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- What should I consider before buying?You may consider "wet testing" a spa before purchasing. This means getting into a spa with water in it. Many reputable spa dealers maintain filled demonstration models just for this purpose. Here is what you should look for: Verify that the seats provide comfortable support. You do not want to have to scoot down in the spa like you do in a bathtub. When sitting in any seat, the water should reach shoulder level. If it does not, you will not get full hydrotherapeutic value. Stay in the spa with the jets on for at least 15 minutes. At the end of that time you will know whether the seating and jet arrangements are comfortable.
- How much should I spend?Quality spas are available in a wide range of prices. Just like cars, spa prices reflect features, materials and workmanship. Of course, we hope that as you are shopping you will consider a Sundance spa. No matter which brand of spa you finally choose, we want you to be an informed consumer and find the right spa for your needs.
- What about the warranty?Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind: A product warranty is a performance and reliability agreement between you and the manufacturer. Avoid spa dealers who add prorated and deductible provisions. Make sure you read the manufacturer's warranty before buying, and compare coverage with other spas you are considering.
- Is it installed inside or outside?A spa can be installed indoors or outdoors, although over 90%, including those in cold weather climates, are installed outdoors. The two main considerations for installing a spa indoors are: will it fit through the door, and is the structural strength of the flooring adequate. A typical 3-person spa weighs approximately 2,500 lbs/1,150 kg when filled.
- Do I need to install plumbing?No. All above-ground portable spas are filled with water using a garden hose.
- How do I clean the water?Proper water maintenance is vital to enjoyment of your spa. Maintenance procedures are not difficult, and knowledgeable retailers will provide the start-up kit and instructions you need.
- How often do I clean the spa?Most manufacturers recommend draining and cleaning your spa no more than 3 or 4 times per year, depending on how frequently you use it and how well you maintain your water. In most cases this simple process will only take about an hour to accomplish.
- How is the temperature controlled?Most quality spas have relatively sophisticated digital thermostatic controls. These highly reliable modern systems are capable of keeping the spa water within one degree of any temperature you select. While this is important for comfort, it is also important for safety. You should pay particular attention to the control system if you have children who will be using the spa. Better systems have safety locks and digital readouts. A good indicator of the control system's quality is to read and compare manufacturers' warranties.
- How many jets are adjustable?Truly beneficial hydrotherapy is directly related to the placement of the jets and to some extent, being able to adjust each jet where it is needed. These are the standards by which physical therapy and athletic hydrotherapy systems are judged. A common point of consumer confusion occurs when manufacturers load up a spa with lots of inexpensive, non-adjustable, stationary jets. It doesn't make any difference how many jets a spa has if they are not properly located and plumbed to provide the correct balance of water, air and horsepower.
- What does the pump's horsepower rating mean?There are two kinds of horsepower ratings applied to spa pumps: "Continuous Operating" horsepower and "Brake" horsepower (also called "Marketing" horsepower). Continuous Operating is the horsepower the motor is capable of producing while the spa is in operation. Brake is the amount of horsepower the motor produces on start-up before dropping to the Continuous Operating rate.
- Is the spa full foam insulated?All major manufacturers agree that filling the spa cabinet with polyurethane foam insulation significantly reduces heat loss, thus reducing heating costs. While this process adds to the cost of manufacturing, research has shown that full foam insulation provides substantial savings to the spa owner over time. Some manufacturers eliminate full foam insulation in an attempt to provide a less expensive product.
- What is hydrotherapy?Hydrotherapy is the combined effect of heat, massage, and buoyancy. Warm water dilates blood vessels, increasing blood flow to sore or damaged tissues, allowing oxygen and nutrients to help overworked muscles recover faster. Massage, provided by the spa's jet system, relaxes tense muscles and relieves pressure on surrounding nerves. Massage also improves circulation and accelerates the body's natural healing process. Buoyancy reduces your body's weight by 90%. This relieves pressure on strained joints and muscles. Hydrotherapy is widely recognized as an effective method of alleviating the tension commonly associated with stress.
- How do the jets and jet systems allow me to customize my hydrotherapy experience?Many jets are adjustable, giving you an amazing number of options. The Fluidix jets on many Sundance Spas models adjust from oscillating to targeted; rotate clockwise, counter-clockwise, or stationary. You can control the flow, volume, and movement of other jets as well. In addition, controlling the amount of air mixed with the water with the air control valves changes the dynamics of the massage. Conveniently placed massage selectors let you divert water from one seat to another to increase or minimize the water flow. Ask your dealer to show you how our strategically placed and uniquely designed jets make the Sundance Spas experience the ultimate in relaxation and therapy.
- Won't more filters produce better water quality?The Sundance MicroClean Water Purification System, available on 880 and 780 Series spas, produces a level of water purity never before found in any spa. And it's easy to maintain! Incorporating the new micro-filtering disposable filter, our system creates water that is cleaner and clearer than ever before.
The Sundance MicroClean Plus filter on 880 Series spas removes large particles, ultra-fine particles and oils from the water. So more filters are not able to give you the maximum water filtration found only on Sundance spas.
- Isn't a bigger pump going to give me a better massage?Many manufacturers talk about the horsepower of their pumps. Horsepower can be measured using a "service factor" or a "true rating" system. The first describes the initial thrust as the pump first engages, but immediately the pump output falls to a lower, continuous horsepower level. When a spa manufacturer claims they have a 6-hp pump, they are describing the "initial thrust," not the horsepower the pump delivers as it runs.
Efficient plumbing, better jets and flow control are more important than horsepower. A lower horsepower pump in a more efficient spa will produce just as much jet power as a higher horsepower pump. And remember, you are looking for a comfortable but strong massage, and not looking for acceleration up a mountain road or a punishing hot water experience!
- What's the purpose of a circulation pump?Today's finest spas feature a circulation pump that continuously filters the water to keep it clean and clear. It also provides the necessary flow to allow the heater to constantly maintain your set temperature. Spas without circulation pumps must rely on the low speed of a larger horsepower pump turning on periodically to provide filtration and the flow required for heating. The circulation pump is the most efficient method to provide flow for filtration and heating.
- How long before I want to use the spa should I start heating it?The Sundance control system can keep your spa hot and ready to use. Or you may prefer the "economy" setting which allows you to tell the system when you are most likely to use the spa and the water will be hot and ready at your designated times.
- I understand that the heater is usually the most vulnerable component of any spa. How is yours different?The Sundance Heater employs a titanium coil that directly heats the water, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Titanium prohibits heater corrosion and nearly eliminates failure. The Sentry Smart™ Heater carries a 5-year unconditional warranty.
- Can any Sundance spa operate on 120V electrical service?Most Sundance spas must be connected to 240V electrical service, but some offer the option of operating on either 120V or 240V. While connecting to 120V can be less involved, most customers prefer the benefits of the 240V spa, which include quicker heating time and better temperature maintenance during cold weather use. This is because the heater output is four times as great in a 240V spa versus a 120V spa. If you choose to connect your spa to 120V service, you must be certain that it is a dedicated circuit, not shared by any other appliance, and has amperage rating appropriate for the spa you select.
- What can I do to assure my family's safety?
- Check to be sure that the spa you buy is listed by a recognized independent testing agency such as ETL.
- Use a qualified electrician to connect the electrical service to the spa.
- Make sure the cover comes with a locking system to prevent unauthorized use. Many spas feature locking control panels, as well.
- Keep appliances and other electrical devices away from the spa area.
- Always observe the warnings about spa use by small children, pregnant women, people with certain health conditions and people under the influence of alcohol or drugs.


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(visited by Ross Finlayson)
16-Apr-2011 -- Because I knew that this confluence point lies inside a Naval Weapons Base, I was expecting - as I drove northwards along a public road just west of the base - to have to register this as an 'incomplete' visit. I was surprised to learn, however, that by standing just off the side of the road (near a set of railroad tracks running between the road and the base), I was able to get 280 feet from the confluence point. This, taking into account GPS error, was barely enough for a successful visit.
If I had walked along the railroad tracks themselves, I could have gotten a little closer, but I suspected that I might be breaking the law if I walked along the tracks, so I decided not to go there. (Getting 'all zeros' definitely seems to require venturing onto the base, however, so I definitely don't advise doing that without permission.)
I was reminded of another confluence point, [38,-122], near my home in California, that is also located just inside a Naval Weapons Base. (In both cases, you can get close enough for a successful visit by stepping off the side of a public road that runs just to the west of the base.)

subset: commoncrawl


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Exposition : Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) and the age of Dürer, Vienne, Musée de l'Albertina, du 14 septembre 2012 au 6 janvier 2013.
Source : http://www.albertina.at
Many of the most important works created for the propaganda and in memory of Maximilian I are preserved in the Albertina. These include works of Albrecht Dürer, but also the extraordinary Triumphal Procession of Albrecht Altdorfer and his workshop, which will form the core of the exhibit. Of the original 109 large-sized parchment sheets with flamboyantly colourful representations of riders, magnificent chariots and landsknechts, sheets 49 to 109 are preseved in the Albertina and, compiled as a frieze, amount to a length of more than 54 metres. In addition to this unique work, other important imperial commissions are presented, such as the monumental woodcut Arch of Honor and the book projects Theuerdank, Weisskunig and Freydal, which are very closely intertwined with one another in terms of form and ideas. Emperor Maximilian I has been called the "Last Knight" since the 19 th century, although he stood at the beginning of a Europe-wide renaissance of chivalry represented in the form of magnificent tournaments and armaments.
In addition to many other themes, the exhibition presents this illustrious aspect of the art from the time of Maximilian with numerous examples from the internal collection, complemented by important loans from international museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) Vienna.
Commissaire(s) :
Marie Luise Sternath and Eva Michel
Catalogue d'exposition :
Emperor Maximilian I. and the Age of Dürer, éd. par Maria Luise Sternath et Eva Michel, München, Prestel Verlag, 2012, 365 p., 35 euros.
Consulter le dossier de presse.


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The Career Gateway is a way to access online tools, resources, and leads that will help you be more successful in finding and securing employment. You'll learn about career opportunities, find training programs, link to placement services, and much, much more.
CLICK HERE TO START YOUR CAREER SEARCH - Connect to opportunities and resources.


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A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health
Helping Doctors Spot Who's Not Taking Their Blood Pressure Meds
Simple urine screening could prevent unnecessary procedures, study saysThursday, April 3, 2014
THURSDAY, April 3, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A simple urine test for people with high blood pressure could help doctors determine if patients aren't taking their medication as directed or whether their body isn't respond to treatment, a new study suggests.
Using this test, British researchers found one-quarter of more than 200 patients weren't following medication orders. The urine screening could help prevent unnecessary tests and procedures for high blood pressure that appears resistant to treatment but really isn't, the study said.
The study was published online April 3 in the journal Heart.
"A majority of these patients in any secondary/tertiary care center would routinely undergo many additional tests and procedures in search of the explanation for their apparent unresponsiveness to standard therapy prescribed in primary care," the researchers wrote in a journal news release.
The study involved 208 patients with high blood pressure treated at a specialist clinic. Of these patients, 125 were newly referred by their primary care doctor and 66 were follow-up patients who had poor control of their condition. The remaining patients had resistant high blood pressure that did not seem to respond to medication.
The researchers analyzed the participants' urine for commonly prescribed high blood pressure drugs. They found that one-quarter of the patients were not taking medications as prescribed by their doctor. Of these patients, 10 percent did not adhere to their treatment at all and 15 percent only took their medication sometimes.
The study also showed the average number of drugs detected in the urine samples was lower than the number of medications prescribed. The patients with the lowest blood pressure were among those taking all of their medications, the researchers said.
Meanwhile, the patients least likely to follow their drug regimen were those diagnosed with resistant high blood pressure that did not respond to treatment. The researchers said almost one in four of these patients had no traces of any high blood pressure drugs in their urine.
Although the study was small, the study's authors said their findings suggest a large number of patients are not taking their medication as directed by their doctor. They added that analyzing patients' urine could avoid this unnecessary testing in one in five cases of high blood pressure.
Morris Brown, of the clinical pharmacology unit at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in an accompanying journal editorial that the technique could "solve at a stroke the problem of monitoring adherence, and should rapidly transform practice."
SOURCE: BMJ, news release, April 2, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
- More Health News on:
- Blood Pressure Medicines
- High Blood Pressure
- Laboratory Tests


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QuestionClick here to send us a question
What is the meaning of Fatema?
This is an official answer by QuranicNames.com Staff
Fatema is another spelling of the Arabic girl name Fatima, which means "child who has been weaned off breast milk". Fatema and Fatima are the same name and have the same meaning and pronunciation. Both spellings are acceptable. For more details see on this name and its pronunciation see: Fatima


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At first they came for the smokers but I did not speak out as I did not smoke. Then they came for the binge drinkers but I said nothing as I did not binge. Now they have an obesity strategy.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Back to Greece
I hope to find none of these,
enjoy this
and savour an odd drop of this.
Depending on how the fancy takes me, light posting may lie ahead so here is another fat man on a keyboard to keep you going.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Local courses for local people
... local contacts, learning delivered through community centres, supported by community workers and local volunteers, with established and trusted partnerships between the college and local agencies. That's based on high calibre creative workers; plus conversations, lots of them, sometimes called networking.What that signifies is an investment in a community and its people. And it is an investment that, in time, does pay off in terms of participation. Networking builds links and trust between institutions, like universities, and a community that can have see them as hostile, remote or simply 'not for the likes of us'. However, it costs money, it takes time and effort and the effects can be seen, felt, but rarely measured.
Unfortunately, bureaucrats do not place value on apparently-purposeless conversation, because its effects can't easily be measured. Which may be why community education is slipping from crisis into oblivion.As well as increasingly surreal managerialism, there has been much damage done by the plethora of short-term projects. Just as something gets up and running, the funding runs out and people whose lifetime experience is one of being let down are disappointed once more. Then there is a new tranche of money and it all gets reborn before it, once again, dies through the end of the project and changes brought about by the latest fashionable nonsense. It is the karma of community education.
Long term commitment is one of the keys for extending educational opportunities for adults, as is local delivery. However, there is another factor as well. Many of our educational institutions, especially universities, need reforming to develop a local commitment and a culture that does not exclude. Put crudely, they are still far too far up themselves. And how can they loosen up when all that seems to be rewarded are numbers described in jargon?
Friday, July 25, 2008
Signs of the times
A self-employed painter and decorator has been given a £30 on-the-spot fine for smoking in his own van because it is classified as a workplace.
He had popped out to buy teabags.
While returning from work the other day, my partner phoned to ask if I could pick up a couple of cans of lager. I popped into our local shop and took two cans to the counter, where I was informed that "due to binge drinking" they were now unable to sell me just the two — I had to purchase the whole four-pack.
It is no wonder I am confused.
Punishing the poor
There has been, rightly, a lot of fuss about recent attacks on human rights and civil liberties. However, there has also been an erosion of economic rights, as embodied in the universalist principles of the welfare state, through an increase in conditionality that has generated far less noise. Rights are disappearing and obligations multiplying.
Shuggy, both on his own site and the Drink-soaked Trots, does an excellent job on Labour's forward march to 1834 by attacking the notion that poverty is the result of the moral failings of the poor and opposing the concept of 'workfare'. The comments are well worth reading too. I would like to support his critique by committing further heresies against conventional wisdom.
The first is to question the notion of dependency culture. I always thought that this idea of a demotivated underclass languishing on benefits because that it is all they know, if it bore any relation to reality at all, mistook effect for cause. However, let's take it one step further and ask what is wrong with dependency? Why do we view dependency as being so bad? We are all dependent at different stages of our life; when we are children, when we are old, when we are sick. If people neglect us then, they are called cruel and heartless. A civilised society recognises dependency as a necessary condition in which we will all find ourselves at times and actually supports us through it. Instead, Labour is offering us Victorian parenting, a sound thrashing for our own good.
Secondly, there is a monomania about the only way out of poverty being work. Work may well be a good way out. However, it is also a route in. It depends what you get paid.
Wages depend largely on the position of people in the labour market. Unlike some of his modern followers, Adam Smith was deeply concerned about the dangers of the market depressing workers' income if their market position was weakened. Much of recent government policy has been devoted to doing just that.
Trade unions have been legislated against, employment protection weakened and the 'flexible workforce' promoted. Tax credits may be invaluable to the recipient, but, in reality, they are a state subsidy to employers and encourage low pay. Coercing people into the job market by removing their means of subsistence and getting them to, in effect, work for nothing puts more downward pressure on pay levels.
The way out of poverty is actually to have a secure, adequate income. Flitting between low paid, insecure work and periods of unemployment might look good on the statistics, but is not much use to individuals trapped in the whole dispiriting process.
Thirdly, governments have this wonderful self-confidence that they can shape human behaviour by using an economic stimulus. The problem is that people don't always respond as expected. And often their choices are damaging and anti-social, but make far more sense in the context of their lives than the approved route. For instance, if you take benefits away from someone with a drug addiction because they do not, or cannot, seek treatment what will they do? Rob you, that is what.
Cutting support may make people disappear from the statistics, but not necessarily into employment. They can sink into the black economy, homelessness, prostitution, crime - they become part of an invisible, disenfranchised poor.
And finally, if, as Shuggy suggests, we have necessary and inevitable structural unemployment, wouldn't it be better if the unemployed were actually the ones who want to be? They would be happier and better at it than those who want to work.
Let's be honest about this. Unemployment is a curse. If you want to see the damage it can do, look at the bitter experience of people who lost their jobs when mass unemployment hit under Thatcher. However, low pay, long hours, exploitation, exhaustion and stress are just as much a scourge. To pitch people from one to the other is not progress.
Working in adult education has allowed me to see the fantastic transformation that gaining qualifications and employment can make on individuals. I have also seen the complexity of the problems people need to overcome if they are to make that transformation. They need support, help and real choices, sometimes over a long period of time. The worst thing to do is to is to force them into inappropriate training or work through fear of the benefit officer, accompanied by constant anxiety over the loss of their means of support. An activist welfare policy makes a lot of sense, but not one that punishes the poor for the sin of their poverty and is really designed to cut spending and appeal to the right wing press.
The mainstream left has had to spend much time and energy rescuing itself from the stupidities of the "we are all Hezbollah now" brigade. It also needs to free itself from an authoritarian, centralising and conservative political economy and social policy if it is to be a left worthy of support. In Britain, after Glasgow East, it looks increasingly like this reinvention will take place in opposition. They have only themselves to blame.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Grumpy old fat man
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Weeping in Widnes
As a Swinton fan, dislike of Salford runs deep although I can see the sense in expanding the geographical spread of the game to South Wales. However, Rugby League has never been short of paranoia and if you are a Widnes fan you might be entitled to feel that they really are out to get you.
Demoted to the second tier when Super League was first formed in order to admit a new team based in Paris, despite never being under threat of relegation if the old system had remained, the former world champions struggled financially but rebuilt the club and their stadium and won promotion. In the meantime the Paris club collapsed and disappeared. Then, though once more not in a relegation place in any other season, they were demoted again to make way for another French side, Catalan Dragons. Now, rebuilding once more with new financial backers, they have missed out to South Wales.
There is anger and disappointment amongst the other teams applying and I can't help thinking that it is all the result of abandoning the only proper way to decide a club's status, by competition on the pitch. If something as commercialised as football can live with it, why can't Rugby League?
I have been wrong about many of the changes in the sport, but this rankles. My hope now for the end of the season is for the National League One Grand Final to be between Salford and Widnes and for Salford to be soundly thrashed. It won't change anything, but boy will it be satisfying to a Swinton supporting traditionalist like me.
Bravo Barbara!
As well as questioning the health benefits of Brody's principles, Ehrenreich calls them a way of enabling the well-off to feel virtuous merely by indulging their own narcissism. "The low-fat diet has been the hair shirt under the fur coat - the daily deprivation that offsets the endless greed."
"The hair shirt under the fur coat" is a wonderful sound bite and will be added to my catalogue of anti-diet sentiment. It is a beautiful way of encapsulating the moral smugness of a particular type of dieter. What it does do, however, is to ignore the real damage done, not by self-righteousness, but by self-loathing and this is the main emotion that drives the plump into continuous yo-yo dieting. It is this product of the social bias against fat people that makes diet gurus not only smug, but rich.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Things you learn
The publication chronicles a group of radicals and socialists gathered around J W Wallace, a Whitman enthusiast, who struck up an unlikely, long distance friendship with the poet from 1887 until Whitman's death in 1892. The group continued and had links with the leading figures of early British Socialism, notably Edward Carpenter, together with Keir Hardie and Katharine and Bruce Glasier.
The left they belonged to was far from orthodox, it experimented with a range of ideas, many of which were hardly impressive, but others provide insights that are relevant to a libertarian left and laid the foundation for modern sexual politics. At a time of left realignment the rediscovery of what became marginalised traditions is of more than academic interest.
(Thanks to Mike)
Lighten up fat man
What mainly drew me was the other star of the film, Greece. It was shot in the Sporades and Pelion. I could identify many of the locations and seeing them was tear-jerkingly evocative on a cool Manchester evening. There is one scene with a small boat leaving the jetty in the dark with the moon spreading a rippling satin streak on the water and the night sky laden with stars. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a studio mock up. No, it really is like that. I am not sure I would have liked the movie quite as much if it had been filmed in Withernsea.
There is the inevitable stereotyping, but on the whole the film caught the atmosphere of some of the more out of the way places well. And, despite the critics, Meryl Streep was perfect as the kind of ex-pat you can find, working impossibly hard to run a small business so that they can stay and raise a family there, instead of having the comfortable professional existence that could have been theirs elsewhere if they had chosen not to dream.
The broadsheet critics hated it of course. Then they too need to lighten up a bit. Now all I have got to do is to get those bloody tunes out of my head.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Bad taste news
Margaret Thatcher will have a £3million state funeral.The Tory will be the first Prime Minister since Sir Winston Churchill to be given the honour. Plans, backed by the Queen and Gordon Brown, have already been drawn up to mark the occasion at St Paul's cathedral in central London.
Plans for the occasion have now been leaked
(Thanks Kev)
Friday, July 18, 2008
The future of education increasingly resembles the factory-line producing cans of nothing - 6,000 students on a single course called perhaps 'Studies Studies', sponsored by McDonalds, Blue Arrow and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Paulie picked up on the post too.
The passage in Bayley's article that raised eyebrows was this,
The architecture both expresses and helps direct a new educational philosophy. Rigidity went the way of the cane. Academies must respect key stage testing, but do not have to follow the national curriculum. This ventilates both the style of teaching and the plan of the building. The way it was explained to me was: we don't do French language and history, we do 'Napoleon'. This way, pupils learn about motivational leadership and acquire French language and history at the same time.
It's a masterpiece. Six short sentences. How is it possible to cram so much bollocks into such a small space? OK lets briefly pass over the suspicion that best way to speak French might just be to learn French. Let's ignore that a study of Napoleon alone could leave a few gaps in someone's knowledge of the history of France, however significant he undoubtedly was. And it would take far too long to unpack the concept of motivational leadership (funny how they rarely talk about the motivated led), which has a long, and slightly dubious, historical pedigree.
No, it is clear that Britain needs motivational leaders to take it forward to a bright new future. Who better than Napoleon as a role model? He was a high achiever certainly. He seized power, crowned himself emperor in a fit of megalomania, helped plunge Europe into war, ultimately led his country to defeat and spent his last years in bitter exile. Just what Britain needs; an economic model based on Enron.
(Ta Will)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Darkly brooding
The narrative is melodramatic, the sadistic violence pervasive, the theme of cruelty, grief, hatred and revenge is overpowering. Yet there are none of the artifices that alienate George Szirtes from the novel as a literary form. There are no convenient coincidences, no neat closing of circles. There is a resolution, but it is one of the real world; the new generation struggling to repair the damage of the old after death has removed their passions.
What allowed our Prime minister to be drawn to a casual comparison with someone so ferociously cruel? Ignorance is one factor, but another is that both he and his interviewer were not thinking of the Heathcliff of the novel, but of the stereotype of romantic fiction; the dark, brooding man waiting to be redeemed through love. The erotic power of this fantasy figure was beautifully explained in Scribbles' memorable post here. I rather fear that Brown might have fancied the idea of being a sex symbol.
The Bronte sisters all played with this fantasy. Charlotte subverted it within the genre. In Jane Eyre there is a neat conclusion, though reached in a bizarre manner, that redeems Rochester from sin through a marriage based on absolute equality. This was not Emily's way. She took the stereotype and celebrated it with a shudder. What is more, her female heroine is no redeemer. Speaking to the narrator, Nellie Dean, Cathy says, "...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same ...". She shares his savagery. Instead, it was she who faced a choice between redemption and damnation. She chose redemption, but desired damnation. Her choice led to an unquiet death. And Heathcliff's revenge was remorseless. Somehow I always feel that Emily Bronte's sympathy lay, in truth, with the damned.
Could this book be a metaphor for Brown's premiership? Perhaps. Brown faced a choice when he acceded to the leadership between continuity and change. In his brief period of popularity he flirted with change, but then retreated into the comfort of continuity and a formulaic Blairite strategy. There is no point to his premiership if he is not to be the candidate of change. Will he be redeemed? I doubt it. I think that he is facing an early and unquiet political death.
A pastiche of Wuthering Heights is so much part of popular culture that this incident will do little other than to confirm Brown's personal awkwardness. If he really wants us to like him, maybe a little sing-a-long will help.
(Thanks Doc D)
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Mind you ...
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The strange death of liberal adult education
Her great interest has been in adult education. She and her husband moved to Yorkshire in 1976 when her daughter was due to be born. In the mid-80s, working for the extramural department at Sheffield University, she started teaching day-release classes for miners.
These days, liberal adult education is dying; not a natural death through lack of demand, but as a victim of government policy. I have watched with an increasing sense of despair. The Tory governments of the 80's and 90's had waged a long war of attrition against it and, just when it seemed salvation was at hand, New Labour embraced a narrow utilitarianism and started to deliver the coup de grace.
This hostility leaves me baffled. Both parties had viewed adult education with favour and funding, even if it was never as lavish as we might have liked. Then, despite its continuing popularity and growth, the climate changed; the right saw adult education as an expensive state extravagance, the left as middle class privilege, both articulated economic justifications for their prejudice. Policy makers began to see education as predominantly an economic, rather than a social good.
Justificatory ideologies went through a number of phases, one of the fashions being the idea of a post-industrial knowledge economy. You hear less of it today, thankfully, because, like many ideas that see us entering a new modernity, if you look hard enough all you see is a tired banality. All economies are knowledge economies. A hunter gatherer economy, as Jared Diamond memorably pointed out, can only survive because of an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of their environment, a knowledge that would put many a naturalist to shame. The knowledge economy is a truism; there is no such thing as an ignorance economy.
What they really meant was that wealth creation was based on 'knowledge products' in a 'weightless', hi-tech 'new economy' and hence there was a premium on science and technology, a concept eagerly leapt on by the scientifically illiterate lawyers in government. This was accompanied by the eulogising of a flexible workforce and followed more recently by anxiety about a skills gap between Britain and the other industrialised nations. None of it bore much relation to reality, as described by the more convincing research, but the breathless urgency with which it was expressed, together with the apocalyptic prophecies of decline that would result inevitably from a failure to follow the latest fad, gave policy makers the ammunition to use against the expensive, unproductive luxury of liberal adult education.
The only reason to learn was now work. Learning for its own sake became a 'bit dodgy'. Lifelong learning, when it did not have a direct relationship to employment, was seen as a luxury in the scramble to maintain a competitive advantage in a globalised economy.
This analysis is all based on a false dichotomy between liberal and instrumental learning. There are no hard and fast barriers, hermetically sealed against the other. Lifelong learning means just that, and people learn for different reasons at different times of their lives. In a desperate attempt to justify liberal learning, its practitioners have leapt on the examples where the first step on the ladder is something that would now be demeaned as a 'leisure course', for example the person who started in a belly dancing class and ended up at university (true story). What we often forget though is the example of the person who got turned on to learning by a health and safety course at work and finished by studying mediaeval literature (also true). There is no good learning and bad learning, one strand is not more useful than another, there is not only one path to take. Instead, lifelong learning is complex, diverse and intensely human.
Adult educators tried to counter this philistinism by finding their own utilitarian justifications for liberal learning, yet it should be unnecessary. We do not need to justify the protection of children, the care of the elderly, a universal health service or, indeed, education for the young as anything other than a self-evident good. Learning is intrinsic to humanity and adult education is a human need and a human right; it is something people like to do and they love it. Not only that, the impact of learning on individuals, families and communities can also be awe inspiring and transformational. It should be provided in the most appropriate way for a wealthy, industrial nation.
It has been a bitter experience watching as doors closed and departments shut, all the while struggling to protect my own work from the barbarians at the gate. Now the defences have been breached and the threat is palpable; anger and frustration have been joined by an intense grief. We are witnesses to a crime.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
More importantly, has he read the Labour Party Constitution? Remember it says, "the Labour Party is a democratic socialist party." On the other hand he says, "I don't think these labels help. They confuse people sometimes." And he's its leader?
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
This is my life
Stolen from Norm, I think.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
If that has whetted your appetite there are two old series on You Tube, Music of the Outsiders, a really excellent film featuring a young George Dalaras, and a more glossy and romanticised, though interesting, BBC 2 documentary narrated by Anthony Quinn.
If you just want a song, there are plenty of gritty, early recordings from the first half of the 20th Century on You Tube, but this is a modern version of a standard from Glykeria.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Tony Blair 2005
Balls to aspiration, it's a tosser's mirage.
Charlie Brooker 2008
I'm with Charlie.
Via Graeme and Will in comments
Eat your greens
Do you remember having earnest childhood exhortations to 'eat up everything on your plate because there are plenty starving in Africa'? It seems that Gordon Brown does and took it to heart. We now have the political equivalent, a war on waste. Only with the current obesity panic it is don't buy it in the first place rather than eat it.
Food waste is an important problem. All those 'buy one get fifteen free' offers and use by dates that suggest that your Worcester Sauce will turn into nuclear waste at a particular time in a couple of years don't help either. However, to suggest that this is anything other than peripheral in a crisis that affects the supply and price of basic staple grain crops is to duck the important issues. The world food system is a bit more complicated than that.
How about the dysfunctions of a fully commercialised and heavily monopolistic capitalist food system? How about the monopoly over supply and retail exercised in the developed world by the big supermarkets? How about the continuing dispossession of highly productive small farmers? How about the displacement of local markets by global ones? How about cash cropping as a substitute for food production, of which biofuels is only the latest emanation? How about the erosion of sustainable rural communities? I could go on adding to the list and you can explore more here.
Malnutrition kills millions annually. Millions of poor people that is. Cutting down on that extra banana, which you bin when it goes manky, will only reduce the income of farmers rather than save the world.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Shades of grey
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
I'm busy
Why Work?, is a collection of essays put together by the late anarchist activist, Vernon Richards, and published by Freedom Press. Subtitled Arguments for the Leisure Society, it is an eclectic collection, including non-anarchist classics by Bertrand Russell and William Morris, together with some post-war pieces, mainly culled from the pages of Freedom. There are quite a few striking insights that are still relevant, but some of the material seems dated. This is not only because post-war assumptions about the growth of leisure have proved wide of the mark, but also because of a resurgence of the work ethic, not least in New Labour's approach to social welfare, resulting in the expression of a growing contempt for leisure.
Bertrand Russell remarked that, "the idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich" and there are many comments in the older essays about the idle wealthy living off the industrious poor. This is still the case, especially globally, where much luxury in the North is created in the sweatshops of the South. However, within the developed countries, for many of the better paid, idle privilege has been replaced by a pathological, macho, workaholic culture. Managers can work ferocious hours themselves, a sign of their social dysfunction, and also seek to impose them as the norm on the rest of us. Managers' hours are spent inventing more "useless toil" for us to do, thereby displacing "useful work" and driving too many people into exhaustion and ill health. The contempt for, and even fear of, leisure is widespread.
Much of the book is not spent on the discussion of leisure itself but on making work pleasurable and rewarding, after all it is unavoidable. Though this contrasts with my current need for pure indolence, there is a real issue here - the deeply destructive nature of boredom. The question of the problem of boredom is now being answered mainly through work alone, even including proposals for the extension of working lives long into retirement age. Other solutions have seemingly been abandoned. For example, adult education, which was widely seen once as a socially useful weapon against boredom, is now derided as 'leisure courses', with funding withdrawn from liberal adult education in favour of training for work.
Paid employment, for some people, may well be a way of staving off boredom and finding satisfaction and meaning in life. It can be part of a drive to achieve and succeed. For others it is the essence of tedium, carried out in a network of servile relationships, that only brings money. For those of us in the public sector, a belief in the core values of our work can give us the privilege of rewarding work and great pleasure. You can get too much of a good thing though. Everyone can get tired.
And so we are always thrown back onto the human need for rest and leisure and they should be seen as valuable and desirable rather than as manifestations of weakness. The fight for paid holidays was an integral part of working class struggles, just as the right to work was. We should celebrate leisure, have more holidays and invest in those who provide leisure for others. One person's fun is another's paid employment until it is their turn to escape. Yet how do we define what leisure is? There isn't an easy answer. Sitting and looking can be mind-numbing to some, whilst DIY fills me with horror. I suppose it is whatever gives us, as individuals, a sense of delight, pleasure and refreshment. And, at the moment, writing this post is doing just that for me.
The challenge of creating a society where the enjoyment of leisure is universal is a profoundly political one. It requires more than shifting social attitudes away from a driven, aspirational work ethic. The key to the ability to enjoy leisure is certainly the liberty to do so, but that liberty can only spring from economic security and that, in turn, raises profound questions of political economy. They will have to wait though. Now it is time for me to pull up a chair into the shade. After all, I'm busy.


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This is a fastlane pulsating electro/dance track. Got some really cool bass sounds and a lot of energy.
WANT TO USE MY WORK?You are more than welcome to use my preview audio in your, portfolio, videohive items or whatever comes in your mind. Just send me an email with the link to your project so that I can link to it from my page.
And make sure to follow me here for the latest updates
Check out my website for news and updates – Webbdesign made easy


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Debian Security Advisory
DSA-2454-2 openssl -- multiple vulnerabilities
- Date Reported:
- 24 Apr 2012
- Affected Packages:
- openssl
- Vulnerable:
- Yes
- Security database references:
- In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2012-0884, CVE-2012-1165, CVE-2012-2110, CVE-2012-2131.
- More information:
Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in OpenSSL. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following issues:
Ivan Nestlerode discovered a weakness in the CMS and PKCS #7 implementations that could allow an attacker to decrypt data via a Million Message Attack (MMA).
It was discovered that a NULL pointer could be dereferenced when parsing certain S/MIME messages, leading to denial of service.
Tavis Ormandy, Google Security Team, discovered a vulnerability in the way DER-encoded ASN.1 data is parsed that can result in a heap overflow.
Additionally, the fix for CVE-2011-4619 has been updated to address an issue with SGC handshakes.
Tomas Hoger, Red Hat, discovered that the fix for CVE-2012-2110 for the 0.9.8 series of OpenSSL was incomplete. It has been assigned the CVE-2012-2131 identifier.
For the stable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 0.9.8o-4squeeze12.
For the testing distribution (wheezy), these problems will be fixed soon.
For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1.0.1a-1.
We recommend that you upgrade your openssl packages.


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Why Inspiring Leaders Don't Always Make Good Bosses
While they might get all of the attention, inspiring leaders such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Sam Walton aren't the best fit for every business, new research suggests.
A study from the University of Iowa finds that sometimes leaders don't need to be transformational to lead a highly productive group. Instead, it might be better for a solid, stable manager to be seen as just one of the gang.
While businesses are continually looking for leaders whose energy, charisma and disruptive ideas lead to innovation and corporate growth, researchers found that sometimes, transformational leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be.
"Leaders need to take the pulse of their teams and establish the extent to which team identification is high," said Ning Li, an Iowa professor of management and organizations and co-author of the research. "If identification is high, transformational leadership efforts will [be met] with less success."
As part of the study, researchers examined data gathered from 55 work groups, consisting of 196 employees and their leaders, at two Chinese firms. They found that a transformational leadership style did little to improve a work group's citizenship and willingness to take charge of their own work, especially when the workers' sense of being part of a team was already high.
The study found that employees who are less likely to be influenced by transformational leaders are those who are self-motivated, as well as those who have more traditional values. Those workers, Li said, believe that doing a good job is what they're paid to do, not something for which they need inspiration.
Researchers found that there were times, in fact, when transformational leadership was actually counterproductive because it ended up getting in the way of a team that was already functioning at a high level.
The study indicates that if employees see the leader as one of their own, their team identification may improve and they may be more willing to help each other, or take charge of their own work. In those cases, Li said, transformational leaders, who by definition are not seen as part of the group, do little to motivate employees.
Based on the study's results, Li said firms must set aside their belief that a transformational leader is a good thing in all situations and instead appoint managers based on the strengths and personality of the team and its members.
"Leaders need to tailor their transformational actions accordingly, rather than use a one-size-fits-all, group- directed, transformational style," wrote the study's authors, which also include Texas A&M University's Dan Chiaburu, North Carolina State University's Bradley Kirkman and Zhitao Xie of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
The research was recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology and the Academy of Management journal Perspectives.
Originally published on BusinessNewsDaily.


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Madam Chief Minister,
We, the members of Maitree, a women's rights network in West Bengal, are writing to protest against the manner in which the complaint of rape of a woman in a car in Kolkata on Feb 5, 2012 been dealt with by the government, especially the police.
- Despite being the Chief Minister and the Home Minister of the State, without giving time for investigation, you have stated that the incident is contrived and intended to malign your government. We are extremely apprehensive that your pronouncement will discourage a just and fair investigation. Supreme Court judgements on rape, say that for such cases oral testimony is enough to initiate the case, and sensitivity has to be shown to the assaulted women who come to seek justice.
- The Minister of State for Transport and Sports, Mr. Madan Mitra, also made offensive public comments about the lifestyle of the complainant and alleged that the complaint was fabricated to extort money. He said: "She has two children and so far as I know she is separated from her husband. What was she doing at a night club so late in the night?"
- A section of the police officials seemed more intent on finding "inconsistencies" in the complainant's statements, instead of taking action against the police personnel who delayed in filing the FIR, failed to get the medical investigation done in time and misbehaved with the complainant
– At the same time, we would like to point out that there are inconsistencies in the different police versions. Had the police taken a proper attitude from the beginning, the arrests would probably have come much before 18thFebruary and the woman would have had less of a trauma.
- Despite the Supreme Court judgements that the name and details of the victim of a rape case must be kept anonymous, these details have been made public.
- Not only was there a delay in getting the medical examination done but no woman police personnel accompanied the complainant to the hospital. The law is clear that that immediate forensic investigation is needed.
It takes immense courage for a woman to report rape and sexual assault. It is shocking to see that the complainant is being treated as the wrongdoer in this case.
We demand
- An immediate apology from you, the Chief Minister and the Transport Minister for prejudging the issue and casting aspersion on the integrity of the complainant.
- Action against police personnel responsible for mishandling the case and misbehaving with the complainant
- Immediate security for the woman
- Fair and just investigation of the complaint
We hope that you will heed our concerns and ensure that justice is done in this matter.
Thanking you,
Yours sincerely,
Members of Matiree
Secretariat: Sappho for Equality, 11A Jogendra Garden, South, Kolkata 700078
Contacts: Swayam 98302 04322 & Jeevika Development Society 98317 40384
[Distributed in the street corner and rally held on 21-02-2012 at Hazra More]
Related articles
- Mamta and Madan Mitra's Medieval Moralising (kractivist.wordpress.com)
- Apalling and Shocking -West Bengal: Hearing impaired patient raped in hospital by medical staff (kractivist.wordpress.com)


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Costco Wholesale, which has come under some scrutiny for lagging the trend toward online shopping, this week announced two initiatives to address that void, including an expanded partnership with Instacart and a new online shopping service known as CostcoGrocery.
The latter offering, which launched for the first time Oct. 1, consists of around 500 nonperishable dry grocery items, which will be delivered free to Costco shoppers making orders of more than $75. The Instacart offering, now available at 376 U.S. locations, will be expanded to additional locations between now and the end of fiscal 2018 next September. That offering, through a "white label" partnership, provides same-day delivery of about 1,700 fresh and nonperishable items.
Officials made the announcements late Thursday while reviewing financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter.
Richard Galanti, Costco's CFO, in a conference call said that online grocery shopping at Costco has typically been used as a "fill-in" shop by its customers, but he didn't underestimate the potential value of that. "We feel good that we've got a few delivery options for our members that, frankly, are better than the ones they were doing the day before," he said. "So we feel that to the extent that somebody wants to choose to use that route, they'll be able to and we'll be able to generate the sales from it."
E-commerce sales improved by 21% in the quarter. At the same time, Galanti told analysts, Costco still prefers when their shoppers visit stores, where baskets are typically much larger. He said Costco "had only scratched the surface" of its ability to generate store visits using electronic messaging to shoppers.
Some investors have been concerned that Costco was falling behind in e-commerce efforts, even if analysts said those fears were overstated. "Costco can now offer home delivery for comparable products vs. Amazon including fresh at lower price points from 73% of the U.S. store base," Karen Short, a Barclays analyst, said in a note Friday.
Investors also appeared concerned that a slight drop in membership renewals signaled trouble at Costco, but company officials said the dip (from 87.5% to 87.3% in the quarter) related to lapping a period of adjustment following the Costco credit card change a year ago. Nonetheless, Costco stock was down 6% Friday afternoon.
Net sales for the 17-week fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 3, were $41.4 billion, an increase of 15.8% from the 16-week fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. Net sales for the 53-week fiscal year were $126.2 billion, an increase of 8.7% from $116.1 billion in the 52-week fiscal year of 2016.


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The month of August ended as the deadliest Chicago has seen in two decades, and while Chicago's top cop claims "the solution is right in front of our faces," he said it isn't the national guard.
The last 31 days saw 384 shooting incidents with 472 shooting victims and 90 homicides, the most killings in one month since June 1996, which also saw 90 homicides.
"I'm sick and tired of it and everybody in Chicago should be sick and tired of it," Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said before repeating his claims that the violence in the city is perpetuated by repeat gun offenders.
"I have to keep going back to the fact that the entire city of Chicago is not at risk for these types of things," he said.
Johnson, who is working with local officials to draft a bill that would encourage higher sentencings for repeat gun offenders, said just 15 percent of the victims of violence so far this year were "the good people of Chicago."
The remaining 85 percent were "the same group of people that choose that lifestyle."
The spiking violence numbers have prompted calls for city officials to bring in the national guard.
U.S. & World
"We have the fire of violence and gunfire, we have the flood of blood in our streets and we have communities that look like third world countries, look like it must have had a tornado that hit it or a hurricane," outspoken priest Father Michael Pfleger said during a rally at his South Side church Wednesday. "You can't tell people to take pride in your neighborhood when your neighborhood looks like it's been abandoned and it's not part of the United States of America."
But Johnson, along with Gov. Bruce Rauner, have denied that the national guard will help the situation in Chicago.
"They're not trained to deal with domestic issues like this," Johnson said. "They don't have arrest powers, there's just too much that could go into that that I don't think would benefit us."
Rauner said the idea "wouldn't make sense," adding that "no thoughtful leader thinks that's a good idea or would really provide a solution."
He said his team has analyzed and discussed the idea, but, "in fact, it may exacerbate the other problems. So, nobody thinks that's a good idea."
According to Chicago police statistics, there have been 2,346 shooting incidents and more than 470 homicides so far this year. That's more killings than New York City and Los Angeles combined.
Authorities have blamed access to illegal guns, repeat offenders and not enough penalties for gun offenses for the city's rising number of shootings.
"The solution is right in front of our faces, we just have to make a choice to deal with it," Johnson said, noting that several cities have stricter penalties for gun offenders than Chicago.
"All I'm asking for is to hold the repeat gun offenders. I'm not trying to cast a net over the city of Chicago but the guys that continually show us that they don't respect the rules those are the ones we should go after," he added.
The city's violence has been spotlighted nationwide, with comments from celebrities including Donald Trump, Kanye West and Jabari Parker.
Over the weekend, Chicago Bulls star Dwyane Wade spoke out about the city's crime after his cousin, Nykea Aldridge, was fatally shot while pushing a stroller on the city's South Side.
"The city of Chicago is hurting. We need more help& more hands on deck. Not for me and my family but for the future of our world. The YOUTH!" Wade tweeted Saturday morning.
Aldridge was among 10 people killed over the weekend. More than 50 others were wounded in shootings across the city.
But while Johnson said legislation is "one part of the solution," he noted it isn't the only answer.
"Let's face it, the violence in Chicago is not a police issue it's societal ills that are driving a lot of this, but unfortunately law enforcement has nothing to do with that," he said.


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Lenzer to Cultivate UMD Innovation-Based Economic Development Efforts
Lenzer to Cultivate UMD Innovation-Based Economic Development Efforts
The University of Maryland (UMD) today announced the appointment of Julie Lenzer as Associate Vice President for Economic Development, effective December 12, 2016. Lenzer will also serve as Director of UM Ventures – College Park in the UMD Division of Research.
Lenzer is an award-winning software entrepreneur, ecosystem builder, investor, and educator with a foundation in innovation-based economic development.
Lenzer joins UMD after a two-year appointment at the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration, where she was director of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. In this role, Lenzer developed and launched the Regional Innovation Strategies program, deploying $40 million in grants across the country over the course of two years. The program was recently recognized as one of President Barack Obama's Top 10 Actions to Accelerate American Entrepreneurship. Additionally, Lenzer led the successful reorganization and institutionalization of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship within the Economic Development Administration, and as a result was named the U.S. lead for the G20 Innovation Task Force.
"Julie's remarkable experience and connections will ignite our growing innovation ecosystem," said University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. "She has launched her own enterprises and worked in and out of government to build innovation networks. She has done it all and will do it here."
Prior to her work in the Commerce Department, Lenzer served as the first leader of the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship. As executive director, Lenzer built and connected regional entrepreneurial ecosystems and delivered entrepreneurship development and growth programs across complex local, regional and state markets. She is also a founding co-chair of Startup Maryland, which through its statewide bus tour, Pitch Across Maryland, connected innovation communities and increased entrepreneurial success across the state. Recently, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan appointed Lenzer to the Maryland Economic Development Commission.
"The university's academic and research programs are incredibly strong, and there is a great opportunity for university innovation to flow into the surrounding community, transforming good ideas into economic growth and jobs," said Lenzer. "I look forward to channeling my most recent experience at the national and international level to benefit my home state of Maryland."
As Associate Vice President for Economic Development and Director of UM Ventures-College Park, Lenzer will report to the Division of Research and the President's Office. She will foster and support the development that is currently underway in the UMD Research Park and Greater College Park. She will also promote and facilitate productive, university-wide collaboration to launch startup ventures based upon University intellectual property, as well as maximize synergies between UMD and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to leverage strengths of each and encourage technology commercialization.
"Julie's technology commercialization experience at the regional, state, national, and international level will surely benefit the university's efforts to bring ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace to help stimulate the regional economy," said UMD Interim Vice President for Research Amitabh Varshney.
In all of these efforts, Lenzer will foster collaboration between the university's entrepreneurship and venture creation groups, including the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, the Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, and the Maryland Small Business and Technology Development Center.
Lenzer is a serial entrepreneur, technology transfer educator, and an active member of the Maryland community. She received the EDA Bronze Award for Excellence in Development, participated in the President Leadership Workshop, and has been recognized as one of Maryland's Top 100 Women, an Influential Marylander, and a Bisnow Federal Innovator. Lenzer earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.
December 9, 2016
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Did You Know
UMD is the only major public research university inside the Washington, DC beltway!!


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The following simple tips will help ensure that the plants you plant today will thrive for years to come. See detailed instructions below, and be sure to check out the new illustration by our staff Jon Wagner on how to plant bare-root plants!
Preparing the Site
- Clear away all loose materials, such as leaves, rocks and branches, from the area where the hole will be dug.
- Dig the hole wide enough to completely spread out the plant roots, without crowding or bending them.
- Dig the planting hole deep enough so the plant, when set in the hole, will be at the level it was in the pot.
- Thoroughly clear any existing roots from the hole.
- Pile soil in a cleared area next to the hole. Take plant roots and grass clumps out of the soil that will be used to backfill the hole.
- Roughen the sides of the hole if they appear slick.
Preparing the Plant
Keep all plants cool and moist until planting. Do not store indoors!
The plants you purchased may either be in containers or they may have no soil around the roots (bare-root plants). See below for instructions on each kind.
For Potted Plants:
- Ensure the soil in the pot is moist, then tip the pot on its side and gently press on the pot to loosen the plant. Gently pull the plant by holding on to the base of the stem.
- Most plants will have roots exposed. Pull loose roots outward and cut or straighten any that are encircling the rootball (circling roots will continue to grow in a circle and cause the plant to grow poorly and possibly die).
- Place plant in hole and arrange roots so they point outward.
- Make sure the plant is placed at its original depth. Do not plant too deeply.
For Bareroot Plants:
- Keep the roots moist until planting by storing them in moist compost or soil. In addition, you may soak them in water for 1-2hours (never longer than 6 hours).
- Before planting, prune back any badly bruised, broken, kinked, or jagged roots to sound wood.
- Make a small mound of soil in the bottom of the hole.
- Arrange the roots around the mound so they all point outward from the plant.
- Place the plant so that soil covers the roots, but doesn't cover the stem above the roots.
Replacing the Soil
- Backfill using the native soil that was dug out of the hole (or a hole nearby if more soil is needed). Do not fill hole with store-bought soil, this may cause the roots to extend only to the edge of the hole.
- Ensure that only soil goes back into the hole. No large rocks, sticks, clumps of grass, sawdust, leaves.
- Do not add any soil amendments (fertilizer or compost) to the planting hole.
- Push soil around the roots in the hole without disturbing root arrangement.
- Push soil down firmly to remove any air pockets.
- Use any extra soil to build a ring around the periphery of the planting hole to hold water and adjust the soil so that water drains away from the immediate trunk area. Gently pull the plant by holding on to the base of its stem.
Finishing Up
- Water the plant immediately to settle the soil and eliminate any air pockets. Add more soil to any holes that appear.
- If using compost or mulch, apply it to the top of the soil in a circle at least as wide as the roots, but not touching the stem.
Find out more about native plants
Explore our Native Plant Resources section for information on selecting plants, landscape planning, places to obtain native plants, and much more.


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Foreign is as foreign does. There really is no difference between any two cultures, except that they're totally different. An example: In The Joys of Engrish (just out from Penguin/Tarcher), Steven Caires puts together a humorous compendium of misused English phrases found mostly in Asia. Caires has a popular website (engrish.com) that I will admit to visiting monthly. Some of the Engrish examples, however, are not actually incorrect usages or spellings, but funny juxtapositions of things that shouldn't belong together. The oxymoron "Fight Peaceful" probably wouldn't be funny enough for Jay Leno, were it not found on a T-shirt in Japan. The key is irony: We presume that the double entendres are lost on Asians.
Hollywood especially loves unironic Engrish. No other industry makes its own language speak so proudly in foreign accents. We Americans have enormous respect for actors who can convincingly fake foreignness ("Meryl Streep has never used the same accent twice!"). This has nothing to do with authenticity. If we can love Missouri native Don Cheadle playing a Rwandan, then we can love Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese landlord. If we can love Hank Azaria playing an Indian convenience store owner, then by God, we can love Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre playing a Japanese spy.
At least in the movies and TV shows mentioned above, though, the characters would have in fact spoken English in their represented settings. This is what makes Memoirs of a Geisha so audaciously stupid: It's set in Japan (where, believe it or not, English is not the official language), with an almost entirely Chinese starring cast performing completely in heavily accented English. The only Japanese you hear is unsubtitled Foley meant to historicize the story, with an incessant wooden flute playing a bad appropriation of Kitaro. The movie's credibility is a lose-lose situation for those filmgoers with any respect for Asia. To begin with, a lot of people are complaining about the fact that the actors are Chinese. According to the New York Post, one Chinese blogger said Ziyi Zhang's playing a Japanese courtesan is a national insult and that "hacking her to death would not be good enough." (What would happen to James Gandolfini if he portrayed Chairman Mao in a biopic?)
But my damage is the fact that these women were cast on the condition that they would be handicapped of their talent for natural speech. Everyone's in raptures about how hell-raiser Gong Li says, "I shall destroy you," and later leaves the geisha house in flames, but that is nothing compared to her psychotic break in
Raise the Red Lantern, where even the subtitles were truer to her Mandarin. Taking the natural speech from the actresses' performances in order to give them a bigger fan base is an irony paralleled in one of the movie's premises: that reclaiming the innocence of a girl by kidnapping and making her a geisha is the only way to make that innocence more valuable. If this sounds turgid and wrong (after all, the original book was in English, so it's natural the film would be too, right?), let's put it this way: The equivalent of the Memoirs production in Japan would be Pearl Harbor
starring Russian actors playing American soldiers and speaking really poor Japanese.
And it really is poor English that's spoken in most of the movie, regardless of whether anyone is too impressed with the actresses' ability to memorize sounds to care. It gives new meaning to the climactic pickup line in Jerry Maguire, "You had me at hello," as in I didn't understand a word you said after that. Half of Ziyi Zhang's dialogue was totally lost on me, and I found myself mouthing along with Gong Li's lips in a desperate attempt to capture her lines when my perfect hearing failed me. I will admit to being impressed with rival geisha Pumpkin, played by Youki Kudoh, who does a flawless imitation of a tipsy Tara Reid, oblivious to the boob hanging out of her dress.
After I got used to the ESL pace of the story, my difficulty in following the dialogue turned into incredulity at the story. To sum up, the movie is an apology for sexism with two essential conflicts: the rags-to-bitches catfight for geisha supremacy, and the ill-fated love between Ziyi Zhang's Sayuri and Ken Watanabe's Chairman (who turns out to have been a pedophile: His initial attraction to Sayuri was when she was the ripe age of nine). Throughout, the film muses on what a geisha is exactly. Apparently, a geisha is not a hooker, but you can only become a geisha by selling your virginity. I guess the thinking is that if you only sell sex once you're . . . not a hooker?
The worst part of Memoirs is still that Ziyi Zhang speaks a slow and crude English that she learned in half a year. But even if God's wrath upon the Asian denizens of Babel is broken Engrish, at least it's not total silence. The Harajuku Girls are a quartet of dancers (at least one of whom is from California) on Gwen Stefani's solo music tour. They pose as avatars of the Tokyo neighborhood famous for being a spectacle of fashion and consumerism. Rumor has it that they were contractually obliged by Gwen Stefani (or her PR gurus) not to speak English while on tour, despite being fluent in the language. Love, Angel, Music, and Baby are, like the geishas in Memoirs, simply empty roles of Asian women who aren't allowed to speak openly. I hope that there is no doubt, but just to be clear, silencing people is the epitome of taking away their autonomy and subjectivity, even if Gwen Stefani thinks her silent Japanese fashionistas are part of an awesome and empowering counterculture. This raises the question: Why would an American entertainer who presumably knows cultural diversity (Stefani hails from a part of the O.C. not 10 minutes from my own provenance, where— unlike in the TV show—close to half the population is nonwhite) make such stupid demands specifically for Asian roles? What would be so wrong with Asian women speaking normally?
Maybe it's a thing with bigwig white musicians who are attempting to straddle the cultural divides of urban America. In a New York Times Magazine
cover-feature interview with Beck in March, the Los Angeles darling of white funk recounted how difficult it was to find a Japanese woman to speak fucked-up English on "Hell Yes," a track off his album Guero. Apparently everybody his producers' assistants solicited in the local L.A. sushi bar scene spoke pitch-perfect English, so Christina Ricci ended up standing in to do a rendition of Engrish. (According to producer John King, "She was sounding so good and it was so funny to all of us that we just kept feeding her lines.") I don't see the point of either the story itself or its recounting in one of the world's highest circulating newspapers. Have we come so far from the days of Long Duk Dong that now only Engrish can represent serious Asian roles?
As I ponder the limits of ridiculousness in Asianica, I begin to feel less and less offended. While there was in fact a moment when I worried Edward Said (who coined, defined, and criticized the term and concept of Orientalism) was turning in his grave for today's broadly defined Oriental, I realized soon thereafter the poetic justice. Things like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Joys of Engrish and the Harajuku Girls are, in the end, just kitschy, cliché bird droppings of consumerism— the equivalent of a mini bamboo tree that had sex with a kimono, gave birth to Mishima, and then got a tattoo in Chinese and put on cowboy boots before heading to Pearl River. No real harm done. Said could give two squirts about this stuff. He's got more important things to turn in his grave about, like the fact that Zizek and Derrida got movies before him.
Anne Ishii is director of marketing and publicity for Vertical Inc.


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Profiles can be reported to the support at Lovely. You can send a report via Profile > Actions > Report profile or directly from a conversation in the header menu. If several members report a profile within a short period of time, this may lead to a warning that is sent automatically from our system. Our support may review this profile to verify if it is in accordance with the Lovely terms of service. If more members report the profile after the warning this can lead to an irrevocable deletion of the user account.
What can I do?
In Lovely there are rules that have to be considered like in most other social networks:
- Lovely terms of service and applicable German law
- our guidelines for pictures
- and a generally fair and respectful treatment with other members
that is for example: no insults, racism, copyright offenses, threats, violence, drug glorification, pornography, commercial advertising, harassment or fake profiles.


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I'm really, really starting to hate seeing this when I download a new application:
My objections:
- What if I stop using the service I choose to log in to your application?
- You are totally going to spam my friends and followers on the service I choose—likely without asking me.
- I use different strong passwords for as many applications as is feasible to limit the surface area of any personal security compromise. You're not letting me control my own security.
What I think when I see this:
- You were too lazy to write your own login and authentication system.


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Watching the moon's shadow
NOTE: Press the "refresh/reload" button on your WWW browser to update the images on this page. The latest images will automatically be loaded.
Update: February 26, 1998:While most eyes turn skyward to watch Thursday's solar eclipse (with the appropriate filters to protect your eyes) one satellite will look earthward to watch the moon's shadow race across the globe.
Print copies of UVI images are now on line! This page provides a single large JPG with the 10 best eclipse shadow images plus a timeline page depicting where they were taken and an annotated image labeling major features.
Two animations of the eclipse as seen by UVI are now on line! The first is a 320K, 150x150 pixel sequence. The second is a 718K, 300x300 pixel sequence with time, camera filter, and other data added to the image.
"It's a unique perspective," said Dr. James Spann, a co-investigator for the Ultraviolet Imager (UVI) aboard the Polar spacecraft.
UVI images will be posted here as they are received. In addition, an animated image showing the last two hours of images will be posted so visitors can see a time-lapse movie of the eclipse shadow.
Geostationary weather satellites have taken striking images of many eclipse shadows on the Earth since the 1960s, the pictures, some of which are shown below, have limited scientific value, however. In the case of Polar, the spacecraft's cameras may be able to examine some of the chemistry of the upper atmosphere as the air molecules are suddenly put in the dark then re-exposed to light.
"Right now we're not sure about the science" because the method is new, said Spann at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. This will be the first eclipse UVI has observed.
UVI scientists hope to examine changes in the upper atmosphere by modeling the changes in airglow seen during the eclipse. Airglow is just that, an effect caused by solar ultraviolet light striking the atmosphere. By observing how the glow is extinguished then ignited as the Moon's shadow moves across the globe, Spann hopes that he and other scientists will be able to estimate oxygen densities at different altitudes in the upper atmosphere.
Polar, launched in 1996, was designed to study how the Earth interacts with the space environment. As its name indicates, most of the spacecraft's energies are focused on the Polar Regions where the magnetic field lines leave the Earth open to space. (Marshall's other instrument, the Thermal Ion Dynamics Experiment, studies ionized gases flowing upward from Earth into space. It will not be involved in eclipse observations.)
Three cameras - Marshall's UVI, the University of Iowa's Visible Imaging System (VIS), and Lockheed Martin's X-ray imager called PIXIE - are designed to observe the aurora borealis as the polar spacecraft arcs over the North Pole.
Fortunately, the satellite's position will be just right so that with a little change in attitude, the cameras can observe the Moon's shadow during the eclipse. (Looking at the Sun during the eclipse is out of the question; it would fry their image intensifiers.)
In a sense, an eclipse is always under way since the Moon always casts a shadow in space. A few times a decade, the motions of the Earth and Moon position them so the shadow is cast across the Earth.
The animation at right, built from images courtesy of Dr. Lou Frank, VIS principal investigator at the University of Iowa, depicts Polar's view of the Earth and the track of the shadow, from 1719 to 1900 UT, as the spacecraft rises towards the North Pole. The spot size indicates location and does not necessarily match the size of the shadow.
During this period, the Moon's shadow will be in the UVI's field of view. The Polar spacecraft camera platform will be positioned to begin viewing at 1544 UT (at 10:44 a.m., before the eclipse).
Initially, the UVI will observe with a filter that admits light at 130.4 nm wavelength (visible light spans from 700 nm [red] to 300 nm [violet]). This first filter is used to adjust settings so the electronics can compensate for a slight wobble in the spacecraft.
From 1838 UT to 1851 UT, the UVI will cycle through each of its 4 filters: 130.4 nm, 135.6 nm, 140 to 150 nm, and 160 to 180 nm. The latter two are broad bands called LBH after the initials of the discoverers. The camera will spend 36 seconds taking two pictures through each filter, then step to the next one, and repeat the sequence. From 1851 UT to 1930 UT, UVI will observe with just the 130.4 nm ultraviolet filter, then return to normal observations of the aurora with the two LBH filters.
Image in Visible Light
Image in Infrared Wavelengths
These Images Courtesy of
Click on the logo to get more satellite data!!!
For more information on the eclipse, check:
Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips
Curator: Bryan Walls
Responsible NASA official: John M. Horack


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Most definitely. Yum.
Here's Mos Def at the 2008 American Black Film Festival held at the Sofitel on Friday.
That tell all book from his estranged wife was just published recently…you hear about that? Mos Def married some woman 3 or 4 days after meeting her in 2005. Rumoured to be a starf*cker type, allegedly counting many celebrities and star athletes on her resumé. Needless to say, they're no longer together, but she's jotted down her memories to share with anyone who wants to know.
Photos from Wenn.com
Mos Quivering
Most definitely. Yum.


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Where to buy Emla without prescription in 2023?
› Verified 1 days ago
Robaxin is used to treat muscle spasms/pain. It is usually used along with rest, physical therapy, and other treatment. It works by helping to relax the muscles.
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The dosage is based on your medical condition and response to treatment. Do not increase your dose or take it more often than prescribed. Your condition will not improve any faster, and your risk of side effects will increase.
Tell your doctor if your condition does not improve or if it worsens.
Drowsiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, stomach upset, nausea/vomiting, or blurred vision may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly.
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Robaxin may make you dizzy or drowsy or cause blurred vision. Do not drive, use machinery, or do any activity that requires alertness or clear vision until you are sure you can perform such activities safely. Avoid alcoholic beverages.
Before having surgery, tell your doctor or dentist about all the products you use (including prescription drugs, nonprescription drugs, and herbal products).
Older adults may be more sensitive to the side effects of Robaxin, especially confusion, dizziness, or drowsiness. These side effects can increase the risk of falling.
During pregnancy, Robaxin should be used only when clearly needed. Discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor.
It is unknown if Robaxin passes into breast milk. Consult your doctor before breast-feeding.
Drug interactions may change how your medications work or increase your risk for serious side effects. This document does not contain all possible drug interactions. Keep a list of all the products you use (including prescription/nonprescription drugs and herbal products) and share it with your doctor and pharmacist. Do not start, stop, or change the dosage of any medicines without your doctor's approval.
Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are taking other products that cause drowsiness including alcohol, antihistamines (such as cetirizine, diphenhydramine), drugs for sleep or anxiety (such as alprazolam, diazepam, zolpidem), other muscle relaxants, and narcotic pain relievers (such as codeine).
Check the labels on all your medicines (such as allergy or cough-and-cold products) because they may contain ingredients that cause drowsiness. Ask your pharmacist about using those products safely.
Robaxin may interfere with certain laboratory tests (including VMA or 5-HIAA urine screening test), possibly causing false test results. Make sure laboratory personnel and all your doctors know you use Robaxin.


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