text: My favourite day of the week is Saturday. On Saturday I usually get up at 9 o'clock. When I get up I usually read books, watch TV or just relaxing in my living room. I love Saturdays because on Saturday I always have a free time, to watch series, read books or workout sometimes. I also do my homework on Saturdays and study for the exams.

subset: commoncrawl


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Sky Sports takes ChyronHego's Player Tracking graphics to air
Sky Sports UK is to deliver a powerful graphics solution to enhance its live football coverage using a combination of TRACAB Player Tracking data complemented by ChyronHego's advanced virtual graphics and football analysis tools. Together, they create a winning solution that enables graphics to be tagged to any player on the pitch and follow them across the field of play.
"ChyronHego's Player Tracking graphics present many new possibilities for broadcasters such as Sky Sports," said Johan Apel, President and COO at ChyronHego. "Single players or formations of players can immediately be highlighted and identified during a live match, and the graphic then automatically follows each player as they move in 3D space. This allows for the quick and easy creation of complex analysis sequences that would typically be reserved for post-match highlight shows and would require time consuming key framing and preparation work."
This solution was both prototyped and enhanced by ChyronHego in partnership with Sky Sports on several games during the last season of the Premier League, with much of the output content making it live to air. At the start of the current Premier League season, Sky Sports and ChyronHego have continued to work together to enhance the solution even further. On the back of these successful productions with Sky Sports in the UK, Sky Germany has also begun to deploy the same solution across its domestic Bundesliga coverage to take advantage of the player tracking data being provided and to bring a new dimension to their domestic broadcast.


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Some shows there's so much buzz about specific products that the Hot Picks practically write themselves. This show, however, the standouts were more difficult to pick out from a solid field of offerings at a quiet show in Chicago. But after much consideration, and some difficult decisions about some eliminations to get the list to only ten, here's the Scrapbook Update Top Ten Hot Picks List for CHA Summer 2012:
Martha Stewart Adhesive Silk Screens by Plaid
I knew as soon as I saw (and tried) this product that it would be a hot pick! These silkscreens are an extension of Plaid's fabulous line of Martha Stewart acrylic paints and adhesive stencils – and the silkscreens really impress.
At first glance the silkscreens look just like the Martha Stewart line's regular stencils:
However, if you look really closely, you can see the difference between the traditional stencil and the silkscreen – the fine mesh in the template's openings:
The silkscreen allows for much finer detail in the stencil design, and also means that the design doesn't have to be all connected – it can have "floating" elements in it. Elements like this finely detailed feather would never be possible in a traditional stencil:
These silkscreens are so easy to use that they, in combination with Martha's applicator tool, even allowed me to create a perfect stencil impression on the first try – something that I can never do!
(And while we're at it – check out the finish on that paint too! I can't help but love that Martha Stewart pearl finish acrylic paint!)
These products appear similar to Plaid's "Simply Screen" silk screen stencils, which according to the Plaid website, are reusable 20 times. The technology for the silk screen stencils is patent pending by Plaid.
FarmHouse Paper Company
The new exhibitor section was smaller than usual at CHA Summer 2012, but the new entrants to the show were a strong group overall. Unlike some of the other CHA newbies, FarmHouse Paper was a completely new company as well as a CHA show first-timer. They made an impressive debut.
The company presented three full collections – patterned paper, embellishments and stamps – at the show.
"Market Square" is a red, blue and brown palette, full of retro trendy design elements like kraft, vintage text and graphics, and retro patterns.
"Sugar Hill" is a classic looking autumn collection that isn't too heavily themed. Paper crafters will also find it versatile for providing projects such as cards and layouts a more masculine tone.
"Fair Skies" is a loosely travel themed line that incorporates a lot of currently popular vintage design elements in it, along with a color palette of deep blue and red and cream.
FarmHouse also debuted with something fairly ambitious for a new scrapbooking start-up – an entire line of chipboard mini albums, in very heavyweight material that will be sure to get attention.
Learn more about Oklahoma-based FarmHouse at their website.
Elle's Studio
Another new exhibitor that made a big impression at CHA Summer 2012 was Elle's Studio. The company's name is familiar to many in the industry already, as they began first selling direct to consumers – and then later wholesaling their products – some time ago. But this show was their first foray into the CHA marketplace, and the company was well-received by show attendees.
Items such as these 1.25 inch Tidbits from the Sweet Life collection are especially popular with Project Life fans:
The Project Life crowd also loves Elle's 4×6 journaling tags and 3.5×2.5 inch Note Tags, like these ones (also from The Sweet Life collection, which is shipping Aug. 13th):
But Elle's Studio is not just for Project Life fans. Her designs straddle beautifully the line between the industry's popular vintage and graphic looks, and lend themselves perfectly to being used in the current trend toward layering in designs. This sample project features some of the company's signature calendar tags, in the upcoming 2013 versions that will be shipping on August 13th:
In a nod to what buyers expect to find at the CHA Summer show, Elle's Studio was offering up two holiday themed lines, one for Halloween and one for Christmas, something of a departure from previous offerings for the company.
Spooky Tales, shipping Sept. 24th, focused on browns and harvest gold for Halloween:
The color scheme for the Christmas line, which is called Be Merry and also ships Sept. 24th, is much brighter:
You can learn more by reading the full report about Scrapbook Update's visit to the Elle's Studio booth.
Jillibean Soup
If you liked the last pick, you'll probably like this one too. Jillibean Soup is also part of the emerging style in the industry that pairs brights with natural browns, for an effect that is homespun and charming. They've won fans among scrapbookers and card makers for their papers, stickers and embellishments, and their market-savvy CHA Summer 2o12 release will only continue to cement their popularity as a fast-rising powerhouse in the industry.
Perhaps the hottest of their new introductions was the addition to the Soup Staples paper line that featured chevrons on one side and small dots on the other. It was unanimously popular among show attendees I spoke with.
Jillibean's affordably priced stickers usually fly off of store shelves, and especially hot from this new round of releases will be the new Soup Labels for card labels, and the uber-trendy hexagon stickers:
Another set of Jillibean stickers that are sure to be popular is the brand new colors for their wonderful Alphabeans line:
Jillibean Soup introduced four new lines at CHA Summer 2012, but the biggest guaranteed hit I believe is the Grandma's Lima Bean Soup line. A versatile combination of amazing vintage elements in a broad color palette that ranges from pastels to brights, this collection is sure to attract die-hard vintage fans as well as fans of the country and graphic looks.
To read full coverage of Jillibean Soup's CHA releases, visit our Jillibean Soup CHA Summer 2012 report.
This company just seems to hit all the right notes with the changing trends lately. Sometimes, a change in ownership takes the heart out of a company. Instead, its time at American Crafts has seemed to re-energize the Pebbles brand. They are actually rapidly becoming one of my favorite companies.
Pebbles has displayed absolute genius lately at creating patterned papers that use trend-forward color palettes, and are well-scaled for use on layouts as well as slightly smaller projects like mini-books. The truly amazing thing is that these patterns then also scale down perfectly in 6×6 pads to use on cards – satisfying both the scrapbook and card crafting markets. While most companies these days offer both sizes in their collections, many times the collections really only "work" in one of the sizes. With Pebbles, that is not the case – their patterns almost always work well at both scales. (Pebble's upcoming "Walnut Grove" collection is featured below.)
The company has always paid attention to detail in their embellishments, but since having access to American Crafts' production resources they've really stepped it up a notch. Their embellishments are arguably unmatched in the industry for pure beauty as well as usability.
Pebbles is also trying to get its piece of the market in the pocket scrapbooking segment as well. Their new "Seen & Noted" collection contains divided 12×12 page protectors, and also books of coordinating journaling cards. The journaling card books are 4×6 sized, and some of the pages are made up of two 4×3 cards. It's an innovative way to market these sizes of elements, which mostly have been sold in 12×12 sheets or as die cut packages until now. (Simple Stories is also trying the pad format for journaling cards with their new Sn@p Studio line.)
The 4×6 cards from the journaling card pads can be used in another product from the "Seen & Noted" line. The "o'flip" album is ingenious in its simplicity – it is postbound, an acrylic cover with strips of adhesive in the binding that can then be attached to either 4×6 photos or 4×6 cardstock elements to create the album's pages. The "o'flip" will be a new way to create 4×6 mini-books. It's available in either 25 pages or 53 pages (perfect for photo a week albums, with one page for a cover).
If you'd like to learn a bit more, see our report on the o'flip from CHA.
Echo Park Photo Freedom
Echo Park is a perennial hot pick contender for its reliable and beautiful collections. This time, however, they are a hot pick for their new entry into the pocket scrapbook market, a line called Photo Freedom.
A lot of companies are jumping on the pocket scrapbooking trend, but Echo Park's offering stands out for several reasons. First, Photo Freedom is actually a trademark of Stacy Julian's from the book of the same name, and she, Big Picture Classes, and the book bring marketing power to the product line. No other pocket scrapbook line besides Becky Higgins' Project Life has a celebrity power driving it and an entire philosophy behind it in anywhere near the same way.
Another major difference about Photo Freedom is the way in which it is packaged. Most pocket scrapbook systems are packaged and sold ala carte. Consumers buy page protectors and design elements separately. Even Project Life is now sold this way after starting out as an entirely pre-bundled kit. While Echo Park will sell packages of Photo Freedom page protectors (pictured above) and sheets of stickers and journal cards ala carte, it will also be featuring all-in-one kits.
The Photo Freedom kits will MSRP for $11.49, and will include a sheet of stickers, 6 12×12 sheets of journal cards, and 5 pocket page protectors. In this single affordably priced package, customers will be able to grab everything they need (besides an album) to get started with pocket scrapbooking. This makes for a great gift item.
Another thing that Photo Freedom has going for it is the diversity of designers under the roof of Echo Park Paper. Most companies doing this sort of system, like Simple Stories, have a very distinctive signature look to their offerings. Echo Park's signature is their diversity, using a variety of signature designers. Their first three Photo Freedom lines exemplify this, with offerings from elegantly classic Carina Gardner (pictured below, top) and funky graphic Allison Kreft (pictured below, bottom) as well as a cute holiday line by Sharon Rowan.
Photo Freedom will be shipping to stores in October.
Jenni Bowlin embellishments
This company is known for its incredible attention to detail in it's embellishments, and several trends apparent at this show were tailor-made for them.
First up is an item that I heard a lot of buzz about on the show floor: paper feathers. These are truly unique and so true to Jenni Bowlin's signature style.
While they look interesting in the package, you don't see these items' full potential until you see them in action:
The white feathers are translucent because they are vellum, and the feathers are wire so they can be twisted and bent to add incredible texture, depth and movement to a project.
The layout above also shows another of Jenni's unique products from this release in action, her perforated papers. These 12×12 sheets are perforated like tickets and can be used in strips or individually. The perforation is great for folding them to provide depth, or for creating strips just the size and shape you want easily!
Bowlin's stickers, which have long been popular, really exceeded her usual standard of excellence with the CHA Summer 2012 releases. Bowlin has a distinct style but one thing that stood out about some of the CHA Summer releases is that they would appeal to an audience that wouldn't normally go for her products, while still maintaining her signature style.
These airmail themed stickers key on a huge trend in scrapbook products right now, and fit perfectly with Jenni's signature red palette.
The stamp-themed number stickers also combine several current trends – stamps and numbers – into one fun product that is sure to have wide appeal. The small sizes of these stickers makes them great for everything from layouts to cards to Project Life.
The stamp line shown above actually has four different designs in it. The third design is a sheet filled with the vintage graphics that Jenni is known for:
Jenni also released a slate of true vintage embellishments such as buttons and milk bottle caps. However, those (while beautiful) are likely to appeal only hardcore vintage fans. The items highlighted above will have broader appeal and bring Jenni outside her core fan base.
Sn@p Studio by Simple Stories
A significant sub-market of the pocket scrapbooking trend is evolving in 2012 with the rise of the "mini album" in this format – the 6″x8″ sized pocket scrapbook. Simple Stories introduced a limited line of 6×8 products at CHA Winter, but with their new Sn@p Studio line at CHA Summer, they proved they are the force to be reckoned with in the segment.
The color palette for Sn@p Studio is somewhat brighter than the traditional Simple Stories look, and is clean instead of being distressed. The look of the line is kraft layered with bright colors. The new 6×8 line started from scratch, starting with the albums, which are now offered in kraft chipboard with a rainbow of colored spines.
Each binder comes with inserts such as pocket pages and dividers. There are also basic print papers in the coordinating color palette (as pictured above) available in 12×12 and 6×6 sizes.
Once you have an album, there are too many available options to count of what to put in it. There's a huge selection of 4×6 and 3×4 cards, plus stickers sold on both 4×6 and 12×12 sheets:
With the exception of the custom 6×8 dividers, many of these elements – journal cards and stickers, for instance – can be used in full sized 12×12 pocket scrapbooks as well, and will be likely to appeal to people not using the Sn@p mini albums.
Put it all together and you get a really bright, fun project:
These smaller albums may be great introductions to paper crafting for kids and teens who would otherwise be overwhelmed by a larger project, or for a "mini album" of a specific scope like a vacation or event.
My Mind's Eye
This company has, quite simply put, become a powerhouse when it comes to producing paper collections. They do a very specific thing, and do it extremely well. And consumers have responded to it. This is an amazing third time in a row that they've made the CHA Hot Picks list, but buyers and consumers keep flocking to their reliable collections.
At CHA Summer, My Mind's Eye released their standard "mega" collection of feminine shabby chic that they do every show. This one was called "The Sweetest Thing", and designed by Jen Allyson. As is typical of the MME mega collections, "The Sweetest Thing" is made up of four sub-collections: Tangerine, Honey, Bluebell, and Lavender. Stephanie Howell created a sample layout using "The Sweetest Thing: Tangerine" for the My Mind's Eye booth (pictured below), that really showed off the possibilities of this gorgeous collection. It also emphasized how the Tangerine sub-collection infuses some of the current trend towards brighter colors into a company that is mostly known for very muted tones:
One notable point about this My Mind's Eye collection versus their past collections of this type is that this collection is much lighter on the pre-designed "scene" prints than the typical My Mind's Eye collection, instead being almost entirely all-over prints. This doesn't necessarily signal that My Mind's Eye is abandoning that type of design, however, since several of their other CHA Summer 2012 releases remain heavily in that style. Many consumers find all-over prints easier to work with than pre-designed scene pages, so this shift may increase the marketability of The Sweetest Thing line to consumers that often pass up MME for that reason.
Another of the interesting details in the The Sweetest Thing collection is one of the embellishment SKU's. My Mind's Eye has created a button pack that is half wood buttons and half chipboard buttons, something quite unusual. The Bluebell version is pictured below:
This collection is heavy on pink and yellow tones, yet another indicator that we will probably continue to see those colors around heavily in the market for awhile.
For the upcoming Fall and Winter holidays, My Mind's Eye also had new collections. First up, for Halloween, is an addition to the hit "Lost & Found" collection, called (appropriately) "Lost & Found: Halloween". The collection includes brads, stamps, layered stickers, and chipboard, in addition to patterned papers, and is accented heavily with festive orange glitter for a bright touch.
The vintage graphics look and burnt orange has been extremely popular the last year or two with consumers for Halloween, and this collection is beautifully executed – spooky without being too creepy. It hits just the right themed notes and I expect that it will be a major win in the marketplace for MME.
Like many companies, My Mind's Eye opted to offer two different looks for the Christmas holidays this year. The first, Winter Wonderland, is a bright, almost cute styled line, focusing on trees and houses.
The Christmas line that truly garnered buzz at CHA Summer, however, was their more vintage styled "All is Bright." Designed by Rhonna Farrer, her signature style is very evident in the line, and it will be sure to make her legions of fans very happy.
Both holiday lines, of course, come with beautiful lines of embellishments as well as the paper and stickers pictured above: brads, tape, twine, buttons, stamps, and layered stickers.
Amy Tangerine for American Crafts
This selection is also a three-peat to the list for rapidly rising star Amy Tan, who has made the list with every single one of her releases since her debut a year ago at CHA Summer 2011. Amy's quirky, funky, colorful style has proven to be a breath of fresh air for consumers burned out on the heavy tone of vintage that had overtaken the industry the past few years, and provides a much needed appeal to a younger audience for paper crafting as well. Her CHA Summer 2012 collection, Ready Set Go, looks to continue her rise.
Amy's camera-covered Sketchbook collection album at the CHA Winter 2012 show hit a home run with consumers, and I believe she has done it again at CHA Summer 2012, with the release of two woodgrain chevron albums in the Ready Set Go collection:
Although at first glance the line doesn't appear seasonal, compared to the spring/summer release "Sketchbook" which featured nearly neon colors, it actually has some seasonal elements to it. The colors are warm and muted, and the woodgrain used throughout the collection presents a very fall feel. The blues have a very gray undertone to them, a very winter weather sky color. Using these touches, the line retains the cheer and perk that is so characteristic of Amy's work, without seeming completely out of place with the time of year.
One standout in the collection of amazing embellishments is the Thickers alphabets that coordinate with the collection. The offerings are simple and versatile, and should appeal to a wide range of paper crafters (not just Amy Tangerine fans). There are tiles, bright corrugated, and some light pinstriped alphabets, all in excellent font choices that go with anything.
So there you have them…the Scrapbook Update CHA Summer 2012 Top Ten Hot Picks! Please feel free to share if you agree, disagree, or what you think was hot or not!
Want to stay up-to-date on all the latest scrapbook news?


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Body image is the picture in our mind of how our body looks and works. It's how we think and feel about our bodies and how we believe others see us.
Our body image is important. It's linked to our feelings of self-worth and how we think others value us.
Cancer and its treatments can change your body and how you feel about it. Because of this, body image concerns are common in people affected by cancer. Women and men at any age can have body image concerns.
Changes to your body may be temporary or permanent. They include changes that can be seen by you or others, such as hair loss or weight gain. They also include changes that are more private.
Body image concerns are different for everyone. Some people may feel uncomfortable or unhappy about their bodies. Others may feel so anxious they avoid going out or socialising. Sometimes body image concerns can make you feel less feminine or less masculine.
There are things you can do to improve your body image. There are also different ways to get help and support.


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Has The Video Game Industry Surpassed The Military In Driving The Next Wave Of Technological Change?
from the video-game-industrial-complex deptFor much of the twentieth century, many of the biggest technological advancements were trickle-downs from the military, which took huge government expenditures for R&D and later commercialized that technology. While many people here no longer remember this, the military connection was a big part of what built up Silicon Valley in the early days. However, times are changing. Andy Kessler's latest opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal suggests that the greatest driver of technological change these days appears to be the video game industry. He talks about how China created the world's fastest supercomputer, using chips that were built on video game chip technology:
Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower was worried enough to declare that "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." No need to worry anymore. That game (pardon the pun) is over: Welcome to the entertainment-industrial complex.He points out that technologies like Microsoft Kinect and online game technology are likely to start to move into corporate applications before too long as well:
Consider the Apple iPhone, often touted as the tech symbol of our era. It's actually more evolutionary than revolutionary. Much of its technology—color LCD displays, low power usage, precision manufacturing--was perfected for hand-held videogames like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, which sold in the tens of millions. Think about how much more productively workers are now able to communicate because of some silly games.
Videogames will influence how next-gen workers interact with each other. Call of Duty, a military simulation game, has a mode that allows players to cooperate from remote locations. In World of Warcraft, players form guilds to collaborate, using real-time texting and talking, to navigate worlds presented in high-resolution graphics. Sure, they have funky weapons and are killing Orcs and Trolls and Dwarves, but you don't have to be a gamer to see how this technology is going to find its way into corporate America. Within the next few years, this is how traders or marketers or DNA hunters will work together.So why is it that the military has been displaced? Kessler believes it's all about the money:
For one, capital formation. Governments had the unique capacity to raise (read: tax) the enormous capital needed to fund state-of-the-art projects. But a fully functioning stock market can raise billions for productive commercial applications, bypassing the military connection. Hate Wall Street all you want, but it's now better than wars at driving progress.It's an interesting theory. I'm not sure I totally believe it -- as I think there's some cross-pollination going on, but it's definitely an idea worth thinking about.
Second, displacing the military is about high sales volume. Often that means lower costs. The $300 Roomba automatic vacuum, which the company iRobot says it has sold to five million customers, helps drive down the cost of the Army's robotic bomb removers. Volume is especially good at spurring the creation of new applications. Hardware is nothing without software and apps. Caffeine-fueled coders won't even think about writing apps unless there are millions, if not tens of millions, of potential customers.
Filed Under: innovation, progress, video games


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AMC, home of zombies and smoking zombies, is developing a brand new post-apocalyptic show Galyntine, in which humans abandon technology and live in tribes. In other words, sort of like what we'd expected from Revolution.
The LA Times reports that AMC picked up a whole few new shows, including one historical drama — but we're most interested in Galyntine, which is described thusly:
"Galyntine" takes place on a planet long after a technology-based disaster has made humanity reject technology, causing society to re-form in small tribes scattered across the face of the planet.
It's written by Jason Cahill and produced by The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero, along with Ridley Scott. So fingers crossed...


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They'd like to know when or if Thomas will return to have his day, get his number retired and visit his statue.
And it's really all up to Thomas now.
"The door is open," said White Sox GM Ken Williams. "It's pretty much in his court as far as what he wants to do."
Despite his conflicts with Thomas in the past, Williams said it's all forgotten, and he was in favor of Thomas returning last year so that he could retire in a Sox uniform.
"If he felt like the time was right to come back for a day and retire with this uniform, I think everyone here wants that to happen," Williams said of Thomas, who hasn't played since August 2008. "I don't know that we'd want it to be an official appearance, because then you'd have to restart the clock on his Hall of Fame status." …
January 29, 2010
Waiting for Big Frank
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Students who have access to computers at home and regularly use them for assignments are more likely to be strong writers, a national exam suggests. But it also says just a quarter of America's eighth- and 12th-grade students have solid writing skills.
Twenty-seven percent of the students at each of those grade levels were able to write essays that were well developed, organized and had proper language and grammar — 24 percent were considered proficient, 3 percent advanced. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.
"It is important to remember this is first-draft writing," said Mary Crovo, deputy executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation's Report Card tests. "They did have some time to edit, but it wasn't extensive editing."
Students who took the writing test in 2011 had an advantage that previous test takers did not: computers with spell-check and thesaurus. Previously, young people taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test had to use pencil and paper; the switch was made in line with changes in technology and a need for today's students to write across electronic formats.
Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, some 33 percent of eighth-grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.
Crovo said most students already use such technology as spell-check on a daily basis. Without those tools, she said, "It's as if years ago we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser."
She said word processing tools alone wouldn't result in significantly better writing scores if students didn't have the core skills of being able to organize ideas and present them in a clear and grammatical fashion.
Still, students in both grades who used the thesaurus and the backspace key more frequently had higher scores than those who used them less often. Students who scored below the 25th percentile were less likely to have computers at home: 87 percent said they did, compared to 99 percent were in the top quarter.
The technology gap was hinted at in other statistics as well: The lowest scorers reported less daily computer use for school assignments, and 44 percent fewer said they always used a computer to make changes to papers or reports.
Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, said research consistently shows the use of computers in the classroom improves writing performance. He said students end up writing more, getting more feedback from peers and teachers and publishing more, all of which keeps them motivated.
"It just improves every aspect of the writing process," he said.
The latest test results make a strong argument for more use of technology in English language programs at school, Warschauer said, as home access is more uneven.
The results at both grade levels showed a continuing achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic and Asian students. At the eighth grade, Asian students had the highest average score, which was 33 points higher than black students on a 300-point scale. At the 12th grade, white students scored 27 points above black students.
There was also a gender gap, with girls scoring 20 points higher on average than boys in the eighth grade and 14 points higher in 12th grade. Those who qualified for free and reduced price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, had lower scores than those who did not; there was a 27 point difference between the two at the eighth grade.
For the 2011 exam, laptops were brought into public and private schools across the country and more than 50,000 students were tested to get a nationally representative sample. Students were required to write essays that explained, persuaded or conveyed an experience.
Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor at Florida State University who served on the advisory panel for the test, said one factor to keep in mind is that research shows most students in the United States don't compose at the keyboard.
"What they do is sort of type already written documents into the machine, much as we used to do with typewriters four decades ago," she said.
Yancey said for this reason there was some concern about having students write on computers as opposed to by hand. Likewise, having the advantage of spell-check assumes students know how to use it. And in some schools and neighborhoods, computers are still not easily accessible.
"There are not so many students that actually learn to write composing at the keyboard," she said.
Yancey added that many kids who do have access to computers are not necessarily using them to write at school, but to take standardized tests and fill in bubbles.
"Digital technology is a technology," she said. "Paper and pencil is a technology. If technology were the answer, that would be pretty simple."


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THE PUBLIC EYE: Romney Channels Reagan, Wins Debate
To the delight of Republicans and the dismay of Democrats, Mitt Romney won the first presidential debate. His performance was reminiscent of the 1980 presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, where Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
In the October 28, 1980 debate, Carter came across as serious and disdainful. Reagan appeared relaxed and competent. When hectored by Carter, Reagan chided, "There you go again."
In the October 3, 2012 debate, Barack Obama was professorial and pensive. Mitt Romney appeared relaxed and competent. When challenged by Obama, Romney repeated one of his five promises: restore jobs, propose no tax cut that adds to the deficit, repeal Obamacare and shift Medicaid and other programs to the states, restore $716 billion cuts to Medicare, and prevent dramatic cuts to the military. Romney blamed America's problems on lack of leadership and boasted he had the skills to get Republicans and Democrats to work together.
Romney's opening statement set the contrast between his plan and that of Obama. "The path we're on has been unsuccessful… trickle-down government." "I will restore the vitality that gets America working again." Romney was selling his skills as an executive more than a specific plan. Late in the debate Romney promised that on his first day as President he would sit down with Democrats and Republicans to figure out what to do.
Romney asserted: "Under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried… [They've] seen their income come down by $4300… At the same time, gasoline prices have doubled under the president. Electric rates are up. Food prices are up. Health care costs have gone up by $2500 a family."
During technical discussions about tax plans, Romney kept returning to jobs.
And if we lower that rate, [small businesses] will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs. This is about getting jobs for the American people… My priority is putting people back to work in America. They're suffering in this country… We've go 23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work… when the president took office, 32 million people on food stamps; 47 million on food stamps today; economic growth this year slower than last year, and last year slower than the year before.
Romney seemed to be in command of the facts but Think Progress reported that most of what he said was either a distortion or lie.
Romney dodged Obama's complaint that he intends to turn Medicare into a voucher program and responded, "He's cutting $716 billion from the program." Actually Obama is not cutting Medicare benefits but instead producing $716 billion in savings by eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.
When asked to give an example of harmful Federal regulations, Romney mentioned the "Dodd-Frank" financial reform law and complained, "it designates a number of banks as too big to fail, and they're effectively guaranteed by the federal government." That's not true. The Think Progress website noted: "The law merely says that the biggest, systemically risky banks need to abide by more stringent regulations. If those banks fail, they will be unwound by a new process in the Dodd-Frank law that protects taxpayers from having to pony up for a bailout."
Romney presented a formidable case against Obamacare: "It will cost $2500 a year more than traditional insurance… it cuts $716 billion from Medicare to pay for it… it puts in place an unelected board that's going to tell people what kind of treatments they can have… 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect…" Again, Romney's complaints were untrue. Think Progress reported "Obamacare will actually provide millions of families with tax credits to make health care more affordable." The $716 billion are savings. The Board is restricted to "lowering health care spending" and has nothing to do with treatment. "The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans."
Romney finished strong.
What we're seeing right now is… a trickle-down government approach, which has government thinking it can do a better job than free people pursuing their dreams. And it's not working. And the proof of that is 23 million people out of work… we need to have leadership in Washington that will actually bring people together.
For several weeks there have been rumors than in the final month of the campaign, Romney would liken Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter; he would do as Ronald Reagan did when he claimed Carter was part of the problem. That's what Romney's strategy was in the first debate; through aggressive duplicity, he painted Obama as a villain.
In 1980 Jimmy Carter had one debate with Reagan and lost it and the election. Fortunately, Obama will debate Romney two more times and has an opportunity to set the record straight. To accomplish this, Obama must be much more aggressive and engaged. The President must confront Romney on his lies and distortions.
Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com


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Cygwin software offers Linux-like environment for Windows making it possible to port software running on POSIX systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to Windows. However, sometime you just wanna run bc or wget under Windows without going through Cygwin. Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools. A must download for die hard gnu folks working on windows systems 🙂
Tools included:
- bc-1.05
- bison-1.28
- bzip2-1.0.2
- diffutils-2.7
- fileutils-3.16
- findutils-4.1
- flex-2.5.4
- gawk-3.1.0
- grep-2.4.2
- gsar110
- gzip-1.2.4
- indent-2.2.9
- jwhois-2.4.1
- less-340
- m4-1.4
- make-3.78.1
- patch-2.5
- recode-3.6
- rman-3.0.7
- sed-3.02
- shellutils-1.9.4
- tar-1.12
- textutils-2.1
- unrar-3.00
- wget-1.8.2
- which-2.4
Download GNU utilities for Windows
Visit offical project to grab common GNU utilities for Windows [binary zip file 3.2M] (Outdated link)
=> Please download latest and updated GNU utilities from GNUWin32 project [thanks Kurt]
Updated for accuracy.


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By Connor Wentzell '12
The Harvard Men's Golf team opened up its 2011 spring season with the Yale Spring Opener at the Yale Golf Course in New Haven, Connecticut. The 1924 design by C.B. MacDonald always proves a formidable opponent for the Crimson in their first tournament since the fall season. The Yale Spring Opener has become a 36-hole, one-day event. It is traditionally played in difficult conditions: in the past few years, the Crimson have faced severe rain, wind and cold in this tournament. The week leading up to the tournament suggested that this year would be no different; snow was even expected to fall in New Haven on the day of the event. However, the team missed the bad weather by one day, and instead was met with clear skies and moderate temperatures for the first week of April.
The Crimson fared well in their first 18 holes of the day, considering they were playing without the leadership of their Captain Tony Grillo '12 and the consistency of Seiji Liu '14, who were both unable to play this weekend. As a result, the team featured two new comers to the roster: Max Campion '13 and Kevin McCarthy '14, who provided substantial help for the Crimson.
After the first round, Harvard was in 3rd place with a score of 303. Harvard was led by the stellar play of junior Mark Pollak with a solid 71 that left him tied for first place individually after one round. Kevin McCarthy '14 added a 76 and Connor Wentzell '12 and Max Campion '13 followed with 78 to put the Crimson within striking distance for the second round. Freshman Theo Lederhausen, playing in the '1 spot', was unable to find his game during the first round, finishing with an uncharacteristic 80. Michael Lai played as an individual and also shot 80.
As the wind picked up for the afternoon 18, the Crimson saw their position near the top of the leaderboard falter slightly. The team was led by Max Campion, who fired a solid 74. Theo Lederhausen was able to battle back from his first round struggles to fire a 75 in the afternoon. Mark Pollak continued his consistent play to also shoot a 75 in the 2nd round, despite somewhat stumbling towards the finish. Connor Wentzell added a gruesome 82 to round out the team total, while Kevin McCarthy struggled on the greens to end with an 83. Michael Lai, despite a solid front nine, wasn't able to find his game on the back and finished with a 92.
The Crimson ended with a total of 609, good enough for 4th place; notably ahead of Dartmouth and Yale – the only other Ivy teams in the field. Mark Pollak was able to hold onto his first round lead to finish in a tie for first place. The tournament marks the first collegiate win for Pollak, placing him in the same category as fellow H Golf legends Michael Shore '09 and Big John Christensen '09, who won the individual title at the Yale Spring Opener in 2008 and 2009, respectively.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to "Radar" Ray Peck and his family. Ray, who became ill during the event, is a longtime volunteer and starter at the Yale Golf Course. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.


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*These values should not be compared directly with 2007 data since these data do not include any departments that have been created in the interim. These data can be interpreted as estimates of minima for all 2012–13 departments combined.
Source: Susan White, Raymond Chu, and Roman Czujko, The 2012–13 Survey of Humanities Departments at Four-Year Institutions (College Park, MD: Statistical Research Center, American Institute of Physics, 2014). Study conducted for the American Academy of Arts Sciences' Humanities Indicators Project.
For context, see the overview of the numbers from the HDS-1 population and the disciplines added with HDS-2.
For comparisons to specific disciplines, see the tables for the disciplines of art history, classical studies, combined English and languages and literatures other than English, communication, English, folklore, history, history of science, languages and literatures other than English, linguistics, musicology, philosophy, and religion.
The Humanities Indicators and Departmental Survey have been made possible in part
by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this
website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
© 2018 American Academy of Arts & Sciences | Web
136 Irving Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
617.576.5000 | email@example.com


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Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has put up a petition asking the Governor General and PMSHithead to retract the Queen's Jubilee Medals from the Jubilee Jailbirds.
Queen's Diamond Jubilee medals were awarded in October to two convicted criminals. Conservative Member of Parliament Maurice Vellacott selected Linda Gibbons and Mary Wagner to receive medals. Both women are anti-choice protesters who repeatedly and deliberately violate Ontario court injunctions that ban protesters from harassing women as they enter an abortion clinic.Sign the petition here.
Wagner has illegally invaded clinics, frightening patients and staff and obstructing clinic operations. Both women have been in and out of jail for years, showing no respect for the rule of law or the rights of others.
Image source
h/t KayVee.


text: Echoes of Christmas Church Flyer and CD Template is great for any Church Event. Use it for Christmas Gospel Concerts, Pageants, Musical Events and Sermons, etc. The layered Photoshop files are color coded and organized in folders for easy editing. The file also contains 7 – One Click Color options.


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MIAMI – The awards are starting to pile up for Jose Fernandez.
The reigning NL Rookie of the Year wasted little time picking up where he left off with his first NL Pitcher of the Month award. Fernandez, 21, was 4-1 with a 1.59 ERA the first month of the season. He had 55 strike outs and walked eight.
Continue reading "Marlins ace Jose Fernandez named NL Pitcher of Month; Mets changing up signs just in case"


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In January, 2006, shortly after James Zadroga died at his parents' house, in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, Dr. Gerard Breton received a call from the Ocean County Medical Examiner's Office. A retired hospital pathologist, Breton now conducts autopsies for the county on contract. Compared with its more violent neighbors—Newark, to the north, and Atlantic City, to the south—the central New Jersey shore tends to generate uncomplicated deaths: heart disease, liver failure, sunstroke. Zadroga's death, at the age of thirty-four, was different. Medical records showed that his health had been failing for almost five years, apparently owing to degenerative lung problems, which had forced him to go on sick leave from his job as a New York City homicide detective in 2002. He had spent the last year of his life dependent on a portable oxygen tank. After Zadroga died, on January 5, 2006, his father, Joe, requested an autopsy.
At the morgue, Breton surveyed the body. He noted two small bruises on the chin and a pair of faint scars on the abdomen—from stab wounds, he speculated—along with several tattoos. Cutting inward from the armpits to the pubic bone, he folded back the muscle and removed the rib cage with a saw. Six feet tall and weighing two hundred and sixteen pounds, Zadroga was solidly built, despite losing weight rapidly in the final months of his life. Even so, Breton recalls being struck by the size of Zadroga's lungs, which had a reddish, meaty appearance, and were unusually firm to the touch. "Normally, the lungs feel soft and spongy," he said. Lifting the lungs onto a scale, he also found that they were exceptionally heavy—almost three times the usual weight.
A dissection revealed the cause. Zadroga's lungs contained a vast number of foreign-body granulomas: knots of scar tissue that build up around inorganic particles, like the pearling around sand grains in an oyster. The scarring was so extensive and severe that the right ventricle of Zadroga's heart had thickened from the strain of trying to force blood through the ravaged vessels and capillaries. "It's not unusual to find a few granulomas in a lung," Breton noted later. "But usually this is something you see here and there." The granulomas in Zadroga's lungs were all over.
Breton couldn't identify the gritty particles lodged in the tissue with his microscope, though he remembers thinking that some of them looked "dustlike." He sent a sample to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which identified the foreign material as a combination of talc, cellulose, calcium phosphate, and methacrylate plastic. Breton also spoke to Joe Zadroga, who said that his son's health had begun to deteriorate in the weeks following the World Trade Center attacks. Shortly after joining the recovery effort at Ground Zero, Joe said, James had developed a persistent cough.
After talking with Joe, Breton had little doubt about the underlying source of Zadroga's lung trouble. In his final report, he concluded that James Zadroga had died from respiratory failure due to severe panlobar granulomatous pneumonitis. He added that he felt "with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death in this case was directly related to the 9/11 incident."
News of the diagnosis spread quickly. The hazy air in which rescue teams worked was already suspected of contributing to everything from chronic coughs to cancer, and Zadroga's death was widely seen as the harbinger of an epidemic. A few weeks later, the senators for New York and New Jersey—Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Robert Menendez, and Frank Lautenberg—wrote to George Pataki, who was then the governor of New York, urging him to extend the list of 9/11 victims, and to compensate the families of first responders who became chronically ill after working at Ground Zero. The letter called attention to the predicament of Zadroga's four-year-old daughter, Tyler Ann, now orphaned—Zadroga's wife, Ronda, had died the previous year—and in the care of her father's parents. "Detective Zadroga served with great courage in the line of duty and paid the ultimate sacrifice for his heroism," the senators wrote, adding that his death "will not be the last to be suffered by the brave Americans who rushed to Ground Zero in the hours and days after September 11."
The so-called Zadroga Act, which Pataki signed in August, 2006, provided generous benefits to the families of city workers who died of 9/11-related illnesses. Tyler Ann became one of the first recipients. But there were other complications to come. In order for Zadroga's name to be added to the official victims' list—and, ultimately, engraved on the National September 11 Memorial—his status as a casualty of 9/11 had to be verified. In the summer of 2007, copies of Zadroga's autopsy report and medical history (and, later, slides of tissue taken from his lungs) were sent to the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, Dr. Charles Hirsch. In October, he returned his verdict. Calling his assessment "markedly different" from Breton's, Hirsch disputed the claim that the talc and the cellulose found in Zadroga's lungs came from Ground Zero. Instead, he said, the embedded material was pharmaceutical debris produced by injecting a solution of crushed prescription pills.
The news provoked an uproar. The Daily News ran an editorial accusing Hirsch of "smearing" Zadroga's reputation. The president of New York's Detectives' Endowment Association suggested that the city was trying to arm itself against pending class-action suits from Ground Zero workers. A congressional delegation demanded that an independent panel be established to investigate all deaths connected to dust exposure at the 9/11 sites. "The history of 9/11 should not be decided behind closed doors by one person," Carolyn Maloney, a New York congresswoman, announced. Michael Moore took up the cause on his Web site.
At a conference a few days later, Joe Zadroga appeared with Michael Baden, a celebrity forensic pathologist who had used one of Zadroga's lung-tissue slides for a segment on 9/11-related illness in his HBO series, "Autopsy: Postmortem with Dr. Baden." Baden, a former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City who is now the forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, announced that he had reviewed the evidence and had no doubt that James Zadroga had died as a result of exposure to toxic dust at Ground Zero. There was no sign of any drug addiction, Baden said. "You could see glass fibres in there. You don't get that from injecting drugs."
In the months since the announcement, Baden has not changed his view. Discussing the case with me in his apartment, eighteen floors above the Museum of Modern Art, he acknowledged that granulomas can result from injecting ground-up medication—as happens when heroin users inject a solution of crushed methadone tablets—but disputed the idea that the wreckage in Zadroga's lungs could have been caused by shooting up. "People who have chronic lung disease from drug abuse have long histories of drug abuse, rehabilitation, doctors going in and out," he said. "You can't hide that sort of drug abuse." He had noted earlier that Breton had observed no needle scars on Zadroga's arms. "If I saw needle-track scars, that would make me think right away: intravenous abuse."
Baden would not speculate on what lay behind Hirsch's finding, though he wondered whether the case had involved something political. Either way, he said, he found the assessment baffling. "I think that Dr. Hirsch seems to have been misled by the fact of finding talc and cellulose, which can be found in people who grind down drugs that are meant for oral consumption. But they can occur in other ways." He said that he considered the assessment not only medically wrong but also "nasty"—a mean-spirited swipe at a guy "who was at Ground Zero, who really worked hard on the pile."
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has the unrenovated pallor of a forgotten city agency. Dimmed by a concrete overbite, the street entrance manages to look at once ominous and shabby—a homely approach to an agency that houses one of the largest and busiest forensic labs in the country. Even by the standards of other big cities, New York has a prolific capacity to produce dead bodies, and, as Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsch is responsible for the processing of some twenty-five thousand fatalities a year—nearly half the city's annual total. Roughly fifty-five hundred of those cases require autopsy, including all deaths that are violent, sudden, mysterious, or in some way related to public or consumer safety—an infant asphyxiated by a car seat, say, or a runner who died from applying too much topical muscle cream.
Hirsch's role is covertly powerful. Medical examiners are frequently required to testify in criminal cases, and in the past few years he has overseen the investigation of several high-profile fatalities, including the sudden death of Heath Ledger and the fatal child abuse of Nixzmary Brown. Being the final medical authority in such cases—particularly those involving police brutality or city negligence—can be politically fraught, and, in New York, administrative infighting and sheer population density combine to create a singular institutional challenge.
For someone occupying such a controversial position, Hirsch has managed to remain unusually invisible—in part because, unlike many medical examiners, he rarely speaks with the press. In the course of his nineteen-year tenure, he has never been interviewed on television, and has hardly ever been quoted in print. Jonathan Hayes, a senior medical examiner who has worked in the office since 1990, told me that one of Hirsch's maxims is "Medical examiners get into trouble by saying too much, too soon, or to the wrong person."
Privacy, however, can also create problems. By refusing to detail the evidence supporting his interpretation of Zadroga's death, Hirsch appeared secretive, fostering suspicions about his motives and the validity of his verdict. Policemen in particular felt betrayed. Barbara Butcher, who coördinates crime-scene investigations between Hirsch's agency and the Police Department, said, "There are cops I've known for years who wouldn't talk to me about it."
When I visited Hirsch recently, he had, as usual, been in his office since seven in the morning. (His departures are less consistent. He lives with his wife just a few blocks north of the office, and Hayes told me, "I've looked up from bodies and seen Dr. Hirsch standing there at three in the morning.") Hirsch is seventy-one years old. Courteous and mannerly, he walks with a slight forward cant—the lingering effect of an operation to repair a herniated disk. Although his face is lean, the cheeks are rosy, with large ears and dark eyebrows framing a nose that is slightly off center. Before coming to New York, Hirsch went to school in Chicago and worked in Cleveland, and his habits still reflect Midwestern tastes: sober suits worn with narrow suspenders, and, for pleasure, a pipe of Captain Black tobacco. When making a point, he occasionally taps one finger lightly on the desktop. His speech is so soft that one has to strain to hear it.
At an afternoon meeting, conducted with ten of the agency's thirty forensic pathologists, Hirsch received brisk updates on a dozen ongoing investigations, including the apparent suicide of an eighty-year-old man, and the autopsy of a woman who was found mummified in her apartment wearing nothing but a sweater. Hirsch listened to these recitations quietly, removing and folding his glasses with care. Dissatisfied with the evidence presented in the suicide, he asked about the meaning of a note found on the man's kitchen table, which was addressed to relatives in Eastern Europe and ended, simply, "Farewell."
"Was the letter dated?" he asked. "Do you know how long it was sitting there?"
He also lingered on the mostly full bottles of prescription medication that were found in the room. "People who want to kill themselves tend to empty every bottle," he noted. A discussion ensued. A medical examiner pointed out that the only empty bottle recovered from the scene contained Ambien, a sleep aid—but that the toxicology panel had found no traces of Ambien in the body. The bathroom cabinet contained an unfamiliar antibiotic, possibly bought in Eastern Europe, and not listed in any of the standard pharmaceutical resources. Hirsch listened politely until the conversation ended. Then he turned to address the medical examiner in charge of the case. "The note isn't compelling, and the toxicology is borderline at best," he said quietly. "If you're going to conclude that this is an intentional self-destruction by medication, you're going to have to prove it."
Hirsch is known for his willingness to challenge seemingly obvious conclusions, a tendency that, in politically charged cases, has often made him unpopular. In 1989, a twenty-five-year-old black man named Richard Luke died in police custody after being physically restrained by the arresting officers. Although the medical examiner's office confirmed extensive bruising, Hirsch ruled that Luke died not as a result of police brutality but from acute cocaine intoxication—a verdict that prompted street protests. Hirsch insists that he has been unaffected by the excoriation following his findings on the Zadroga case but noted that he had received requests from several senators urging him to change his assessment. "It's the only instance in which political pressure has been exerted on me," he remarked tartly.
Since the controversy, Hirsch has revealed little about the evidence in the case, but when we spoke he stressed the fact that the granulomas in Zadroga's lungs were concentrated in the arteries and not in the alveoli. Drug users who inject crushed pills routinely develop granulomas, because insoluble fillers used to bind a pill's active ingredient don't get digested—as they would if a pill was swallowed—and, instead, circulate through the bloodstream, eventually lodging in the narrow pulmonary arteries. The condition is well known and is sometimes referred to as "mainliner's lung." When I spoke to Michael Baden, he argued that Zadroga's lungs were in such bad shape that it was impossible to tell where the damage had originated. Hirsch disagreed. Crystals lodged in the pulmonary arteries can sometimes get pushed into the alveoli, he observed, because of the constant pressure of surging blood, but the same force does not exist in reverse. Therefore, the matter in Zadroga's pulmonary arteries must have entered his lungs through the bloodstream, not through inhalation.
The type of material found in Zadroga's lungs was also significant. Talc and cellulose are widely used pharmaceutical ingredients, Hirsch noted, but neither was considered a major respiratory hazard at Ground Zero: talc because it wasn't found in the air in abundance; cellulose because it is not considered particularly hazardous. (The molecules are too large to pass through the elaborate filtering apparatus of the upper airway.) The absence of needle marks Hirsch deemed insignificant, because clean needles cause less scarring.
Talking about the case later, Jonathan Hayes remarked that one of the dangers of forensic pathology, particularly in dramatic cases, is that people see what they expect to see. "I think there's a possibility that that's what happened here," he said. "This guy's been down in the World Trade Center, spent hours after hours on the pile. You look at his lungs: oh, they're full of scar tissue and inflammation!" He went on, "As Dr. Hirsch would say, 'Sometimes it's necessary to slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact.' "
Interestingly, Hirsch was himself exposed to the miasma of debris created during the 9/11 attacks. Early that morning, he rounded up a small crew of examiners and drove to the base of the burning towers to scout sites for a temporary morgue. With an investigator named Diane Crisci, he walked south along the West Side Highway and had just reached the pedestrian walkway connecting the World Trade Center to the Winter Garden when the south tower collapsed.
The blast threw Hirsch underneath the walkway, where he was battered by flying rubble but sheltered from the worst of the falling debris. When he opened his eyes, Hirsch recalled, the air was so black that he couldn't tell whether he was on the surface or buried. He spat out the dust and located Crisci. Together, the pair hobbled away from the devastation—Hirsch with a sprained ankle and a gashed wrist, Crisci disabled by a broken leg. Hirsch arranged medical care for Crisci, then hitched a ride back to the office, his arm still bloody and his clothes covered in dust.
When I asked Hirsch whether he had experienced any symptoms from this exposure, he was emphatic that he had not. When I persisted—did he, at least, worry about the long-term effects?—he grew terse. "There's no point in worrying about things that you can't control," he said.
For professional reasons, Hirsch said, he continues to follow the epidemiological research, particularly a recent study that showed a statistical increase in sarcoidosis—an inflammatory disorder that attacks the lungs and other organs—among firefighters who worked at Ground Zero when the smoke was thickest. Last May, the weight of this study persuaded him to revise his opinion of five years earlier on the death of Felicia Dunn-Jones, a forty-two-year-old lawyer who died five months after being trapped in the initial explosive plume. In his review, Hirsch noted that, while the sarcoidosis that killed Dunn-Jones may have been present before 9/11, the illness had almost certainly been exacerbated by the particulate-laden air she inhaled on the morning the towers fell. The ruling made Dunn-Jones the first dust casualty to be entered on the official list of 9/11 victims. It also prompted a number of other families to resubmit cases that had been closed.
Each of these claims will be examined, Hirsch told me, and as more information becomes available some deaths may eventually be reclassified. But the results may be slow in coming. Hirsch said that he'd had letters from survivors who had developed cancers of one form or another, and that he could only reply that the scientific evidence isn't there yet. "It's going to take a lot of epidemiologic investigation," he said.
This attitude of scientific caution is not always welcomed by those who have lost a loved one to degenerative illness. "I would never misrepresent the reality that there are people who are terribly unhappy with us," Hirsch acknowledged. "I sometimes have to tell the family, 'You know what's in your heart. I have to go with the evidence.' " As difficult as such conversations are, he believes that truth ultimately allows the living to come to terms with the dead. In a lecture that he gave in 1997, Hirsch discussed the medical examiner's "sacred responsibility" to talk to the bereaved. "None of us lives comfortably with uncertainty," he observed. "Once they know and understand the facts, even if unpleasant, most people have the ability to make their peace with reality."
One Sunday in early March, I drove down to Little Egg Harbor, two hours south of New York City, to see Joe and Linda Zadroga. It was a cold day, with a brisk wind that whipped sand up from the roadsides and drove it against the sides of saltbox houses and trailered boats. Anchoring the tip of a small cul-de-sac, the Zadroga house, with an observatory window and wide, steeply raked front steps, is so much larger than its neighbors that at first I mistook it for a church. In the driveway, a pair of vintage cars sat covered next to a silver Ford pickup whose rear window had been transformed into a memorial: the World Trade Center towers framed by an American flag, and the legend "James Zadroga, Detective NYPD. Gone but not Forgotten. Fidelis ad Mortem."
Joe greeted me at the door. A former cop, like his son—he was the chief of police in North Arlington—he is stocky, with a bullish neck and shoulders and expressive hooded eyes. His wife, Linda, a petite woman with a deep tan, seemed tiny next to him. She wore a bright-pink sweatsuit and a silver heart-shaped pendant with a photograph of her son, inscribed "Jimmy." Sitting in the breakfast room, which overlooks a stretch of silvery shoreline, Joe talked about nearby Atlantic City ("She goes sometimes. I don't"), and bowed his head when Linda groused about his attachment to old T-shirts ("He holds on to everything"). Tyler Ann wandered in—a wary six-year-old in pink camouflage pajamas—and fussed with Joe's chair before wandering out again. When the conversation turned to James, Linda excused herself. "She don't like to talk about it," Joe said with a shrug.
Joe was just back from Washington, D.C., where he had attended a rally in support of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, introduced by Representative Maloney. Since his son's death, Joe has become a regular presence at such events; last year he attended about one a month. The attention that followed Breton's autopsy has added a disorienting public overlay to an otherwise private sorrow, and Joe seemed distinctly conscious of the symbolic pressure. But he was less concerned with arguing the merits of 9/11-related compensation claims than with affectionately recalling his son's good-old-boy ways. He cheerfully described James as "a partyer," who, during his days as a beat cop, would cadge meals from the Fire Department—"He always knew which firehouses had the best cooks"—and who, assigned to work on street crime, had an intuitive ability to sense who in a crowd was concealing a gun. There was a good-natured quality to this banter: a cop's-cop fondness, couched in jokey bravado. "That's his tough guy," Joe said, sifting through photographs of James that included one of him posing solemnly with a foot-long striper. He lingered over a later shot, taken at the ceremony when James made detective. In the picture, James stands with one arm around his wife, a pretty brunette with a shy smile. Dark-haired and baby-faced, he is powerfully built—a younger version of his father. He regards the camera with a lightly mocking pride.
On the morning of 9/11, James Zadroga had gone into the city early for an arraignment, and was almost back home before he switched on the radio. When he heard the news, he dashed inside, grabbed a bag, and turned around. "His wife was on her knees crying for him not to go back," Joe told me. Ronda Zadroga was seven months pregnant at the time. Assigned to a traffic post, Zadroga instead made his way to the towers, where he joined the search for survivors.
In all, Zadroga spent roughly three weeks on the pile, but according to Joe his decline began almost immediately. "He was sick, like, the first day," he told me. "And he said he felt terrible from all the chemicals he inhaled. He felt like he had the flu." Joe urged his son to see a specialist, and eventually got him an appointment with a pulmonologist at the Columbia University Medical Center. "He examined Jimmy and did some tests and said come back in three, four weeks. And then, when we came back, he took us into his office and he says, 'I'm not going to treat you.' And I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'Nah. I can't treat you.' And he just walked out the door." The Columbia University Medical Center could not comment, owing to patient confidentiality, but Joe claimed that the same problem occurred with one doctor after another. "Anytime he went to a hospital after that, they would say, 'Oh, you're a hero! We'll take good care of you,' " he said. "And within two days they'd discharge him, and not do anything. You know, shoot him up with steroids, maybe, so he could breathe easier, something like that."
The steroid shots, Joe claimed, gave James episodes of 'roid rage, and he suspects that they may also have led to the degeneration of two disks in his back. Joe said that James was hospitalized in 2002 and prescribed a course of intravenous antibiotics. While in the hospital, he was given a shunt—a small plastic tube that allows nurses to administer medication intravenously—which was left in when Zadroga was discharged.
In January of 2003, Joe persuaded a doctor at the Deborah Heart and Lung Center, in New Jersey, to take a biopsy of James's lungs. The procedure removed three inch-long chunks of tissue, one from each lobe of Zadroga's right lung, and James had to spend about a week in the hospital recuperating. I contacted Deborah to verify the results of the biopsy, but the hospital, citing confidentiality rules, would not release them. Joe, however, assured me that the test showed the presence of substantial damage. "His lungs were, like, eighty per cent black," he said. It seemed strange, I told Joe, that no doctor would offer a diagnosis, or order additional tests, even after a biopsy showing such extensive damage. (If there's anything doctors like, it's ordering additional tests.) When I asked Joe why he thought so many doctors would have denied treatment, he blamed what he considered to be political pressure from the city, intended to discourage institutions from treating a potentially controversial patient. He also told me that the Police Department suspected Zadroga of malingering and often sent cars, and even a helicopter, to watch the house. (When I contacted the N.Y.P.D. about this, a spokesman denied surveillance or use of a helicopter, but said that the N.Y.P.D.'s Medical Division did make unannounced visits to Zadroga's home and that this is a standard procedure for an officer on long-term sick leave.)
By 2003, Zadroga's condition had worsened further. He relied on oxygen tanks, and on three occasions passed out while driving, twice wrecking the car. Zadroga had already petitioned the Police Department for permanent retirement with a disability pension—a request that was granted in 2004. In the meantime, he and Ronda relocated to Florida, hoping that the climate would be easier on James's lungs. They bought a house not far from Ronda's parents, who sometimes babysat Tyler Ann, who was then a year old.
In Florida, however, events took a strange turn. About a year after the move, Ronda died, suddenly, at the age of twenty-nine. The news came as a surprise to Joe. "We didn't even know she was sick!" he told me. When I asked what could have killed Ronda so abruptly, Joe suggested that it was stress—the burden of looking after a young child and an invalid husband. "It was just too much for her," he said. Reached by phone, Ronda's mother would not talk about her daughter's death. A family friend, however, said that the actual cause was blood poisoning, brought on by intravenous drug use, adding that "everybody down here knew what was going on." A local investigation noted that, according to the Medical Examiner's Office, Ronda's lethal infection could not be conclusively determined to be the result of intravenous drug use. But track marks and multiple needle punctures were found on the body, and a toxicology report revealed non-toxic levels of drugs, including methadone.
There were other indications that something was seriously wrong. Arriving at the house in Florida for the funeral, Joe and Linda found it a mess. "Jimmy had passed out," Joe said. "The dogs had crapped everywhere." He cleaned up, and the next day a woman from the Florida Department of Children and Families arrived, escorted by two sheriffs. In a report filed with the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office, investigators who went to the house two days after Ronda's death to look into a report of child endangerment and drug use observed that Tyler Ann "was verbal and appeared happy," but noted the presence of a pill bottle prescribed in a relative's name, and carpet stains "where the family pets had left feces." Joe said that he was also quizzed about Tyler Ann's care. "She said, 'What's going to happen to the baby?' " Joe recalled. "And I said, 'What do you mean, what's going to happen to the baby? The baby's going to be with her father.' And she said, 'Well, her father can't take care of the baby, I understand.' And I said, 'Yeah, you understand right. He can't take care of the baby, but that's why he's going back to New Jersey with us.' "
Relocated to the house in Little Egg, James spent most of his time in bed. There, Joe remembered, he would sometimes sleep without waking for several days—"not to eat, not to go to the bathroom, nothing." By that point, Joe said, James was taking up to twenty pills a day for pain, including the drug OxyContin. As he told me this, Joe glanced out the window. "I never seen him use his drugs inappropriately," he said. "I can say that." He stopped, and pressed the heel of both hands to his eyes. "Whether he did . . ." He trailed off and sighed. "And then, on the other hand, like the lawyer said, what difference does it make anyway? He's dying anyway. That's not what killed him!"
Last October, shortly after receiving a letter from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner challenging the cause of James's death, the Zadroga family drove to New York to meet with Hirsch and hear his findings in detail, an experience that Joe described as "like getting hit over the head with a baseball bat." Joe recalled his wife's outrage. "She said, 'Are you calling my son a junkie? A drug user?' He said, 'No, no. I'm not. I'm not saying he used illegal drugs. They were legal drugs, but he used them wrong.' " The day after the meeting, Representative Maloney called. According to Joe, she gave her assurance that her opinion was unchanged, and urged him to call a press conference. "She said, 'We don't believe it. We'll fight it,' " he recalls.
Since then, the Zadroga story has been at a stalemate, with many officials unwilling to question either the accuracy of Hirsch's findings or the truthfulness of the Zadrogas' account. Shortly after the news broke, Mayor Bloomberg aroused fury among victims' families and in the press when he said, "We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes. It's just, in this case, science says this was not a hero." He soon apologized for his remark but stopped short of retracting it. The Mayor called Zadroga "a great N.Y.P.D. officer," adding opaquely, "It's a question of how you want to define what a hero is, and certainly I did not mean to hurt the family or impugn his reputation."
The question of what actually killed James Zadroga is one that public officials appear reluctant to answer candidly, and, increasingly, the debate surrounding the case seems to be less about scientific evidence than about public feeling. This is the view of Brian Monahan, a sociologist at Iowa State University who is working on a book on 9/11. "After 9/11, we suddenly had emerging all these perfect heroes, who stood against bin Laden, the perfect villain," he said, observing that Zadroga was also a natural icon: young, the first to die, a father. Aligning oneself with a hero, he added, is a convenient way to manage the chaos of a complicated event, and to present a point of view that can't be argued with. In that sense, he said, Zadroga was a valuable figure for politicians, 9/11 groups, and police unions—"anyone with a vested interest in how 9/11 illness was going to be treated."
When I spoke with Representative Maloney, she acknowledged the "confusion" created by Hirsch's finding. But she defended the idea that Zadroga's time at Ground Zero ultimately precipitated his decline, and the bill she introduced, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, is still making its way through Congress. Regardless of what eventually happened, Maloney argued, "James Zadroga would still be alive if not for 9/11."
The truth of this is hard to gauge. Four months after meeting with Joe, I wrote to the Zadrogas' lawyer, who agreed to fax me a copy of the results of James's 2003 biopsy, the one that Joe had said showed extensive lung damage. The document that arrived was eight pages long: a comprehensive report on the various tests and their findings. But its import was unequivocal. The lungs had only minor abnormalities and showed no evidence of talc or cellulose. When I contacted a pathologist unconnected with the case to ask whether this could have been an oversight, he scoffed, explaining that, under the polarized light that labs use to spot foreign particulate matter, such particles shine out like stars in the night sky. Had the material Breton found in Zadroga's lungs in 2006 been there in 2003, it would have lit up the lab.
A few days after receiving the biopsy report, I contacted Dr. Philip Landrigan, the physician who oversees Mt. Sinai's World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program. Landrigan has spent the past seven years tracking the health of twenty-five thousand workers and volunteers exposed to the dust cloud at Ground Zero and advocating additional funding for treatment and research. Zadroga's celebrity, he acknowledged, had helped advance the political cause of 9/11 survivors by "putting a human face on the statistics." When I asked whether this development might now create problems—whether there could be a backlash if it became known that Zadroga's death may not have been caused by exposure at Ground Zero—Landrigan said that he hoped it wouldn't. As for Zadroga's continued fame as the first dust victim, he shrugged it off. "It is what it is," he said. "It's a fact at this point."
But, while the biopsy sheds some light on the facts of Zadroga's death, it seems to make the events of his life even murkier. If Zadroga's lungs weren't significantly compromised, why did he undergo a biopsy? And if he wasn't mainlining drugs in early 2003—as the biopsy would indicate—when, and why, did he start?
Before I left Little Egg, Joe gave me a letter that he said James had written on the first anniversary of the attacks, at the behest of Ronda's father, a minister. It was morbid and bleak. Recalling his time at the towers, Zadroga described a landscape strewn with human remains: an ear fringed with hair, a dismembered foot. A year later, he reported that his health was bad—"I can't breathe, my throat is constantly sore, I'm always coughing," he wrote—and that he remained deeply troubled by his days at Ground Zero, plagued by nightmares, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Zadroga's memories seemed to overshadow even the birth of his first child, and he apparently saw himself as doomed. "Everyone praises the dead as heroes, as they should, but there are more living suffering than dead," he wrote. "The dead, their deaths were quick and painless, and mine has just begun." ♦


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ST. LOUIS - Matt Holliday was hit by a ball three times while he was in the batter's box. He was sore from head to toe.
Of course, he did have a great big smile on his face after another important victory for St. Louis.
Holliday drove in a run for the seventh consecutive game, helping Joe Kelly and the Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds 6-1 on Tuesday night.
St. Louis won for the sixth time in seven games, including the first two of its three-game series against third-place Cincinnati. The NL Central-leading Cardinals moved 1 1/2 games ahead of Pittsburgh, which lost to Milwaukee, and 4 1/2 games up on the Reds, who won the division last year.
Kelly (6-3) scattered eight hits and allowed one run in six innings. He also walked three but managed to improve to 6-0 since rejoining the starting rotation on July 6.
The 25-year-old Kelly has won each of his last three starts and five of his last six overall. He has a 2.08 ERA in 34 2-3 innings this month.
"I made pitches when I had to and I enjoyed that," Kelly said. "My arm felt good. They got guys in scoring position a couple times, I just tried to bear down and leave those guys out there."
St. Louis manager Mike Matheny is impressed with Kelly's recent run.
"Joe did a good job, he had great life again," Matheny said. "He just keeps making good starts for us."
Shin-Soo Choo homered for the Reds, who lost for the fourth time in five games. Cincinnati's last 13 batters went down in order in its third consecutive loss to St. Louis, making it 4-10 against the Cardinals this year.
The hot-hitting Holliday had a rough game at the plate, at least physically. He fouled two separate pitches off his foot and toe in different at-bats. He also was plunked on the shoulder by a pitch from Alfredo Simon in the eighth.
The last blow signalled the end of his day.
But he went 2 for 3, including an RBI single against Mat Latos in St. Louis' two-run first. He is batting .346 with three homers and 10 RBIs over his last seven games.
Holliday's RBI string is tied for the second-longest in the majors this season. Arizona slugger Paul Goldschmidt had an eight-game RBI run in early June.
Latos (13-5) gave up four runs and nine hits over six-plus innings. He has dropped two of his last three starts.
The Cardinals went 4 for 11 with runners in scoring position.
"That's the type of team that we are," Holliday said.
Holliday admitted that he was sore after the rough night. He even joked he would soon be wearing a catcher's shin guard to the plate to prevent any further damage.
The Cardinals needed just 14 pitches to take a 2-0 lead. Matt Carpenter and Carlos Beltran began the first back-to-back singles. Holliday then singled in Carpenter, who scored his major league-leading 100th run. Beltran scored when Allen Craig bounced into a double play.
Choo hit a leadoff drive in the fifth for his 100th career homer, but the Cardinals answered with single runs in the sixth and seventh and scored twice in the eighth.
Craig pushed the lead to 3-1 with a run-scoring double in the sixth, giving him 96 RBIs on the year. Carpenter brought in Jon Jay with a sacrifice fly in the seventh.
"A loss is a loss, you've just got to play better baseball," Cincinnati manager Dusty Baker said. "There are a few things we've still got to learn about playing winning baseball."
Baker was particularly upset with a baserunning error by Zack Cozart in the fourth inning. Cozart and Jay Bruce ended up on third base at the same time after Bruce was held while rounding third on a hit by Latos. The play ended the inning.
Had Cozart stopped at second and noticed Bruce was being held up, the Reds would have had the bases loaded for Choo.
"It's my (mistake) definitely," Cozart said. "It was a bad play. You have to keep your head up. When I got to third I was surprised Jay was even there. That was a big part of the game."
Baker was not in a forgiving mood.
"Sometimes guys have got to be held accountable for their actions," he said. "They're all big boys, they're all getting paid here."
NOTES: Adam Wainwright (15-7, 2.58 ERA) faces Homer Bailey (8-10, 3.71) in the final of the three-game series Wednesday. Bailey is 0-5 with a 6.90 ERA in seven career starts at Busch Stadium. ... St. Louis INF Pete Kozma is mired in a 0-for-23 slump. ... The Cardinals are 34-22 against NL Central opponents this season with 22 divisional games remaining. ... The Reds have spent the past 127 days in second, third or fourth place. ...Latos had two hits for his second multihit game of the season. ...The Cardinals have doubled in a season-high 18 consecutive games.


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A challenge to a previous legal determination. An appeal is directed towards a legal power higher than the power making the challenged determination. In most states and the federal system, trial court determinations can be appealed in appeals courts, and appeals court decisions can be appealed in a supreme court.
The person pursuing an appeal is called an appellant, while the person defending the lower court's ruling is the appellee.
Appeals can be either discretionary or of right. An appeal of right is one that the higher court must hear, if the losing party demands it, while a discretionary appeal is one that the higher court may, but does not have to, consider. For example, in the federal system, there is an appeal of right from the District Court to the Court of Appeals, but appeals from the Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court are discretionary.
Appeals do not always originate from court decisions. In administrative law, people are often allowed to appeal, in court, the decisions made by executive agencies.


text: Find in this WebRing sites from around the world pertaining to the marine electronics industry and related topics. Pictured on this page: a "giant box corer (spade corer); used on research vessels to take undisturbed surface samples (50 x 50 cm, 50 cm deep) from ocean floor sediments. Developed by USNEL (United States Navy Electronics Laboratory) during the nineteen seventies. This image shows the deployment of the corer from the research vessel POLARSTERN in the Southern Ocean off the shelf ice edge," photographed in 1985 by Hannes Grobe of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany. On the NavBar: marine radar, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, copyright 2005 by David Monniaux.


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Remember Me
Our goal is to promote the knowledge of the significant history of railroad passenger cars and trains. This includes the historical cars and trains of past centuries and of the present day Amtrak and commuter railroad operations, as well as the developing high speed rail operations. These goals are met through our activities, conferences, symposiums, field trips, excursions, and by communication through our website and future newsletters. The exchange of knowledge by education at our activities and the participation of the membership in this exchange will help us learn more of the history of passenger trains in different areas and eras. The PTHS has been under development since 2008 by those interested in the presentation, preservation, and exhibition of railroad passenger operational history. Presently, the PTHS is growing and will be managed by a five person Board of Directors which is selected from the membership at large. Many passenger train historians and excursion train operators and organizations are members.
The organization has a website and plans to publish an annual newsletter, with interesting articles, and news of historical events related to passenger trains that are of interest to the membership. The newsletter will feature articles provided from members and some featured contributors among the most knowledgeable in their field.Our annual conference is held in late April or early May and coincides with the creation of Amtrak which was formed from the remaining passenger train operators on May 1, 1971. It is attended by many of America's most successful rail passenger historians and the average railfan who wishes to learn about the great history of railroad passenger train operations. Many authors, artists, and photographers are regular exhibitors at the conferences and symposiums and offer many opportunities for networking and friendships to develop at these events. The PTHS annual meeting is one of many enjoyable railroad events held by the organization. Future chapters can have regional events, or may focus on a particular railroad, such as Amtrak or commuter railroad operations. We intend to work closely with other historical societies and organizations. If you are interested in passenger train history and like passenger cars, then you should consider membership with the


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RICHMOND, Va. – Winners of nine straight, the Virginia Commonwealth University men's basketball program is quickly gaining the attention of college basketball fans across the country.
The Rams will get a shot of gaining even more attention after ESPNU announced that VCU will travel to Wichita State out of the Missouri Valley Conference in its annual BracketBusters contest.
The game will be a primetime Friday night game with tip time set for 7 p.m. on ESPN2.
"It's a great opportunity to play a high-quality opponent from a great league," Head Coach Shaka Smart said. "The fact that it's a Friday night game on ESPN2 is an added bonus. We're definitely looking forward to it."
It will be only the second meeting ever between the two schools with the other coming on Dec. 28, 1996 when VCU dropped a road contest to the Shockers, 80-50.
The Shockers are currently 18-4 on the year and 9-2 in conference play, good for a tie atop the Missouri Valley standings. Senior J.T. Durley and junior David Kyles lead the way, both averaging over 11 points a contest.
In the latest RPI rankings released by the NCAA, VCU was 51st while Wichita State sat just above them at 49th.
It's the second time in the past five seasons that the Black & Gold have been paired with the MVC, the other coming in 2006-07 when VCU took on Bradley at home. That's also the last time the Rams compiled at least a nine-game winning streak and also the year VCU took down Duke in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
With the game being on ESPN2, VCU will now be on the ESPN family of networks no fewer than six times in 2010-11, the record is seven in 2007-08 and 2008-09.
The Black & Gold are one of five teams from the Colonial Athletic Association that will be in televised BracketBusters contests. Drexel, Old Dominion, George Mason and Hofstra will all be shown across the country.


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Talking Tibbs the Cat by Tap 'n Cap Apps
by via_web on
May 18, 2012
Filed under App DB, Entertainment, Games, iPhone Apps
Say "Hi!" to Talking Tibbs the Cat, he's your new best friend! He'll talk to you, repeat back in his own voice, and react to your touches!
Tap him on his arms, legs, body, or head to make him do things! You can also tickle him and make him giggle out loud! Upgrade to join Tibbs as he lets his imagination soar with 4 special "dress-up" animations!
He's such a cute little guy, Tibbs is sure to please people of all ages!
✔ Beautiful, professional quality 24fps animations
✔ Optimized for iPhone4+
✔ Tap his various body parts or tickle his tummy to interact with him!
✔ Talk to him, he'll listen and repeat what you say in his own kitty voice!
✔ If Tibbs gets bored he'll let you know by yawning and eventually falling completely asleep!
✔ Upgrade in-app for four special animations, including Tibbs playing dress-up in amazing costumes and doing a secret dance!
✘ Please speak close to the mic for best results
✘ Designed & recommended for iPhone4+
We hope you enjoy Talking Tibbs the Cat!
Developer Website: http://tapncap.com/talkingtibbs/


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Airbus will demonstrate the leading position of its comprehensive product family at this year's ILA Berlin Air Show, with a special focus on its highly efficient and popular widebody product range. The highlight of the opening day will be the first ever display of an A350 XWB test aircraft (MSN 4) at a German Airshow.
Compared to current generation long-range twin-engine aircraft, the A350 XWB is up to 25 per cent more fuel efficient thanks to an intelligent use of advanced materials, latest state-of-the-art aerodynamics, cutting edge systems and new generation engines. Its Xtra wide fuselage provides generous space for passenger in all classes with 18" wide seats at nine-abreast as standard in economy class. Entry into service is planned for the fourth quarter 2014.
Underpinning its leadership in the widebody market, a customer Airbus A380 will also be on show, as well as an A400M on static and flying display during the first days of the show. The fuel-saving and cost-effective Airbus widebody product line is unique, offering airlines tailored and efficient growth opportunities, while the A400M is a true game-changer in modern air-transport capabilities for military and humanitarian missions.
Continuous innovation is a key driver for Airbus. The commitment in this field ranges from constant improvements in series product lines giving customers more added value and productivity, to industry-wide activities in order to reduce aviation's environmental footprint. More announcements in this regard will be made during the show.
The outside static display is complemented by the Airbus Group Pavilion, located at the Western Chalet Row (8-14). It features large cutaway models (1/20) of the Airbus A330, A350 XWB and the A380. In addition, four German research projects will be displayed at the booth of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) in Hall 2, booth No. 2219.
Media will be invited to the Airbus Press Conference on Tuesday, 20th May at 10.00 in the ILA press centre, Hall 3. Notice of any announcements during the week will be posted in the ILA press centre and in the Airbus Group Pavilion press area.
Source: Airbus.


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Testing new and potential life-saving drugs can be a harrowing process because of the risk involved with not knowing how a substance will react once in the human body. Harvards scientists are hoping that microchips, such as the one pictured above, can mimic the function of human organs well enough for them to test those drugs.
While the chip doesn't look like a human organ in any way, Inhabitat says that the little, seemingly simple objects are more than capable of replicating the processes of those organs.
Each faux organ is made from a clear flexible polymer and is about the size of an average computer memory stick. The microchip organs feature hollow microfluidic channels that are lined with living human cells. Although they don't resemble the real shape of these organs inside the body, the cells allow scientists to observe how these organs might react to new drugs.
The Harvard researchers hope to make 10 of these chips (each one associated with a different organ) and has FDA Chief Scientist Jesse Goodman so excited that he believes it could be the best way to test new drugs. Along with $US37 million in funding from DARPA, that's a strong endorsement. [Harvard via Inhabitat]