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Three Missing Montana Children Found
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana Department of Justice official says three children who were reported missing from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation have been found.
Agency spokesman John Barnes says a tip led Flathead tribal police Thursday to 8-year-old Ivan Redhorn III, 4-year-old Cerista Bullbear and 1-year-old Ivanna Redhorn.
Barnes says the children are uninjured and are in the custody of Child and Family Services.
Tribal officials say the three children were taken May 27 by their non-custodial parents.
They said they believed 31-year-old Ivan Redhorn Jr. and Angelina Bullbear were in the Ronan or St. Ignatius areas.
It was not immediately clear where the children were found or whether any arrests have been made.


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Following on the first article on defining customer experience, this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey.
A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes. Sometimes customer journey maps are "cradle to grave," looking at the entire arc of engagement. Here, for example, is a customer journey timeline that includes first engaging with a customer (perhaps with advertising or in a store), buying the product or service, using it, sharing about the experience with others (in person or online), and then finishing the journey by upgrading, replacing, or choosing a competitor (re-starting the journey with another company):
At other times, journey maps are used to look at very specific customer-company interactions. By way of example, let's look at a customer journey that doesn't work well: home theater.
Anyone who has attempted to research, buy, set up, and use a home theater system knows that this is one of the most frustratingly complicated customer experiences in the consumer electronics realm. It makes buying a car seem trivially easy. Here's a real sample of some questions asked by a prospective purchaser on a home theater forum:
"For HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio I do not understand if any post processing is done on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1 apply to these? What are the limitations?"
Don't worry if you have no idea what this means — you shouldn't have to. There is no good reason why a layperson just wanting to watch movies at home should be exposed to such complexity and jargon. Yet in home theater, such confusion is rampant. It's a bad sign when there are numerous forums for customers to help each other out, as is the case in home theater, since it means that the manufacturers have utterly failed in creating a comprehensive customer experience. But it's also an opportunity for smart companies: retailer Best Buy bought service start-up Geek Squad to solve exactly this type of problem.
If I were a manufacturer, how would I go about understanding the customer journey so I could improve it? Here is a diagram that shows one way of looking at the home theater journey up to the point of getting the gear home:
The spine of the timeline in this case is based around the conventional sales funnel (awareness, research, purchase), but then adds another step: OOBE, or out-of-box-experience. This has become an increasing important step. Do a search on YouTube for "unboxing", for example, or looking at unboxing.com for many examples of people going through what is now a ritualistic act of opening up the latest gadget.
But beyond the emotional factors, it makes good business sense. A great out-of-box experience is like a little piece of theater. Scripting it well helps guide the customer through the first steps of using their new purchase and minimizes expensive calls into help lines.
The timeline is just the starting point; next we need to look at what's happening at each stage. A framework that I find consistently useful is to look at:
- Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move themselves on to the next stage? (Don't list what your company or partners such as retailers are doing here. That will come later when we look at touchpoints)
- Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
- Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving to the next stage? As you can from the diagram above, home theater has a larger proportion of questions than almost anything else at each stage, which indicates this is an area that manufacturers and retailers should be attacking aggressively.
- Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of moving on to the next stage?
Filling all these out is best done if grounded in customer research, preferably including in-depth ethnographic-style interviews and in-context observations. Surveys and focus groups tend to gloss over too many details that are critical to really understanding the experience. Ask customers to map out their journeys for you, while you are visiting them for the research.
Note that the journey is often non-linear. Someone may jump straight from awareness to purchase if they are not inclined to do research and have a strong recommendation from a friend, for example. Or they may spend a long time spinning through iterations of the research process for an expensive purchase. I remember interviewing a gentleman in Texas who spent six months visiting stores for a big-screen TV, as he didn't want to get it wrong, and he would play sales people off one another to get the lowest price.
This is certainly not the only way to create a customer journey. My colleague Gianluca Brugnoli has a nice Slideshare about a customer journey for digital media (including touchpoints, which is the next installment in this series). You can find some other examples at Service Design Tools (software products also), and at This is Service Design Thinking (PDF download). Interaction designer Hugh Dubberly has also written and diagrammed extensively about customer experience, and looked at the customer journey. Treating the journey as a storyboard, complete with photos or sketches of each stage, is a nice way to add more flavor, but is not necessary to get started.
There is no single right way to create a customer journey, and your own organization will need to find what works best for your particular situation. But the frameworks provided here should give you a good head-start at better understanding the journey that your customers travel through as they engage with your company, brand, products, partners, and people.
Adam Richardson, a Creative Director at global innovation firm frog design, is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company's Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage. He can be found on Twitter at @Richardsona.

subset: commoncrawl


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5" Speedometer (60 MPH) GPS (Studded) Chesapeake White with Stainless Steel
Hole Size: 5"
The GPS Speedometer is a drop in replacement for your current speedometer to match your existing instrument dash.GPS information is gathered from an internal GPS antenna. No external antenna required. The Faria GPS Speedometer uses a highly accurate 48 channel GPS receiver. You can be sure that the Faria GPS Speedometer is giving you the most accurate GPS information available on the market today.Course Over Ground (COG) and actual heading (compass heading over ground) are displayed on the optional digital LCD.Speed data is shown by an analog pointer. This pointer is driven by a digital stepper motor for increased accuracy and minimized pointer bounce during vessel operation.


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Walcott (1919) considered this species to be a cyanobacterium, but Walton suggested a relationship to red algae instead (Walton, 1923). More recent studies concurred with Walcott's original interpretation (Conway Morris and Robison, 1988).
Marpolia – from Mount Marpole (2,997 m), a peak located near the Burgess Shale, northwest of Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park.
spissa – from the Latin spissus, "crowded," in reference to the bush-like aspect of this cyanobacteria.
Burgess Shale and vicinity: M. aequalis Walcott 1919 from the Trilobite Beds on Mount Stephen (known from a single specimen).
Other deposits: Marpolia (possibly represented by different species) is common in various Cambrian exceptional fossil deposits, in particular from the Middle Cambrian Spence Shale and Wheeler Formation in Utah (Conway Morris and Robison, 1988) and the Middle Cambrian Kaili Formation in China (Yang et al., 2001).
The Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge, the Tulip Beds (S7) on Mount Stephen, and other smaller localities on Mount Field, Mount Stephen and Monarch Cirque.
Walcott described Marpolia in 1919 and named two species from the Burgess Shale, M. spissa from the Walcott Quarry and M. aequalis from the Trilobite Beds. M. spissa was compared to the modern Oscillatorialesin an unpublished thesis (Satterthwait, 1976), an interpretation followed by Conway Morris and Robison (1988) based on the study of fossil material from various Utah deposits. M. spissa is commonly found in thin sections (Mankiewicz, 1992) and can be isolated by acid maceration (Butterfield, 1990). A recent taphonomic study demonstrated that the preservation style of Marpolia is similar to other Burgess Shale organisms (Butterfield et al., 2007).
Marpolia forms dense tufts up to 5 cm in length composed of numerous filaments. Filaments tend to branch near the base of the tuft. Each filament averages about 40 microns in width. Filaments are composed of an outer sheath and one to four strands of inner cells. Each cell is about 2 microns in length. M. aequalis has a central stem and stronger branching structures than M. spissa.
Estimating the abundance of Marpolia is difficult since some bedding planes have large tangled masses of this cyanobacterium, and many could represent fragments of the same colony. M. spissa is rare and represents only 0.07% of the Walcott Quarry community (Caron and Jackson, 2008).
The absence of an attachment structure suggests that Marpolia may have been free-living, floating in large masses (i.e., planktonic). It may have attached to other floating objects as free-living cyanobacteria do today. It is also possible that the lack of attachment structure is taphonomic (a structure that is lost during deposition), due to detachment from the sediment during transport (caused by having been swept up in mud flows) prior to burial.
BUTTERFIELD, N. J. 1990. Organic preservation of non-mineralizing organisms and the taphonomy of the Burgess Shale. Paleobiology, 16: 272-286.
BUTTERFIELD, N. J., U. BALTHASAR AND L. WILSON. 2007. Fossil diagenesis in the Burgess Shale. Palaeontology, 50: 537-543.
CARON, J.-B. AND D. A. JACKSON. 2008. Paleoecology of the Greater Phyllopod Bed community, Burgess Shale. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 258: 222-256.
CONWAY MORRIS, S. AND R. A. ROBISON. 1988. More soft-bodied animals from the Middle Cambrian of Utah and British Columbia. University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions, 122 p.
MANKIEWICZ, C. 1992. Obruchevella and other microfossils in the Burgess Shale: preservation and affinity. Journal of Paleontology, 66: 717-729.
SATTERTHWAIT, D. F. 1976. Paleobiology and Paleoecology of Middle Cambrian Algae from Western North America. Unpublished PhD thesis, California, Los Angeles, 120 p.
WALCOTT, C. D. 1919. Middle Cambrian Algae. Cambrian Geology and Paleontology IV. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 67(5): 217-260.
WALTON, J. 1923. On the structure of a Middle Cambrian alga from British Columbia (Marpolia spissa Walcott). Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society-Biological Sciences, 1: 59-62.
YANG, R., J. MAO, Y. ZHAO, X. CHEN AND X. YANG. 2001. Branching macroalgal fossils of the Early-Middle Cambrian Kaili Formation from Taijiang, Guizhou Province, China. Acta Geologica Sinica, 75: 433-440.


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As you've probably heard, Gotham's growing packs of boozehounds are in a fix: Pappy Van Winkle, a big-game bottling from Frankfort Kentucky's Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery is almost nowhere to be found. Look, we've tasted most of the Pappy range and we can attest to its luscious, buttery, appley, punch-you-in-the-gut then tongue-kiss-you-in-the-rain deliciousness. But this is America y'all: Pappy ain't the only game in town. In fact, our fellow countrymen produce plenty of outstanding bourbons and ryes — most widely available and at prices far under the $200-plus that a bottle of Pappy goes for when you can find it.
1. Rittenhouse Rye 100 proof
Where it's made: Louisville, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: This titan of the American backbar has been punching above its weight since 1934. This rye is an incredible value at around $23 a bottle, with a hairpin balance of richness and menacing heat. Swirled with sweet vermouth and angostura it makes one of the most impeccable Manhattans around.
2. Old Overholt
Where it's made: Clermont, Kentucky, though its ancestral home is Pennsylvania, where it was distilled from the early nineteenth century through the eighties.
Why it's amazing: Remember the first moments of Good Will Hunting, before Matt Damon saved all the math and you still believed he was just an exceptionally good-looking janitor? That's Overholt for you. You may spot this sneaky bottle hiding out on the bottom shelf — its cut-rate price tag of around $20 helps keep it there — but the bargain rye is a goodly surprise: minerally and clean with a black pepper bite.
3. George T Stagg
Where it's made: Frankfort, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: Here's another bottle to add to your masochistic aspirational shopping list. Stagg bourbon is extremely difficult to find — a limited supply is released each fall as part of Buffalo Trace's "Antique Collection." And of course it's wildly expensive, starting at around $70 and soaring from there on the bourbon black market. It is unfiltered. It is uncut. It is viciously strong; so aggressive and muscled it would steal your lunch money if it could. To get a bottle, put yourself on a wait list and try not too look like such a dweeb.
4. Hirsch Small Batch Reserve Bourbon
Where it's made: Bardstown, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: This creamy pour is tray of warm cookies in a bottle with all its solicitous scents of vanilla and caramel, baking spices and walnuts. It has the classic warm profile of an American bourbon, but doesn't overstay its welcome on your palate. Rich and ephemeral, and a solid value at around $30.
5. Wild Turkey 101 Rye
Where it's made: Lawrenceburg, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: Don't hold the mass market label against this high-proof rye. The bartender favorite is a spicebox beauty, all oranges and cinnamon sticks with a little leather thrown in to keep it honest. The 101 has the makings of a trophy bottle, making it tough to find, if not quite as scanty as Van Winkle. If you spot it on some forgotten liquor store shelf, hoard it. Otherwise, right this way to the wait list.
6. Eagle Rare Single Barrel 10 year
Where it's made: Frankfort, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: This unimpeachable sipping bourbon is another feather in the Buffalo Trace cap — and unlike its cousin Stagg, it's widely available at around $33. Think of it like a bag of faux-healthy trail mix plucked from a vending machine: There are notes of cereal grain and almond, sure, but there's plenty of sweetness in there too.
7. WhipperSnapper Oregon Whiskey
Where it's made: Sheridan, Oregon
Why it's amazing: This bottle is a boozy insurgent, borrowing from a variety of global booze-making traditions to build something entirely new. It noses like a malty Dutch genever, but the flavor has that sweet-grain backbone so essential to an American bourbon. Instead of the usual charred oak, WhipperSnapper is aged for only about a year in Pinot Noir barrels (among others). It defies categorization, but at around $30 a bottle, it's worth a test drive in a lighter whiskey cocktail (a smash, with lemon and mint, would do nicely).
8. Templeton Rye
Where it's made: Mostly distilled in Lawrenceburg, Indiana; bottled in Templeton, Iowa
Why it's amazing: The heroic press-release tale of this Prohibition era recipe reads a bit suspect: Originating in the tiny Iowa town that gives the rye its name, Templeton claims to have been Al Capone's preferred hooch during the Noble Experiment. But whether it's all exaggerated marketing hogwash doesn't matter much: Hovering around $40, Templeton is one of the most interesting American whiskeys available right now, with a high rye content that gives the juice a lush and sturdy structure.
9. Ancient Age Bourbon
Where it's made: Frankfort, Kentucky
Why it's amazing: It's cheap (about $15), juicy and balanced with spice and fruit. This isn't a broody, fireside bourbon; it's a line 'em up and shoot kind of bourbon. That Ancient Age happens to be delicious makes it go down even easier.
Earlier: Let the Great Pappy Van Winkle Shortage Begin (or Continue)


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Petraeus's COIN Gets Flipped
During the course of the developing scandal involving former CIA Director David Petraeus, his biographer Paula Broadwell, Gen. John Allen, and Tampa social planner Jill Kelley, one journalist on Twitter, Max Fisher, commented that he was "having a tough time understanding why Petraeus's scandal means that counterinsurgency doesn't work."
To which a prominent think tanker who spent much time in the field advising the former Gen. Stanley McChrystal on his counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, Andrew Exum, added, "the scandal quickly became an excuse for everyone to grind their favored policy-related axes: Iraq, Afghanistan, COIN, drones…" Another national-security writer, Peter Munson, responded almost immediately: "while not germane to validity of COIN, I do think the scandal has much to say about national security dysfunction writ large."
Exactly — while the sex scandal and whatever else may come out of this hot mess may not be "germane" to whether COIN worked in Afghanistan (the prevailing view today is that it did not), this is an opportunity to talk frankly about counterinsurgency. Now dethroned, Petraeus and his war policy are fair game.
"First, even if Petraeus eventually gets somewhat rehabilitated and doesn't disappear from public life, these events will puncture the image of a superhuman general that he has carefully cultivated over the years," writes Stephen Walt, a longtime critic of the Bush and Obama foreign policies. "More importantly, this embarrassing personal failure will open the door to a more toughminded and dispassionate look at his actual record in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his brief tenure as CIA head."
Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter largely responsible for General McChrystal's firing from his post as commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, was quick to trigger such a conversation last week. As a former embed in Iraq, Hastings has criticized how the cult of Petraeus was used to sell the Surge and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. He recalled how Petraeus became the greatest of all "celebrity generals," not by winning wars, but by cultivating compliant journalists who gave him glowing coverage in the press. As a result, the counter-narrative — that the tide had started turning against the insurgents in Iraq before the "Surge" in 2007, that COIN was failing in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban was not losing traction — was conveniently lost in the din of hero-worship and runaway military idolatry (see Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor's "Epitaph for a Four Star"). Writes Hastings:
The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell … More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus' entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. "Perception" is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."
Yes, it's not what actually happens that matters — it's what you can convince the public it thinks happened. Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things.
Wired's Spencer Ackerman, who has a sound reputation as a thoughtful and fair national security writer, came forward and actually confessed he had fallen under the Petraeus spell as a war correspondent and analyst. In an admirable fit of journalistic honesty, Ackerman explained:
To be clear, none of this was the old quid-pro-quo of access for positive coverage. It worked more subtly than that: the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed. Nor did I write anything I didn't believe or couldn't back up — but in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical … Another irony that Petraeus' downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuating myths without fully realizing it.
Military writers like Andrew Bacevich, Col. Gian Gentile, Carl Prine, and Macgregor have been charting the counterinsurgency myth for sometime. But the "end of COIN" narrative accelerated over the last year, with thoughtful postmortem analyses of the Iraq Surge and its ill-fated exportation to Afghanistan (See: Joshua Rovner's "The Heroes of COIN").
And the floodgates of mainstream criticism opened last week, some remarks taking on an almost funereal tone: "The disgrace of David Petraeus has ended more than a great military career. It is also the symbolic end of a major chapter in American security strategy," wrote Time's Michael Crowley. "The fall of the former Iraq and Afghanistan commander adds a tawdry exclamation point to the decline of counterinsurgency, the military theory for which Petraeus offered a heroic public face."
Crowley explained that "even before he was sworn in as CIA director in September 2011, Petraeus was bending the rules of his own doctrine in Afghanistan," relying more on air strikes and night raids than the hearts-and-minds, "all of government" exercises he had touted back in 2009. "By the end of his career — in a country exhausted by war and slashing its budget — Petraeus had embraced that shift," Crowley continued. "He had lowered his profile too far to become the drone war's public face. But to those watching closely, the Petraeus Doctrine had morphed into something different. Counterinsurgency was finished. Much like the general's career."
Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd felt liberated enough to compare the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle to the Cult of Petraeus circa 2009:
Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the C.I.A. had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to experience. Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they were "given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses."
So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That's the real scandal.
Jed Babbin, former George H.W Bush defense official and writer for The American Spectator, joined a chorus of writers on both sides of the political spectrum who now dismiss the "success" in Iraq as though this has come to be the conventional wisdom. How times have changed! Notes Babbin:
Petraeus leaves as an historic figure whose legacy is not as bright as many people say. His counterinsurgency strategy didn't defeat the enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan. It merely propped up tinfoil regimes that will either turn to be our enemies — as in Iraq — or will fall quickly and be replaced with enemies we'd fought before, as in Afghanistan.
Of course, there are plenty of establishment writers who still insist Petraeus "won" Iraq but mucked the whole thing up in Afghanistan. One wonders where they were years ago when it was clear COIN was a disaster, starting with the replacement of poor Gen. David McKiernan with the COIN-friendly McChrystal, the showy summer 2009 Marine offensive, and then the disappointing 2010 Marjah operation, which brought to us the cringe-worthy promise of a "government in a box."
Meanwhile, hardline neoconservatives who never quite warmed to post-Bush humanitarian interventionism are turning on their hero at last. While Diana West is hardly the best messenger, her complaints about how COIN's "population centric" dictum did not translate well for the complexities of the Afghan battlefield are nevertheless widely shared in the military community.
COIN doctrine approaches war from an ivory tower, a place where such theories thrive untested and without hurting anyone. On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the results have been catastrophic. Tens of thousands of young Americans answered their country's call and were told to accept more "risk" and less "protection." Many lost lives, limbs and pieces of their brains as a result of serving under a military command structure and government in thrall to a leftist ideology that argues, in defiance of human history, that cultures, beliefs and peoples are all the same, or want to be.
West's Islamophobia, as usual, gets in the way of a cogent argument (amputations due to IEDs, including the newer "dismounted complex blast injuries," had risen in 2011, even while Petraeus was testifying to the contrary). But there is no denying that what seemed like an attempt by Clinton-era Democrats (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, et al) to join forces with Petraeus to carry out a kinder, gentler war, had backfired, badly, and the warhawks-turned-vultures, perched and eager to pick the bones of this thing, know it.
There is little solace for the once-anointed king. If anything, it's that not everyone has abandoned him. There's always Sen. John McCain, neoconservative stalwart Max Boot, and author Bing West, a former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, who not only offers valuable moral support to Petraeus and his family (he lauds him for stepping down), but makes it clear the ex-general's legacy is still up for grabs:
What, then, did Gen. Petraeus accomplish that deserves admission to the pantheon of military heroes? The answer is clear: He saved America from an appalling disgrace—the bloody disintegration of Iraq. … His legacy is twofold. As a general, he won a war. As a man, he took responsibility. In his common humanity and his exceptional dedication to his ideals, he showed nobility.
Funny, West spent most of last year criticizing COIN in Afghanistan as a futile nation-building exercise that put U.S. troops in harm's way. He skims over this quickly in his Petraeus encomium, claiming that it "wasn't his fault."
Nonetheless, no one thought there would be this much conversation about COIN and Afghanistan after the election and this is a good thing. Too bad it had to happen under such salacious circumstances.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance reporter and TAC contributing editor.