa Barbara record for single season wins after tossing a complete game three-hitter against UC Davis on Sunday afternoon at the Aggies' La Rue Field. The Gauchos defeated UC Davis, 2-1, to avoid the Big West series sweep.
With the win, the Gauchos improve to 24-28 on the season and 9-6 in league. UC Davis drops to 20-26 and 10-5 in conference games. With two series remaining, UCSB is now in fourth place on the league leaderboard. Pacific and Long Beach State remain on top, each with an 11-4 mark.
Wisdom improved to 19-14 on the season, marking the highest single season win total in UCSB lore. The freshman had tied the school record, which was previously held by Krista Cobb, Jennifer Davis and Sandy Ortigies, last weekend against Pacific.
The pitcher limited the Aggies to just one run on three hits. She struck out five and walked four.
Kathryn Pilpil gave the Gauchos a strong start in the first inning when she hit a one-out double to left center field. Allison Taylor followed with a walk before Keilani Jennings came up big with an RBI double hit to center field.
In the fifth with two outs, Jessica Soria reached on an Aggie throwing error by shortstop Kelly Harman and dashed to second on the same play. Pilpil then reached base on balls before a base hit up the middle by Taylor sent Soria home from second for the unearned run.
Wisdom gave up just her second hit of the game in the bottom of the sixth when Rachel Miller hit a leadoff home run over the left field fence to cut the Gaucho lead to 2-1.
The run would be the Aggies' only of the game as the Gauchos held on for the victory.
Five different UCSB players accounted for the team's five hits in the game.
UCSB will continue Big West action next weekend when it returns to Campus Diamond for its final 2012 home series against Central Coast rival Cal Poly. The three-game series will open with a doubleheader on Saturday, May 5 at noon.
To purchase tickets, visit the Athletics Ticket Office in the ICA Building on campus, call (805) 893-UCSB or click here to purchase online. The entire series will be broadcast by KCSB 91.9 FM. To listen live and watch live stats, click here.


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My husband, John, and I own the OUTLET Store in downtown Estherville. In June, I was approached by Steve McCauley, a teacher in our ELC school district, about the high school purchasing supplies to decorate floats for the homecoming parade in September. My first response was, "Wow! He is really thinking ahead!" My second response was, "This is great! The school is supporting my local business!"
After researching several companies to see what I could get for float making materials, I contacted Steve and gave him the website for a company that I order from frequently. He told me what his budget was and that each class freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior all had their own budgets. Several weeks later, he came in with a list from each class and the items that they wanted to order for their class float. They had gone through the website, chosen the items, and had written down order numbers and prices. Steve had the process very well organized. I placed the order and it arrived 5 days later order complete and in plenty of time to decorate the floats! As Steve and I worked together, I made sure that I gave him the lowest prices possible and was able to receive free shipping, so there were no shipping charges for either of us. The order came to a few cents under budget.
John and I would like to thank Steve and the high school classes for giving us the opportunity to service your needs. Money spent locally in the community helps to keep our businesses open. THANK YOU!
Debbie Rudd
Owner, OUTLET Store


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Today the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) released the results of its annual salary survey. The headline news is that finance managers and staff are receiving larger raises today than at any time since the financial crisis.
More than 3,300 finance professionals provided information on their base salaries as of January 1, 2014, as well as their total compensation (base salary plus any bonuses) during calendar year 2013. Respondents represent every region of the United States and companies of all sizes. Exactly half come from organizations with over $1 billion in annual revenue, while 22 percent come from companies with under $100 million in annual revenue.
Among all these respondents, the average raise in base salary from January 1, 2013, to January 1, 2014, was 3.8 percent. This is up from 3.4 percent the previous year, and it's considerably higher than at any other time since the crisis. For the first time in several years, finance staff saw a larger increase (4.1 percent) than did finance managers (4.0 percent) or finance executives (3.5 percent). Executives were the only group to see a lower average salary increase last year than they received the year before (see Figure 1, below). Among the 20 different job titles tracked in the survey, the two that saw the highest raises were financial reporting specialists (5 percent, on average) and financial analysts (4.8 percent).
Salaries vary fairly predictably by region, with finance professionals in the Northeast making around 10 percent more than those in the Midwest, although the difference varies by job title. For example, when treasurers' average salary is broken down by geographic region, the figure ranges from $207,362 in the Northeast to $195,331 in the West; $187,503 in the South; and $185,307 in the Midwest. Assistant treasurers make an average of $155,685 in the Northeast but only $136,512 in the Midwest, with salaries in the West ($140,256) and South ($138,725) falling in between.
The survey reveals that company size has an even bigger impact on a finance pro's base salary than does geographic region. Across all job titles, the average salary in the survey's largest companies is $126,886, while it's only $88,909 in the smallest companies. (See Figure 2, below.)
In addition to earning higher raises, 71 percent of survey respondents also received bonuses in 2013. At the executive level, the average bonus equated to 34 percent of the respondent's base salary. Managers received bonuses equivalent to 17 percent of their base salary, and finance staff received bonuses equal to 10 percent, on average, of their base salary.
Among the companies that gave bonuses to members of their finance team, 94 percent awarded cash bonuses and 33 percent awarded stock options. In nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of organizations awarding bonuses, operating income or EBITDA targets were a key consideration in evaluating performance and calculating bonus size. Around half of companies based bonuses on completion of specific projects (51 percent) or on achievement of profit-related targets (48 percent).
The AFP survey also asked about vacation time, and it found that respondents get around three weeks off in their first year. First, they receive an average of 9 paid holidays. On top of these days, those who have separate tallies for vacation and sick leave receive an average of 11 days of paid vacation and 8 days of sick leave. Respondents for whom sick and vacation time are combined receive an average of 15 days of paid time off, in addition to company holidays. Half of organizations require employees to wait five years before they receive another week's worth of paid vacation—and 12 percent of companies require them to wait even longer. But 16 percent of companies provide another 5 vacation days after one to two years, and another 16 provide it after three to four years.


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What is a vaginal prolapse and a prolapsed womb?
The normal anatomy of the female pelvis is illustrated in the following figure:-
The walls of the vagina have elasticity to facilitate intercourse and childbirth. If the support is weakened a prolapsed womb may develop. The prolapse may involve the womb, which descends into the vagina and may eventually protrude from the vaginal opening. The concept that all vaginal prolapses relate to the womb (uterus Figure 30.1) is incorrect. Sometimes it is the front or back walls of the vagina which are bulging with associated distortion of the bladder (cystocoele bladder prolapse Figure 30.2) or rectum (rectocoele Figure 30.3). If you have had a hysterectomy the vault of the vault (top) of the vagina can prolapse. Sometimes the bowel may prolapse under the posterior (back) wall of the vagina (enterocele Figure 30.4).
What are the symptoms associated with prolapsed womb?
Usually there is a feeling of 'something coming down? or vaginal discomfort. Some women are aware of a dragging ache in the pelvis. The degree of prolapsed womb does not necessarily match the severity of symptoms that you may experience. Sometimes we find quite marked prolapsed womb but the patient has no symptoms. Other women report quite severe symptoms although there may be only minimal prolapse. Most backaches are due to problems in the back, although, on occasion, repair of a prolapsed womb may provide some relief.
If there is a cystocele there may be bladder symptoms (Chapter 29).
Why have I developed a prolapsed womb?
Vaginal prolapse is usually seen in women who have had children delivered vaginally. It is unusual to see a prolapse in ladies who have never had children. Vaginal delivery of a large baby is particularly likely to weaken the vaginal supports, and there is greater likelihood of prolapse if you have a large family. After the menopause, the reduced levels of oestrogens may further weaken the vaginal support.
Overweight women are stretching the vaginal support (pelvic floor) as well as their backs and joints. Patients with chronic cough (e.g. smokers), or others with constipation may similarly weaken their pelvic floor.
I have a prolapsed womb. Should it be treated?
If a prolapsed womb is causing problems for you treatment is advisable. In deed, the only reason to treat a prolapse is to alleviate symptoms.
Many women have lax vaginal walls but are not aware of any problems: they may, for instance, be told that they have a
prolapsed womb when they are examined at a well woman clinic. If there are no symptoms there is probably no reason to recommend surgery. For reassurance, a further examination at six monthly or yearly intervals may be sensible.
How can my prolapsed womb be treated?
The treatment of choice has been surgery to repair your pelvic floor. In some circumstances, where other illness preclude this, or if it is your preference, an internal support pessary, usually a ring, may be fitted by your gynaecologist. For hygienic reasons these rings should be replaced at three or four monthly intervals.
The use of pessaries to treat prolapsed womb is becoming increasingly popular.
A ring pessary can be introduced into the vagina to support some prolapsed womb and reduce symptoms.
If the vaginal outlet is enlarged, the ring may slip out. Shelf pessaries have been useful for many patients with prolapsed womb when the ring is not suitable. To evaluate a simplified protocol for pessary management women with symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse who opted for pessaries were enrolled in a prospective simplified protocol for pessary management. After the initial pessary fitting, they were seen at 2 weeks for re-examination and thereafter at 3- to 6-month intervals. One hundred ten women (mean age 65 years) were enrolled, and 81 (74%) of them were fitted successfully with a pessary. Life-table analysis showed that 66% of those who used a pessary for more than 1 month were still users after 12 months and 53% were still users after 36 months. The severity of pelvic prolapse did not predict the likelihood of pessary failure except in cases of complete procidentia. Patients complaining of stress incontinence were less likely to have a successful pessary fitting and more likely to opt for surgery. Current hormone use and substantial perineal support do not predict greater likelihood of pessary fitting success. No serious complications from using the pessary were observed in the study sample. It was concluded that stringent guidelines calling for frequent pelvic examinations during pessary use can be relaxed safely. Pessaries can be offered as a safe long-term option for the management of pelvic prolapse.9701 There is some evidence that pessaries prevent progression of prolapsed womb and that they may reverse it.0201
- Do pessaries prevent the progression of pelvic organ prolapse?(2002-01)
- A simplified protocol for pessary management.(1997-01)
What happens during a pelvic floor repair?
This depends on what parts have prolapsed and the degree of womb descent. If there is a cystocoele or rectocoele the vaginal skin is dissected off the underlying bladder or rectum, and the excess skin is removed. Two layers of stitches are introduced to restore the vagina into its correct position.
Should there be a major degree of womb prolapse, it may be necessary to remove the womb vaginally – vaginal hysterectomy (hysterectomy). If there is a lesser degree of womb prolapse just the neck of the womb (cervix) may be taken away and the ligaments previously attached to the neck of the womb are then stitched into the lower part of the womb to keep it in place. This is called a Manchester repair or Fothergill procedure.
What can I expect after a pelvic floor repair?
You will probably need to be in hospital for a week. On return from the operating theatre you will have a fine tube (drip) in one of your arm veins with fluid running through. Most surgeons will have introduced a bandage in the vagina (pack) and a catheter into the bladder. Usually the drip and pack come out the day after surgery and the catheter is removed three to five nights after the operation. As soon as your bladder is functioning without difficulty and you are feeling ready you will be able to go home.
It is important to avoid stretching the repair particularly in the first weeks after surgery. The stitches dissolve during the first three weeks and the body will gradually lay down strong scar tissue over a few months.
It is usual to have a consultation with your gynaecologist about six weeks after the operation. After that assessment, you should be able to resume most activities, including sexual intercourse. It is advisable to avoid heavy lifting for a few more weeks and even then care should be taken.
What are the risks of a pelvic floor repair operation?
The general risks of surgery are discussed in surgery risks. The risks of hysterectomy (hysterectomy) are discussed in Q 24.21. During pelvic floor surgery your gynaecologist will be tailoring the vagina so that the symptoms related to the laxity will be resolved whilst not making the vagina too tight. On occasion the vagina may still feel too loose or too tight.
How successful are pelvic floor repair operations?
The majority of operations are successful. Failure is more likely to occur if you are overweight, if you are a smoker or if constipation is a chronic problem. These problems should be corrected, if possible, before surgery. In postmenopausal women who have not had HRT the tissues may be weak. There is often merit in treating the vagina with local oestrogen (Q 28.2) before surgery. Again, care to allow the repair to heal in the weeks after surgery must be emphasised.
When there is prolapsed womb causing discomfort, surgery is likely to provide symptomatic relief. If there is prolapsed womb and stress incontinence, surgery may resolve both problems. When urgency is the major bladder problem, it may not respond to surgery if the cause is detrusor instability. Urodynamic studies may be considered before operating (Q 29.22). Occasionally a second operation may be required if the prolapsed womb recurs. Success rates from a second operation are lower.
Related Medical Abstracts
- Posterior colporrhaphy: Its effects on bowel and sexual function (1997)
What should be done if I have a prolapsed womb and plan a pregnancy?
Clearly there is no reason to refrain from pelvic floor exercises. The question of surgery is more difficult to answer. The benefits of surgery for prolapsed womb or stress incontinence may well be lost after another vaginal delivery. If the pregnancy is to be fairly soon, a support vaginal ring pessary may relieve some prolapsed womb symptoms. If surgery has been performed, the obstetrician may offer Caesarean section delivery next time, particularly if stress incontinence has been successfully treated.
Support groups
Members of a support group, provide each other with various types of help and information for a particular shared difficulty.
The support may take the form of providing relevant information,
- relating personal experiences,
- listening to others' experiences,
- providing sympathetic understanding and
- establishing social networks.
A support group may also provide ancillary support, such as serving as a voice for the public or engaging in advocacy.
Support groups maintain interpersonal contact among their members in a variety of ways.
Support groups also maintain contact through printed information rich newsletters, telephone chains, internet forums, and mailing lists.
Support groups offer companionship and information for people coping with diseases or disabilities. Support groups may not be appropriate for everyone, and some find that a support group actually adds to their stress rather than relieving it.
Evaluation of the quality of Web sites is discussed in (internet information). You may find that several general women's health sites may help you (internet information). The following are more specialised relevant Web sites:-
This page was reviewed on 24th April 2008
Please click on the required question.
- 1 What is a vaginal prolapse?
- 2 What are the symptoms associated with vaginal prolapse?
- 3 I have developed a vaginal prolapse. Why has this happened?
- 4 I have a vaginal prolapse. Should it be treated?
- 5 How can my vaginal prolapse be treated?
- 6 What happens during a pelvic floor repair operation?
- 7 What can I expect after a repair operation?
- 8 What are the risks of a repair operation?
- 9 How successful are repair operations?
- 10 What should be done if I have a bladder problem or vaginal prolapse and plan to have another pregnancy?
- 11 Are there any alternatives to surgery for vaginal prolapse?
- 12 Where can I obtain more information?
- 13 Support Groups.
- Cystocele
- Rectocele
This is the personal website of David A Viniker MD FRCOG, retired Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist – Specialist Interests – Reproductive Medicine including Infertility, PCOS, PMS, Menopause and HRT.
I do hope that you find the answers to your women's health questions in the patient information and medical advice provided.


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Born From Above by Original Innocence
Album Description
The first presentation of "Original Innocence," a new religious rock opera by Dave Nuss and Eric Sanders, will be performed on Friday, March 25, 2011 at 8 PM and 10 PM at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn (232 3rd Street at 3rd Ave.), staged by acclaimed theatre and opera director Pat Diamond.
"Original Innocence" is a rock opera conceived by Dave Nuss and Eric Sanders. A traveling troupe of performers from a new religious sect dramatically depict their theology in a tent-meeting style 'passion play' about the creation of the world. While their tale includes familiar characters from the Biblical narrative — Adam, Eva, Lucifer, and Satan — their myth explores more 'Eastern' spiritual concepts of liberation and enlightenment, redefining humanity not as corrupted by but born from 'original sin.' The narrative tells of the pre-historical mythology of our world, offering a tale of Adam and Eva's 'first love' in which their 'sin' ultimately leads to our 'salvation': the beginning of our human existence and ability to love.
» VIEW ALL"Born From Above" Fans
Track Info
Born From Above by Original Innocence is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.


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Tux Template is a simple style with many choices can be used for any project, for its style and functionality make it a comprehensive model for the project, with the benefits that are optimized for viewing on iPhone and iPad, scaly sensitive size of the screen you are viewing.
Tux has many options is very complete with a code clean, neat and easy to understand to make the necessary changes in the template.
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Gregory Alan "Greg" Maddux (born April 14, 1966) is a former Major League Baseball pitcher. He was the first pitcher in major league history to win the Cy Young Award for four consecutive years (1992-1995), a feat matched only by Randy Johnson (1999-2002). During those four consecutive seasons, Maddux had a 75-29 record with a 1.98 ERA, while allowing less than one runner per inning.
Maddux is the only pitcher in MLB history to win at least 15 games for 17 straight seasons. In addition, he was awarded a record eighteen Gold Gloves. A superb control pitcher, Maddux won more games during the 1990s than any other pitcher, and is 8th on the all-time career wins list, with 355. Since the start of the post-1920 live-ball era, only Warren Spahn (363) recorded more career wins than Maddux. He currently works in the Cubs' front office.
Maddux was born in San Angelo, Texas, but spent much of his childhood in Madrid, Spain, where the United States Air Force had stationed his father. His father exposed him to baseball at a rather young age, and kindled his passion for the sport. Upon his return to Las Vegas, Nevada, Maddux and his brother Mike trained under the supervision of Rusty Medar, a former scout from the majors. Medar preached the value of movement and location above velocity, and advised throwing softer when in a jam instead of harder; Maddux would later say, "I believed it. I don't know why. I just did." Though Medar died before Maddux graduated from Valley High School in Las Vegas, he instilled a firm foundation that would anchor Maddux's future career. Maddux currently lives in the same community.


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Stockton has many opportunities for sports spectators and participants. Spectators can enjoy professional sports at the Stockton Event Center. Two major sports teams call these downtown waterfront venues home: Stockton Heat (Ice Hockey - affiliated with the Calgary Flames) at the Stockton Arena, and Stockton Ports Baseball, a single-A minor league team, at the Stockton Ballpark at Banner Island.
For more information, please visit the team web sites listed under External Links below.
This City of Stockton web page last reviewed on --- 5/6/2015


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The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, included 118 healthy adults who were divided into four groups: three groups received equal calorie snackseither hazelnuts, milk chocolate, or potato chipsto eat daily for 12 weeks, while the fourth group, as the control group, received no snacks.
The type of satisfaction the researchers were trying to measure is called sensory-specific satiety, which is unrelated to fullness, but rather has to do with the feeling that a desire for some pleasurable sensation has been fulfilled. To measure this, participants answered questions designed to evaluate their liking, desire, and sense of satisfaction before and after tasting a variety of snack foods at sessions at the beginning and end of the trial. The three test groups also answered similar questions before and after snacking on their assigned foods daily during the trial.
People in all of the snack groups reported liking their assigned snack foods less at the end of the study. Sensory-specific satiety after eating the assigned snack foods, but not other snack foods, diminished in the three test groups and not in the control group.
People in the chocolate group experienced the greatest drop in liking and sensory-specific satiety for their snack food, and people in the hazelnut group experienced the least change.
The desire to eat the snack food did not diminish in any of the snack groups, even though liking and satisfaction declined. In fact, when given the chance to eat their snack food freely, people in all groups ate more after the 12-week trial than they did before.
Collectively, these results showed that repeated consumption of a food for 12 weeks led to monotony, in which the liking of the eaten food declined significantly whereas the liking for the uneaten foods remained unchanged, the studys authors said. This effect was more pronounced in the chocolate group, followed by the potato chip and hazelnut groups.
Scientists are still learning about the ways that liking, desire, and satisfaction associated with specific foods can affect our food choices and our tendency to overeat. Information from this and other studies may lead to a better understanding of weight gain and obesity.
In the meantime, the evidence suggests that we can make choices that increase the chance that well feel satisfied and not overeat:
(Am J Clin Nutr 2012;95:103847)


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- This event has passed.
Indoor Basic Archery
November 26, 2016 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
An event every week that begins at 10:00am on Saturday, repeating until December 31, 2016
Have you ever wanted to release your inner archer? Maybe you're just looking for a place to hone your skills, no matter the weather. Our indoor archery classes are a great place to start! All equipment is provided; ages 9 and up. Class is held inside Nature Center, NOT at the Archery Range. Call Nature Center to register.
Parking fee: $5
Event Phone: 770-389-7801


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The Packers wanted to see how linebacker Clay Matthews managed with a club on his right hand in Thursday's practice before making a decision about whether or not he'd play against the Eagles this Sunday and it seems that he managed just fine.
Matthews has been listed as probable by the Packers, which puts him on track to play for the first time since October 6. Matthews broke his thumb in that game and had surgery that has kept him out of the last four games.
Mike Vandermause of the Green Bay Press-Gazette reports that coach Mike McCarthy said that the team would closely monitor Matthews' snaps, especially because the no-huddle attack employed by the Eagles makes it difficult to sub on the fly if they feel Matthews needs to come out of the game.
The Packers remain hopeful that they can also get Nick Perry back at linebacker this week, but he's listed as questionable with the foot injury that's forced him out in recent weeks. McCarthy said the way he feels on Saturday will be a big factor in whether or not he's able to be part of a defense that Green Bay will need to carry some extra weight with Aaron Rodgers out of the lineup.


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Story highlights
- Four African-American girls killed in 1963 church bombing receive posthumous honor
- President awards Congressional Gold Medals to each of four girls, ages 11 and 14
- "We just want to express incredible thanks," Obama tells families
- Three former Ku Klux Klan members were convicted of murder in the bombings
President Barack Obama on Friday awarded posthumous Congressional Gold Medals to four African-American girls killed in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that became a key and tragic moment of the civil rights movement.
Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11, were killed during Sunday services on September 15, 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
At least 14 others were injured.
Three former Ku Klux Klan members were convicted of murder.
Obama signed legislation at a White House ceremony granting the posthumous honor and acknowledged the families who pressed for the recognition.
"To the families who are here today, those who lost daughters and sisters, we just want to express incredible thanks not only for the strength you showed in suffering but also in your persistence," Obama said.
President John F. Kennedy hoped in the aftermath of the bombing that it would spur action against racial hatred.
"If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state -- if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence -- then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost," he said.