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Secret is hoping to grow bigger and capitalize on SXSW with two new features. Share lets you post any Secret you see to Twitter, Facebook, SMS, or email. Nearby lets you opt in to seeing Secrets shared by people nearby, which could create an ad hoc community of users at SXSW. The two could draw more people into Secret and keep them there even if they don't have friends on the app.
Secret, an "anonymish" sharing app that lets you post thoughts and images without your name attached, only launched five weeks ago. But it spread like wildfire in Silicon Valley and has caused a renewed interest in anonymity after a decade where Facebook's real names and authenticated identity reigned.
Secret has seen both cyberbullying and compassionate community. In one Secret you might see a public figure insulted, while the next features commenters rallying in support of someone who's depressed. I'll be doing a fireside chat with Secret founder David Byttow at SXSW tomorrow, Saturday March 8th at 5pm In Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center. We'll be discussing these benefits and pitfalls of anonymity.
A Little More Context, A Little Less Secret
While technically everything posted on Secret is public, the fact that its juicy little nuggets could get shared on Twitter and Facebook might scare people away revealing their more scandalous thoughts. The Secret team is betting that the growth achieved through public sharing will offset any chilling effect it causes.
In a blog post, the Secret team explained that "Whether you're reading secrets from your friends or someone at the same event, we believe that knowing how you're connected to the author of a post is a big part of what makes Secret fun and different. We hope these new features will help you discover more of the innermost thoughts of your friends and those close to you."
When you share with Secret, tweets come out looking like this:
It seems like Secret rushed out the update for SXSW and didn't have all the bugs worked out. The sides of images seem to be getting cut off in Twitter cards and the text within the image isn't wrapping to the next line like it does in the app, as you can see above. [Update: Secret says it has fixed this bug.]
More worrisome is the formatting of the tweets. It looks as if you're the author of the Secret you shared, not that it's someone else's that you're re-sharing. Typically, social syndication features like this are used to let people take a piece of content they created on one network and distribute it on another. But that convention could mislead people into thinking it's you cheating on your boyfriend, taking drugs in the woods, buckling under work pressure, or bragging about your sexual escapades. I've already had people on Twitter worried the tweet above meant I was the one desperate for someone to confess their affection.
Most apps launch with a minimum viable product. The adage is that with startups, you're falling out of the sky and trying to build the plane before you hit the ground. And that usually works.
But few startups gain such traction (even if only in Silicon Valley) so quickly and get thrust into the spotlight the way Secret has. Its early community and feature set could set the tone of the app for the foreseeable future. A false move in terms of moderation policies, security, or this new Share feature could leave a bad taste that might be hard to wash out. But that scrutiny is the price you pay for rapid success in a frontier territory like anonymous mobile sharing.


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VMware is working on products that will give enterprises more control over Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, including how users are authenticated, company CTO Steve Herrod, said in an interview on Tuesday.
VMware's acquisition of cloud service vendor TriCipher in August will form the basis of products that should help the IT department get more control. TriCipher manages authentication for SaaS applications, according Herrod, who thinks of TriCipher as a switchboard service in the sky.
TriCipher's technology takes credentials stored in Active Directory or other internal directory services and translates them into a form of authentication that the SaaS applications can understand, according to Herrod. This will allow the IT department to control who gets access, and also easily remove credentials from users that leave the company, he said.
Besides authentication, TriCipher's technology will also allow IT departments to automatically provision SaaS applications to their users, according to Herrod. Users then pick the services they need from a menu in their browser.
The first VMware offering based on TriCipher's will be released during the first half of next year, and will be the first instance of Project Horizon, which aims to allow the delivery and management of cloud-based desktop applications to any sort of user device.
VMware hasn't decided if TriCipher's technology will be integrated into an existing product or be turned into a stand-alone product, or what it will cost.
For VMware, the proliferation of SaaS applications will affect every layer of its software stack, according to Herrod.
For example, many of its service provider partners will end up hosting the services, according to Herrod.
Also, VMware is hoping the applications will be built using its vFabric cloud application platform, he said. vFabric was announced at the end of August, and it combines the Spring Java development framework with a lightweight application server, cloud-ready messaging, load balancing and management, of both data and performance.
Today, VMware has a person who goes out and talks to SaaS vendors to help VMware understand more about the kinds of challenges they are facing when building apps, and then reports to Herrod. It will end up being a win-win situation: VMware can do more business and the SaaS vendors can take advantage of VMware's reputation among enterprises as they try to increase adoption of their services, according to Herrod.

subset: commoncrawl


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Deemed indispensable by the families who hire them, why are domestic workers excluded from legal protection?
When Juana Flores first arrived in the United States from Mexico 27 years ago, she found a job taking care of a child for what seemed like a huge amount of money: $75 every two weeks. After the first two months, her employers told Flores that she would need to care for two additional children. "A few months after that, the first boy's father began to intimidate me, to insult me, and talk to me in suggestive ways," says Flores, speaking through a translator.
While the husband was responsible for most of the intimidation, his wife overworked Flores, expecting her to do all the cleaning in addition to the child care Flores had signed on for. Her employers psychologically bullied her by telling her that at any moment someone could break into the house and assault her or the children. "I had to always be there, always alert, because at any moment someone could do something horrible to the children," she says.
Flores was a textbook example of a vulnerable domestic worker. Alone in a foreign land, she was naïve and unfamiliar with her new surroundings. Like most domestic workers, she worked alone in an isolated position without the support of fellow workers—much less a union.
Ninety-five percent of domestic workers are women, and they're doing "women's work"—work that has traditionally been seen as having little financial value in the marketplace. They do the work that wives, slaves, or unemployed family members (grandmothers, for instance) used to perform without pay. Domestic workers include nannies like Flores as well as housecleaners and caretakers for the elderly and disabled, often called home health care workers. Their numbers are growing: There are at least 1.8 million home health care workers in the United States, with that number expected to swell to more than 3.2 million by 2020. More families are also hiring nannies and housecleaners.
It's often thankless work. According to a 2012 survey from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, 23 percent of domestic workers are paid below the state minimum wage, with the average hourly pay for live-in workers being $6.15. That pay isn't low because the work is easy: Twenty-five percent of live-in workers were not able to get more than five hours of uninterrupted sleep in the week before they answered the survey, and 36 percent of live-ins have experienced threats, insults, or verbal abuse.
Legal protections? Think again
Domestic workers, like agricultural workers, have long been part of the universe of "excluded workers," that is, excluded from union support. That's because the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically barred domestic workers from forming unions. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 also excluded them. That act, which established a minimum wage and overtime pay for many jobs, and which made child labor illegal under most circumstances, was a huge victory for unions and created the basis of the middle class. The exclusions were concessions to Southern legislators who would have otherwise voted against the acts.
"Why would you exclude these most vulnerable employees?" asks Juan Perea, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago. "It was racism, pure and simple, and the current abuses are the legacies of it. It was anticipated to affect blacks; now it mostly affects immigrants."
The exclusions weren't only at the behest of some openly racist Southerners, however. Depression-era progressive women's organizations that had fought hard for the earlier labor bills were not in favor of a minimum wage or guarantees for decent working conditions for domestic workers. Women's organizations in New York were overwhelmed by the negative reaction to the idea from their members. Those matrons explained they were good to their "help" and didn't need government labor rules invading the privacy of their homes.
That's still a concern today. Anne Cohen, a disability consultant who has a disability herself, explains that many people with disabilities were against the 2013 California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights because they wanted to be able to hire, manage, and fire their own workers without red tape or meddling by a union. Cohen finds that people with disabilities are saying, "Don't make decisions on our behalf without us."
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed that bill into law after those who supported it made compromises so that several disability groups—and the California Catholic Conference (the lobbying arm of the California bishops)—supported it. In its final form, the bill only provides basic overtime protection to domestic workers. It didn't go nearly as far as the groundbreaking New York Domestic Worker's Bill of Rights, passed in 2010. In addition to overtime pay, that law provides domestic workers with a day of rest every seven days, three days of paid vacation a year, and protections against discrimination. California advocates were pleased nevertheless.
Strength in numbers
An Old Testament author sums it up: "Two are better than one: They get a good wage for their toil. If the one falls, the other will help the fallen one. But woe to the solitary person! If that one should fall, there is no other to help" (Eccles. 4:9-10).
No one understands that precept better than domestic workers, the archetype of the "solitary person." In response, over the past two decades domestic workers have founded and furthered advocacy groups. Juana Flores found the courage to escape her abusive job—she simply walked away from it. The experience led her to join a San Francisco advocacy group for domestic workers, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, in 1991. An active volunteer for many years, she was eventually asked to join its staff and now leads workshops to help other women.
Unions are paying attention, too, supporting new efforts to protect domestic workers with laws that cover other workers. "A significant theme in [the 2013] AFL-CIO convention was connecting with workers who are not traditionally part of the labor movement," says Father Clete Kiley, director for Immigration Policy at the union Unite Here. "The National Domestic Workers Alliance was a very big presence."
The National Domestic Workers Alliance now has 39 local member organizations, including Arise Chicago, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and El Centro Humanitario Para Los Trabajadores in Denver. The groups won several huge victories in 2013: The Department of Labor now includes home health care workers in minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, and Hawaii and California joined New York in adopting domestic workers' bills of rights.
El Centro, housed in a lilac-painted former warehouse in downtown Denver, was founded to support male day laborers but expanded to cover domestic workers, because they kept showing up. During a recent visit, Ai-jen Poo, head of the national alliance, sat at a table with eight domestic workers. Poo admired the bounty of red tomatoes and green chili peppers from the women's gardens at the table's center, as well as the prepared dishes at a side table, saying it was also an Asian tradition to bring food to gatherings.
The workers told her their stories, often using the words dignity and respect. Poo, named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2012, told the group how she began organizing in New York City 17 years ago after meeting four Filipina domestic workers. "They were tired of being abused," Poo says, "tired of being told they couldn't use the same bathroom as the family, tired of not being paid on time."
The Filipina women told Poo it didn't have to be this way. In Hong Kong, where a couple of them had previously worked, the law required employers to offer contracts to domestic workers that specified wages, time off, holidays, and working conditions. Domestic workers had organized there and set higher standards.
"They were shocked when they came to America and found that dog walkers were treated with more respect," Poo says. "They told me, 'We need to organize, so we can work with contracts, and get days of rest and holidays.' "
It was a slow start. A hundred flyers for a meeting would bring in five women. Over time the group discovered that offering nanny training, cleaning training, and other educational programs brought in women who were then willing to speak out. Their numbers grew from a handful in 1998 to 3,000 in 2003.
They launched a six-year campaign for the country's first domestic workers' bill of rights that became law in New York in 2010. After the recent successes in Hawaii and California, advocacy groups are now working on campaigns in Massachusetts, Illinois, Colorado, and elsewhere.
"It's not everything we need, but it's a beginning," Poo says. "It sends a message to employers that they need to follow the rules and treat us with respect."
Employers who care
Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Association has supported domestic workers' bills of rights and similar legal protections. Representatives from Hand in Hand, as well as individual employers such as Kathy Barry, spoke out in favor of the California bill. Barry's support included traveling with her longtime housekeeper to the capitol in Sacramento to lobby. "It didn't seem fair to me that so many of the workers that our economy depends upon are badly treated and poorly paid," Barry says.
A professor and clinical psychologist, Barry wouldn't be able to work outside the house if she couldn't hire someone to care for her home. "Women's work would come to a grinding halt if we weren't able to employ domestic workers," she says.
Barry's current housekeeper has worked for her a couple days a week for 15 years. Prior to that, she employed another woman for about 10 years. Barry, who was raised Catholic, keeps track of what the going rate is in her California community and makes sure she pays well above that.
Hand in Hand's "One Step Up" campaign asks employers to make an improvement to their current employment practices, whatever they may be. According to the Hand in Hand website, "By professionalizing these relationships, we show value for the work and help bring dignity and respect to our homes, families, and the domestic workers whom we employ."
That's because, ironically, part of the reason domestic workers are exploited is because employers tend to think of them as part of the family. "A lot of exploitation isn't nastiness, it's just not thinking of the person as a paid employee," says Tony Robinson, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver.
Out of sight, out of mind
The issue of social justice for domestic workers has been invisible to most Catholics—even those who care about social justice—if the lack of initiatives, pastoral letters, or books on the issue is any measure. "Domestic workers are perhaps the most invisible and isolated workers in our society," says Jesuit Father Thomas Massaro, dean of the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University in California and the author of several books on Catholic social justice. "You just don't see them unless you knock on the door."
"This should be hugely important to Catholics," says Kiley. "Catholic teaching can work to change the global acceptance that it's always about cheaper labor, leaving people in desperate situations and having to put up with a lot of abuse. It's almost unfathomable that people could go to work every day and have no protections."
"They're doing a difficult job and taking care of our loved ones," says Anna Jakubek, the Polish-language organizer for Arise Chicago, an interfaith advocacy group for which Father Larry Dowling is board president; their religious advisory board includes Bishops John Manz and Alberto Rojas, both auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of Chicago.
"We're not saying they're always abused; some are treated very well," says Jakubek. "But guidelines are needed to protect both families and workers. We're asking, 'Why is this not part of the law?' "
Our Lady of Guadalupe in San Jose, California is one parish that has taken on the issue of social justice for domestic workers. Its pastor, Father Jon Pedigo, considers the issue to be inextricably entangled with social justice for immigrants because so many domestic workers are immigrants. Pedigo includes announcements from the pulpit on upcoming actions, and he preaches on social justice. "Not about a labor campaign or workers' rights, but telling a human story," he says. "How a struggling person is able to overcome through her faith, her community, and her pushing back—what she does to recover her dignity. Telling the story is a healing moment for the community."
Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, says her group also approaches congregations with messages about their concern for specific people rather than generic workers' rights. "As a society we can raise core standards for everyone, raise the minimum wage, for instance," she says. "Congregations are very open to this message."
Pedigo would like to see the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sponsor a hearing so that the bishops could hear people's stories. "They could then hold a reflection with these individuals, and together write up a pastoral response. It would address questions such as: What is the obligation of the Christian and the Catholic tradition? What is our response? This would be consistent with Pope Francis' methodology of listening, accompanying, and, at the end, issuing a proclamation. This would return us to our gospel roots of listening and accompaniment."
The bishops might begin with Eva Aucapina's story. When Aucapina first arrived in the United States, she took a position as a live-in domestic worker, earning $100 a week for around-the-clock work. After talking with other domestic workers, she learned that her sense of injustice over her low wages was correct; what she was being paid wasn't just, and others in her situation earned more. She also saw a news segment on television about organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) marching in the streets for domestic workers.
When Governor Brown signed the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, Aucapina was the woman with the big smile in the pink CHIRLA shirt standing at his side.
Speaking through a translator, she explains that she got involved because she realized one day that she had to act. In an act of bravery and determination, she decided at some personal risk that she had to join the movement for domestic workers' rights. "I'm not going to be a spectator anymore," she thought. "I'm going out to march. I know that the Holy Spirit leads me. With God's help we are mutually helping each other."
This article appeared in the January 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 79, No. 1, pages 17-21).
Want to read more? Here are some tips for employers of domestic workers and some questions you should ask to make sure you're taking care of your caretaker.
Image: Flickr photo cc by Dzhingarova


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Is This News a Crushing Blow to Obamacare's Credibility?
There isn't much that the stock market dislikes more than uncertainty; and there are few pieces of legislation to have worked their way through Congress with more question marks than the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known also as Obamacare.
This health reform bill, which will greatly expand the number of insured individuals in the U.S. while also capping insurers' profits, is set to go into full effect in just under six months... or so we thought.
Source: White House on Flickr.
A crushing blow to the U.S. labor force
Having just this weekend examined the merits of whether the federal government was ready to handle the technological, staffing, and educational aspects of setting up the complex health insurance data center and leading 34 separate state health exchanges, we received what I consider to be devastating news last night from the White House. According to the Obama administration, it will be announcing later this week a postponement to the health care law requirements (known as the employer mandate) for medium-to-large business for one additional year, until Jan. 1, 2015.
If you recall, as part of Obamacare, businesses with 50 or more employees are required to offer health care options to their full-time employees (defined under the PPACA as working 30 or more hours). Although these businesses aren't obligated to pay a cent of their employees' health care premiums, if the costs of their employees' premiums tops 9.5% of their income, the business is penalized between $2,000 and $3,000 on a per-employee basis.
The prospect of this penalty sent shockwaves throughout the large business sector and prompted job and hour cuts across a number of industries. Regal Entertainment , the nation's largest movie theater operator, slashed weekly hours for thousands of its employees and squarely blamed Obamacare for the cuts. Medical device maker Stryker took a slightly different approach but delivered similar end results. Because of the 2.3% medical device excise tax, which will be used to help fund the Medicaid expansion, Stryker shed 5% of its workforce in order to save more than $100 million annually.
The decision to give medium-to-large businesses an extra year to prepare was summed up by the Associated Press, which had been in discussion with White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, as: "She [Jarrett] said since enforcing the coverage mandate is dependent on businesses reporting about their workers' access to insurance, the administration decided to postpone the reporting requirement, and with it, the mandate to provide coverage."
While the explanation by Jarrett makes sense, the only reward here is for U.S. businesses, which will get another year of potentially full-time employment from their workforce. In return, the U.S. labor force gets another 18 months of uncertainty as to how their employer is going to handle the implementation of Obamacare. Although I noted a study a few months ago that showed only 11% of employers had altered their hiring habits, or planned to cut hours or jobs in anticipation of Obamacare, if any of these employers are big corporations, then we could have a very large problem on our hands.
Not so fast, individual health insurance buyers...
If you've been jubilantly cheering the delay up until now and are an individual health insurance purchaser, you may not be nearly as excited to find out that the individual mandate willstill go into full effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
A big component to yesterday's delay announcement has to do with seeing how quickly workers adapt to the new law and sign up for insurance. Admittedly, the penalty for failing to sign up for health insurance for the average worker is going to be pretty low in 2014 (a flat fee of $95 or a percentage of income), but will escalate each year through 2016. There has been talk that individuals may choose to take the penalty since it would be, in some cases, considerably cheaper than purchasing even the least costly health insurance plan on the health exchanges. If a lot of individuals choose to go this route, delaying the employer mandate isn't going to make much difference to the success of Obamacare.
The other piece of the puzzle I examined over the weekend and relates to whether the government is ready to implement the insurance exchanges in just 90 days. If history serves as any indicator, it's going to be a glitch-filled and shaky start. It took the Bush administration three full years to prep for the implementation of the Medicaid Modernization Act, with work on that project continuing up to, and after, its launch. Nowadays, with even more riding on the line with regard to cloud-computing technology and needing to simultaneously access numerous branches of the government to determine everything from eligibility to health-plan conformity, the pressure is many times greater.
Is Obamacare's credibility gone?
Regardless of your personal opinion on the merits of Obamacare, the fact of the matter has been that many of the initial promises of the bill haven't been adhered to thus far.
In February, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, proposed a 2.2% reimbursement rate decrease to Medicare Advantage health-benefit providers. Though a bit steeper than many had expected, the reduction proposal followed the basic expectation that the government was going to reduce its cash disbursements to for-profit health-care business. However, following two months of some 160 lawmakers and insurers lobbying the CMS, it decided in April to reverse its decision and propose a 3.3% increase to Medicare Advantage reimbursement rates! At the time, it was great news for Humana and Universal American, which derive about two-thirds and three-quarters of their revenue from Medicare Advantage plans. But, it set an even greater precedence in the sector that health insurers weren't going to cede their pricing power to the government.
History practically repeated itself just a few weeks later when the CMS reversed its decision yet again on reimbursement rates, this time for acute-care hospital providers like HCA Holdings and Tenet Healthcare. Unlike with Medicare Advantage providers, there wasn't any lobbying involved, just a mere reversal of opinion to raise reimbursement rates for acute-care providers by 0.8% and 1.1% for outpatient acute-care providers. The initial assessment by the CMS had called for a drop of around 1% in reimbursement rates.
Then came yesterday's decision to back down from the employer mandate deadline and push it back one year, which multiple news outlets have referred to as more politically motivated than anything else with elections coming up in mid-2014.
One big benefit and a potentially huge problem
There is a chance this move could have benefits to the insurance sector and health-benefit providers like WellPoint in that it gives businesses an extra year to figure out how to operate with a part-time labor force and exempt themselves from the penalties that could be associated with needing to offer health insurance and subsidizing their employees. If medium-to-large businesses choose to reduce hours, it could cause employees in increasing number to seek out insurance plans on the state-run exchanges, ultimately validating the effectiveness of Obamacare and making WellPoint -- which purchased AMERIGROUP last year to expand its individual market Medicaid-based member group -- look like a genius.
Conversely, separating the effective dates of the individual and employer mandates makes a difficult bill to understand even more complex. More so than that, it could potentially reduce confidence in a bill that registered its second-lowest favorable rating since it was passed, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's latest tracking poll. If approval ratings for Obamacare continue to wane, individuals may simply opt to take the penalty rather than sign up for health care, adversely impacting insurers like WellPoint.
The one thing I can tell you is that I'm very eager to see what the next approval rating for Obamacare is according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Are you still in the dark about how Obamacare might affect you and your portfolio? Don't worry -- you're not alone. To help prepare investors for the massive changes coming to the American health care system, The Motley Fool created a special free report that makes this complex topic easily understandable. Download "Everything You Need to Know About Obamacare" and discover how the law may impact your taxes, health insurance, and investments. Click here for your free copy today.
The article Is This News a Crushing Blow to Obamacare's Credibility? originally appeared on Fool.com.
Fool contributor Sean Williams has no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on CAPS under the screen name TMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle @TMFUltraLong.The Motley Fool owns shares of, and recommends, WellPoint. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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Gawker Dating: Uniting You in Awkwardness
As something of a social experiment, Gawker is introducing a relatively lo-fi dating service! It'll take place in the comments, under the tag #gawkerdating. Leave a want ad, a picture, or both!
We got the idea from our nerdy younger siblings over at io9, who have had a dating service for their commenters for some time now. You needn't be a die-hard commenter to enjoy the romance, though. If you'd like to participate but aren't yet a commenter, consult our Community FAQs and follow the instructions on how to sign-up for an account.
Once you're signed up and approved, simply go to the Gawker Dating tag page and leave a personal (what you're looking for, who you are, etc.) in the "Share" box. (It should do it automatically if you're on the page already, but double check to make sure there is a #gawkerdating tag somewhere in your comment so it will show up in the proper place.) If you're ballsy enough to want to upload a picture, just click the "Upload Image" button in the comment box and either select one from your computer or from the web.
If you see something you like when perusing others' ads, go to their commenter page (by clicking on their name), send them a private message, and have at it, loverboy/girl. Or you can reply to the comment itself if voyeurism turns you on.
There aren't really any rules beyond don't post anything you're not comfortable with strangers reading. Pertinent details like who (or what) you're into and looking for will obviously help increase your chances of success. Also, any sharing of addresses, phone numbers, etc. should be done through private messaging or email rather than on the #gawkerdating tag page. Just for safety's sake! We don't want any murders on our hands.
Beyond that, have fun! Hook up, date, get married, have miserable acrimonious divorces, take it as far as you want! The staff might occasionally pop in and choose to highlight a particularly good posting, but don't worry: We'll never make fun of your crushing loneliness. We'll just help you alleviate it!
Happy hunting!


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Recent Cassini images of Saturn's moon Enceladus backlit
by the sun show the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of
material that towers over the south polar region. The image
was taken looking more or less broadside at the "tiger stripe"
fractures observed in earlier Enceladus images. It shows discrete
plumes of a variety of apparent sizes above the limb of the moon.
The greatly enhanced and colorized image shows the enormous
extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume.
Imaging scientists, as reported in the journal Science on March 10,
2006, believe that the jets are geysers erupting from pressurized
subsurface reservoirs of liquid water above 273 degrees Kelvin
(0 degrees Celsius).
This caption was updated on March 9, 2006.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.


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In his new book, Jeremy Rifkin focuses on the value crisis of contemporary capitalism based on the revolution in marginal costs which destroys the profit rate. He concludes that this will mean that the economy and society will re-orient itself around collaborative commons, with a more peripheric role for the market dynamics. In this, Jeremy Rifkin joins the founding charter of the P2P Foundation, which was precisely created in 2005 to observe, study and promote this transition.
Past historical phase transitions, say the transition from the Roman Empire slave-based system to feudal serfdom, or the transition of feudalism to capitalism, where not exactly smooth affairs, so it may be un-realistic to expect a smooth and unproblematic phase transition towards a post-capitalist social order.
To get a better understanding of how this transition could occur, we can do two things. First, we can look at past transitions, such as transition to feudalism, and ask ourselves what this means for the current one; second, we can look at the micro-economy of the already existing commons economy, and perhaps deduce from this the future outlines of the social order to come. Follow me in these two explorations.
Most historical empires followed the process outlined by the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun: at a certain stage of development, the benefits of the expansion are no longer sufficient to outpace the rise of the costs of managing complexity, the empire starts to decline and is taken over by neighboring 'barbaric' tribes ... But Roman transition did much more than that: it created an entirely new economic and social system. Faced with the crisis of Roman globalization, i.e. a dearth of slaves and gold, Roman emperors and the more intelligent parts of the elite, switched to the emerging coloni system, i.e. a system of land-bound agrarian serfs.
The transition dynamic can be summarized as:
1)a crisis occurs in the dominant system;
2)an exodus occurs at the bottom of society in the producing class (from slaves to serfs, from serfs to labor, from labor to peer producer);
3)a section of the managerial class orients itself to the new mode of value creation and distribution.
Hence the paradox that it is actually a section of the former ruling class that funds and creates the new modalities. Reality check today: the economic meltdown is causing an exodus of labor to freelance status, unemployment and peer production; a section of capital, netarchical capital, invests in the commons and sharing-based social media. Think IBM, which has morphed to a certain degree into a Linux-based consulting company; think Facebook, paradoxically enabling and empowering self-organization and p2p social logics on a global scale.
A second factor, based on the resource crisis of the Roman Empire, is a transition from economies of scale, to economies of scope, i.e. 'doing more with the same thing.' Hence, the feudal system relocalized production in local domains, the Catholic Church and its monasteries created a global open design community at the scale of Europe, and the monks mutualized the physical infrastructures of production and became the engineers of the first medieval industrial revolution (Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages). Note that this was NOT a smooth transition, and took almost five centuries of instability before its consolidation after the first European Revolution of 975 (the Peace of God movement led by the monks which created the new feudal social order that would blossom in the 10th to 13th centuries).
Reality check today: the free software, free culture, open design and hardware movements are mutualizing knowledge, while the sharing economy and the hackerspace/makerspace/fablab/coworking movements are mutualizing physical infrastructures. Just as after the 5th century, the transition towards economies of scope has started.
The third lesson is crucial: political and social revolution is preceded by the emergence, within the old system, of the new productive system and its value logic. Not the other way around, as the socialist and marxist tradition has claimed. Today, in the very womb of capitalism, the new mode of production, the new way of value creation and distribution, is already emerging and growing, but under the domination of the old system still, but, as its logic is fundamentally different of the logic of capital, it cannot possibly be subsumed forever, and prepares the ground for a structural transformation. This structural transformation, or 'phase transition', will make the emergent subsystem into the new dominant logic. Today, the economy based on common knowledge pools is already estimated at 1/6th of GDP in the US (17 million workers). Netarchical capitalism, the forces of capital that are funding and enabling the transition towards the collaborative commons, though under their own conditions, are a increasingly strong sector of the economy, but their very parasital mode of operation (i.e. expropriation of nearly 100% of the value created by human cooperation), makes it impossible for them to be the next ruling class. A capitalism that doesn't pay its value creators simply cannot exist in the long term as a stable system. This is why Jeremy Rifkin is entirely correct in his prediction for the future.
2.Looking at the already existing collaborative commons economy.
So what is the existing commons economy? It's the economy of commons-oriented peer production, first described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks. It consists of productive communities of contributors, paid or unpaid, who are contributing, not to privatized knowledge, but to common pools of knowledge, code and design, which fuels a new commons-oriented economy. It's the economy of open knowledge, free software, open design and open hardware, more and more connected to practices of open and distributed manufacturing. It's the economy fueled by the exodus from waged labor, into a freelance economy of young urban knowledge workers, who live from the market economy, but produce more and more for open knowledge pools.
It has a fairly clear institutional structure that prefigures the commons society to come.
Unlike proprietary capitalism, the value is deposited by a community of contributors in a common pool ; this is the core of the new value creation; this is the sphere of abundant knowledge that can be shared and reproduced at marginal cost; the infrastructure of cooperation is empowered and enabled by a new type of for-benefit associations, which do not command and control the production, but make it possible. They are most often foundations, like the Apache Foundation or the Gnome Foundation; around this is constituted a entrepreneurial coalition of enterprises, which provides employment to an increasing number of peer producers: 75% of linux contributors are paid by enterprises who operate on the market , and create market value on top of the commons. Other forms of peer-driven economies are constituted around distributed labor (crowdsourcing), social media (Facebook, Twitter). This new form of netarchical capital (the hierarchy of the network, hence 'net'-'archical') that at the same time enables and empowers social cooperation and collective value creation through sharing and the commons, also captures the value.
In this transitional model, still capital-based but already working around a commons that has an entirely different logic, that is already no longer a commodity, that is already no longer based on a command hierarchy, that is based on the self-allocation of effort through a distribution of tasks instead of a division of labor. In the more extreme variants of this model, we see 100% of the value creation carried out through free human cooperation, but also 100% of the value capture done by the proprietary platform owners. This 'value crisis', where no value flows back to the value creators, clearly show that it is a transitional model, not bound to last. How could a capitalism function, where none of the created value returns to the value creators. Who will buy the products ?
Hence the increasing contradiction in a system where the ability to directly create use value in the commons rises exponentially, but the capacity to monetize these efforts only grows linearly, and is captured without return in terms of livelihood.
Thus the need to harmonize the value distribution mode, in an increasingly dysfunctional capitalism, with the value creation mode. Bottom-up, the new type of enterpreneurs are experimenting with new types of open business models, which recognize the characteristics of the commons. But this will not be enough, restoring the value loop between value creation and value realization will be the key challenge of the phase transition.
3.Facilitating the transitions
The most interesting experiment is happening in Ecuador, where the author of this article has been asked to be the research director of a research project to plan a national transition towards a social knowledge economy. It is the first time that a nation-state recognizes the necessity of such a transition.
They have asked a team of research to create a framework and ten policy papers, that create both the material and immaterial conditions to re-orient the economy, and hence the social and economic system, around open knowledge commons in every field of social, economic and political activity. Following Rifkin's lead, the internet of knowledge creation, driven by common-based pools; could be matched with an internet of energy and manufacturing. Imagine that the neo-colonial economy of Ecuador, which still experts raw material like oil and bananas with low added value, and has to import consumption and production goods with high added value, would develop its own domestic industries, by combining cooperation with global open design communities, and local communities of practice (say in the field of open agricultural machine design and production), and would actually produce these tools and machines locally, close to the place of need. Today, in the neoliberal globalized economy, the cost of transportation is three times the cost of production, and IP-based profits trump the profits in material production. This is why open hardware can be produced consistently at about one eight of the cost of production of proprietary hardware. Imagine that a country like Ecuador, would systematically follow the advice of Joshua Pearce in his book, Open Source Lab (Pearce, Joshua M. Open-Source Lab. Elsevier, 2013), which shows how scientific labs can be built at about 10% of the cost, by systematically opting for open scientific instruments ? It is to early to tell to which degree Ecaudor will indeed follow the recommendations, but that it is contemplating such a transition, shows that the maturity of the emerging mode of production, is much more advanced than most analysts believe. This national effort is already matched by remarkable experiences at the local (city) and regional level in different parts of the world.
4.In conclusion: some recommendations
Our own recommendation is the following (in detail here): open design communities should move to the use of reciprocity-based commons licenses, which unlike the General Public License, allows for the creation of cooperative and reciprocity-based forms of material production, i.e. 'ethical', 'not-for-profit' enterpreneurial coalitions, formed by the commoners themselves. Once constituted, the members of such coalitions, operating in solidarity around the same commons, could move forward to new practices such as open book accounting and open supply chains. If this were done, peer production would become capable of insuring its self-reproduction outside of the sphere of the accumulation of capital.
Through mutual coordination, the already existing, stigmergy-based mutual coordination of 'immaterial' production, would become applicable to material production. In other words, the system of allocation of resources through market price signals, as well as the internal planning that takes place in large enterprises, would be matched by an emerging sphere that would allocate resources through mutual coordination. If the micro-economic model that we discussed in section 2 would grow to become a societal model, we would see that the core of society would have become a productive civil society, organized around contributory commons; we would see that the state would have been transformed into a Partner-State, which like the micro-economic for-benefit associations, would enable and empower autonomous social production on a societal scale; finally, a post-capitalist market economy would have been constituted by ethical enterpreneurial coalitions, who would use their surplus and profit to realize their social goals.


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Army Corpsman Barebacks A Marine Corp Staff Sergeant
You guys are definitely going to love this new video from All American Heroes. Army Corpsman Logan is back to fuck some more hot military ass when he is paired up with Marine Staff Sergeant Alex. Logan has always been a take charge, dominant kind of guy which is exactly was Alex likes about him. The two start their video with a little workout, but after breaking a sweat, the testosterone is flowing and both of these straight hunks are horny. The guys take off their military issued shirts and Alex notices that Logan has a boner. Alex can't help but want to touch Logan's big package, and he does just that when he starts rubbing Logan's bulging crotch. Logan smiles and pulls his cock out so that Alex can get a taste of his big Army cock. Alex strokes Logan's cock a few times before placing it fully in his mouth. Logan puts his hand on the back of Alex's head to guide the cocksucker. After some hot cock sucking, Logan throws Alex onto the couch and pulls his pants off and starts sucking on Alex's big cock. Both guys have throbbing boners now and are ready to take it to the next level. Logan lifts Alex's legs up in the air and starts rimming his hot hole. With spit covering Alex's fuck hole, Logan guides his raw cock up Alex's hole and begins giving the Marine a hard bareback fucking. The guys fuck in several positions with Logan digging his cock deeper inside Alex's ass with each new position. After some intense breeding and edging, Logan can't hold his cum back anymore. The Army corpsman pulls his thick cock out of Alex's ass and blasts the Marine's face with a hot load of cum. Alex opens his mouth to try and catch as much of that Army cum as he can. Fucking hot!


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With a new administration taking over in Washington D.C., educators and technologists alike are redoubling their emphasis on 21st Century Campus. In the world of higher education, this means a renewed commitment to familiarizing students with the hardware, software and services that can prepare them to meet challenges of the new millennium. Most 21st Century Campus initiatives also are designed to help students develop the ability to communicate, collaborate, think critically, utilize media to gather information and incorporate awareness of the world around them. To prepare for the campus of tomorrow, we all must act today.
Nine years into the 21st Century, a millennium that many expected to be characterized by the Internet generation, many classrooms at higher education institutions are looking a little....old-fashioned.
Sure, a growing number of institutions have embraced wireless 802.11n. And yes, more and more colleges and universities now boast hardware such as electronic podiums, interactive whiteboards, student response systems, classroom management software and lecture capture software.
Continue reading....
University of Georgia Student Offers Inside Look at the 21st Century Campus
In science-fiction and fantasy books, seers and prognosticators usually are ancient men with white beards down to their knees. They wear cloaks. They carry scepters. Sometimes, they're even wizards.
These resources are provided to give you fresh perspectives on the meaning of 21st-century learning, the role of technology in facilitating the teaching of 21st-century skills, and the relevance of these skills as students are prepared to enter the general workforce.
Listen to more 21st Century Podcasts
Sponsored by CDW-G


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Chris Brown has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault in Washington, where he was accused of punching a man who tried to join a picture that the singer was taking with two women outside a hotel.
Brown, 25, was sentenced to time served on Tuesday. He had been in jail for two days in the case. After entering his plea, Brown apologized to the judge.
The singer had been facing 180 days in jail.
Singer @ChrisBrown and attorney leave court. pic.twitter.com/i1kwxbrF8W — Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) September 2, 2014
According to a statement entered with his plea, Brown was leaving the W Hotel near the White House last October when he was approached by two women who asked him to take a picture. Brown agreed, and one of the woman gave Brown's bodyguard Christopher Hollosy a cellphone to take the picture.
As the group posed for the picture, the victim, a 20-year-old Maryland man, tried to get into the picture. Following a verbal altercation, Brown punched the victim in the face.
Court papers say the victim's nose was fractured.
Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia local news, events and information
Brown will remain on probation in California until early 2015.
Singer @ChrisBrown must pay DC court fee of $150.00. — Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) September 2, 2014
Brown had previously pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge stemming from the case.
A trial scheduled for April was delayed, and two previous attempts to reach a plea deal fell through, in January and again in June.
Brown's attorney, Danny Oronato, said there were "nuances'' of difference in the potential deals.
Hollosy, Brown's bodyguard, was found guilty of assault during a separate trial in April. His attorney says he will ask for a new trial based on new evidence.
Attorney for @ChrisBrown says civil lawsuit in DC assault case is still pending. — Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) September 2, 2014
At the time of the incident, Brown was on probation in California for a 2009 attack on his then-girlfriend, singer Rihanna.
Onorato said the singer's career has been "derailed for a year" by his legal trouble, arguing that Brown had already suffered extensive consequences from the D.C. case. He noted the additional jail time in California and the four months Brown spent receiving inpatient counseling.
He said that Brown wanted to take responsibility for his actions so he could go back to work, including a tour in support of a new album.
"To say that he's been punished severely in this matter is an understatement," Onorato said.
Brown spoke only briefly, saying: "I would like to say to the court that I'm sorry." He did not comment as he left court, swarmed by photographers and a handful of fans.
A civil case is also in the works. The victim, a Greenbelt resident, is suing for $3 million for doctors' bills, pain and suffering.
"As Chris Brown himself has now finally acknowledged, he punched a man in the face without provocation," U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen said in a statement. "No matter your status or celebrity, you will be held accountable for such conduct in our city."


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Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. and IGDRASOL Proceed with Development of Cynviloq™ under 505(b)(2) Bioequivalence Regulatory Pathway
SAN DIEGO and IRVINE, Calif., Aug. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. (OTCQB: SRNE; SRNED; Sorrento) and IGDRASOL announced today that IGDRASOL has received official meeting minutes from an End-of-Phase 2 meeting for Cynviloq (or IG-001) with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Cynviloq (paclitaxel polymeric micelle) is initially under development for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the US. The FDA Division of Oncology Products 1 agreed that the data available from: (i) the postmarketing surveillance (PMS) studies conducted in ex-US territories for MBC and NSCLC, (ii) Phase 1-3 studies for MBC, and (iii) Phase 1-2 studies in NSCLC, Ovarian, Bladder, and Pancreatic cancers are sufficient to support pursuing the 505(b)(2) Bioequivalence (BE) regulatory submission pathway approach using Abraxane® and Taxol® as the Reference Listed Drugs. Abraxane® is an albumin-bound paclitaxel (nab-paclitaxel) product approved for MBC and NSCLC indications. Taxol® is a cremophor-based paclitaxel product approved for these indications as well as other cancer indications. IGDRASOL anticipates filing its BE protocol with the FDA within a month.
"Now with the regulatory pathway clearly defined, we intend to initiate the pivotal BE study of Cynviloq in patients with MBC before year end, and our NDA filing could be as early as 2015 for both MBC and NSCLC indications", said Vuong Trieu Ph.D., CEO of IGDRASOL.
Sorrento has the right to acquire IGDRASOL pursuant to a previously-announced option agreement, entered into in March 2013.
About Cynviloq
Cynviloq is a next-generation, branded, micellar diblock copolymeric paclitaxel formulation currently approved and marketed in several countries as Genexol-PM®. It has completed Phase 1-2/3 and PMS trials in MBC and NSCLC, and Phase 1-2 studies in pancreatic, ovarian and bladder cancers in the US and/or ex-US territories.
About Sorrento Therapeutics
Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. is a publicly-traded, development-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in the acquisition, discovery, development and commercialization of proprietary drug therapeutics for addressing significant unmet medical needs in the Unites States, Europe and additional international markets. Sorrento Therapeutics' primary therapeutic focus is oncology but it is also developing therapeutics products for other indications, including inflammation, metabolic, and infectious diseases. Sorrento Therapeutics' proprietary G-MAB® fully-human antibody library platform was designed to facilitate the rapid identification and isolation of highly specific antibody therapeutic product candidates that bind to disease targets appropriate for antibody therapy.
More information is available at www.sorrentotherapeutics.com.
About IGDRASOL
IGDRASOL's lead therapeutic platform is Cynviloq, a branded micellar paclitaxel formulation which is free of cremophor and human serum albumin, the excipients for Taxol® (cremophor-based paclitaxel) and albumin-bound paclitaxel (Abraxane®), respectively. Cynviloq combines the simplicity of manufacturing and preparation of Taxol® and potentially the albumin-mediated transport of paclitaxel. IGDRASOL intends to conduct registration trials for multiple cancer indications. The executives of IGDRASOL are a group of pharmaceutical veterans who believe that personalized paclitaxel nanoparticle therapy will present a paradigm shift in the delivery of chemotherapeutic agents. To learn more about IGDRASOL's mission, please visit its website (http://www.igdrasol.com).
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Words such as "assumes," "plans," "believes," "expects," "anticipates," and "will," and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements about the potential combination of STI and IGDRASOL and the synergies and prospects for a combined enterprise going forward; and the clinical development and commercial potential of nanomedicines such as Cynviloq and TOCOSOL® paclitaxel. All such forward-looking statements are based on IGDRASOL and Sorrento's current beliefs and expectations, and should not be regarded as a representation by IGDRASOL or Sorrento that any of its plans will be achieved. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in this press release due to the risks and uncertainties inherent in IGDRASOL's and Sorrento's businesses, including: whether Sorrento will have sufficient cash and other resources to exercise the option and ultimately acquire IGDRASOL; the potential that Sorrento and the combined company may require substantial additional funding in order to obtain regulatory approval for and commercialize any oncology products; the risk that delays in the regulatory approval or commercial launch of Cynviloq will enable competitors to further entrench existing products, or develop and bring new competing products to market before the approval, if any, of Cynviloq; the scope and validity of patent protection for Cynviloq as well as IGDRASOL's and Sorrento's and platform technologies, and the risk that the development or commercialization of product candidates may infringe the intellectual property rights of others; and additional risks set forth in Sorrento's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements represent Sorrento's judgment as of the date of this release. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement and Sorrento undertakes no obligation to revise or update this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. This caution is made under the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Genexol-PM® is a registered trademark of Samyang Corporation; Abraxane® is a registered trademark of Celgene, Inc; Taxol® is a registered trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Inc.
SOURCE Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc.
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Tech News
In the past months, a lot of work has been made on haXe. See http://haxe.org to donwload latest 1.07 version. Please note that haXe now fully supports Flash 9. Also, Neko has been improved with latest 1.4.5 bugfix release.
A new stable release of MTASC, including some fixes for better Flash8 support. Get it now.
The Neko intermediate language and Virtual Machine has been greatly improved, check about it now on nekovm.org.
After more than one year of development, MTASC has now reached a Stable Release 1.11. Development efforts will now concentrate on haxe but if some bugs are left in MTASC they will be fixed.
haXe is an open source programming language for the web. It can be used on both client and server side since it generates Flash SWF, javascript, and Neko. You then only need one single language for programming your whole website. See haxe.org website.
Neko is an intermediate programming language. It has been designed to provide a common runtime for several different languages. Neko includes several libraries for database access, system, and a Mod_Neko for Apache webserver. You can get it now from nekovm.org website.
A new version of MTASC is ready ! With this 1.10 a lot of small things have been fixed, and the compatibility with MMC is enforced. Also, all the Flash8 API is accessible right now by using
-version 8 commandline parameter.
MTASC 1.09 is out ! And since the Flash Player Beta have been released, you can start right now using Flash8 features ! (don't forget
-version 8 commandline parameter).
A new version of MTASC, with some small bug fixes again and an new commandline parameter : -out. See CHANGES.txt in distribution for more details.
MTASC 1.07 have been released. This release corrects some problems introduced in 1.06 and fixes some small additional bugs (see CHANGES.txt in distribution for details).
Like us you would like to generate nice UML schemes from your PHP5 libraries ?
We produced this small tool (beta) which works surprisingly well with the free umbrello modeler.
The script is released under the LGPL.
And if you find any of our projects usefull, do not hesitate to send us a mail card from where you live, it will proudly decorate our office !
Great News for MTASC fans : Nicolas Cannasse, the author of MTASC, will speak about his experience writing the compiler at O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON 2005) in August, see this link.
MTASC have reached version 1.06 ! Not so much things changed, since the compiler is now working well, but a problem about bytecode size limit of 1.05 is now fixed, and the "main" behavior have been changed so it will execute when the Movie is completely loaded.
MTASC version 1.05 have been released ! Most changes are minor bigfixes, some new things are :
- detection of unused imports generate a warning
- some error message when bytecode size limit is reached
- reduce the bytecode size by better package registration
MTASC version 1.04 have been released ! Some new features are :
- support for Flash6
- custom TRACE function, which get called with file position, class name and method name
- some minor bugs fixed, see CHANGES in distribution for details
MTASC version 1.03 have been released ! Watch the CHANGES in the distribution, and enjoy !
Added all content from old "tech" website, as well as a PHP section and MTASC page.
Design is (re)done. Nice work Sebastien, now is time to fill the content !


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Sunday talk show tip sheet
"Meet the Press" on NBC
• Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)
• Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)
• Rep.-elect Joaquin Castro (D-Texas)
• Steve Schmidt, Republican strategist
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian
"Face the Nation" on CBS
• David Axelrod, senior adviser to the Obama campaign
• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
"This Week" on ABC
• Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairwoman, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
• Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), ranking member, Senate Intelligence Committee
• Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.)
• Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.)
"Fox News Sunday" on Fox
• Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman, Senate Budget Committee
• Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), ranking member, House Budget Committee
• Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)
• Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.)
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman, Senate Intelligence Committee
"State of the Union" on CNN
• Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman, House Homeland Security Committee
• Sen Bob Menendez (D-N.J.)
• Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)
• California Gov. Jerry Brown (D)
• Gary Bauer, chairman, Campaign for Working Families; president, American Values
• Former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Romney campaign adviser
• Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R), former presidential candidate
"Newsmakers" on C-SPAN
• Grover Norquist, president, Americans for Tax Reform
"Al Punto" on Univision
• Gutierrez
• Henry Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development
• Rep.-elect Joe Garcia (D-Fla.)
• Rep.-elect Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.)
• Rep.-elect Pete Gallego (D-Texas)
• Rep.-elect Filemon Vela (D-Texas)
"Washington Watch" on TV One
• Cornell Belcher, Obama pollster
• Karen Finney, Democratic strategist
• Elroy Sailor, Republican strategist
• Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP


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Patriots Training Camp, 2008
New England Patriots Training Camp, Gillette Stadium, July – Aug. 2008. All photos © 2008 Joel Shore. MetWest Gallery is in no way affiliated with the New England Patriots or the National Football League. Team logos are registered trademarks of the National Football League and players' likenesses are copyright of their rightful owners. Thus, these photos are for your viewing pleasure only and are not for sale. Send e-mail to the photographer, Joel Shore.Read More


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Jaw-Dropping Distance
Ultimate Autocorrect
Versatile Powerhouse
Effortless Distance
Flawless Flier
Locked-In Forgiveness
Approachable & Advanced
High-Flying Forgiveness
Supreme Handling
Wicked Forgiveness
Simply Fast & Far
Simply Sweet Shots
Formidable Forgiveness
Brilliantly Balanced
Absolute Creativity
Progressive Performance
Fundamental Forgiveness
Pure Blade
Piercing Performance
100% Milled, Calculated Accuracy
Forged To Perfection
Cult Classing
Game Over
Double Down
Swith Striker
Locked On Target
Sound Performance
Fully Balanced
Next-Wave Blade
Straight Shooter
Calibrated Control
Optimum Horsepower
Stabilized Approach
Smooth Glider
Critical Precision
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Named after the military transport aircraft, our Battle Ready Hercules is a bite-sized mallet, built to deliver herculean performance on the green. Featuring our most advanced technology, the Hercules features a bi-material body construction, mid-mallet design, and Precision Weighting Technology for fine-tuned adjustability. Hercules presents two tungsten inserts for enhanced stability and a long flange sightline with soft ballasts that frame the golf ball for intuitive alignment.
Long flange sightline
2 Sole Weights
Originally introduced in our GEN2 putter lineup, the Pyramid Face Pattern has been re-engineered for maximum performance. Based on Tour feedback and R&D testing, the groove depth has been adjusted to optimize feel and initial ball velocity across the face. The updated face design also helps ensure consistency and other significant factors that affect roll such as launch angle, spin rates, and skid distance.
The balance of a putter can be fine-tuned by changing the location of the weights. Based on the hosel selected, fine-tuning can alter the overall clubhead weight, as well as influence launch conditions.
The introduction of a high-density tungsten insert allowed the CG to be moved farther away from the shaft axis, creating greater face angle stability and higher MOI.
Optimized Pyramid Face Pattern
Precision Weighting Technology
High Density Tungsten Inserts
Optimal for players with a mild amount of face rotation and for those with straight- and arced-stroke types. The plumber's neck hosel orients the shaft axis midway between the heel and face center, resulting in a mid-toe hang angle which significantly reduces the rotational inertial forces.
Mid-toe hang
Full shaft
Optimal for players who tend to push the ball, the double bend hosel orients the shaft axis plane through the CG to create a face balanced hang angle, which reduces the inertial force required to rotate the putter face.
Face Balanced
Half shaft
Optimal for players who have more rotation in their stroke and will appreciate the greater control and stability, the heel-shafted hosel orients the shaft axis far into the heel side of the putter to create significant toe hang, which increases the inertial force required to rotate the putter face.
Significant toe hang
Optimal for players who desire the greater control and stability – or who suffer from the yips, the armlock hosel orients the shaft axis through the CG to create a face balanced hang angle, which reduces the inertial force required to rotate the putter face.
Face balanced
PXG offers a robust matrix of high-end shaft options. Each shaft is handpicked and rigorously tested by PXG Engineers. If it makes the cut, that shaft becomes part of PXG's coveted lineup of driver, fairway, hybrid, iron and putter shafts. To learn more about all the shafts in PXG's matrix, click here.
In 2022, PXG unveiled its first ever shaft, the PXG M16 Putter Shaft. Delivering unmatched stiffness, effortless consistency, and a wildly soft feel – it features a high-grade multi-material construction and superior internal engineering for enhanced stability on the green. To learn more about the M16 Putter Shaft, click here.
Club Dexterity
This order comes with our Deluxe Performance Headcover. This headcover is lightweight, durable, water resistant, and features our internal QuickStick™ Cart Magnet Technology, which allows you to attach the headcover to your golf cart when not in use.
Total: ¥
If you would like advice to perfect your fitting, please contact our PXG Fitting Experts at firstname.lastname@example.com
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*Excludes shipping
All prices and product availability are subject to change and revision from time to time without prior notice due to pricing or availability in other markets or currency fluctuation.
PXG Products bought thru PXG Japan are assembled in Japan.
For a limited time, PXG is offering free expedited shipping when you purchase 7 or more 0211's or Gen2 Irons. Expedited Shipping will be applied during the checkout process when the correct conditions are met.
Putter Loft: Loft is the angle measured between the face and a vertical plane. Loft enables the ball to launch at the proper angle to be sure it isn't being driven into the ground at impact or skidding significantly before rolling. Players with substantial forward press should consider adding loft, while players whose hands are behind the ball at impact should consider a decreased loft angle.
Putter Lie: Lie is the angle measured between the shaft and the ground plane at impact. Lie angle is adjusted to make the head level at impact; the proper lie angle will help square the face angle to the target and improve consistency of contact.
Putter Length: Putter length is determined by your physical stature and putting posture. Generally, a longer putter will cause a player to stand farther from the ball, while a shorter putter will make a player stand closer. Our goal when adjusting putter length is to help a player consistently and comfortably get into the proper position over the ball.
GRAPHITE: Graphite iron shafts are vibration dampening, light weight options. They produce a softer feel as well as higher launch and more speed for improved distance.
STEEL: Steel iron shafts are designed to maximize consistency and provide a stable feel for stronger players. Steel shafts are generally heavier than graphite and are available in a variety of weights and stiffness profiles to help optimize your launch conditions.
Beginning golfers who are not in the L or A shaft flex category should select R: Regular Flex Shafts.
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To celebrate MODERN's 100,000 Facebook LIKES and to thank our fans for helping us get there, get ready for exciting giveaways!!
Throughout this celebration, we're going to post a fill-in-the-blank question for you to answer once per day. If we choose your answer as one of our favorites, you win that day's giveaway! We're talking free shears, shampoos, stylers, nail polishes and more as we celebrate this huge milestone! Each day brings a new post and a new opportunity to win something cool, so make sure you "LIKE" MODERN's Facebook page!
Friday, December 7th's question was: The best my hair has ever looked was when: _________...
If we picked your answer as one of the best 10, we're going to direct message you on Facebook to get your address to send you a FREE Sultra Bombshell Oval Rod Curling Iron (check those inboxes)!
The Sultra Bombshell Oval Rod Curling Iron features Japanese Kyocera Ceramic Heater Technology that mends and defends hair while you style with constant 360°F heat. Perfect for color-treated, dry, or damaged hair, this iron creates bouncy curls while smoothing the cuticle and locking in looks.
The 10 MODERN Facebook fans who will be receiving the curling rod are below! Congratulations to the winners—keep an eye on those Facebook inboxes!
The best my hair has ever looked was when: _________...
1...when I found out how to control my hair. Being half black, with my mom white, I grew up not knowing how to do my hair and neither did she. It took a very long time and plenty of hair appointments for me to sit back and really look at myself. I used to only wear weaves so I could mask my hair. But from teen years into adulthood,I have found acceptance and confidence for who I am. And I never looked back. Since then, my hair has grown and it finally began to work with me instead of against me. I'm glad I know better now! So when was the best my hair has ever looked? Today and from now on. —Amanda Kyrie' Ayala
2...when it started to grow back after I finished chemo. I had always had stick-straight hair. After I finished my treatments, my hair grew back in a beautiful dark brown with a wave to it! (we like to call this effect "chemo perm") the wave gave me the cutest Pixie and my hair looked shiny and healthy. Or, maybe I was just excited to have hair again, but it looked the best it has ever looked. Nothing to make you appreciate your hair in its most natural state like losing it all will. —Jessica Warburton
3...when I started following the advice i had been giving clients for years, I stopped shampooing everyday and started using better products to protect my hair from heat. My hair is finally growing out and it is because I decided to make it a priority. Now I can make all the changes in cut and color and it will style properly because it acts like healthy hair should. —Caitlin Andrews
4...when I dared to be different and rocked some old school finger waves on my short bob! Very time consuming, but worth it! Never felt more beautiful you can never go wrong bringing back the basics. —Nicole Mary Kathryn Bruno
5...when I shaved my head because my friend was going through chemo. We were bald together. I didn't think I had the confidence to pull it off--but I rocked it! —Bethany Nichols Brown
6...after a bad few weeks I decided to pamper myself and get the works done by a brand new stylist out of school. She did an amazing job, gave me a cut, color and in return I gave her some very useful advice to make it in the industry! Every since then she's been thanking me and we are still close. —Douangta Keoonla
7...when my fellow classmates took it upon themselves to fix my over-bleached hair with some deep conditioning and style it in a new cut. Before school, I never knew what I was doing wrong. My wonderful teacher taught us well. —Joshua Poppell Jr.
8...when my three little girls curled it with pink sponge rollers and then brushed it out two hours later! It was wild, but the best bonding day with them! —Sharon McCage Hollberg
9...when my best friend took me to her salon and I was in the chair for once on my wedding day! It was so beautiful and she took such good care of me that day and made me feel like a princess! I will never forget that special time and how beautiful my hair looked!—Tricia Botsch
10...when I was pregnant. Maybe it's because I already felt so beautiful because I was growing my son inside of me, or maybe it was because of the help of all of the prenatal vitamins and hormones. Regardless, my normally thin hair was thick and grew long! I could do ANYTHING with it! God bless pregnancy hair! —Brittany Pohler
REMEMBER.... Each day brings a new post and a new opportunity to win something cool, so make sure you, and your collegues, "LIKE" MODERN's Facebook page!
The best hairdressers are the ones who _____
I love being a hairdresser because ______
The most inspiring day in my career was ______
The most unique location I ever did hair: ____
For reprint and licensing requests for this article, Click here.


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Nicolas Eymerich The Inquisitor - Book I: The Plague
About this game
A will of steel, a heart of stone, intelligence as sharp as a knife, and wisdom as deep as oblivion.
Eymerich is called upon to investigate an obscure case. Something that goes way beyond heresy, revealing a new face of Evil. He must tackle a great number of arduous tasks and make many painful choices. Terrible creatures await him, but with his burning determination he will overcome a Plague that is deadlier than his worst possible nightmare.
Play a remorseless character to live an original story inspired by the famous novel of Valerio Evangelisti.
- Numerous unique riddles and environments rich in details
- Sound effects immersives atmospheres and enchanting original musics
- Voices in English, Italian
- Texts in French, English, Italian, German, Spanish
- Voices and texts in Latin for a best experience!
- Divine's Help system to save player to get stuck


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Journal of the South African Veterinary Association
versión On-line ISSN 2224-9435
versión impresa ISSN 1019-9128
DYK, E van et al. Detection and characterisation of papillomavirus in skin lesions of giraffe and sable antelope in South Africa. J. S. Afr. Vet. Assoc. [online]. 2011, vol.82, n.2, pp.80-85. ISSN 2224-9435.
Papillomavirus was detected electron microscopically in cutaneous fibropapillomas of a giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) and a sable antelope (Hippotragus niger). The virus particles measured 45 nm in diameter. Histopathologically, the lesions showed histopathological features similar to those of equine sarcoid as well as positive immunoperoxidase-staining of tissue sections for papillomavirus antigen. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) detected bovine papillomavirus (BPV) DNA. Bovine papillomavirus-1 was characterised by real-time PCR in the sable and giraffe, and cloning and sequencing of the PCR product revealed a similarity to BPV-1. As in the 1st giraffe, the lesions from a 2nd giraffe revealed locally malignant pleomorphism, possibly indicating the lesional end-point of papilloma infection. Neither virus particles nor positively staining papillomavirus antigen could be demonstrated in the 2nd giraffe but papillomavirus DNA was detected by real-time PCR which corresponded with BPV-1 and BPV-2.
Palabras clave : cutaneous fibropapillomas; Giraffa camelopardalis; giraffe; Hippotragus niger; malignant pleomorphism; papillomavirus; sable antelope.


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A white stone grave marker standing in Baltimore National Cemetery under an ancient oak tree is all that remains to remind passers-by of the life of Ensign Edwin Nash Broyles Jr.
Broyles, a Navy fighter pilot from Guilford in North Baltimore, was killed in the final hours of the Korean War, which ended in a cease-fire 60 years ago Saturday.
Broyles, 27 and the pilot of a F2H-2 Banshee fighter jet, was last seen July 26, 1953, as his plane descended in a 40-degree dive at 6,000 feet, after a bombing raid on Hoeryong Air Field in North Korea.
Born in Baltimore and raised on Bedford Place, Broyles studied at Gilman School, Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., from which he graduated in 1946.
When Broyles was a student at Yale, from which he graduated in 1950, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Book and Snake, a secret society.
Broyles was on the staff of The Baltimore Sun when he joined the Navy in the early 1950s. After being trained as a fighter pilot, he was assigned to the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt and participated in NATO operations Mainbrace and Longstep.
He transferred to Fighter Squadron VF-22 aboard the carrier USS Lake Champlain, where, because of his newspaper background, he also served as the squadron's public information officer.
Ordered to Korea in 1953, the carrier arrived at the naval station in Yokosuka, Japan, in June and launched its first combat sortie over Korea in support of ground forces on June 13.
Early on the morning of July 26, Broyles and three other Banshee pilots roared off the deck of the Lake Champlain on a mission that would take them far into North Korea, north of Hungnam.
Joining Broyles were Lt. Cmdr. Stanley M. Montunnas, the flight's leader, Ensign W.K. "Monk" McManus and Lt. William M. Russell.
In the configuration of planes, Broyles' was the last — "Tail-end Charlie," as naval pilots called it — which made it particularly vulnerable to enemy anti-aircraft fire.
The fliers spotted a dam and went in for what should have been a routine kill.
"When we pulled out and I looked back, there was a hell of an explosion at the target with lots of yellow flame at the bottom. I exclaimed, 'Stan, you got a great secondary explosion there,' " Russell told The Baltimore Sun in a 2003 interview.
As they regrouped, Broyles' plane was not among them.
"It was a pretty traumatic experience," recalled Russell. "I must say, there wasn't much doubt in my mind but that Ed was killed right off the bat when we went in."
The pilots continued circling the area until they were forced to return to the carrier.
At 10:01 a.m. July 27, delegates meeting at Panmunjom signed the truce that ended all combat operations. It also "prevented an extended search for the young officer," reported The Sun at the time.
In the 2003 interview, Russell described Broyles as a "wonderful guy."
"Real class. Smart. Good-looking. Bright. Wonderful aviator. Personable. A real class act," he said.
Broyles' body was never recovered and a memorial service was held Jan. 15, 1954, at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. On Aug. 20, 1954, the Navy "presumptively" declared him dead.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.
Engraved on the stone are the words "Missing in action," along with the coordinates of the pilot's final mission: "Lat 40 46 35 North. Long 128 27 20 East."
This week, the Defense Department POW/Missing Personnel Office announced that the remains of Army Sgt. Clement Thibodeaux Jr., 18, of Baton Rouge, La., who had fought in Korea with the 25th Infantry Division, had been identified and will be buried Friday in Church Point, La.
The Defense Department reported that more than 7,900 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War.
Baltimore Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article.


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Boasting the realistic designs and grain details customers expect from Karndean, LooseLay is available in the large scale wood look planks and stone look tiles and can help you create a look that works in almost any space. What's more, it's easy to install and can be laid over most existing hard floors. Oh, and it's 100% recyclable!
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Brand: Karndean


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U S. Department of Education
Office for Civil Rights
Washington, D.C. 20202-1101
July 1991
This pamphlet describes the requirements of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, with respect to elementary and secondary school policies involving the placement of children with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS.
On April 18, 1991, the President announced AMERICA 2000: An Education Strategy. It is a bold, complex, and long-range plan designed to move every community toward the six national education goals that the President and the Governors adopted in 1990. Consistent with AMERICA 2000, the Office for Civil Rights has instituted a National Enforcement Strategy designed to help protect equal educational opportunity for all students. Providing educational services to students with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is consistent with AMERICA 2000's goals of helping to fight the modern plagues that touch our youth. The goals enumerated in AMERICA 2000, and the National Enforcement Strategy, will help in our nationwide crusade -- community by community, school by school -- to make America all that it should be.
The information in the pamphlet explains to school officials and parents how children with AIDS should be served, and their rights under the law. It reflects the policy of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), U.S. Department of Education. OCR enforces Section 504 in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance, such as public elementary and secondary school districts
AIDS is caused by infection of the individual with a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that alters a person's immune system and damages his/her ability to fight off other diseases. AIDS is primarily spread by sexual contact and the sharing of contaminated needles and syringes among users of illegal intravenous drugs. Children generally acquire the disease in one of two other ways:
- the virus can be passed on from infected mothers during pregnancy, at birth, or shortly after birth; and
- in a small number of cases, the virus has been spread through blood products (clotting factors) and blood transfusions.
However, in recent years, knowledge about the disease has increased. Many precautions are now taken in screening blood donations. As a result, the chance that anyone will get AIDS through blood products or blood transfusions is extremely small. Today, the most common way that children contract AIDS is in utero as the offspring of mothers infected with the AIDS virus. Health officials stress that the disease is not transmitted through casual contact. The Surgeon General of the United States has declared that "casual, social contact between children and persons infected with the AIDS virus is not dangerous." No cases of AIDS have been identified in which students were infected in a school setting.
Children with AIDS are Handicapped Persons
Section 504 prohibits discrimination against persons with handicaps in federally assisted programs such as elementary and secondary schools. It provides that:
No otherwise qualified individual with handicaps in the United States ... shall, solely by reason of his or her handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
The law of which Section 504 is a part defines a handicapped person as one who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, has a record of such an impairment, or is perceived as having such an impairment. For example, while some individuals with AIDS are substantially impaired physically, virtually all individuals with AIDS are regarded as having an impairment.
Section 504 protects individuals infected by AIDS on the basis of any actual, past or perceived effect of HIV infection that substantially limits any major life activity so long as the individual is otherwise qualified. Since AIDS damages many of the body's systems, such as the hemic (blood), lymphatic, reproductive, and other systems, persons with AIDS are often substantially limited in a major life activity due to physical impairment.
Persons with AIDS are also substantially limited in a major life activity due to the reaction of others to their perceived contagiousness. The fear of AIDS includes a perception that a person with the disease is substantially impaired in his/her ability to interact with others, for example, to attend school. Persons, such as those with AIDS, who are "regarded" as impaired, are just as "handicapped" under the law as those who possess the physical limitations that arise from actual impairment. Discrimination based solely on the fear of contagion is discrimination based on handicap when the impairment has that effect on others.
Children with AIDS are Qualified Handicapped Persons
Section 504 defines a qualified handicapped person, with regard to elementary and secondary school programs, as:
- a handicapped person of any age during which nonhandicapped persons are provided education; or
- a handicapped person of any age during which it is mandatory under state law to provide services to handicapped persons or to whom a state is required to provide a free appropriate public education.
Thus, in the case of elementary and secondary school children, "qualified" is defined in terms of age. If a child handicapped by AIDS is of school age, he or she is considered a qualified handicapped person.
Where Should Children with AIDS be Educated
Most children with AIDS can attend school in the regular classroom without restrictions. There has been no medical evidence disclosed to show that AIDS is contagious in the school setting. According to the latest medical information, there have been no reported cases of the transmission of the AIDS virus in schools. The Surgeon General and other health authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the American Medical Association, have reinforced this position stating that there is no significant risk of contracting AIDS in the classroom.
If a parent or school official believes that a child with AIDS needs related services or placement outside the regular classroom, Section 504 requires an evaluation and placement process to determine the appropriate educational setting for a child with AIDS. However, a full educational evaluation is not required when neither the school officials nor parents believe that a child is in need of special education or related services.
If an evaluation is necessary, Section 504 requires the following procedures. Placement determinations are to be made by a group of persons, including persons knowledgeable about the child, the meaning of the evaluation data, and the placement options available. The group may include the child's physician, public health personnel, the child's parent or guardian, and personnel familiar with all possible educational services. The group would draw upon information from a variety of sources, such as tests, teacher recommendations, and assessments of the child's physical condition.
In making placement decisions, the information needed by the placement team varies with the handicapping condition. In the case of children with AIDS, the placement group must have the benefit of the latest reliable public health information with regard to the risks that the disease entails. This information would be considered along with information on the child's medical condition, behavior, and so forth. In each case, risks and benefits to both the infected child and others in the setting should be weighed.
A Child with AIDS Has a Right to Section 504 Procedural Safeguards
Section 504 requires elementary and secondary school districts to provide a free appropriate public education for handicapped students that includes evaluation and placement procedures, and a system of procedural safeguards that includes notice to parents or guardians of their rights under the law, an opportunity for the child's parents or guardians to examine relevant records, an impartial hearing with an opportunity for participation by the parents or guardians and representation by counsel, and a review procedure.
A Child with AIDS Has a Right to Confidentiality
Although Section 504 does not contain a specific provision regarding confidentiality, it does state that recipients may not "provide different or separate aid, benefits or services to handicapped persons or to any class of handicapped persons...."
Under Section 504, singling out children handicapped with AIDS for treatment that differs from that provided to nonhandicapped children or children with other handicaps with respect to confidentiality would constitute different treatment on the basis of handicap, and would be a violation of the regulation.
This provision would not affect state and local public health rules regarding the duty of school districts to report specified diseases to public health departments. However, when reporting any cases of AIDS to public health authorities, school districts should convey such information in a manner that respects the privacy of the individual and the confidential nature of the information, in the same way that information about other diseases is treated.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and other federal laws provide protection against unwarranted disclosure of school records. If school districts have concerns or need guidance on confidentiality requirements, they can contact the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and the Family Policy and Regulatory Staff in the Department of Education.
OCR enforces Section 504 and interprets the Section 504 regulations. OSERS administers the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and interprets the act's regulations. Because Section 504 and IDEA are different federal statutes, they may have different compliance standards. For further information regarding the requirements of IDEA, contact:
Office of Special Education Programs
Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services
400 Maryland Avenue, S.W.
To obtain additional assistance, see OCR's list of its ten regional offices, which contains the address and telephone number for the OCR office that serves your area.
Date of Document 07/01/1991