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SAFETY & RELIABILITY- With air assist, removing heat and combustible gases from the cutting surface to prevent burning during engraving working, and with a built-in cooling fan for effective ventilation; Owns FDA, CECertification, ISO9001 Quality Certification. POWERFUL PERFORMANCE- Support USB2.0 port, U disk reading and writing, support U disk system upgrade; Able to work independently of PC; Visible red dot pointer for better guidance; Use virtual array list and additional off-cut graph to realize the off-cut function; With feeding devices to realize the cyclical model of working-feeding-working; Separation of cutting up to 256 Colors.HIGH COMPATIBILITY- Supports multiple graphic formats, including HPGL, BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, DXF, DST, AI, etc. Adopts advanced RD Works digital control system, able to directly output from CorelDRAW and Auto CAD. WIDELY USED- Can be used to engrave on wood, bamboo, plexiglass, crystal, leather, rubber, marble, glass, etc. Suitable for advertisement, gifts, shoes, toys etc. Note: This machine does not have Z-axis lifting and auto-focusing functions. Adopts premium CO2 glass sealed laser tube with high power and fast speed.
Multi languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and more languages updating) are available. Adopt RD Works original control system with RDC 6442G precise control panel. Equip with RD Works V8 software featuring 128MB memory and support 2000dpi high accuracy.With large working area of 55"x35"(140x90cm), featuring bending table, which adopts honeycomb structure, with high strength, anti-deformation, sound absorption and heat insulation. Equipped with a USB port for convenient connection to desktop or laptop. U-disk is also available for direct inserting of the U disk to read and write. Industrial grade laser head, with high quality, reliable performance and durability, improves the engraving precision and performance. Features high precision micro stepping motor and high-quality reflector for strong performance. Switches and emergency button for better control. The built-in cooling fan reduces temperature of all components. With 4 caster wheels for convenient movement. 130W CO2 Laser Engraving Machine. New Laser Engraving and Cutting Machine. The machine is a kind of Laser Engraving Machine System equipped with CO2 laser Tube, it is used to engrave on wood, bamboo, plexiglass, crystal, leather, rubber, marble and glass etc. It is most suitable and the preferred choice of equipment in industries such as advertisement, gifts, shoes, toys etc. It supports multiple graphic formats, such as HPGL, BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, DXF, DST, AI and so on.
This machine must connect with a computer with USB cable when you change the settings of the machine for the design files, you can transfer the file with USB memory stick to the machine, or can download it to the machine directly with USB cable from the computer. Even on the same Job, you can do setting with different color in the software and also can make holes. And it can the legs separate from the main body of the machine.
The machine has doors which can be opened to accommodate larger materials. All laser engraving machines can not carve and cut metal.
Working size: 55"x35"(1400mm x 900mm) with unlimited length design. Machine Dimension(L/W/H): 204014601070(mm). Laser engraving software package (English Version). 3 Reflect optics (installed in the machine). 1 Focus optics (installed in the machine).
20"x28"(500mm x 700mm) with unlimited length design. 35.4"x23.6" (900mm x 600mm) with unlimited length design. We believe that it is our vision and mission to provide innovative products with best service and competitive price to satisfy you.Our goal is to make sure that you can find exactly what you are looking for and make it easy for you to place your orders. California Warehouse: City of Industry, CA. If you need to return, please check twice to confirm the item not work and contact our customer service representative, let us know the detailed problem and send us some pictures for confirmation. Please make sure that item has NO man-made sabotage. Used items will not be accepted for return. All emails will be responded to within.
Special circumstances will be listed clearly in the listing. Please do check everything carefully after you received the parcel, any the damage except DOA (Dead-On-Arrival) would not be covered if it's your fault. Caifornia Warehouse: 18501 Arenth Ave, City of Industry, CA 91748. 300 W Airtex Blvd, Suite 200, Houston, TX 77090. 2125 Gateway Blvd, Hebron, KY 41048.1000 High Street, Perth Amboy, NJ 08861. The item "VEVOR 130W CO2 Laser Engraver Cutting Machine 55x35 USB Disk with Ruida Panel US" is in sale since Saturday, May 16, 2020. This item is in the category "Business & Industrial\Printing & Graphic Arts\Screen & Specialty Printing\Engraving". The seller is "ganfeii1_4" and is located in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. This item can be shipped to United States, Canada, Mexico.


text: To participate in the 911Metallurgist Forums, be sure to JOIN & LOGIN; Use Add New Topic to ask a New Question/Discussion about Grinding.; OR Select a Topic that Interests you.; Use Add Reply = to Reply/Participate in a Topic/Discussion (most frequent). Using Add Reply allows you to Attach Images or PDF files and provide a more complete input.; Use Add …Read On

subset: commoncrawl


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Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge - LITE
- Publisher: Lucasfilm Ltd.
- Genre: Adventure
- Released: 7 Jul, 2010
- Size: 196.6 MB
- Price: FREE!
- App Store Info
Description"Now supporting iOS 4.0. Arr, the retina display be a thing o' beauty mateys."
More Pirates! More Adventure! More Monkeys! Relive the second hilarious swashbuckling misadventure of the wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood in signature special edition detail!
Pocket Gamer: 10/10 "Adventure gaming doesn't get any better than this."
Game Informer: "Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge is a great addition to your downloadable library."
MixNMojo.com: "…made me feel like I was playing Monkey Island 2 for the first time."
Play it again for the first time with signature Special Edition features:
o High-definition graphics: All new re-imagined contemporary art style, hand-drawn and presented in high definition.
o Voice over: Complete voice over using original Monkey Island franchise cast members brings the story and characters to life like never before, now available for both the Special Edition and Classic modes.
o Renewed music score: Re-mastered and re-recorded musical score using live instruments.
o Special Edition and Classic modes: Scene-for-scene hot swap lets you seamlessly transition between Special Edition and Classic modes at anytime during gameplay.
o Hint system: In-game puzzle hint system keeps the puzzles fresh and fun.
Plus, includes all new features:
o Direct control: Choose how you play -- use the classic point-and-click interface or the all new intuitive direct character control for a more interactive gameplay experience.
o Object highlighting: Interactive object highlighting provides quicker clues to finding hidden objects.
What's New in Version 1.1"ARR! THIS BE THE SCURVY iPATCH YOU BEEN ASKIN FOR MATEYS!"
Version 1.1
- Added support for the iPhone 4 Retina display
- Adjusted timing delays for certain puzzles
- Added intro and outro credits sequences to the Classic version
- Fixed music synching issue with the Bone Dance sequence


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Pigeon Point Lighthouse (Altered)
Pigeon Point Light Station or Pigeon Point Lighthouse is a lighthouse built in 1871 to guide ships on the Pacific coast of California. It is the tallest lighthouse (tied with Point Arena Light) on the West Coast of the United States. It is still an active Coast Guard aid to navigation. Pigeon Point Light Station is located on the coastal highway (State Route 1), 5 miles south of Pescadero, California, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. The 115-foot, white masonry tower, resembles the typical New England structure. The lighthouse and the land around have been preserved as Pigeon Point Light Station State Historic Park, a California state park. The lighthouse is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and designated as a California Historical Landmark.
Pigeon Point LighthousePigeonPointLighthouseCaliforniaCoast GuardLightStationLight StationPescaderoNational Register of Historic PlacesState Historic ParkState ParkCalifornia Historical Landmark030119z
From Pigeon Point Lighthouse


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The belief that government must continue to be structured and must function in 2012 as it has in the past is a myth. There is much that public sector leaders can do to change their organizational culture, improve the quality of services they deliver, and become more efficient stewards of the public's money. I would argue that one of the cornerstones of building substantive change in the public sector is interest and commitment to creativity in management's thinking and in the creativity of the personnel they employ.
When government agencies are established, they are given a clear charge, like issuing driver's licenses, for example, and they are required to operate within specific parameters and meet particular criteria. Beyond these mandates, however, leaders can cultivate a creativity-rich culture by attending to:
- How employees view their own role;
- How they relate to co-workers, managers, subordinates, and the public;
- How performance will be evaluated;
- Which tasks or responsibilities have the highest priority; and
- Determining the standards of conduct that will guide workplace behavior.
When the leader's vision includes a commitment to creativity, employees experience a sense of urgency in finding innovative ways to achieve the agency's purpose.
The following are a few suggestions agencies should consider.
Foster creativity. Creativity can emerge within an organization even if it does not include changing pay levels or job classifications. When agency leadership sets specific performance or cost-saving benchmarks and an individual or division meets these goals, leadership can do more than just recognize their achievements, they can award authority, and at least a portion of the saved resources so the innovations can be extended agency-wide.
Align people with the right tasks and goals. In the 2009 Harvard Business Review article "Why Change Programs Don't Produce Change," Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat and Bert Spector contend that leaders should make every effort to assign employees and managers to tasks and roles for which they are particularly suited because of temperament, experience and expertise, and commitment to creativity. They also recommend engaging employees in diagnosing the problems or challenges that they will address; developing a shared vision of how to organize and manage for competitiveness; fostering consensus for the new vision; allowing each successive department or work group undertaking change to "reinvent the wheel" so they are fully engaged in their own process; institutionalizing changes through formal policies, systems, and structures; and monitoring and adjusting strategies over time.
Hire creative types. Administrators of governmental agencies and organizations almost never start with a blank slate. Whether the agency's leader is elected, appointed, or hired, they inherit the existing staff, and have few options for "cleaning house" and beginning again. When it comes to hiring, however, they have choices. In screening job applicants, agencies can look for those with an intrinsic, or self-driven, motivation, and a willingness to put creativity at the center of their work. These applicants should have well-honed skills and relevant factual knowledge, and should be able to suspend judgment while actively looking for creative approaches and solutions.
Encourage the formation of effective work groups. Conversation and creative exploration becomes richer when groups avoid reaching consensus before all divergent views can be expressed and considered. To help ensure that minority views are more likely to surface, Michael West and James Richter recommend that groups not only include members that are likely to hold contrary views, but that those individuals should not feel like the lone voice in the conversation. When people can find at least one other person who shares their views, they are more likely to express those views and feel they are making an investment in whatever decisions are ultimately reached.
Support the formation of effective networks. Organizations are complex entities. Robust and resilient organizations do more than just acknowledge the existence of the ways their employees are connected to others outside their home work groups—they cultivate these networks. When individuals are part of networks that cross disciplines and levels within the organization, they are more likely to have access to ideas, knowledge, and skills that help them to develop creative and innovative solutions to the problems or challenges they encounter.
Make diversity of experience a precondition to promotion. The leadership in any kind of organization, including governmental agencies, can create more opportunities for ideas from one discipline to influence problem solving in another. They can even consider requiring employees to move laterally one or more times within the organization before they can be promoted. Few dispute the wisdom of having members of an organization learn about unfamiliar areas of operation. For Andrew Hargadon, a professor of technology management at the University Of California, Davis, the key advantage to interdisciplinary exposure isn't thinking outside the box—it is the ability to free oneself from old ruts by applying reasoning skills from one domain to another. In this way, Hargadon argued in his 2009 article, "Creativity That Works": "People do not think outside the box—they think in other boxes."
Measure what you value. Leaders can provide powerful, extrinsic motivators for ensuring that creativity will be a hallmark within their organizations by making it a standard against which performance will be measured. Employees should understand that they are responsible to contribute to the creativity of their teams, work groups, and departments. And managers should be rewarded when they stimulate and support the creativity of those they supervise.
Generally, public sector employees are compensated according to standard pay schedules, and there is no such thing as "pay for performance," or a bonus, for superior contributions to the agency. To address this issue, leaders in the public sector must look for non-monetary recognition, such as agency-wide acknowledgement of an individual or work group's creativity in solving a problem, and establishing "pilot" projects throughout the agency to test new strategies for improving performance. Leaders can also make creativity more than just a pre-condition to advancement. They can make creative contribution a way to accelerate one's advancement in the organization.
Identify and support each employee's sense of professionalism. Most professionals consider those with similar training, education, and experiences to be colleagues of one sort or another. Public sector leaders should do more than just participate in their own professional communities; they should communicate a sense that each and every employee is considered a professional within the organization, and then provide access to information and other resources about the expectations associated with each of the professional positions they supervise. People who see themselves as professionals are more likely to ascribe the common values of professional practice to their own work and "raise the bar" for overall performance.
Leaders must hold themselves accountable to the same standards they set for others. People often have a keen sense of incongruity when someone's actions do not match their words. When the mismatch between the expectation of employees and leadership persists, employees feel increasingly entitled to ignore—if not outright oppose—the directives they receive from the top. Here again, Beer, Eisenstat, and Spector can be helpful. In their 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review, they noted that when leaders "make an effort to adopt the team behavior, attitudes, and skills… their struggle with behavior change … lend credibility to top management's continued espousal of change."
Acknowledge that change is hard and is a process as much as it is an outcome. Organically-grown (rather than mandated) change in human relationships and organizations is seldom linear. At the beginning, most change is nearly imperceptible. Once it begins to take hold, however, it can quickly gain momentum. The idea of "phase change" can be helpful here. When you first put a pot of water on the stove to boil, nothing much happens except that a few small bubbles form here and there. As the minutes pass, the intermittent bubbles created as heated water molecules release oxygen quickly pick up speed until the water is at a roiling boil. Change in organizations often follows this same trajectory.
For all the bad press that public agencies earn and endure, they are not doomed to an eternally-formulaic existence. Given a slightly different perspective and enough passion to carry their initiatives forward, leaders in the public sector can tap into their own and their employees' creativity to generate new results. With a persistent focus on convening the necessary resources and supports, it is more than possible to embed a commitment to creativity and rewrite the story about "how work gets done here."
Read other posts by Mimi Lyster Zemmelman
Keep up with our community: Facebook | Twitter | Saybrook's Organizational Systems Program


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SYNOPSISxscreensaver-getimage [-display host:display.screen] [--verbose] window-id [pixmap-id]
DESCRIPTIONThe xscreensaver-getimage program is a helper program for the xscreensaver hacks that manipulate images. This is not a user-level command.
This program selects a random image, and puts it on the specified window or pixmap. This image might be a snapshot of the desktop; or a frame captured from the system's video input; or a randomly-selected image from disk.
If only a window ID is specified, the image will be painted there. If both a window ID and a pixmap ID are specified, then the image will be painted on the pixmap; and the window may be modified as a side-effect.
OPTIONSxscreensaver-getimage reads the ~/.xscreensaver file for configuration information. It uses these settings:
- grabDesktopImages
- Whether it is acceptable to grab snapshots of the desktop. The security paranoid might want to turn this off, to avoid letting people see (but not touch!) your desktop while the screen is locked.
- grabVideoFrames
- Whether it is acceptable to grab frames of video from the system's video input. Grabbing of video is done by invoking the xscreensaver-getimage-video(1) program.
- chooseRandomImages
- Whether it is acceptable to display random images found on disk. Selection and loading of images is done by invoking the xscreensaver-getimage-file(1) program.
- imageDirectory
When loading images from disk, this is the directory to find them in.
The directory will be searched recursively for images.
It may also be the URL of an RSS or Atom feed, in which case a random image from that feed will be selected instead. The contents of the feed will be cached locally and refreshed periodically as needed.
If none of the three options are set to True, then video colorbars will be displayed instead.
BUGSWhen grabbing desktop images, the window argument will be unmapped and have its contents modified, causing flicker. (This does not happen when loading image files or video frames.)
COPYRIGHTCopyright © 2001-2011 by Jamie Zawinski. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
AUTHORJamie Zawinski <[email protected]>, 14-Apr-01


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Your cart is empty.
Product 93/107
A simple, quick way to thread beads. The twisted stainless steel needle is already installed at the end of the cord and saves threading time. You can knot the cord easily because the thread has the correct twist. Approx. 79 inches (2 meters) of thread per card, which is enough for a necklace with a knot between each bead.
Made in Germany. By the pack of 2 m.
Silk Thread
For pearls, or items where the thread is part of the design. Very soft and luxurious feeling and glossy with a soft sheen, really changes colour depending on the angle you look at it. Silk is arguably the most beautiful natural fiber in the world. This is a smooth, twisted three-ply, 100% pure silk thread. Extremely supple, yet resistant to stretch and wear. Durable enough to withstand the abrasion of pearls, glass beads, and gemstones.
It is with a heavy heart that we have to say good-bye to Champion silk. Champion - long a staple of bead stringing - was make by Gudebrod, who sadly have closed their doors for the final time and the assets have been sold off.
In it's place - we are pleased to presend Dazzle-It brand silk thread. While the range of colours is not yet particularly extensive, it comes in a wide variety of widths, and it means that we once again have access to the very handy "card with 6 feet of silk and a needle" - which we have all missed!
Traditionally, pearls were knotted to keep them from rubbing on each other, and if the thread broke, you only lost one instead of the entire strand. ;-) Transparent stone or glass beads can be strung on a deeper self-colour to make their colour look richer. Try Rose Quartz on Strawberry Pink to see what we mean!


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Nissan Brings New, U.S.-Assembled 2013 LEAF to Market with Major Price Reduction
- Addition of a new LEAF S trim level lowers entry price by more than $6,000, or 18 percent
- Available federal and state incentives can bring price down to less than $19,000
- Improved energy efficiency, faster charging times and greater customer choice headline 2013 model year improvements
14 Jan, 2013, 04:00 ET
FRANKLIN, Tenn., Jan. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Nissan has announced that U.S. pricing for the new 2013 Nissan LEAF will start at an MSRP of $28,800 for the newly-added S grade, making it the lowest priced five-passenger electric vehicle sold in the United States. Depending on location, some consumers may purchase the vehicle for as low as $18,800 with qualifying federal and state tax credits, putting the LEAF on par with gas-powered vehicles of its size.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130114/CL42137 )
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080506/NISSANBADGELOGO )
Nissan's objective for the LEAF has always been to produce an affordable zero-emission vehicle for the mass market, and the 2013 LEAF is a prime example of that commitment with increased value at every trim level, making it more accessible for more people.
"With nearly 50,000 LEAFs on the road globally, we are the leaders in zero emissions vehicles and our class-leading product just got better," said Billy Hayes, Global vice president of LEAF sales for Nissan. "From the very outset, Nissan has continuously advanced and refined the affordable zero emissions vehicle ownership experience. Now customers won't have to pay a premium for owning a green car that's really fun to drive, and that's exciting."
Nissan recently began U.S. assembly of the 2013 Nissan LEAF at its manufacturing plant in Smyrna, Tenn., a localization initiative that further drives efficiencies by leveraging already-existing equipment and processes while also reducing exposure to fluctuations in foreign currency. The battery packs that power LEAF are built in an adjacent facility in Smyrna while the vehicle's electric motor comes from Nissan's powertrain plant in Decherd, Tenn., further supporting efficient manufacturing.
Eligible consumers can take advantage of a $7,500 federal tax credit, and some states and municipalities offer additional incentives. For example, California residents can get a 2013 Nissan LEAF for as low as $18,800 after the federal tax credit and state rebate of $2,500.
Nissan will also continue its lease offer for the 2013 LEAF, allowing consumers to lease the electric vehicle for as low as $199 per month for 36 months, which includes tax credits and destination charges.
Additions to the 2013 LEAF include: 17-inch alloy wheels and leather appointed interior on SL models, available Around View® Monitor and 7-speaker Bose® energy efficient audio system and a 6.6 kW onboard charger that significantly reduces 220V charging times and is standard on SV and SL models.
Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Prices* (MSRP) for the 2013 Nissan LEAF:
About the 2013 Nissan LEAF
Now in its third model year, the Nissan LEAF is the world's best-selling pure electric vehicle with nearly 50,000 cumulative sales worldwide. For 2013, the LEAF features numerous customer-focused upgrades. LEAF is powered by a responsive 80kW AC synchronous motor produced at Nissan's Powertrain Assembly plant in Decherd, Tenn. The 2013 LEAF's output is 107 horsepower, with 187 lb-ft. of torque. Energy is supplied by an advanced 48-module lithium-ion battery made at the new battery plant in Smyrna, Tenn.
The 2013 Nissan LEAF is offered in three well-equipped models, the LEAF S, LEAF SV and LEAF SL. Standard features include 6-way manual driver's seat, 4-way manual front passenger's seat, trip computer (instant and average energy consumption, driving time, outside temperature and autonomy range), Automatic Temperature Control (ATC), center console storage and 3.6 kW onboard charger. Other standard equipment includes Nissan Intelligent Key® with Push Button Start, Bluetooth® hands-free phone system, power windows with driver's window one-touch auto up/down, power door locks with auto locking feature, remote charge door release, variable intermittent windshield wipers, AM/FM/CD with MP3 playback capability and a 12-volt power outlet.
LEAF SV models are upgraded to 16-inch aluminum alloy wheels, a 6.6 kW onboard charger, cruise control, auto dimming rear view mirror, energy saving hybrid heating system, an upgraded 6-speaker sound system, 7-inch color LCD display, Pandora® link for iPhone users, Nissan Navigation system with CARWINGS telematics and B-mode setting for increased regenerative braking. At an MSRP of $31,820, the 2013 LEAF SV represents a $3,380 savings over a similar 2012 model.
LEAF SL adds leather-appointed seats, 17-inch five spoke alloy wheels, DC 480V fast charge port, automatic on/off LED headlights, fog lights, photovoltaic solar panel rear spoiler and HomeLink® Universal Transceiver. At an MSRP of $34,840, the 2013 LEAF SL represents a $2,410 savings over a similar 2012 model.
Incremental aerodynamic and energy management improvements are expected to give the 2013 LEAF improved range** over previous model years. Final range estimates for the 2013 Nissan LEAF are awaiting EPA test cycle verification.
About Nissan
Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Japan's second-largest automotive company, is headquartered in Yokohama, Japan, and is part of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Operating with more than 248,000 employees globally, Nissan provided customers with more than 4.8 million vehicles in 2011, generating revenue of 9.4 trillion yen ($118.95 billion US). With a strong commitment to developing exciting and innovative products for all, Nissan delivers a comprehensive range of 64 models under the Nissan and Infiniti brands. A pioneer in zero-emission mobility, Nissan made history with the introduction of the Nissan LEAF, the first affordable, mass-market, pure-electric vehicle and winner of numerous international accolades, including the prestigious 2011-2012 Car of the Year Japan and 2011 World Car of the Year awards.
About Nissan North America
In North America, Nissan's operations include automotive styling, design, engineering, consumer and corporate financing, sales and marketing, distribution and manufacturing. Nissan is dedicated to improving the environment under the Nissan Green Program 2010 and has been recognized as a 2010 and 2011 ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More information about Nissan in North America and the complete line of Nissan and Infiniti vehicles can be found online at www.NissanUSA.com and www.Infiniti.com.
With a strong commitment to developing exciting and innovative products for all, Nissan delivers a comprehensive range of fuel-efficient and low-emissions vehicles under the Nissan and Infiniti brands. A pioneer in zero emission mobility, Nissan made history with the introduction of the Nissan LEAF, the first affordable, mass-market, pure-electric vehicle and winner of numerous international accolades including the prestigious 2011 European Car of the Year award.
For more information on our products, services and commitment to Sustainable Mobility, visit our website at http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/.
* MSRP excludes applicable tax, title, license fees and destination charges. Dealer sets actual price. Prices and specs are subject to change without notice.
**Charging times and range estimates may vary depending on driving/charging habits, weather, temperature and battery age. A 6.6W onboard charger is a standard feature on SV and SL trims, and optional feature on the S trim.
SOURCE Nissan North America


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Florida Faces Protests Over Early Primary Date
This December, along with the holidays, voters in Iowa and New Hampshire can also look forward to lots of visits from presidential candidates. The primary calendar now looks like it will start early in January—first with the Iowa caucuses, followed closely by New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and then, by month's end, Florida.
On Friday, officials in the Sunshine State announced they were scheduling their presidential primary on Jan. 31 — breaking party rules and forcing four other states to move up even earlier to maintain their places in the batting order.
Under Republican Party rules, only four states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — are allowed to hold presidential nominating contests before March 6.
Tell that to Florida — a megastate that has agitated for years to be more important in the primary season.
A special state commission met Friday and decided—for the second presidential cycle in a row — that Florida would flout the rules. State Sen. John Thrasher, a Republican, said in choosing Jan. 31, Florida is showing respect to the four traditional early states.
"Florida has more voters than all of those other states combined," Thrasher said. "And it has an incredible amount of diversity. It is a reflection, I think, of the national interest. And Florida, because of that, ought to be an early state."
Other States Cry Foul
That might be how it looks in Florida. But other states—jealously guarding their early positions—see it differently. Iowa's Republican Party chairman called Florida leaders arrogant.
In South Carolina, the Republican chairman described Florida as a "rogue state" that should lose all of its delegates at next year's national convention.
The executive director of South Carolina's GOP, Matt Moore said his state will now have to move up its primary into January — and he is not happy about it.
"A compressed calendar in January really hurts candidates, it hurts voters," Moore said. "For the Republican Party, this election is important to get wrong. And we want to pick the best candidates. And a calendar that makes sense would really go a long way to doing that."
When Florida jumped the line four years ago, both parties imposed penalties. This time, with President Obama likely running unopposed, there won't be a Democratic primary. That makes this a Republican-only dilemma.
Biden: Florida Too Big To Ignore
But that hasn't stopped Vice President Joe Biden from weighing in. In an interview this week on NPR member station WLRN in Miami, Biden said Florida was right to go early.
"Anybody who thinks they can walk away from Florida and get elected president, anybody who thinks they can walk away from Florida and be held harmless in the nominating process, I think is making a gigantic mistake in either of our parties," Biden said.
Florida Republican leaders agree. Four years ago, Florida's primary helped seal the nomination for Sen. John McCain. The state was penalized half of its votes at the convention, but in the end, the party seated all the state's delegates. That's the outcome Florida Republicans are betting on again this time.
The Republican National Committee will now have to negotiate with the four traditional early voting states before it can finalize the primary calendar.
As in 2008, Iowa now looks likely to hold its caucuses in the first or second week of January.
In New Hampshire, the secretary of state announced that the filing period for presidential candidates in his state would commence two weeks from Monday. And he said he couldn't rule out holding his state's primary as early as December.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Excerpts of the President's State of the Union Address
"It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.
It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country – the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.
It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours."
"A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs – that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?"
"Tonight, I'll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat – nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It's not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth."


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Inside IBM's Mega Outsourcing Projects With ABN Amro and Bank of Ireland
Love it or loathe it, outsourcing activity grew dramatically last year among large banks, especially in the fourth quarter. According to TPI's index of outsourcing contracts worth more than $25 million, financial services signed $25 billion in such contracts in 2010, more than in any prior year.
IBM was a big winner of this business, signing up 17 banking deals greater than $100 million in 2010, and $8 billion in IT services agreements with banks worldwide in the fourth quarter alone (according to TPI, the total contract value of all large outsourcing contracts in the fourth quarter was $22 billion, down 30% from 2009).
Likhit Wagle, global industry leader, banking and financial markets at IBM, yesterday shared an insider view of a few of these deals with us. Likhit says over the last nine months clients have been increasingly interested in IT providers like IBM taking end-to-end responsibility for the delivery of services with very specific business outcomes, so that the banks could cut operational costs, improve efficiency and focus on their core competencies.
IBM inked a $1.8 billion deal with ABN Amro in October to help speed the bank's merger with Fortis Bank Nederland. ABN Amro's retail banking operation in the Netherlands has two key objectives, according to Likhit.
First, following the financial crisis and the breakup of Fortis' banking business in Europe, ABN Amro was asked by the government to take over Fortis in the Netherlands, which meant those two banks' systems needed to be integrated. As Fortis's home-grown core banking platform is considered the stronger one, IBM has been tasked with extending and "progressively renovating" that platform across ABN Amro's Netherlands retail banking operation.
ABN Amro's second objective for the IBM deal is to create a single view of customers that would enable the bank to quickly introduce new products and services tailored to customer needs. ABN is currently in the first, information management phase of this, for which it will deploy IBM's information management and master data management software, WebSphere application server, and DB2 database. "They're rationalizing their core information landscape to reduce duplication of data and of data warehouses, to instill a state of the art governance process so they've got the foundation to obtain, clean and report that data to support the single view of the customer," Wagle says. The next phase of the project will be using that information to understand what customers require and put together appropriate products and services. The third phase will be to predict customer needs in the future; this will involve the business analytics technology IBM acquired with its acquisitions of Cognos and SPSS.
With Bank of Ireland, IBM struck a more conventional, five-year outsourcing deal to run the bank's IT infrastructure in November, when a similar agreement with HP ended. The total contract value of the IBM deal was approximately $263 million, a number that has not previously been disclosed. IBM will manage the bank's data centers, desktop systems, servers, mainframes, local area networks and service desk.
As the bank considered its bids for this contract, a major factor was Ireland's challenged economy. "There's almost a maniacal focus on what can be done to improve the capital position and the operational efficiency and profitability of those businesses," Wagle says. The bank looked to IBM to lower its IT costs and improve its operating performance, he says. He declined to share any specific products IBM will be using in the data centers.
A third deal with Australian bank Westpac, also signed in November, is worth $1.3 billion over five years. It's a renewal of an existing 10-year outsourcing contract with IBM. Westpac will deploy a virtualised computing platform known as UCS that uses a variety of products from Cisco, EMC and VMware. "They're looking for a flexible, robust IT infrastructure," says Wagle. "They're going down a journey of specialization, looking for IBM to run their infrastructure for them at levels of operational performance that will enable them to achieve productivity targets."


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Veteran broadcaster Larry King says he battled lung cancer this summer but appears to have the disease at bay.
The former CNN host, who is 83, told Us Weekly that a spot on his lung was noticed this summer during a routine check-up. He said he had surgery in July. The tumor was malignant but King said it was found at such an early stage that his doctor told him he was lucky.
King has had health issues in the past, including a heart attack and prostate cancer. He was a smoker but gave it up after his heart attack in the 1980s.
King keeps working. He told the magazine that his secret wish is to do six months on Broadway, telling stories and taking audience questions.
Copyright AP - Associated Press


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Ovarian Insufficiency
1. What every clinician should know
Are you confident of diagnosis?
Ovarian insufficiency develops in women who most likely underwent normal puberty and had experienced regular periods before developing ovarian insufficiency. Women with this condition tend to stop having periods or skip periods for a few months.
Ovarian insufficiency indicates cessation of ovarian function prior to age 40. Women often present with characteristics of early menopause such as heat intolerance, flushes, night sweats, irritability, anxiety, palpitations, depression, sleep disturbance, decreased libido, hair coarseness, vaginal dryness, and fatigue. Although women with ovarian insufficiency greatly vary in their symptoms, about 75% of them present with some signs of estrogen deficiency on careful questioning.
Premature ovarian failure is accompanied by loss of oocytes, lack of folliculogenesis, loss of ovarian estrogen production, and infertility. Women who have experienced four months without regular menses and have had two FSH levels in menopausal range (thirty days apart) meet diagnostic criteria for ovarian insufficiency. Random serum AMH levels less than the lowest sensitivity of the assay, generally 0.1 ng/ml, are consistent with a perimenopause/menopause transition. An AMH <0.1 ng/ml accompanied by an elevated FSH >20 IU/ml is consistent with a perimenopause/menopause transition (Figure 1).
Continue Reading
Who is at the risk of developing the disease?
Any women of reproductive age are at risk of experiencing ovarian insufficiency; however, women with a family history of ovarian insufficiency as well as women exposed to chemotherapy, radiation, smoking, environmental pollutants, and toxic agents have higher chances of ovarian insufficiency. Increasing age certainly contributes to diminished ovarian reserve, leading to ovarian insufficiency. Women with chromosomal abnormalities such as Turner's syndrome and fragile X carriers (FMR1 carrier) are more prone to decreased ovarian reserve. Pelvic surgeries, especially those involving ovaries and/or fallopian tubes, appear to predispose women to some extent of decreased ovarian reserve, but further studies are needed. Tubal ligation is not found to decrease change in the ovarian reserve.
2. Diagnosis and differential diagnosis
Iatrogenic causes (taking GnRH analogs, antiestrogens like tamoxifen, smoking, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy)
Hypothalamic pituitary diseases (microadenomas and macroadenomas of the pituitary, hyperprolactinemia, Kallman syndrome)
Hypothalamic amenorrhea (psychological or physiological stress, weight loss, fasting, systemic diseases (e.g., SLE), excessive exercise)
Polycystic ovaries
Enzymatic defects of steroidogenesis (e.g., 21-hydroxylase deficiency)
Endocrine disorders such as hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, hyperparathyroidism, Cushing's syndrome
Asherman's syndrome
Obstruction of uterine outflow tract
Gonadal dysgenesis (e.g., mosaic Turner's syndrome, Swyer's syndrome)
Autoimmune disease (e.g., celiac disease, adrenal failure, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, hyperparathyroidism)
What is the cause of the disease?
Pathogenesis of ovarian insufficiency can be divided in two subcategories: accelerated follicle depletion and decreased steroid production.
Accelerated follicle depletion
Genetic factors
X-chromosome disorders
Fragile X syndrome carrier (FMR 1 carrier)
Turner syndrome
Other chromosome deletions/translocations/mosaicism
Gonadal dysgenesis
Somatic chromosomal defects
Bone morphogenic protein 15 (BMP-15) mutation
Other rare chromosomal defects such as mutation in FOXL2 gene, mutation of NR5A1 (steroidogenic factor 1), FSH receptor mutation, etc.
Autoimmune factors
Research has shown that women with adrenal insufficiency also had ovarian insufficiency. Many women with type I and type II syndromes of polyglandular autoimmune failure are associated with autoantibodies to multiple endocrine and other organs.
Environmental factors
Cigarettes, phenylcyclidine (PCP), and dioxin exposure.
Toxic factors
Chemotherapy and radiation, and viruses such as mumps and CMV.
Physical and psychological stressors
Autoimmune diseases, excessive exercise, etc.
Decreased steroid production
Genetic disorders are main contributions in decreased steroid production. Three major mechanisms though which this is done are:
Defects in intraovarian modulators
Numerous substances have been identified as paracrine modulators of ovarian responsiveness and any abnormalities in production of these modulators have can significantly affect cellular response to gonadotrophins
Steroidogenic Enzyme Defects
Genetic defects in the enzymes involved in androstenedione and estradiol biosynthesis are commonly identified. Some of the reported enzyme defect mutations are Steroidogenic acute regulatory enzyme (StAR); and mutations in aromatase gene.
FSH and LH Receptor Mutations
Including the Gs alpha subunit gene mutation.
3. Management
Treatment options
Therapy for women with premature ovarian failure often starts with transdermal E2-17 beta 100 micrograms (Estrace, Alora, etc.), which results in estrogen levels compatible with a normal menstrual cycle. Oral estrogens in the forms of conjugated estrogen 0.625 mg to 1.25 mg (Premarin) or E2-17 beta 1-2 mg (Estrace) are good medical alternatives. When it comes to progesterone administration, stabilizing the endometrium is the main goal. This is often accomplished with micronized progesterone 100-200 mg (Microgest) or medroxyprogesterone acetate 5-10 mg (Provera), which can be given for 14 days every 30-60 days.
It is understood that the administration of progesterone less frequently than every three months may not protect against endometrial hyperplasia. Therefore, transvaginal ultrasound designed to determine thickness of the endometrium after withdrawal bleeding should be considered in cases where progesterone is administered less than once a month.
There is no medication regimen that has proven to be superior over another regimen. Oral contraceptives tend to provide higher levels of estrogen than required for women with ovarian insufficiency; however, this form of hormonal replacement may be easiest and is an emotionally acceptable form of hormone replacement in women younger than 40.
Hormone therapy alleviates symptoms of hot flushes, night sweats, dyspareunia, and accelerated bone loss. Nevertheless, there are no studies that document safety of estrogen use in women with premature ovarian failure. Also, the amount of estrogen used to manage menopausal symptoms in younger women is usually greater than the amount used in menopausal women. Hormone replacement therapy is strongly recommended as therapy for patients with premature ovarian failure, even though data from randomized controlled trials are lacking.
Due to significant hormone insufficiency, women with premature ovarian failure are at high risk of developing osteoporosis and therefore their dietary supplement should include 1200-1500 mg of calcium with addition of vitamin D (600 IU daily). Supplemental treatment with bisphosphonates (i.e., Alendronate, Etidronate, or selective estrogen receptor modulators [SERMs] such as raloxifene or tamoxifen) are options particularly for those who are unwilling to take estrogen replacement therapy and are at high risk of developing osteoporosis.
Treatment for ovarian insufficiency is also inextricably linked to healthy lifestyle habits. Therefore, patients should avoid smoking, alcohol, and drugs, as well as incorporate exercise, especially weight-bearing exercise, in their lifestyle.
There are numerous ongoing trials of the use of SERMs with ovarian insufficiency, and current recommendations state that SERMs have significant effects on bone health; however, they do not have any effects on other parts of early menopause. Women experiencing ovarian insufficiency are often going though great psychological distress. These women should be encouraged to identify sources of emotional support within their families, friends, or support groups.
4. Complications
Systemic implications and complications
There are no long-term studies to access the impact of ovarian insufficiency on mortality, but there are numerous studies concerning the impact of ovarian insufficiency on quality of life. Snowdon et al. summarized that women with premature ovarian failure before age 40 have an increase in significant morbidities. Young women exposed to hypoestrogenic state are at higher risk of not achieving and maintaining adequate bone density. These women are at significantly higher risk for osteoporosis and fractures later in life, such as vertebral and hip fractures. Due to low estrogen levels, many women with a hypoestrogen state are at higher risk for multiple cardiovascular diseases and adverse events such as stroke, premature myocardial infarction due to arteriosclerosis, etc. Premature ovarian failure often coexists with other endocrine and nonendocrine diseases, and careful examination of these coexisting conditions in necessary. Premature ovarian failure has significant psychological effects on women, with increased rates of depression. Atrophy of genitourinary tract (vagina and urethra).
5. Prognosis and outcome
Optimal therapeutic approach to the disease
Women with ovarian insufficiency usually visit a few physicians and undergo numerous tests before being diagnosed with this condition. The key in treatment is adequate diagnosis and follow-up care with a team composed of a reproductive endocrinologist, and support personnel such as a psychologist or a psychiatrist, nutritionist, and physical therapist or fitness trainers. Ovarian insufficiency occurs in approximately 1% of women.
The estimated incidence is:
by age 20: 1:10,000
by age 30: 1:1000
by age 35: 1:250
by age 40: 1:100
Patient management
Prompt diagnosis, counseling, and appropriate treatment can markedly improve a woman's quality of life. Besides baseline hormone levels (FSH, AMH, TSH, cortisol), calcium, phosphate, CBC, ANA, FMR-1 testing, and karyotype to rule out genetic causes, patients should be scheduled for a DEXA scan to assess current bone density. Women with ovarian insufficiency tend to have more anxiety, depression, and psychological distress than do healthy women of their age. Thus, psychological evaluation plus support services (nutritionist, fitness instructor, physical therapist) in addition to appropriate medical therapy should be provided as discussed earlier.
Unusual clinical scenarios to consider
There are numerous cases of pregnancies reported in women with transient ovarian failure. In 10% of women, premature ovarian failure will spontaneously resolve for varying periods of time and the patients may conceive. Attempting to induce ovulation using clomid, letrozole, or gonadotropins is ineffective and a waste of resources.
6. What is the evidence for specific management and treatment recommendations
Nelson, LM. "Clinical practice. Primary ovarian insufficiency.". N Engl J Med. vol. 360. 2009. pp. 606-14.
Ledger, W. "Clinical utility of measurement of anti-Mullerian hormone in reproductive endocrinology". J Clin Endocrinol Metab. vol. 95. 2010. pp. 5144-54.
Seifer, DB, Baker, VL, Leader, B. "Age-specific serum anti-Mullerian hormone values for 17,120 women presenting to fertility centers within the United States". Fertil Steril. vol. 95. 2011. pp. 747-50.
Bidet, M, Bachelot, A, Touraine, P. "Premature ovarian failure: predictability of intermittent ovarian function and response to ovulation induction agents". Curr Opin Obstet Gynecol. vol. 20. 2008. pp. 416-20.
Goswami, D, Conway, GS. "Premature ovarian failure". Hum Reprod Update. vol. 11. 2005. pp. 391-410.
Persani, L, Rossetti, R, Cacciatore, C. "Genes involved in human premature ovarian failure". J Mol Endocrinol. vol. 45. 2010. pp. 257-79.
Coulam, CB, Adamson, SC, Annegers, JF. "Incidence of premature ovarian failure". Obstet Gynecol. vol. 67. 1986. pp. 604
Speroff, L, Fritz, M. "Clinical gynecologic endocrinology and infertility.". 2011.
Kelekci, S, Yilmaz, B, Yasar, L, Savan, K, Sonmez, S, Kart, C. "Ovarian reserve and ovarian stromal blood supply after tubal ligation by the pomeroy technique: comparison with controls". Gynecol Endocrinol. vol. 20. 2005. pp. 279-83.
Gleicher, N, Weghofer, A, Barad, DH. "A pilot study of premature ovarian senescence. I. Correlation of triple CGG repeats on the FMR1 gene to ovarian reserve parameters FSH and anti-Müllerian hormone". Fertil Steril. vol. 91. 2009. pp. 1700-6.
Rebar, RW. "Premature ovarian failure". Obstet Gynecol. vol. 113. 2009. pp. 1355-63.
Nelson, SM, Anderson, RA, Broekmans, FJ, Raine-Fenning, N, Fleming, R, La Marca, A. "Anti-Mullerian hormone: clairvoyance or crystal clear?". Hum Reprod. 2012 Jan 11..
Snowdon, DA, Kane, RL, Beeson, WL. "Is early natural menopause a biologic marker of health and aging?.". Am J Public Health. vol. 79. 1989. pp. 709-714.
Visser, JA, Schipper, I, Laven, JS, Themmen, AP. "Anti-Mullerian hormone: an ovarian reserve marker in primary ovarian insufficiency". Nat Rev Endocrinol .
Seifer, DB. "Strategic planning is long overdue and could mitigate long-term complications which result from delayed diagnosis of primary ovarian insufficiency". Fertil Steril. vol. 95. 2011. pp. 1898
Copyright © 2017, 2013 Decision Support in Medicine, LLC. All rights reserved.
No sponsor or advertiser has participated in, approved or paid for the content provided by Decision Support in Medicine LLC. The Licensed Content is the property of and copyrighted by DSM.
- Ovarian Insufficiency
- 1. What every clinician should know
- 2. Diagnosis and differential diagnosis
- 3. Management
- 4. Complications
- 5. Prognosis and outcome
- 6. What is the evidence for specific management and treatment recommendations


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Every 10 years or so a bunch of Nepalese sadists pick a baby (from 2-4 years old) girl to be a "living goddess". Among the trials the successful candidate must endure is spending:
"a night alone in a room among the heads of ritually slaughtered goats and buffaloes without showing fear".
Congratulations little toddler, you survived. Now here's your prize:
"Having passed all the tests, the child will stay in almost complete isolation at the temple, and will be allowed to return to her family only at the onset of menstruation when a new goddess will be named to replace her."
Plus it turns out that this is a "gift" that just keeps on giving:
"Nepalese folklore holds that men who marry a former kumari will die young, and so many girls remain unmarried and face a life of hardship."
In all seriousness, what the hell is wrong with these people??


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May is birdwatching month at Point Pelee National Park in Leamington, Ontario. Birders flock (yes, I said it) to this mostly marshland conservation area. I'm here with my dog Victor days before the ornithology season starts.
Yet there are binocular-carrying bird-enthusiasts here already.
I'm not interested in spotting rare species, but I do love anywhere I can take my dog – whether the birders like it or not. (Birders often don't like dogs).
Point Pelee National Park, and its checkered history, is stop number four of our 2017 quest to visit at least one Parks Canada site each month this year – thanks to our free 150 Pass distributed in honour of the country's sesquicentennial.
Day one is unseasonably mild. Day two is unseasonably cool. Alas, it's the perfect combination to test my new Fjällräven lightweight jacket and determine its 'dog hiking' compatibility.
Fjällräven Canada sent me a burnt umber Women's Raven jacket in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. All opinions are my own. Affiliate links are in blue.
Fjällräven is a Swedish company now in Canada and distributing outdoor active ware and backpacks at quality stores such as Nordstrom. I selected this style because of the durable canvas material and pockets – four front pockets and an inside zippered one offer room for poop bags, a collapsible water dish, water bottle and random treats mandatory during any long hike.
Up next: My complete review of the jacket's success.
First, Dog-friendly Point Pelee National Park.
Day one (the warmer day) we park at the Visitor's Centre, the auto endpoint of a paved road leading from the Point Pelee's entrance along this peninsula's shoreline. At the Visitor's Centre, we (yes, the dog too) ride a shuttle 2.5 km to the 42 degree North latitude point. Then a half kilometre walk gets us to the beach – just south of the 43 parallel, a point in line with Northern California and parts of the Mediterranean. It's mainland Canada's southernmost tip.
Sounds balmy, right?
Not today. It's windy (though not penetrating my Fjällräven jacket), waves are rough and the sun isn't intense enough to warm the sand.
I've stood at the Southernmost point of the U.S. in Key West, Florida and now, I stand at the Southernmost tip of Canada. They're not the same.
But where Key West has views of Cuba, Point Pelee has views of Ohio … very distant views.
This Point is bird migration central, along with a killer undertow – literally. Don't go in the water and don't let the dogs in. People have drowned here.
Otherwise, it's a beautiful view of Lake Erie. The hard-packed path from the shuttle drop-off point to the actual point is an easy walk. (Of course, there's a leash rule and pick-up-the-poop policy).
In fact, most of the park's eight trails – 14 kilometres in total – are hard packed, some gravel and easy to follow. Victor has no problem running along and crossing bridges over marshes, ponds and even former canals near the 1830 DeLaurier Homestead (where my favourite trail starts). The historic house is a restored reminder of pioneer days when most of this land was orchards.
The park does a good job of documenting its somewhat controversial past, long before conservation reclamation in the 1970s. Prior to that, this land was hunted, fished, clear-cut for ship lumber, farmed by homesteaders and, in the 1960s, over-run by cars and vacation properties. Most of those cottages were removed in the 1970s, and nature (in a new form) reestablished itself among the evidence of human interference.
Also, two-thirds of the park is marshland – hence the bird populations. Yet even this can – and must – be experienced.
Start with the view.
Beside the marsh boardwalk is a 12-metre high viewing tower, which Victor happily climbs but is disappointed when he encounters nothing but wind at the top. He also willing follows me along the boardwalk – a weaving path of wood elevated over the marshland. During a 20 to 30 minute walk, we experience what's it's like to be fully encompassed in a marsh. Note two thirds of the way along, the railing disappears. Then it's just high reeds separating us from the water.
Bring a long camera lens.
If your dog likes to swim, you might be 'fishing' him out at this point. Fortunately, Victor doesn't – he also doesn't like canoes. Those can be rented May to September for a more authentic tour of the wetlands.
Point Pelee is an extremely popular National Park, so the spring and fall shoulder seasons are ideal times to visit and few people object to Victor being his adventure loving self. At times, we had trails to ourselves.
Yes, dogs can go in the educational Visitor's Centre and on the shuttle to the point. Picnics tables and shelters are throughout the park but there's no camping. Private campsites exist in the region, along with cottage rentals and B&Bs, though few allow dogs. We 'pupped out' of rustic accommodations and end up at the pet-friendly Talbot Trail Inn and Suites motel in town. Very basic accommodations, but not camping.
Good enough place to hang our jackets … ok, more about that next.
TRAVEL GUIDE: Point Pelee National Park is located in Leamington, Ontario in Essex County about 60 kilometres from Windsor. Almost 400 species of migrating birds stop here annually. There's 14 kilometres of walking trails, including a marshland boardwalk.
The park is home to mainland Canada's southern-most point, more at-risk species than any other national park in the country and Canada's only naturally occurring population of endangered eastern prickly pear cactus, according to National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of Canada (available on Amazon – affiliate link) – a highly recommended guide.
Note: This post contains affiliate links, meaning if you click on a link above and then make a purchase, dogtrotting.net will receive a small commission with no extra cost to you. Cheers!


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One of the big stars of Geographic was a big, heavily scarred male that we called "Al" (as in Al Pacino - Scarface). He appeared to be the dominant bear, as all other bruins in the area gave him wide berth. While we never saw any bears fighting at Geographic, the evidence of some serious combat was obvious.
On one of our last days in Katmai, we observed a large boar with a flap of flesh peeled back from a large, open wound on its hind quarters. Every adult boar had war wounds. In most cases, these were gashed on the forelegs or wounds around the neck area. One bear had a gash on its head that almost reached the eye (at first we thought the eye had been damaged). While everything seemed fairly copasetic during our stay, the area was no doubt an arena from some terrific bruin battles.
A large boar bearing wounds on the forelegs and around the neck - war wounds from intense bruin battling!
Grizzly Aggression
Stonorov and Stokes (1972) found that there were four situations in which aggression most often occurs in brown bear aggregations. They were: 1. when one bear moves too close to another bear (invades personal space) 2. when one bear loses a challenge but then redirects its aggression toward a nearby bear (displacement aggression) 3. when two bears compete for a preferred fishing site 4. when two strange bears meet.
Stonorov and Stokes describes what happen during an intense, aggressive encounter between two bears that are similar in social ranking. The first thing that occurs is the bears confront one another – the two brown bears face each other with the front legs stiffened, the heads are lowered slightly and the movements occur in slow motion, the ears are laid back, both have their mouths wide open (this exposes the canines) and there is excess saliva production.
One of two things may happen at this point – one of the bears may back down or one or both bears may charge one another. When charging occurs one or both bears run at each other, the head is lowered and the ears are back and the mouth is open slightly. If neither bear breaks off the charge and retreats at this point, the big bears will come to blows. The bruins may swipe at each other with their fore paws, bite each other (usually on the neck) or lock jaws.
When one bear has had enough, it will drop its head even lower than its opponent and begin to slowly back away. At some point, the subordinate may walk or run away. During much of the encounter, there will be lots of vocalizations.
Stonorov D. and A. W. Stokes. 1972. Social behavior of the Alaska brown bear. Int. Assoc Bear Res. & Mang. 23: 232-242.
© Scott W. Michael


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Learn About the Law
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[227 U.S. 80, 81] Messrs. J. K. M. Norton and Samuel A. Putman for appellants.
[227 U.S. 80, 83] Mr. J. J. Darlington for appellee. [227 U.S. 80, 84]
Memorandum opinion by direction of the court, by Mr. Justice Lurton:
This is a bill by the appellee to recover from appellants secret profits made by them as promoters of the Las Ovas Company in the purchase of a part of a tract of land known as Las Ovas, in the Republic of Cuba, and also for the cancelation of certain shares of stock issued to them as promoters.
The facts essential to judgment are not in serious dispute. They are found clearly and fully stated in the opinion of Mr. Justice Gould for the supreme court of the District of Columbia, and again in the opinion of the court of appeals of the District by Mr. Justice Robb.
From the facts found by both courts it appears:--
a. That the appellants and certain other persons, not parties to this suit, signed an agreement on March 19, 1904, by which they agreed to purchase for a corporation which they were to organize a specified part of a tract of land in Cuba called the Las Ovas plantation, for the price of $ 34,000, to which it was later agreed to add another small parcel at an additional price of $1,000.
b. It was further agreed that they should organize a corporation, of which they should be the incorporators, with a capital stock of $150,000, and that 40 per cent of the shares should be issued to them for service as promoters and that the remaining stock should be subscribed for by them. For this subscribed stock they were to pay an amount sufficient to cover the purchase money of $35,000 and to create an expense fund of $5,000.
c. It was agreed that the property should, when acquired, be placed in the hands of one of the group of promoters until the formation of the company, and then conveyed to it.
d. The scheme was one originated and engineered by [227 U.S. 80, 85] the appellants, who, at the time of this agreement, had already secretly secured an option for themselves for the purchase of this property at the price of $20,000. To conceal the true consideration from their associates they caused the property to be conveyed by the vendor to one Escalante, a stranger selected by them. The deed to Escalante recited the true consideration. Later, in pursuance of the promoters' agreement, they caused Escalante to convey to the member of the syndicate selected to hold the title until organization, reciting a consideration of $35,000.
The corporation was organized as planned. The promoters' shares were duly issued and the remaining shares taken by the promoters upon the agreed terms, its officers and directors being composed exclusively of the members of the syndicate. Thereupon the property was transferred to the company and paid for, through appellants, out of the proceeds of the subscribed stock.
The result of the transaction was that the corporation was required to pay to those who had assumed to act for and represent it, a secret profit of $15,000 and also to compensate them for their services in buying the land and organizing the company by issuing to each of them $15,000 in nonassessable shares of its stock.
The decree below required the appellants to account for the profits realized by them, in part traced to certain shares in their hands, and to surrender for cancelation the shares issued to them as promoters.
It is now said that the corporation was 'a mere convenient receptacle for the property, erected for the convenience of the syndicate.' That the property was bought by the syndicate for their own advantage, and that the corporation included only the members of the syndicate. That the stock of the company was all taken by the syndicate, who, for property which was their own, agreed [227 U.S. 80, 86] to pay enough to cover the purchase price and create a small expense fund.
Upon this contention it is urged that the corporation has no right to the relief sought, as the whole transaction was a mere form adopted by the parties for their own convenience as owners of the property and owners of the corporation. It is then said: 'If we admit, for the purposes of this point, that appellants did deceive some of the syndicate, what has the company to do with it? For this they cite Old Dominion Copper Min. & Smelting Co. v. Lewisohn, 210 U.S. 206 , 52 L. ed. 1025, 28 Sup. Ct. Rep. 634, where it was held that a subordinate fraud practised by some of the promoters of a corporation upon some of their associates was a matter wholly between them and the syndicate, which gave rise to no corporate right of action in the absence of innocent incorporators or stockholders.
But that is not this case. Some of those, if not all, interested by appellants in the property and in its purchase for a proposed consideration were ignorant of the real price which they were to pay for it, and were not, therefore, in complicity with their scheme to make a secret profit. These innocent members of the syndicate became stock subscribers and directors of the company, as did appellants. The buyers and sellers were not the same. Those of the syndicate assuming to act for the corporation in acquiring the property were under obligation to disclose the truth and deal openly. In the absence of such disclosure the corporate assent was obtained on false grounds. The wrong was done when those members of the syndicate not in complicity with appellants subscribed to the stock to the company and aided their guilty associate managers in the corporate action necessary to the corporate acquisition of the property at the exaggerated price placed upon it by those who were to realize a secret profit. Thus, the original fraud practised upon some of those associated with them in the promoters' arrangement became operative against the corporation itself. The standing of the [227 U.S. 80, 87] corporation results from the fact that there were innocent and deceived members of the corporation when the property was taken over by it.
Neither is the corporate right of action defeated by the fact that the recovery will inure to the guilty as well as to the innocent, nor is the fact that all of the parties who may have shared in the secret profits are not sued fatal to the case. The corporation may well sue either one or all of those who received secret profits. There is no want of necessary parties because all are not here sued.
The distinction between a case in which all of the owners of the property and all of the members of the buying corporation are the same persons, and participate in the profit realized, and the case here presented, is fully recognized in Old Dominion Copper Min. & Smelting Co. v. Lewisohn, as well as in New Sombrero Phosphate Co. v. Erlanger, L. R. 5 Ch. Div. 73, 46 L. J. Ch. N. S. 425, 36 L. T. N. S. 222, 25 Week, Rep. 436, and in the well-considered opinion of Judge Severens in Yeiser v. United States Board & Paper Co. 52 L.R.A. 724, 46 C. C. A. 567, 107 Fed. 340.
There was no error in canceling the shares issued to the plaintiffs in error for promotion of the corporation. They and the other members of the syndicate received these shares upon the assumption that they had in good faith served the corporation in the procurement of the property. Obviously appellants were serving themselves to the detriment of the corporation and innocent subscribers to its stock. In such a situation the corporation may recover the shares.
The decree will be affirmed.
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Citation: 227 U.S. 80
Docket No: No. 87
Argued: December 16, 1912
Decided: January 20, 1913
Court: United States Supreme Court
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Google has been offering public cloud services for several years now, but the company has continued to lag behind Amazon and Microsoft in customer growth.
Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who serves as the executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, the tech titan has focused harder on forging partnerships and developing products to appeal to large customers. It has added a number of key customers under Greene's tenure, including Spotify.
One such win is Evernote, which announced Tuesday it would be migrating its service away from its private data centers and to Google's public cloud. When Evernote was looking for a public cloud provider, the company was interested in not only the base level infrastructure available, but also high-level machine learning services and services for building machine learning-driven systems, said Anirban Kundu, Evernote's CTO.
Tools like Google's Cloud Natural Language API, a service that helps parse human language into something that a program could understand, were a major draw for Evernote. In fact, those high-level machine learning tools were enough to knock Amazon Web Services -- often considered the leading public cloud platform -- out of contention for Evernote's business.
"AWS, they're strong on the machine learning infrastructure side of things, but on the machine learning applications, we thought Google was definitely head-and-shoulders above them," Kundu said in an interview.
Kundu's assessment of Amazon's machine learning capabilities was echoed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who said that Google and Microsoft were the leaders in cloud machine learning, while AWS is "working to get there."
Moreover, Kundu said that Google's services were more accurate than its remaining competition for the sort of tests that Evernote ran on them. In addition to looking at the possible features available from a platform's machine learning services, it's important for cloud customers to actually evaluate what those services are able to do, he said.
When asked whether Google ended up stronger than Microsoft when put to the test, Kundu said that he didn't want to call one company weaker than the other, but that "the results were pretty strong in Google's favor."
Those machine learning tools are important to Evernote, as the company looks to build on its existing popular note-taking app and create new intelligent applications. As more companies look to adopt machine learning tools, Google's capabilities may help it close the gap with its competition in the public cloud market.
"The proximity of strong developer services around data science is a key capability," IDC analyst Al Hilwa said in an email. "Google has clearly invested greatly in this space in many ways because of it generates enormous amount of data and because of its investments in other AI initiatives over the years. What is new and interesting here is using these capabilities as a lever to attract customers like Evernote to its public cloud."
What's not clear yet is whether that lever will be successful over the long run in attracting companies to Google's cloud instead of its competitors, especially since all of the major players in the cloud are constantly updating their capabilities.
Evernote isn't the only company using Google's machine learning capabilities. Disney used the Cloud Vision API to build a marketing tool for its remake of "Pete's Dragon," while website building company Wix used the same tool to help its customers find images relating to the content of the site they're working on.
Actually getting Evernote moved over to Google's cloud will be a massive task. The company has about 3 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,000TB) of data stored in its data centers. Evernote plans to begin migration in October, and hopes to have completed the move by the end of this year, Kundu said.
At the same time, the company is working on developing new capabilities that take advantage of Google's cloud, both in terms of machine learning applications and cloud infrastructure in general.


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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez | Pass / Fail : 89.3 KPCC http://bit.ly/12OJrdp
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Maya Sugarman/KPCC - Incumbent LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia at her East LA campaign office.
February 14th, 2013, 5:00am :: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's unprecedented $1 million donation Tuesday to influence Los Angeles school board elections ups the ante in a school board race that is on its way to breaking fundraising records.
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The 2013 school board races have barely started and they have already attracted more than $4 million in donations. Compare that to 1978, when Bobbi Fielder spent $56,000 to win a seat on the board.
Unlike in Fiedler's time, most of the money this year isn't coming from individual donations. It's coming from independent committees that can raise unlimited amounts of cash.
For years the teachers union was the outside group that spent the most. It got Mark Slavkin elected in 1989. But the scale was still much smaller.
"Mostly we were getting checks in the mail every day from individual teachers to $10, $12, $15," he said. "It was a massive, grass roots effort and at the end of the day all this combined, we raised just over $250,000."
A decade later, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan challenged the teachers union's stranglehold on elections, creating a mayoral political machine to oppose what he saw as a slow-moving, unaccountable board majority put in place by the union.
"I'm going to get myself 100% involved in education to make sure every poor child in this city has a quality education," he said during a public affairs TV program in 1999.
Riordan recruited L.A. billionaires Eli Broad and Jerrold Perenchio to fund the Coalition for Kids. The group elected a school board majority in 1999.
The mayor's office and the teachers union have been at it ever since.
"In politics, if you don't play the game, you get squashed because your opponents will play the game," said John Perez, who was president of United Teachers Los Angeles in 2003. "It was Dick Riordan, Eli Broad, and Jerry Perenchio that started this ball rolling downhill with tons and tons of money in school board elections."
Perez said the teachers union took out a $1 million loan to battle the Coalition for the 2003 elections.
Spending jumped again in 2009. That's when new laws removed limits on how much independent expenditure committees for school board races could raise and spend. By this time L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had renamed Riordan's group the Coalition for School Reform.
The Coalition's campaign manager, Janelle Erickson, said the group supports candidates who'll push for reforms to teacher evaluations, grow charter schools, and support Superintendent John Deasy.
"What's at stake (is) our superintendent who's turning our school district around and what's at stake is a reform minded, progressive school board," Erickson said.
With Mayor Villaraigosa's help, the Coalition has raised more than $2.5 million – including the $1 million from Bloomberg, which is likely a reflection of the two mayors' close work on education policy.
The candidates themselves have received hundreds of smaller checks, and those donors run the gamut. They include district teachers, administrators, charter school employees, Hollywood writers and producers, and owners and employees of businesses that are or could do business with the district.
"We see the charter school operators are obviously players in the big money piece, they stand to make money, buying favor," said longtime PTA leader Scott Folsom. He is running as a write in candidate for LA Unified board because he opposes what he says is the privatization of public education through charter schools.
There are two other committees raising money to influence the school board races.
One is the SEIU labor union, which represents secretaries and other non-teaching staff, raised $329,000 as of mid January. The other is the longtime leader, the teachers union independent expenditure committee, which has raised $740,000 so far.
"I think it's unfortunate when the exceptionally wealthy or those who control lots of money, think that because of their money that they're entitled to dictate how the children of Los Angeles are educated," said Gregg Solkovits, the head of the teachers union committee.
The record for independent expenditures in LA Unified school board races was set in 2009 at $4.5 million, only $1 million less than what the independent groups have raised so far this cycle.
Many more donations are expected to come in the next few weeks leading to the March 5th primary election. For those seats that are not decided in March, the campaigns will reset and rev up for a June runoff – with more fundraising.


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text: Dating from the late 12th to the 13th century, Ta Prohm was an important temple monastery whose construction began during the reign of Jayavarman VII, later enlarged during the reign of Indravarman II. The French authority initially responsible for the restoration of the temples of Siem Reap elected to leave Ta Prohm in an essentially unrestored state as an example of how most of the temples of Angkor appeared at the time of their discovery in the 19th century. Some of the carvings that appear in niches along the walls and elsewhere at Ta Prohm are fine examples of the skill of the Khmer craftsmen.