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Saturday December 14, 2019; 11:06 pm EST
The earth's pulse is quickening
Despite our recent snowy, cold spell, signs of spring are everywhere as the earth awakens from its winter hibernation. Long ago, the Celts of pre-Christian western Europe called this time of year the quickening. To them, all objects of Earth — not just creatures, but trees, stones and the ground itself — were alive, all sharing the same sap of life. Now, deep within the still-bare trees, the sap of life flows, birds build new nests; shoots of the earliest spring flowers pierce the frozen soil. All around us, the earth's pulse is picking up its pace.
These last weeks before the vernal equinox bring some of the greatest seasonal changes. Perhaps most noticeable is the growing length of daylight. Since solstice, December 21, we have gained more than an hour of sunlight in both the morning and at day's end. Now, as the earth reaches an apex in its elliptical orbit around the sun, the days grow longer all the faster, adding another 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning and nearly 15 minutes in the afternoon between now and equinox March 21.
Overhead, too, the changing constellations foretell the coming of spring. The familiar shape of Leo the lion crouches over the eastern horizon, its blazing heart, Regulus, piercing the darkness. Following the great lion is Virgo, the goddess of crops and harvest, holding in her hand an ear of wheat in the form of the brilliant star Spica.
Behind those two zodiacal constellations is Boötes, the herdsman of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. In Greek legend, Boötes is Arcas, son of the nymph Callisto and Zeus and the first to tie a team of oxen to plow, revolutionizing farming and ushering in the era of agriculture that led to the rise of civilization. Each year, Boötes returns to our evening skies to usher in the spring planting season.
All five planets grace our darkened skies this week, with Jupiter appearing at sunset followed by Mars and Saturn later in the evening. Venus rises in the east around 4am — 5am with Sunday's implementation of Daylight Saving Time. And Mercury glimmers low in the east-southeast during dawn, far to the lower left of Venus.
Thursday, March 6, the moon nears the constellation Taurus and its first-magnitude star Aldebaran, which is to the upper left of the moon.The Pleiades star cluster is to the upper right of the moon, while the bull's V-shaped face, the Hyades, is farther to the upper left of the moon. Friday night the moon is just two degrees above Aldebaran, which is roughly the width of a finger held at arm's length.
Sunday and Monday nights, the waxing gibbous moon joins bright Jupiter. Farther below the moon is the first-magnitude star Procyon of Canis Minor, the Little Dog.
Daylight Saving Time begins at 2am Sunday morning, when we spring forward an hour. While we'll lose an hour's sleep in the morning, it will provide a reprieve for night-time sky-watching.
The International Space Station races across our predawn skies. Tuesday it appears above the south-southwest horizon at 6:43am and arcs to the east-southeast horizon before setting at 6:46am. Thursday, March 13, it appears in the southwest at 6:40am and sets six minutes later in the northeast. It's brighter than any star and moves faster than a jet.


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The education of Martin Armstrong, according to Martin Armstrong, commenced in 1964, when he was fourteen. He got a weekend job working for a bullion dealer, in Pennsauken, New Jersey, who initiated him into the idiosyncrasies of the trade in coins and gold. The next year, he bought several bags of rare Canadian pennies, which turned out to be even rarer than he thought. Within a year, they shot up in value: a roll of fifty was worth a thousand American dollars. Since he had roughly a thousand rolls, he became, for a brief spell, a teen-age millionaire. Expecting, as people do, that the pennies' price would keep rising, he held on to them, but the high price precipitated the discovery of a greater supply, their value plunged, and he was once again a regular South Jersey kid working weekends in a coin shop.
Armstrong's father, a lawyer and polymath whose grandfather had lost a fortune in the 1929 crash, disapproved of speculation, and he persuaded his son to put his diminished fortune in a fashionable but conservative investment vehicle called a mutual fund. Not long afterward, mutual funds, along with the broader stock market, abruptly crashed.
Armstrong began to observe that many things worked like this—that occasionally a contagion, of indeterminate origin, passed through the system, hitting one asset class after another. One summer, his father took him to Europe, and the web of foreign currencies gave him a tactile sense of interconnectivity and the oscillations that might come of it. The following year, Armstrong's high-school history teacher showed his class the 1937 film "The Toast of New York," about the Black Friday panic of 1869 and the gold speculator and con man Jim Fisk, with a young Cary Grant as Fisk's accomplice. At one point in the film, Fisk quotes gold at a hundred and sixty-two dollars and fifty cents an ounce. Armstrong, aware that the price, in 1966, was just thirty-five dollars, assumed that the line was Hollywood nonsense. Prices could not possibly have fallen so far over the span of a century. He went to the library, however, and found, on microfilm, a contemporaneous reference in the Times to a gold price of a hundred and sixty-two dollars. It further demolished his youthful assumption that assets gradually appreciated over time—that markets were linear.
One day, in a newspaper, he came across a list of financial panics that occurred between 1683 and 1907. On a lark, he divided the span (two hundred and twenty-four years) by the number of panics (twenty-six) and found that, on average, there had been a panic every 8.6 years. As he read more, he began to suspect that 8.6 was a highly significant number. He discerned a recurrence of major turning points in the economy and in world affairs that followed a distinct and unwavering 8.6-year rhythm. Six cycles of 8.6 years added up to a long-wave cycle of 51.6 years, which separated such phenomena as Black Friday and the commodity panic of 1920, and the Second and Third Punic Wars.
Armstrong was, for the most part, self-taught. His father had him reading Aristotle at the age of nine, which, along with movies like "Cleopatra," inspired him to delve deeply into ancient history: the arcana of Mesopotamian commodities, the decline of the Roman denarius. After high school, Armstrong attended the RCA Institutes, now called the Technical Career Institutes, and he audited a few courses at Princeton, but he never earned a college degree. School bored him.
Still, he adopted the habit of a learned man. In the early seventies, he became a trader and dealer in gold, and began compiling forecasts about commodities and currencies, which he sent out, via Telex, to clients around the world. Over time, the forecasting became his business. Much of it was rooted in cycles research. He travelled to London to the British Museum Newspaper Library and put together historical data on prices and exchange rates, down to the day. He constructed what he called an Economic Confidence Model, which he relied on to predict an upturn in the price of commodities in the early days of 1977. It worked, and he was amazed.
He opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987, crash. "Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level," he wrote later, in an essay called "Understanding the Real Economy." "It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor halfway point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years." Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets. It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? "Suddenly I saw it in my mind's eye," he wrote. "There was a Geometry of Time itself."
Armstrong didn't tell anyone about pi. He kept it a secret for twelve years, and he continued to sell his services as a consultant at up to ten thousand dollars an hour. (The Wall Street Journal wrote, "People who think talk is cheap haven't talked to Martin A. Armstrong.") He had clients and offices overseas, and cultivated connections with central bankers, and with Margaret Thatcher. It was more sensible to suggest that his models, among them one called a Panic Cycle Model, which spotted big reversal days, were rooted in certain fundamentals and complex computer calculations, rather than in a simple mystical number.
Pi suggested some future turning points, which Armstrong watched carefully as they approached. Among them was December, 1989, which marked the Nikkei's peak before it crashed. This call earned him the magazine Equity's award as the top North American economist, and a big following in Japan, where the idea of cycles, a tenet of Eastern belief, did not seem so far-fetched. He presided over conferences in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and began investing billions of dollars on behalf of Japanese clients. He boasted that the Japanese called him Mr. Yen. Another big pi date was July 20, 1998, which turned out to mark the high point in the S. & P. just before a Russian default broke the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management and nearly wrecked the financial system. Armstrong by now was running a couple of hedge funds, and the Magnum Hedge Fund Reporter named him Fund Manager of the Year.
Not long afterward, he claims, the C.I.A. telephoned his firm, eager to get a closer look at his model. Agents had been watching him and were curious about how he had managed to call the collapse of the ruble. They asked if he would come to Washington, he said, and build his model for them. He declined. Finally, in 1999, he published a report—his last at Princeton Economics—explaining the part that pi had played in his calculations.
The model wasn't perfect. It failed, among other things, to foresee its developer's demise. In September, 1999, Armstrong was charged with defrauding Japanese investors of nearly a billion dollars. It was a strange and convoluted case, and his view of it, unsurprisingly, does not square with the government's. The upshot, though, is that he has now spent more than nine years in jail—a pi cycle and then some.
He no longer talks to central bankers, or has access to his computer models—and, apparently, no one else does, either. ("The methodology has to remain a secret until I am free at last," he wrote recently.) But the cycles spin on.
"Here's the thing that gets me—what makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up," a former employee of Armstrong's, who now manages a hedge fund, half-whispered to me over the phone not long ago. "So December '89 is the high of the Nikkei, which he called. Go back 8.6 years. May 10, 1981." He ticked off some milestones—Mitterrand, Volcker—and then went back another 8.6, and then another. "There's a high-to-high-to-high rhythm here." He said that he had counted forward from July 20, 1998, to the next major date: "February 23, 2007. I thought, This could be important."
February 23, 2007, quietly came and went, and the Armstrong skeptics sneered. But it turned out that that day had seen some of the tightest credit spreads ever (that is, the easiest credit); home prices, meanwhile, had begun a sharp decline. It was the peak of the easy-money bubble—the edge of the precipice, the lip of the recession. That this became clear only in retrospect says as much about the perils of prediction as it does about a propensity to see, as the past recedes, patterns and narratives that flatter our particular angle on the world.
Still: "Something turned and you could feel it," the hedge-fund manager said. "But you couldn't find much of anything about it in the papers."
There are two modes of financial-market analysis. The first is fundamental analysis—you evaluate, say, a company or a security, and draw conclusions about its prospects, and assign it the value and the price you think suit it best. Pants, Inc., looks good because it has great earnings and cash on hand, or because it has a charismatic C.E.O. in good health, or because Europeans love buying pants and the euro is strong. This is what most civilians think that market professionals do; it's what the pros talk about in the papers and on TV.
The other is technical analysis. It ignores all this noise; it disregards earnings, and exchange rates, and debt to equity. In its strictest form, it doesn't even care what product a company sells. Technicians don't believe that a stock has any intrinsic value. They focus instead on the market itself—on the action, the trading behavior of a security or an index. They study the charts for patterns of past performance that hint at future results. There are hundreds of templates, ranging from the basic ("head and shoulders," a peak flanked by two smaller peaks) to the runic (Bollinger bands, an elastic method of determining a trading range) and the silly (the Alligator. From a trading Web site: "When the Jaw, the Teeth and the Lips are closed or intertwined, it means the Alligator is going to sleep or is asleep already. As it sleeps, it gets hungrier and hungrier—the longer it will sleep, the hungrier it will wake up." When the Alligator eats, you should, too, or something). There are falling wedges, flags and pennants, scallops and saucers. One of the original technicians was Charles Dow, a co-founder of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. Adherents later elaborated on his views to create Dow Theory, which categorizes trends based on a variety of time periods. These days, many professional investors and traders rely at least a little bit on the technicals. Some hardly look at the fundamentals at all.
Cycle theory is a kind of Gnostic offshoot of technical analysis. The notion that things, generally, happen in cycles goes back thousands of years—Joseph's seven-year fat-lean cycle—but in the West the formal inquiry into economic cyclicality took hold in the mid-nineteenth century. The British economist William Stanley Jevons correlated economic cycles to the sun, proposing that fluctuations in sunspot activity might affect crop outputs. Around the same time, a Frenchman named Clément Juglar identified an economic cycle of seven to eleven years. In the nineteen-twenties, Nikolai Kondratiev, a Soviet economist, concluded that capitalism was inclined to half-century cycles of boom and bust and boom again, rather than, as Marx believed, a single inexorable march toward collapse. Wrong answer. Stalin had him imprisoned and executed. It was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, he of "creative destruction," who called these cycles Kondratiev waves and popularized them in the West. In the Kondratiev waves and other commonly cited cycles—the Kitchin (three to five years), the Kuznets (fifteen to twenty-five years)—the time span is flexible. They are suggestions, not rules. Hardcore cyclists, on the other hand, often seek and find instances of periodicity as rigid and fixed as the laws of physics, which is why hardcore cyclists are often dismissed as mystics or freaks.
It is easy to scoff at cycle theory. Its whiff of predestination chafes the scientific mind. Our culture's fundamental belief in causation and consequence, to say nothing of free will, does not easily accept the suggestion of helplessness, or of some kind of as yet unidentified exogenous force. God may decide the outcome of football games and debilitating illnesses, but he does not intervene in matters of investing and finance.
And yet patterns exist, and we slowly discover them. Seasons, migrations, moons: the template is there. Consciously or unconsciously, most people accept certain components of cycle theory. We seek and see patterns in things. It is the way our minds work, presumably for the purpose of survival.
Few would deny that there is a business cycle, a fluctuation in the economic fortunes of a nation, or even a political cycle, an ebb and flow between mass conservative and liberal sentiment that reverberates in the markets. And it's common for us to think that some things are overdue—a change in the weather, a Masters championship, a comeuppance, or a lucky break. But most of us balk at the notion that any of these may be governed by some kind of deeper universal math.
Armstrong, in his essay "Understanding the Real Economy," said, "I have spent a lot of time trying to comprehend how such a model can even work on a specific level to a precise day, years and decades in advance. The only explanation is the subject matter is so intensely complex that there is indeed a hidden order within what would appear to be random chaos."
Bill Erman, a market-timing analyst in Nashville, and the proponent of a system called Ermanometry, told me, "We believe the market is perfect to the second." (He concedes that we don't have the data to prove it.) He noted that termites build their perfect mounds, and bees their perfect hives, and spiders their perfect webs, all around the world, without, presumably, being conscious of why or what they are doing. "Mankind is unconsciously constructing a geometrically perfect market," Erman said. We can't help building our own beehives in the air. The charts are our termite mounds.
I was told, time and again, that some of the biggest investors out there view even the wackier cycle theories with respect, and factor cycles into their allocations. This may say less about the viability of cycle theory than it does about the chimerical folly of market divination—which may be why such investors are loath to discuss it. "You don't talk to people about it, because they don't understand it," one trader told me. "It's not something you can share openly with colleagues. It's not accepted."
"I've studied cycles for years," Dimitri Chalvatsiotis, a London-based trader at a global hedge fund, told me. "It's part of the methodology. It's an overlay that defines the way I look at the world. These cycles govern the planet. That's where you start. Some people believe news drives markets. I don't."
"The way I think about cycles in general is that they provide a great approach to offsetting human biases," Laeeth Isharc, a hedge-fund manager in London and previously a trader at the giant investment firms D. E. Shaw and Citadel, said. "We tend to think that the future will be like the last few years, only more so. Cycles are a good way of reminding oneself that there is mean reversion."
The big hitters who do keep an eye on cycles seem to do so out of a mixture of hard-won agnosticism and the consideration that if enough other people are paying attention to this stuff then so should they. They keep a wary eye on an array of cycles and waves, which achieve actionable significance when they echo or converge on each other, especially in concert with something more tangible, such as information or news.
"The idea that there may be celestial influences on the spontaneous desire to invest or not is an old one, but it's too embarrassing to explore in modern economics," another trader said. "These topics are not fit for polite conversations in most circles."
One day, I mentioned cycles to an acquaintance who used to work for Goldman Sachs, and he excitedly took down from his stacks a book he had purloined years ago from the library of the J. Aron research department (J. Aron being a commodities-trading firm that Goldman bought in 1981, and that supplied Goldman with its current C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein). It was "Cycles: Selected Writings," an anthology, published in 1970, of the work of Edward R. Dewey, who was the chief economic analyst in the Department of Commerce in the early thirties, under Herbert Hoover. To investigate the causes of the Great Depression, Dewey had talked to one economist after another; each of them seemed to have a different explanation, which suggested to him that no one had a clue. But he lingered over the work of one economist: Chapin Hoskins, who was interested in the "behavioristic" approach. Hoskins, Dewey wrote, discovered "that there was a tendency for certain business behaviors to repeat at fairly regular intervals. The reasons for these regularities were unknown, but the patterns were too regular to be easily the result of chance. They, therefore, had forecasting value." When F.D.R. took over, Dewey left the Commerce Department and soon found that these cycles were everywhere—"in animal abundance, sunspot numbers, disease, weather, and many other things."
The purloined Dewey book, nearly eight hundred pages long, contains one delightful data set after another: "The 16 2/3-Year Cycle in Arizona Tree Rings, AD 900-1939," "The 4-Year Cycle in the Consumption of Cheese, 1867-1953." Dewey produced sine waves depicting fluctuations in the price of malleable iron pipe fittings and in postal receipts in Milwaukee. But it's the ones that overlap that widen the eyes. For example: Starting in 1735, the Hudson's Bay Company kept track of the number of lynx pelts collected in Canada each year. The number rose and fell, precipitously, in a distinct cycle of 9.6 years. As it happened, this cycle was synchronous not only with the variable abundance of other indigenous fauna, such as snowshoe rabbits and Atlantic salmon, but also with the cycles of seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as heart-disease rates in New England and chinch-bug populations in Illinois. Dewey reasoned that all this had to be either a coincidence or the work, as he put it, of "Something Out There." He favored the latter.
"Something Out There" was the title of a Profile of Dewey, by John Brooks, that ran in this magazine in 1962, almost five lynx-pelt cycles ago. (This data set, meagre as it is, suggests that another story featuring Dewey will appear in these pages in 2056.) In the forties, Dewey formed the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, which endeavored, in a pre-computer era, to collect and process as much cycle data as possible. To Dewey's frustration, most of the foundation's members were more interested in figuring out how to use cycles to outsmart the stock market, but he was mindful that their self-interest funded his efforts to determine what the Something might be. His tentative hypothesis was that it was astronomical—"not the sun, directly, but something beyond the earth—either inside or outside our solar system." Much as his work seemed to summon intimations of the divine, it was squarely, and solely, statistical; if "Cycles" was a sacred text, it was Levitical, banal. As Dewey stated in 1958, "I believe that the future is completely knowable—but not, of course, by human beings." He told Brooks, "People try to make a religion of cycle study . . . either a religion or a crackpot fad. Actually, it's neither one. If I'm right, it's an emerging science."
If it was emerging, it did so haltingly, and then retreated into its hole. They say that, like the length of women's dresses and the release of new horror films, tolerance of cycle theory increases in down markets. It blossomed in the thirties, enjoyed a revival in the seventies, and is having a quiet renaissance now. (The interval between each revival is about four pi cycles.) We tend to ascribe rising markets and an expanding economy, as long as they last, to our own ingenuity—to progress, experience, rationality, a generational refinement in the ability of economists and central bankers to manage our affairs. Bull markets are seen to be incarnations of human perfectibility. (Home prices would rise forever, because we had invented a new kind of debt, one that didn't ever have to be repaid.) When things go to pieces, we shirk responsibility and seek other explanations. Fatalism creeps in. It can't be merely that we are, as ever, greedy, short-sighted creatures, prone to self-delusion, incapable of learning from the past. There must be something, or Something, else at work, beyond our understanding or control.
The array of cyclomaniacs (an old Dewey term), pattern seekers, and market timers are like rival Christian sects, prone to doctrinal disputes, petty jealousies, and exclusive claims on divine revelation. They tend to think that their patented system is best, and trumpet a dozen peerless predictions. They cover a wide spectrum, from the omnivorous technicians to the market astrologists, who look to the stars. Arch Crawford, a well-known forecaster, has made a series of startlingly accurate predictions over the years, on the basis of planetary and astrological alignments. He says that he was up a hundred and six per cent last year. The summer of 2010 will be "devastating," he told me. "We'll have the worst stuff in the sky in the two hundred years we've checked." (Indeed, at the end of July Mars and Saturn will be conjunct and in opposition to Uranus, and all three will be squared to Pluto.) Crawford quoted a line that he attributed to J. P. Morgan—"Millionaires don't have astrologers, but billionaires do"—and told me that at the Morgan Library you can still see, on the ceiling of Morgan's old private library, a depiction of the zodiac; the entrance is under Aries, Morgan's sign. The astrologers may be the fringe's fringe, but their predictive powers seem no better or worse than those of the secular fundamentalists who scoff at them. They have a following.
Then, there's Fibonacci. It is widely believed, but variably disputed, that such natural phenomena as the spirals in nautilus shells, hurricanes, and galaxies; the branching of tree limbs, leaf veins, skeletal and circulatory systems; and the distribution of flower petals and brain waves conform to something called the golden ratio, or phi—represented by the irrational number 1.618. In a golden spiral, for example, each successive outer curve might be 1.618 times as far away from the one inside it as the last. In the early thirteenth century, as fans of "The Da Vinci Code" and the band Tool know, Leonardo Fibonacci, a Pisan mathematician, unearthed a series of numbers in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc. It has many elegant properties. One is that every fifth number, and only every fifth number, is divisible by five. Another is that the ratio between each number and the one before it converges on phi.
Interest in phi, and the Fibonacci sequence, as a financial cipher, goes back many decades. (Dewey wrote a report on Fibonacci, "Non-Symmetrical Cycles," in Cycles, the foundation's magazine, in 1966.) The idea is that, say, the S. & P. 500, in an up market, will consist of a five-legged ascent, with three progressively rising peaks and two dips in between, followed by a three-legged descent, interrupted by one lower peak: 5 up, 3 down—you, too, can make billions.
Tom DeMark, a market-timing analyst, has worked with the hedge-fund titans Steven Cohen, John Burbank, and Paul Tudor Jones. He has, over forty years, devised a Fibonacci-based system to monitor and time the exhaustion of trends—that is, to figure out at exactly what point a market, or anything, really (it worked, he says, for the population of geese on Horicon Marsh, in Wisconsin), will reverse directions.
DeMark's initiation into the fellowship of Fibonacci was typically circuitous. The discipline attracts a certain kind. (After enduring a video called "History's Hidden Engine," which featured one pale fellow after another talking about fractals, my wife turned to me and said, "There aren't a lot of women, are there.") In 1971, DeMark, then a gofer at a money-management firm in Milwaukee, was happily perusing an article published by Bank Credit Analyst that mentioned research on wave theory and Fibonacci conducted, in the nineteen-forties, by an accountant named Ralph Nelson Elliott. (Elliott was the author of a book called "Nature's Law—The Secret of the Universe.") Fascinated, DeMark called Bank Credit Analyst's offices. The article's author, DeMark said, suggested that he call a travelling tax judge in Canada named Jack Frost, who in turn suggested that DeMark call two doctors in Florida, the first of whom agreed to come up to Wisconsin to present some data on Fibonacci and the markets to DeMark and his bosses on a Friday night. DeMark went to the Milwaukee airport to fetch him, and, after wandering around the terminal for a while, came across a man with a long white beard, who pointed at DeMark and said, "You know how I know you're Tom DeMark? You're walking in Fibonacci angles." (The other doctor had told DeMark on the phone, "I've been married five times, I have eight children, and I take a vacation every thirteen days.") At the meeting, the doctor took out a folder with graphs depicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to the inception of its precursor, in 1884.
"It embarrassed me," DeMark recalled recently. "I thought I was going to lose my job." He did not. The Fibonacci obsession spooked him, but it infected him all the same, because he began to see the numbers everywhere, too. Over the next decade, DeMark spent thousands of hours poring over old stock charts with a magnifying glass and a calculator, identifying patterns.
Ralph Nelson Elliott had also captured the imagination of a young technical analyst at Merrill Lynch named Robert Prechter. (Merrill in the seventies was a hotbed of technical research.) Prechter found Elliott's original works in the New York Public Library and republished them, turning the Elliott Wave Principle, long forgotten, into a fashionable conveyance for Fibonacci on Wall Street. Elliott maintained that the arrangements of the market's zigs and zags were repetitious, predictable, and fractal, like the crenellations of ferns and seacoasts—self-similar at any scale, whether they depict three hours of trading or three decades. The hard part is figuring out where you are in which wave. Stare at a chart long enough and it will start to look like whatever you want it to, except easy money. (Prechter doesn't manage money; he sells his analysis to people who do. What many of these guys have in common is an underwhelming net worth and a commensurate declaration that they aren't in it just for the money.) Is it possible, considering the mind's capacity for converting complexity into some kind of manageable order, that we may be imposing these patterns on randomness?
"I think it's a shallow question," Prechter said. "Think of the stars, the zodiac. The ancients didn't say, There's a bear. They needed the stars for the purposes of navigation and so came up with names for recognizable arrangements of them."
In 1987, a documentary called "Trader," about the then little-known fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, appeared on PBS. After it aired, Jones reportedly had it taken out of circulation, buying up any copies that he came across. Over the summer, sections of it turned up on YouTube, and you could see Jones and his baby-faced partner, Peter Borish, applying Elliott wave theory to their comparison of the movements of late 1986 with those of 1928. It helped them call the 1987 crash, and Jones became a billionaire.
Jones won't talk about it now, but Borish, the chief executive these days of a firm called the Computer Trading Corporation, doesn't disavow any of it. We met one weekday morning in Central Park and talked long enough to observe joggers and dog walkers on their way both in and out of the Park, at plottable intervals; the amplitude suggested high unemployment. "If your goal is to do research and try to extract money from the markets, you should look at all ideas," he told me. "Whatever works." He went on, "A lot of these guys are freaks. And I don't mean that in a bad way. They spend their entire lives searching for the Rosetta stone so at the end of their lives maybe they can make money."
The Fibonacci work is not, in conception, anyway, pure numerology. The theory is that, if the markets are distillations of herd psychology, mass confidence, or what Prechter calls "the social mood," and if the markets fluctuate in discernible patterns, then the underlying moods must follow predictable patterns as well. Most economists believe that we react, whether rationally or irrationally, to incidents and information. In Prechter's formulation, which he has called "Socionomics," the mood comes first, and it shifts according to the wave principle. A universal math nudges us into wars, bubbles, and a passion for ABBA, and phi may be the key to it.
What's not the key, Prechter believes, is pi. "It's important to geometry but not to living systems," he declared. Prechter and Martin Armstrong were both on the board of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Dewey's old think tank, where Armstrong served for a number of years as chairman. Prechter is mystified by Armstrong's writings. If Prechter is Presbyterian, Armstrong is Pentecostal; he certainly speaks in tongues. Yet there are glossolalians who profess to understand.
"Armstrong's a massive talent, a misunderstood talent," Chalvatsiotis said.
Isharc said, "I don't know Marty, but I have no doubt that he's rescued from darkness some very real phenomena that may have been evident a hundred years ago. He's clearly a genius, although not without flaws. He overstates his case a bit and understandably has a chip on his shoulder. After his pi date in February, 2007, his stuff is everywhere now. Lots of people talk about it."
Armstrong's model is designed to apply to the most stretched markets, with the most excess. It tries to track the path of money sloshing around the world. "Each market has its own cycle, but when capital conglomerates around one it will take on the characteristics of the 8.6," he said. "The 8.6 is the predominant global model." This is his explanation for the way his pi highs and lows move, like the Olympics, from, say, Tokyo to Moscow and then New York.
Pi dictated that Armstrong was an intermittent investor, rather than one who, like most quantitative managers, trades constantly in order to exploit tiny anomalies. The hedge-fund manager who used to work for Armstrong remembers him coming out of his office in September, 1998, two months after he'd got short in front of the ruble crisis. Monica Lewinsky was on TV. "My oscillators just turned," Armstrong announced. He booked his profits, pulled out of the market, and went to his beach house, on the Jersey Shore. (Pi has its limits. "After my case began, it came out that the number of the street address I had grown up in was 314," Armstrong wrote. "I still regard that one as a coincidence.")
Armstrong, no question, is an imperfect conveyance for the science of cycles, and not just because he's a federal convict. His writing is what you might call nonlinear, unless the line in question is one that tracks the stream of his consciousness. In the nineties, Armstrong wrote a heavily researched but quixotically told two-volume account of the Great Depression called "The Greatest Bull Market in History." That it was self-published, and apparently unedited (the book's first sentence is missing a word), has not deterred its fans from declaring it a seminal work. He says that he has a third volume at home. He is also working on a new book, to be called, naturally, "The Geometry of Time."
In 2007, inspired by letters he was getting in prison and, he says now, foreseeing disaster, Armstrong began producing research reports again, under the banner of Armstrong Economics. He types them in the prison library on a Brother typewriter (white-out is forbidden), and draws the graphs by hand, or else Xeroxes and pastes in graphics from other sources. Disdainful of domestic news media, he relies mainly on the Financial Times.
In his essays and letters, he compares himself to Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Galileo, and Neo, from "The Matrix." (Armstrong has also said that the 1998 Darren Aronofsky film "Pi," in which corporate agents hound a man who discovers that pi may be the secret to the stock market, may have been based on him, even though the film came out before he revealed his pi model. Aronofsky says that he's never heard of Armstrong. "We must have been reading the same source material," he told me.) Armstrong tends to wander seamlessly from a discussion of history and economics to the arcana of his own legal case, the common theme being the oppressiveness of government. The reports are not the same, but they often seem to say the same things, in a different order—a prison-epistle version of the old Twainism that history rhymes. They may be fractal.
Many of the reports feature crude drawings on the front, sometimes of Armstrong himself, standing in a suit and tie before a field of ones and zeros embedded with equations derived from pi. He sends photocopies out to a small number of friends, who then post them on the Internet or pass them around. He is coy about naming these friends, because he worries that they would be harassed if anyone found out who they are.
Amid the global economic convulsion of the past year, his reports have achieved a wave of samizdat popularity on financial blogs like Zero Hedge, which is produced by a former hedge-fund analyst who has adopted the alias Tyler Durden, after the hero of "Fight Club." These blogs, and their readers, tend toward a cynical, even conspirational, view of the financial markets, the presumption being that pretty much everyone in power, in Washington and on Wall Street, is either incompetent or corrupt, and that our dissembling, bubble-abetting ways will lead to further doom. Armstrong's recent musings on a purported Goldman Sachs conspiracy found a sympathetic audience. The discussion threads can veer from political name-calling to knowing, sophisticated commentary, and, in their assessments of the work and sanity of Marty Armstrong, can range far and wide. Some call him a genius, others a crank and a con man.
Getting to the bottom of Martin Armstrong's criminal case is about as difficult as proving, once and for all, that the Fibonacci sequence is God. It can be especially hard to achieve certainty in a complex white-collar case. Prosecutors can be financially unsophisticated, and defendants may lie and obfuscate. Imagine a masked man accused of robbing a bank who maintains, all along, that he was merely cashing a check.
In early September, 1999, the F.B.I. raided the offices of Princeton Economics and carted off dozens of boxes of documents. Armstrong was arrested and posted bail. Later that month, the U.S. Attorney handed down a criminal indictment, alleging that Armstrong had been running a Ponzi scheme, and the S.E.C. and the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission filed civil suits charging that Armstrong had defrauded investors of nearly a billion dollars.
According to the government, Armstrong sold interest-bearing notes to Japanese investors and, by mutual agreement, deposited the proceeds in managed accounts that his firm kept at Republic Bank, in New York. He then used the incoming money to cover payments due to other, earlier investors, and also moved money out of their accounts and into accounts that he used to make speculative trades, which generated spectacular losses. To conceal this, he and Republic issued phony account statements to the Japanese investors.
The Japanese note holders were, for the most part, executives at Japanese corporations involved in such industries as electronics, machine tools, chemicals, and yogurt. Their companies' investment portfolios were way below water after the 1989 collapse of the Nikkei, yet they weren't required, by Japanese law, to acknowledge this fact. (Americans jeered at this scenario; now they do their best to emulate it.) Armstrong issued them notes—which he called "the rescue product"—promising to pay them the original, above-water value of their investments, five or ten years hence, and in exchange he took over their wounded portfolios. He liquidated the portfolios, converted the yen into dollars, and put the money to work in the United States.
Armstrong's refutation of the allegations is relentless. He continues to maintain that it didn't matter what the account statements said, because, really, he didn't have to keep accounts for the investors. He also says that he paid investors on schedule, that prosecutors didn't understand the fluctuating nature of the dollar-yen exchange, and that it was Republic, and not him, who fiddled with the accounts.
He says a lot more. In dozens of court filings over the years, he has accused his captors of a conspiracy. He contends that Republic, with the coöperation of the government, scapegoated him for its own shady practices and to derail his investigation into manipulations of the commodities markets. This conspiracy, in Armstrong's telling, widened to include the soon-to-be-killed financier Edmond Safra and the Russian Mob. Armstrong believes that he is in prison because he knows too much about the inner workings of "the Club," as he calls the major banks and their enablers in government; he maintains that he is a political prisoner, not unlike Kondratiev.
In Armstrong's civil trial, the judge, Richard Owen, demanded that, for potential restitution, he surrender about fifteen million dollars in gold bars and coins that it was believed he had, along with a number of antiquities, including a gold crown and a first-century bust of Julius Caesar. He produced some of what he was asked for, but not much, claiming that he no longer owned the rest of it. The Judge ruled that Armstrong was in contempt, and sent him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which is where, speaking of cycles, Bernie Madoff was held earlier this year, before his sentencing.
Armstrong wound up spending seven years there, without his criminal case going to trial—the longest federal contempt incarceration in the nation's history. Each year, Judge Owen upheld the contempt order. Armstrong went through a series of court-appointed lawyers and, at times, represented himself. The S.E.C.'s Armstrong case file was lost when the September 11th terrorist attack obliterated its offices, in 7 World Trade Center. In 2001, Republic admitted that a number of its employees had committed fraud, and the Japanese investors were paid roughly six hundred million dollars. Nobody from Republic went to jail. Still, Armstrong's contempt ruling held.
Prison was not kind to him. At one point, a fellow-inmate beat him in his cell. (Armstrong suspects that it may have been an assassination attempt.) In 2006, he was put into solitary confinement, for allegedly damaging a vent. Soon afterward, he decided, in an agreement with the prosecutors, to plea to just one count in the indictment, conspiracy to commit fraud. The twenty-three other charges were dismissed. He did so in part, he says, because he believed that he might get credit for time served. The criminal-court judge, however, gave him the maximum sentence—five years.
Armstrong was still stuck in the M.C.C., for civil contempt. A U.S. Court of Appeals rejected yet another appeal, although a concurring opinion, written by Sonia Sotomayor, noted that "the district court's finding that Armstrong is motivated solely by greed is not enough to justify disregard for due process." Judge Owen was eventually replaced and the contempt order abandoned. In April, 2007, Armstrong was moved to a low-security federal prison camp at Fort Dix, in southern New Jersey, to begin serving his sentence. On arriving, he was told by other inmates that he looked like a ghost.
The prison camp, situated on the Fort Dix military base, is a white windowless box that brings to mind a giant shipping container. It isn't a country club, but it ain't Alcatraz, either. The prisoners can walk around outside. Armstrong sleeps in a vast dormitory hall that houses two hundred men in bunk beds. Seniority affords him a lower bunk. He works as a clerk, making about eighty dollars a month. He spends several hours a day in the library. He gets visits from his mother and a grownup son and daughter, who live nearby. (His wife left him when their daughter was six months old.) He even has a license to drive a truck around the base.
I met with Armstrong at Fort Dix in late September, in a tidy visiting room decorated with a mural of a tropical beach and a poster about swine flu. Armstrong was squatter than I'd expected, and bald, with a starchy paunch, pocked skin, and a slight underbite. And yet his eyes had an unnerving gleam that contained something like mirth, as though he'd surreptitiously shaken up a can of Pepsi and handed it to me to open. I bought him a cup of French Vanilla coffee out of the vending machine. We sat down across from each other at a red plastic table. A fly settled on the shoulder of his prison greens.
His Jersey intonations were Philly-tinged. "Prison is a microcosm of Adam Smith," he said. "You get a division of labor. There's a guy who knows how to sew, a guy who makes the beds, a guy who does the wash, a guy who's a barber." The coinage is mackerel, or macks; the inmates buy plastic pouches of it from the commissary. The barber, the bedmaker, the tailor: they usually get paid in fish. Armstrong's line was financial and legal advice, and he gave it out free.
In a newsletter I'd got from him in the mail the day before, he'd written, "Pi is not the actual source of cyclical activity. It is merely a proof that TIME is subject to geometry." Did he think there was Something Out There?
He sighed. "At its core, a cycle is the mechanism by which energy is transmitted," he explained. "Think of standing in the water at the beach, as a wave washes in. You can feel the wave, but the water isn't moving. The energy passes through the water. Society is the same way." Sometimes there's a rogue wave—a big event, a major turn, a depression. It was his belief that the rogues were not random but, rather, entirely, if theoretically, preordained, like the concentric reverberations of a stone, or millions of stones, hitting the surface of a pond.
Fair enough. But what creates the energy? What dictates the geometry? "There are going to be people who believe and those who don't," Armstrong said. "If it wasn't that way, you wouldn't have a cycle."
He said that he was working on a paper about Switzerland: the Habsburgs, William Tell, Hitler, secrecy, gold. The upshot was that capital, like water, goes where it encounters the least resistance. "Given a certain set of circumstances, people do the same thing over and over again," he said. "There aren't many options." Soon a guard indicated that our time was up—Armstrong was due back in the dorm for the four-o'clock count.
The next day, Armstrong called from Fort Dix to clarify his basic philosophy: it was the big bang that created the energy waves, setting in motion the cycles that govern the universe. As for pi, he had a theory, which he'd never shared with anyone, that its ubiquity had something to do with dark matter. ♦

subset: commoncrawl


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Sam Blake comes to the XPRIZE Foundation with over six years of experience in research and analysis, which has included stints in the media industry, U.S. government, and as a social entrepreneur. His ability to learn quickly and communicate effectively help him in his work on XPRIZE's Impact team, where he helps to design XPRIZEs and Impact Maps.
Prior to joining XPRIZE full-time, Sam was a member of the 2017 Alzheimer's XPRIZE Visioneering team that was selected as the winner at the October 2017 Visioneering summit. He has been an analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a supervisor for an award-winning team at Major League Baseball Advanced Media, and a freelance reporter for NPR-affiliate station KCRW. Sam has also co-founded two startups, one of which was a national finalist in the 2017 Hult Prize Competition co-sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative.
He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin, and a Bachelor's in History from the University of Michigan.


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IFMCSTAT(8) NetBSD System Manager's Manual IFMCSTAT(8) NAME ifmcstat -- dump multicast group management statistics per interface SYNOPSIS ifmcstat DESCRIPTION The ifmcstat command dumps multicast group information in the kernel. There are no command-line options. NetBSD 9.0 October 14, 2000 NetBSD 9.0
You can also request any man page by name and (optionally) by section:


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Almost four months after Facebook's disastrous IPO, Zuckerberg finally broke his silence at TechCrunch Disrupt. Speaking to Arrington, Zuckerberg described the stock performance as 'disappointing', and shed his characteristic indifference towards Wall Street in an attempt to win back the confidence of investors who have been hurt by the sliding Facebook stock. However, the most interesting revelation came when Arrington enquired about mobile web, which is often highlighted by analysts as Facebook's biggest challenge.
When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native… because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.
Last month, Facebook doubled its iOS app's speed and responsiveness by ditching HTML5 in favor of native. The significant overhaul of Facebook's iPhone app left Android users, who have long been treated as second class citizens by Facebook, disappointed once again. However, Zuckerberg has promised that a similar native Android app is on the way.
Zuckerberg also dismissed Facebook phone as "the wrong strategy", but hinted that search might be something that Facebook will eventually get around to doing. Facebook's deep integration into the fabric of the World Wide Web through the Open Graph enables it to collect treasure troves of metrics that can lend it a decisive advantage in deciphering the semantic web. Zuckerberg's belief that search is a natural progression for Facebook is precisely the reason why Google has been desperately trying to get into the social media arena.


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A Christian Parent's Worst Nightmare by Linda Berg
"Mom, I have something to tell you." I was in the kitchen doing dishes after dinner. Our sophomore daughter was home for college for the weekend and her dad, brother and I, had just enjoyed our first meal together in months.
She had pulled up the counter stool, was sitting on it, visiting with me as I stood at the sink washing dishes. Something in her tone indicated this was going to be serious. An alarm went off in my head.
She had pulled up the counter stool, was sitting on it, visiting with me as I stood at the sink washing dishes. Something in her tone indicated this was going to be serious. An alarm went off in my head.
I quickly grabbed a towel to dry my hands and said, "Let's move over to the sofa so we can talk." The casual carefree way she chatted with us during dinner had disappeared in a matter of minutes.
We sat down and she began, "Mom, umm... I don't know how to say this. I'm sorry. I know this will upset you and dad, but, umm...I don't believe in God anymore."
Incredulously I looked at her and said, "What? Did I hear you right? You said you don't believe in God?"
The tears began to roll down her cheeks. I continued, my panic unrestrained. "How can this be? You are at a Christian College?" Honestly, I'm not sure I heard her initial reply. This was all too unbelievable.
Since her birth, she had never missed Sunday school, Sunday worship, Wednesday Bible study. She had made a decision for Christ at 14. She cared about others, especially the lost. All through High School she had shared Christ with her friends. She was once crushed when a friend did not accept her beliefs about Christianity for himself. Her grandfather was a preacher. Us, her parents, were missionaries in Mexico. All of these thoughts swirled in my head for some time before I was even aware…. she was sitting there, turmoil all over her face, trying to explain it to me.
It's not an uncommon story. The statistics are grim. Three out of four children raised in the church, when they go away to college, will walk away from church and their faith.
There are a myriad of reasons:
· The church is often guilty of entertaining our children and youth into Christianity.
· They don't see the same Christianity they are taught lived out in their parent's lives.
· We have not taught them truth with its scientific and historical evidence.
· They are sent out into the world and universities where religious belief among intellectual educators is Atheism.I Timothy 4:16, "Watch your doctrine and your life closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers."
As parents and church leaders, we have not prepared our youth to defend their doctrine or to have the will to do so by helping them understand their identity in Christ.
Youth leader request a speaker: http://www.crossexamined.org/
Parents pass on this info: http://www.god-evidence-truth.com/
Our daughter? She is faithfully loving and serving God after three years of turmoil in her search for truth.
Every month FaithWriters – The Home For Christian Writers sponsors a blog contest that promotes a ministry that helps in the natural and shares the gospel. This contest includes cash prizes for the winners or Paid Writing Assignments.
Using the power of Christian Book Marketing to share the faith around the world.


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Game 22, UMBC at New Hampshire Game Notes
America East Notes
BALTIMORE – UMBC women's basketball hits the road for a pair of contests over the weekend, starting with a matchup at New Hampshire on Thursday, Feb. 6. Tip-off is set for 7 p.m. inside Lundholm Gymnasium, with all the live action available free of charge on the America East digital network.
SCOUTING THE RETRIEVERS (2-19, 1-8 AEC): UMBC fell for the eighth consecutive game on Saturday, dropping a 61-48 decision to Maine. Despite freshman forward Sara Tarbert notching her second 20-point effort in the last four games, the Retrievers' defense could not stop the Black Bears from matching a program-record with 14 three-pointers in the contest. Tarbert hit 9-of-15 attempts from the field for a game-high 22 points to go with seven rebounds, while classmate Taylor McCarley chipped in nine points and four rebounds.
Over the last four games, Tarbert has hit 57.4 percent of her shots and averaged 17.5 points and 6.0 rebounds. The rookie leads all freshmen in scoring at 13.2 points per game and rebounding, pulling down 6.0 boards a game, both ranking fifth in the America East. McCarley has upped her scoring average since league play began, contributing 10.0 points per game and added 1.9 steals per contest. The freshman duo has combined for five America East Rookie of the Week honors on the season.
Sophomore center Bridget O'Donnell leads the league in blocks (1.9 bpg) and is chipping in 6.2 points per game. The 6-6 center is tied for sixth on UMBC's single-season block list (40) and entered the top-15 all-time in program history in blocked shots (51) in just her second season with the Retrievers.
SCOUTING THE WILDCATS (13-8, 7-1 AEC): New Hampshire has won seven of eight conference games and has won three straight games following Sunday's 72-53 victory against Binghamton. Sophomore guard Elizabeth Belanger has willed the Wildcats to victory during the three-game span, averaging 18 points and seven rebounds en route to America East Player of the Week honors. Freshman guard Kristen Anderson chipped in 14 points off the bench, as four Wildcats finished with double-digit points.
UNH ranks second in the league in scoring defense, allowing 58.3 points per game and holding opponents to a 36.3 shooting percentage from the field. The Wildcats are one of just three teams in the league that have a positive scoring margin on the year (+1.4). Senior guard Kelsey Hogan (12.1 ppg) and red-shirt sophomore forward Corinne Coia (11.9 ppg) each rank in the top-11 in the conference in scoring. Hogan has upped her scoring average to 14.5 points per game during league play, ranking fifth in the conference, while Coia is making 52.8 percent of her shots during AEC games (third in the conference).
New Hampshire was picked to finish fourth in the AEC preseason poll after upsetting No. 4 Stony Brook in the America East Quarterfinals a year ago. The Wildcats fell to eventual-champion Albany in the semifinals, but their quarterfinal victory marked its first America East Tournament win since 2005. The Wildcats return eight letterwinners and three starters from a squad that finished 12-18 overall and 6-10 in America East play.
2014 FIRST MEETING: UMBC welcomed a record crowd to the RAC Arena on Jan. 15, but the Retrievers were unable to take advantage of the home court, falling, 60-47, to New Hampshire. UMBC took a season-high 60 shots and turned the ball over a season-low six times, but the Retrievers hit just 26.7 percent of its shots in the opening half and 33.3 percent for the game, while UNH shot 46.9 percent. Sophomore Bridget O'Donnell scored all of her team-high 12 points in the second half and chipped in a game-high four blocks.
INSIDE THE SERIES: UMBC holds a 12-10 advantage in the all-time series, despite dropping three of its last five meetings versus New Hampshire. The Retrievers hold a 6-5 advantage in home contests against the Wildcats and are an even 5-5 on UNH's home court.
ON THE HORIZON FOR THE RETRIEVERS: UMBC continues its road swing on Saturday, Jan. 8 when it travels to UMass Lowell for a 1 p.m. tip-off.


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Will Rogers Range Riders was formed in the late 1930's as the panhandle region experienced economic growth and expansion while recovering from the Great Depression. In Amarillo, a group of business men and professionals came together to form a new club. Being predominately from rural backgrounds these men shared an interest in horses and western heritage. Chartered in 1941, the club was named after the late humorist, author and philosopher to become "Will Rogers Range Riders." In 1946 the club was incorporated as a non- profit undertaking. The mission of Will Rogers Range Riders is to foster good will in the Texas panhandle region through benevolent, charitable and educational activities.
On countless occasions through the years groups and individuals in need have found the Range Riders willing to help with man power, facilities, equipment and funds. Some of the beneficiaries of Range Rider assistance include; the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, Camp Alphie, Agape, area 4-H clubs, West Texas A&M University, local law enforcement departments, area schools and most recently the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.


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Andy Nelson has been appointed as the new CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Nelson currently serves as Government CIO and CIO at the Ministry of Justice, and will succeed Philip Langsdale, who died in December last year.
The Cabinet Office is currently unwilling to reveal what will happen to the Government CIO position, amidst reports that Nelson might not be replaced at all.
"I am delighted to welcome Andy Nelson to the Department as we make our welfare reforms a reality, including the imminent start of Universal Credit, the Personal Independence Payment and the Benefit Cap," said Permanent Secretary for Work and Pensions Robert Devereux.
"Mr Nelson's wealth of experience prior to him joining the Civil Service, together with his recent role in the Ministry of Justice and as Government CIO place him in a unique position to help us as we enter a critical period in the transformation of the welfare system."
Nelson joined the Ministry of Justice in September 2009 and has since been responsible for the development of the G-Cloud framework under his role as Government CIO. Prior to joining the Civil Service he held a number of IT and business change posts at RSA Insurance, GE Capital and Asda.
"I am delighted to be taking on the role of DWP CIO and look forward to working with the Secretary of State, Robert Devereux and the team at DWP in delivering the transformation of the welfare system," said Nelson.


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The racism is difficult to measure, but a careful survey completed last month by Stanford University, with The Associated Press and Yahoo, suggested that Mr. Obama's support would be about six percentage points higher if he were white. That's significant but surmountable.
Most of the lost votes aren't those of dyed-in-the-wool racists. Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.
Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.
Loads of interesting stuff (and horrifying statistics) there about the power of unconscious prejudice. Definitely worth a read for those who think that if you don't actively hate people of color, your behavior can't be called racist.


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2019 Forbes travel guide 'release the four seasons hotel group five-star hotels title for four years
- 2019-02-25
Chinese tourists consumption patterns change obviously has four characteristics


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BROOKLYN — First Selectmen candidates Republican Austin Tanner and Democrat Rick Ives squared off in a sparsely attended debate Thursday.
While Tanner touted his accomplishments as first selectmen, Ives focused on accomplishing things in a different way.
"I think we've done a lot in fours years," Tanner said. "And I think there's a lot more we can do."
"I want to change the way town government works in Brooklyn," Ives said. "I want town employees and town boards and commissions that are part of a team — a team that will change the way we communicate with each other and the way we communicate with you."
Tanner has been first selectmen for four years. He served as a selectman for six years before that and has also been on the Planning and Zoning Commission. He has lived in Brooklyn since 1981.
"I've had experience running three different farm businesses," Tanner said. "I've got a lot of organizational experience with different boards and running organizations."
Ives moved to town in 1984 and soon became a member of the Board of Education. He is chairman of the Board of Finance.
"I've managed two to 30 people," Ives said of his experience in the insurance industry. "I've hired, fired and trained. I understand how you manage, and I know how you treat people."
Tanner's running mate is incumbent selectman Bob Kelleher. Ives is running with Joe Voccio.
Keller and Voccio did not debate, but they did each make a brief statement. Candidates for the Board of Finance and Board of Education also introduced themselves. There is no contested race for the Board of Education.
Tanner and Ives had agreed to a format that featured questions from the audience. Question topics ranged from finances and planning to the individual styles of the candidates.
One area where they differed was on the need for a full-time finance director.
Tanner said he will pursue a part-time finance director because the school district is resistant to sharing the position. Ives said he believes that door should not be closed and he will begin meeting with the superintendent soon after taking office, if elected.


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EVERETT — More than two years after Monroe corrections officer Jayme Biendl was found dead inside the chapel at the Washington State Reformatory, the trial of the inmate accused of strangling her is expected to get underway today.
Officials say it has cost Snohomish County more than $365,000 to get to this point.
Lawyers on Tuesday wrapped up jury selection. They spent a month choosing a dozen people to decide Byron Scherf's fate. The panel also includes three alternates.
The jury is expected to hear opening statements this morning.
The trial likely will take weeks. Dozens of witnesses are scheduled to testify, including corrections officers, homicide detectives and prison inmates. If Scherf is convicted of aggravated murder, jurors then will be asked to decide if he should be sentenced to death. Prosecutors will have to prove that there are insufficient reasons to spare his life.
The defense made several pretrial attempts to strike down the death penalty as a possible punishment. The arguments attacked Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Roe's decision to seek Scherf's execution without reviewing any information prepared by the defense about why the inmate could merit leniency.
Roe announced plans to seek the death penalty the day before Scherf was arraigned. At the time, Roe said he had studied volumes of information about the convicted rapist, readily available because Scherf, 54, has been in prison most of his adult life.
On Jan. 29, 2011, Scherf was serving a life sentence under the state's persistent offender law. He was convicted of his third strike in 1997 for the rape and assault of a Spokane real estate agent two years earlier. His other strikes also were violent crimes against women, including a 16-year-old.
Scherf confessed to killing firing of three corrections officers. Others were demoted and disciplined. Scherf, a prolific letter writer, had sent prison officials a note suggesting that any meaningful investigation would uncover why there was no officer posted between the tower and chapel during the time he admitted to slipping back to kill Biendl.
Within days of Biendl's death, Scherf also wrote detectives and prosecutors, saying he wanted to plead guilty. He urged authorities to seek the death penalty. He wrote that Biendl's family deserved swift justice. After being advised of his rights, he agreed to videotaped interviews with investigators. He spoke against the advice of his then-attorney.
Scherf later wrote The Daily Herald that his motivation to now fight prosecution and punishment was over being denied jail privileges he believed sheriff's detectives promised him.
As of December, Snohomish County had billed the state Department of Corrections $365,000 to cover costs associated with the Scherf case. The amount includes services incurred by various government offices, including the county sheriff, prosecutor, corrections, medical examiner, superior court clerk and court administration. Included in the total is what the defense has requested for an investigator and experts to assist defending Scherf at trial as well as to explore why a jury should show leniency if he's convicted.
The amount does not include fees for Scherf's lawyers. The Office of Public Defense has a separate contract with the state Department of Corrections to reimburse the hours billed by Karen Halverson and Jon Scott.
So far, the state has reimbursed the county just under $140,000.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; email@example.com.


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Let $u(x, y)$ and $v(x, y)$ be differentiable real functions with continuous partial derivatives in a neighbourhood of $z_0$. Prove that $f = u+ iv$ is complex differentiable at $z_0$ if and only if $$\displaystyle\lim_{r\to 0}\frac{1}{\pi r^2}\oint_{C(z_0,r)}f(z)dz=0$$
Where $C(z_0, r)$ is the circle of radius r centered at $z_0$. I think this maybe related to Cauchy formula but the condition seems to point toward Cauchy Riemann equations.


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No events scheduled at this time.
3340 N Halsted St Chicago, IL | 773 472 4405 | Contact Us
Coming Up
Comedy Open Mic Night
9pm. Comedy show run by Terence Hartnett. email@example.com $3 PBR Drafts and $5 Mixed Well Drinks
Tiki Tuesday
$5 Cousino Crafted Tiki Cocktails
I Saw You
I Saw You is an original comedy show, from Bruised Orange Theater Company, that interprets Chicago area personal ads. These ads are uncensored and always real. I Saw You is a humourous look at dating, realationships, sex, technology and Chicago itself. 8 pm. $5
The Chicago Reader gives this show a 5-Star Rating!!!
Robles Behind the Bar & Tarot Card Readings w/ Calley Nelson
$4 Draft and Bottled Beer. Comprehensive Celtic Spreads ($10 for 15 minutes, $20 for 30 minutes and $40 for one hour). Three card spreads are always pay what you feel. 7-10pm. firstname.lastname@example.com
Free Juke Box
5-9 pm. Free Play!!!
$5 Malort, Fireball & Ginger Bourbon Shots
Sunday Funday on Halsted
Open @ 3 pm. $7 Jalapeno Bloody Mary's. $10 Party Pack includes 4 Jello Shots, 2 Vodka Infused Gummy Bear Cups and 1 Pudding Shot!!!


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The Computerized Scanning and Imaging Facility (CSI) website (at http://www.whoi.edu/csi) is hosted by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). By creating a new account for the CSI website, you agree to the following terms and conditions. If you do not agree to these terms and conditions, do not create a new account.
CSI is the sole owner of any information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in our Privacy Policy statement. CSI collects information from our users only during the submission process.


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The Raiders addressed a glaring need at tackle Tuesday with the addition of free agent Tony Hills.
Hills has played in 10 games over five seasons with one start for Pittsburgh, Denver and Indianapolis. He was released by the Buffalo Bills Sunday.
A former fourth-round draft pick (No., 130 overall) in the 2008 draft, Hills played in 42 games at Texas, with 24 starts at left tackle.
With Jared Veldheer out indefinitely following triceps surgery, Menelik Watson unavailable with a calf injury and undrafted free agent John Wetzel out with a knee injury, the only true tackles on the roster are starters Alex Barron and Khalif Barnes and reserve Willie Smith.
The Raiders have also been using Tony Bergstrom at tackle of late.
To make room on the roster, place kicker Eddy Carmona was waived/injured. Once he clears waivers, Carmona can be added to the Raiders injured reserve list and rehab until healthy.


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Interview with Sensei David Gomez..
Patrick Parker is a Christian, husband, father, martial arts teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: email@example.com or phone 601.248.7282 木蓮
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Sunday, May 16, 2010
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Here is a good example of one phenomenon that I talked about at the seminar this past weekend. In these film clips, the point of view...
Someone asked me a while back to post what I consider to be pros and cons of aikido and judo – sort of what I like and dislike about aiki...
People often ask me at what age should they start their kids in martial arts. I will occasionally take kids as young as 3-4 as long as the p...
Another thing that Chad asked for the other day in his comment to my post about teaching kids judo was some description of our favorite ...
So many readers have enjoyed my aikido vs. judo article from last year that I figured I'd try my hand at doing a comparison between ...


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Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary
Flinders Ranges, South Australia
Sillers Lookout - Arkaroola's famous 4WD 'Ridgetop Tour'
Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary:
South Australia's First Legally Protected Wilderness Sanctuary
Located 600km north of Adelaide and 130km east of Leigh Creek, and in the ruggedly spectacular northern Flinders Ranges, this 610sq km multi award-winning Wilderness Sanctuary, operated by the Sprigg family, contains some of Australia's most spectacular mountain views and offers numerous Advanced Ecotourism accredited guided tours.
Arkaroola features rugged mountains, towering granite peaks, magnificent gorges and mysterious waterholes, the home to over 160 species of birds and the shy and endangered Yellow-footed Rock-wallaby.
Arkaroola is a mecca for bushwalkers and four wheel drivers. The spectacular Advanced Ecotourism accredited rugged 4WD Ridgetop Tour is world famous; journey to the depths of ancient seabeds and across razor-back ridges and peaks of the Flinders Ranges most rugged mountains to the magnificent climax at Sillers Lookout.
Being the first Flinders Ranges tourist organisation to achieve the coveted Advanced Ecotourism accreditation, and with now a total of eleven such products available for you to enjoy, Arkaroola is truly unique. Our third successive S.A. Tourism Award win for Ecotourism (November 2007), saw Arkaroola awarded the coveted Hall of Fame, and is undoubtedly South Australia's premier ecotourism destination.
Where Are We?
These two maps indicate Arkaroola's location in the northern Flinders Ranges, 600 kilometres north of Adelaide in South Australia:
Most visitors tend to travel to Arkaroola via Leigh Creek and Copley, a trip that is about 130km in distance. The road from Copley is unsealed but generally in excellent condition. The average driving time from Leigh Creek via Nepabunna is approximately 2 hours - certainly not the 5 hours as often quoted by Google Earth!
Arkaroola's Facilities:
Even though we are quite remote from the nearest town, you won't miss much in the way of comfort when staying at Arkaroola. Our facilities include:
Native Pine Restaurant
- Formal Dining in the Native Pine licensed restaurant
- Relax in the Pick & Shovel lounge bar
- BBQ facilities in Caravan Park
- Bush Camp fires are permitted (except during Total Fire Ban periods)
- Basic shop, fuel supplies and mechanical repairs
- LPG available for gas bottle refills; sorry, not for motor vehicles
- In-ground swimming pool, including adjacent BBQ area and licensed bar facilities
- Ningana Information Centre - our staff are ready to assist with every question you may have about the area
- A wide variety of motel-style accommodation to suit most budgets, including back-packers
- And no bothersome mobile phones! - we do have normal telephone services (including facsimile), and an Internet Cafe and a WiFi service to help you maintain contact with home.
We have a number of specials and travel packages currently available (our rates and tariffs ae also available at this location).
How do I get to Arkaroola?
- A bus service, by Genesis Tour & Charter, is available to Copley, 130 km to the east of Arkaroola, just north of Leigh Creek
- private vehicle
- 4WD and 2WD hire companies
- charter aircraft - please phone Arkaroola (08) 8648 4848 for more details
- private aircraft
- oranised coach tours - see your local travel agent for details or contact Arkaroola
- see our packages and links pages for third-party tour providers
If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to contact firstname.lastname@example.com or phone (08) 8648 4848.
Tourism Awards:
2010: Australian Hotel's Association SA (AHA | SA)
Best Tourism Initiative - Winner
2007: SA Tourism Awards:
Ecotourism - Hall of Fame (third successive win in this category)
Major Tourist Attraction - Winner
Sustainable Tourism - Winner
Festivals and Events - for Arkaroola's Star Party DownUnder - Bronze Award
From the ARK Newsletter:
Also available from the Breaking News page, you can download the latest Edition of our E-Newsletter, From the ARK, and read the latest news and information about a range of interesting facts about Arkaroola, including the contentious mining proposed on the property. (Previous editions are also available for downloading).
Geological Wonderland:
Photograph by Peter MacDonald - Coulthard's Lookout Looking South-west
The magnificence of Arkaroola has been preserved for the world, thanks to one of Australia's greatest geologists and conservationists, the late Dr. Reg Sprigg, A.O D.Sc, h.c A.N.U. & Flinders Uni.
Reg's appreciation for the region dates back to 1940 when he studied the area as a student of the great Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson.
In 1967, Reg and Griselda Sprigg purchased what had become Arkaroola sheep station, re-establishing native flora and fauna, and transforming this special place into the spectacular private wilderness sanctuary that it is today.
Reg practiced ecotourism 30 years before the word was invented; he was truly a man of vision.
Astronomer's Heaven!
For professional, amateur or beginner, our three astronomical observatories, fitted with all manner of professional telescopes and other equipment, will keep you totally enthralled as the beauty of the Southern Hemisphere night skies open up for you.
Details of our Astronomical Observatories and equipment can be seen by clicking here; or information about our Astronomy Tours can be seen here. The same page also contains a monthly Star Chart for downloading.
Come and see this geological wonderland and astronomical heaven for yourself - we promise you won't be disappointed.
Photographic Workshops:
Renown outback photographer, Peter MacDonald, is offering Photographic Workshops for those interested in improving their skills - please click here for more details.
Arkaroola Email Contacts:
- Senior Management / Administration: firstname.lastname@example.com
- Reservations: email@example.com
Mailing address: Private Bag 106, Port Augusta, SA 5700
Arkaroola Internet Site designed and maintained by Peter Whellum, Arkaroola Marketing - site hosted by Froling Enterprises


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Operation Toy Drop: 19 years of bringing cheer to children
By Spc. Tynisha Daniel
December 23, 2016
FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- Every year U.S. and international service members conduct a joint airborne operation that provides toys to children who might otherwise not have any waiting for them under their tree on Christmas morning.
Founded by Sgt. 1st Class Randy Oler in 1998, the Operation Toy Drop is also an annual training exercise that prepares Soldiers to support the military in theaters of operation around the world. Each December at Fort Bragg, U.S. and foreign paratroopers gather to conduct the charitable training and airborne operation.
In the years since the event's founding, more than 100,000 toys have been donated.
"[The operation] requires that Soldiers use their basic soldier's skills and functional abilities to remain combat ready," said Maj. Gen. Daniel Ammerman, commanding general, Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne).
The operation combines the efforts of active and Reserve support units of the Army and Air Force with those of foreign jumpmasters and civilian service organizations. It is an opportunity for U.S. Soldiers to train side-by-side with foreign partners, while also expanding their own experience and knowledge in airborne operations.
It is the largest annual combined joint training and airborne operation in the military, according to Ammerman.
"I have been a part of Operation Toy Drop since its inception with Randy [the founder]. We were friends for many years," said William B. Wellbrock a retired Master Sgt. with the Air Force.
Even after Oler's passing in 2004, Operation Toy Drop has continued, thanks to the efforts of his Family, friends and the military. The operation is now in its 19th iteration.
"There are highlights in your military career where you work with great people," Wellbrock said. "One of my highlights was meeting Randy and working with him on Operation Toy Drop."
Contrary to popular belief, jumpmasters and paratroopers don't actually drop the toys when jumping from aircraft. Instead, they turn in their donated toys and receive lottery tickets. A Soldier whose ticket number is selected is then given the opportunity to jump. Some Soldiers stand in line with their toys for nearly 12 hours before the event in the hopes of receiving a lucky ticket.
The Soldiers, civilians, and family members who are assigned to USACAPOC(A) say they take great pride in the planning that goes into executing the event.
This year Sgt. Jesse Michel, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Bragg, North Carolina was among the first Soldiers to stand in line for the lottery ticket. It was his fifth year participating.
"As a child, my family [relied on] organizations like this, and I feel that it is my responsibility to give back to the community the way they have me," he said.
"I enjoy knowing I am helping those who are less fortunate."


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The New York Times ran a piece today about the work that goes into capturing photos of Olympic swimmers from underwater. The process is not as simple or mechanical as you might expect it to be, and requires a great deal of preparation and creativity from the photographers who own the cameras.
Before any events begin, each photographer has to dive into the bottom of the pool, and set their camera up in a way that they think will capture the shot they are imagining. When the competition begins, the photographers use a remote to snap the images at the perfect moment.
The first person to use an underwater camera at the Olympics was Heinz Kluetmeier, who placed a camera in the pool at the 1992 Olympics. From the Times:
He was the first person to place a camera at the bottom of an Olympic pool, at the Barcelona Games in 1992. That year he dived the 12 feet to the bottom, only to resurface to find a guard with a submachine gun.
"He said I had to take it out," Kluetmeier said. "He thought it was a bomb."
So let's all be a little more appreciative of those magnificent photos we get every Olympics, OK? Some guy almost got shot in the face 20 years ago so that we could enjoy them.
To Get the Shot, Nerve, Luck and Scuba Gear [New York Times]


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The Temple Daily Telegram via AP/Bell County Sheriff's Dept.
Nidal Hasan, accused in the Nov. 2009 Fort Hood shootings that killed 13 people, undated.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of carrying out the November 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas, sought to plead guilty Wednesday to 13 counts of premeditated murder but the judge said he could not accept the plea, the Temple Daily Telegram reported.
Under military law, Hasan is not allowed to plead guilty because the premeditated murder charges carry death as the maximum sentence and the government is pursuing the death penalty in Hasan's case.
The Telegram, providing live updates from the courtroom, reported that military judge Col. Gregory Gross said Hasan wanted to plead guilty to the capital counts. (Gross) "explained he is prohibited from accepting such a plea," according to Telegram reporter Paul Romer.
"The motion apparently indicated Hasan wished to plead guilty to take responsibility for his actions."
"There is no right to plead guilty...The accused could still take responsibility for his actions — Judge Gross."
"Judge Gross said he would enter not guilty pleas in behalf of Hasan, if necessary."
"Hasan apparently claimed not being allowed to plead guilty violated his religious beliefs, which Gross disagreed with."
Military law would allow Hasan to plead guilty to lesser murder charges that do not carry the death penalty, the AP reported. But that scenario was unlikely because efforts to reach a plea deal failed over a year ago, it reported, citing John Galligan, a civilian attorney who represented Hasan before leaving the defense team in 2011.
It's been nearly three years since Hasan allegedly opened fire on personnel at a medical facility on the Texas Army post, leaving 13 dead and 32 wounded.
The trial for Hasan — scheduled to start on Monday — was put on hold because of another dispute in the military court. Hasan has appealed the court's orders to shave his face to comply with military law, saying his beard is a requirement of his Muslim faith, the Associated Press reported.
Related content:
AWOL soldier plotting Fort Hood attack sentenced to life
On Tuesday, Gross also denied a motion by the defense to exclude testimony by Evan Kohlman, a specialist on "homegrown terrorism," who was on the list of prosecution witnesses.
On Wednesday, for the fifth time, the judge started the hearing with a contempt charge against Hasan and fined him $1,000, for showing up unshaven.
More content from NBCNews.com:
- Drought sends Mississippi River into 'uncharted territory'
- 'Crazy': Dozens of dead birds fall from the sky in New Jersey
- Drought expected to take toll at checkout
- US government weighs using blimps at Mexico border
- Video: Wildfires spread in California foothills
- Cops: Man steals pot from police because 'it smelled so good'
Follow US News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook


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It's been pretty hot and humid in Hawaii the past week. So much so that Mother Nature has forced us to use our portable AC at night in our bedroom to get a good nights rest. As locals and visitors alike look for options to beat the Hawaii heat, it got me thinking about some of my favorite ways to cool down when the sun is out. And I'm not talking about beaches, swimming pools, or spa treatments. I'm talking about cool treats to bring the body temperature down while satisfying the sweet tooth and quenching that thirst.
Here's my suggestions for island treats to beat the summer heat:
Shave Ice
This one is pretty much a no-brainer when it's time to cool off after a long day at the beach, hiking, or working at the office. Institutions like Waiola Shave Ice, Aoki's Shave Ice, Matsumoto Shave Ice, and countless other are the perfect cure. You really can't go wrong with any flavor combination. But my personal favorite is to have shave ice with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and li hing mui syrup all over. YUM!
Ice Cream
There's a few local ice cream producers like Roselani Tropics Ice Cream (Maui), Lapperts (Kauai), and the famous Tasaka Guri Guri (Maui) that trumps the national brands any day in my opinion. Maybe it's just the proud local in me, but I'm not sure there's anything more satisfying than a bowl of Roselani's Haupia (coconut) ice cream, or Lappert's Kona Coffee ice cream, or Tasaka's Strawberry and Pineapple Guri Guri. And don't forget about mochi ice cream found at many Japanese restaurants, sushi bars, and stores like Shirokiya in Ala Moana Center. SO ONO!
Frozen Yogurt
In the past year, there's been a resurgence in the popularity of frozen yogurt. We've seen places like Yogurtland, Menchie's, Red Mango, and many more sprout up on Oahu like weeds. I'm sure there's many other on the neighbor islands. I'm not going to waste my time explaining why. All you need to do is read my friend Melissa Chang's review of "Yogurt mania in Hawaii" in Metromix to understand what the buzz is all about.
Tropical Drinks
A tropical drink may not be considered a "cool treat" to everyone, but it certainly means exactly that to me. And to many visitors as well having as I've witnessed while attending many business meetings at Hawaii resorts and jealously see vacationers lounging poolside with Mai Tais and Pina Coladas (pictured above) in hand. Hawaii has some of the best cocktails found anywhere in the world. So do yourself a favor and get out of the sun for a minute, belly up to the bar, and enjoy a refreshing tropical drink. I always do when I'm enjoying a cocktail at my favorite beach bar. BTW, I hear the Mai Tai Degeneres at The Royal Hawaiian is incredible. Can you guess who it's named after? I thought you could.
These are just a few of the ways I stay cool when things heat up in the Islands. I know there's plenty of other local treats that will do the job. What are some of your favorite ways to cool off?


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Stage II 426 Drop-top Likely One-of-One
This is not a black '63 Dodge Polara 500 convertible with a Stage II 426 Max Wedge. Likely, it's the black '63 Dodge Polara 500 convertible with a Stage II 426 Max Wedge!
Back in 1963, the Max Wedge Ramcharger V-8s weren't restricted to the B-Body Dodge's low-line 330 or mid-range 440 series—or only available in the lightest-weight two-door sedan body styles, either. If you wanted, you could get one in a Polara or Polara 500—or in a convertible.
A summer 1963 Dodge buyer in southern California ordered this car from a dealer in Glendale—just down the road from "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena's" mythical stomping grounds. Equipped with the Ramcharger option ($445), 727 TorqueFlite automatic ($211), power windows ($102), MusicMaster AM radio ($58), and whitewall tires ($48), this drop-top Dodge, whose base price started at $3,196, stickered out at just over four grand, plus shipping.
Needless to say, the owner got a lot for his four grand. The Max Wedge not only received a displacement boost for 1963 to 426 cubic inches, it also got new cylinder heads with bigger valves, better air flow characteristics, and stronger castings. That was all thanks to the work that Willem Weertman's engine-research team at Highland Park was doing—which also resulted in the 426 Hemi.
But the upgraded RB wasn't all that the Ramcharger package contained. The hood was a new-for-'63 fiberglass one with a functional scoop, and the transmission was either a Hurst-shifted Borg-Warner T-85 three-speed, or a modified 727 with its factory dash pushbutton shifter. 1963 was the first year for an optional four-speed in the B-Body—the Borg-Warner T-10—but it wasn't offered by Ma Mopar behind any engine bigger than a 383. The Ramcharger also included tubular exhaust headers with three-inch collectors flowing into two-inch dual exhausts, with racing-intended removable header caps at the headers' aft ends, as well as an 8¾-inch rear end with Sure Grip.
This car stayed in California through the '60s, before its original owner sold it to Randy Schultz in Sumner, Iowa, who used it as a good-weather driver while keeping the original mileage under 18,000. Later, it wore a set of Cragar S/S wheels with 60-series Winston bias-ply tires, and was featured in a couple enthusiast magazines in 1983 and 1984.
Fast forward to 2001, when current owner Elliott Parker entered the picture. At an all-Mopar show and swap meet in Decatur, Alabama—in search of a 440 Six Barrel induction system for his '69 Road Runner—a contact at the show led him to a farm near town. Once there, Elliott spotted the '63. Purchased from Randy Schultz over 15 years earlier as a restoration project, it sat in a barn, partially disassembled, as the farm took more and more of the owner's time.
Elliott bought it and took it home, where it resided in ready-to-restore condition while he did his research on it. He found that not only was it one of maybe 13 '63 Dodge drop-tops out of about 28 B-Body Dodge and Plymouth convertibles built with the Stage II 426 Wedge (which didn't make it into production until mid-June of that year), it was also one of four known survivors and likely the only black Polara 500. Elliott says that a lot of his research was done via phone calls to Randy Schultz. "I'm looking forward to getting to meet him one day," says Elliott. "He's told me so much about this car."
At another northern Alabama Mopar show, this time in Huntsville, Elliott asked around and got the name of The Carriage Works, who restored the 413-powered '62 Plymouth Sport Fury convertible seen in our July issue. The Carriage Works' Tim Snitger was there that day and, before long, the Polara 500 moved to his shop for a 1½-year restoration. "I wanted it to be the best and out-look anything on the road," says Elliott. "That's the way I had it restored."
Fortunately, all of the '63's original pieces were all there. No replacement, reproduction, or fabricated sheetmetal is to be seen anywhere—they're the same stampings that Hamtramck Assembly welded together nearly 50 summers ago. Same for the Stage II Max Wedge and the not-reproduced Polara 500 trim pieces.
The first time that Elliott showed it, at last year's Huntsville Mopar show, he scored Best in Show. Then, after getting a haul from The Carriage Works up to Ohio, Elliott entered it in the Mopar Nationals, where it took first place in the B-Body Original '62-'67 class.
And he just might win that trophy again this year. "They have invited me to bring it back this year," says Elliott. "I don't know whether my wife's going to let me do it, because it's kind of expensive to trailer that car all the way up there to put it in the show, but I'm hoping to do that."
The odometer shows less that 19,000 original miles, and Elliott hasn't put very many on it since the restoration was completed. As the lighter-weight, Stage II-powered '63 Dodge 330s were running consistently in the low to mid 12-scond range on the quarter-mile, this Polara 500 will likely run 13.00 in the quarter without breathing hard!
The Stage II Ramcharger was the capper on a very successful 1963 for The Dodge Boys Thanks to quality improvements that led to Ma Mopar's first five-year, 50,000-mile powertrain warranty (which Max Wedge cars didn't have), the B-Body's Elwood Engel-influenced restyling, the A-Body's makeover into the Dart and the "family-size" C-Body 880 and Custom 880 in the lineup from the get-go, Dodge had a winning sales year. And, thanks to the Stage II Max Wedge, Dodge cleaned up on the strip, too.
Fast Facts
'63 Dodge Polara 500 convertible
Owned by: Florene and Elliott Parker
Town Creek, Alabama
Mopar Power
Engine: The original Stage II 426 Ramcharger, restored by R&R Speed and Machine, Huntsville, Alabama.
Transmission: Restored original 727 TorqueFlite with dash-mounted pushbutton shifter restored by Pat Heron, Huntsville, Alabama.
Rearend: Restored original 8 3/4-inch with a 3.91-geared Sure Grip.
Sure Grip
Suspension: Restored original: (Front) Heavy-duty longitudinal torsion bars and tubular shocks with an anti-sway bar. (Rear) Heavy-duty leaf springs with tubular shocks.
Brakes: Restored original non power-assisted drum and shoe brakes all around.
Wheels and Tires: 14 x 5.5-inch steel wheels wear a set of reproduction BFGoodrich 7.35-14 whitewalls, and a set of "spinner" wheel covers that Polara 500s and Custom 880s shared back then.
High Impact
Body: Low-mileage original '63 Dodge B-Body convertible unibody restored by The Carriage Works, Huntsville, Alabama, using all its original sheetmetal.
Paint: Black acrylic enamel, sprayed on by The Carriage Works, Huntsville, Alabama.
Interior: Restored to factory-fresh condition by Richard Cunningham at The Carriage Works, Huntsville, Alabama. Auto Custom Carpets made the repro press-molded carpets that just dropped right in, as well as the Dodge-logo floor mats atop them.