text:
Today I read a an article at GoodEReader.com by Michael Kozlowski with the headline, Self-Published Authors Are Destroying Literature. I was immediately offended for all self-published authors who've written solid work, I mean what a blanket statement. We all know that the facts are in, and that self-publishing has an obvious role in the future of book publishing, so blaming self-publishing for the downfall of literature seems rather unrealistic.
For one thing, if you're going to blame anything, blame digital publishing and the ebook revolution. But honestly, I didn't realize that literature was being destroyed. From my perspective, it looks like literature is being expanded to encompass more by allowing writers outside the mainstream to have a voice, while also giving the author more control. So many elitists tout the Big Six (not that I wouldn't love to have them notice my work) but I've got to tell you, some of the stuff being published today by the big publishers is yawn-worthy. It's almost as if there is a formula for success in certain genres — ahem, young adult or anything to do with vampires.
For awhile there, I didn't want to get into the whole ebook fad. I'm a print loyalist, I've said it before. But then I started reviewing books and it just became the easy way to go about business. Since a lot of self-published books start in the ebook format, I've read a few. There have definitely been some less-than-polished products, although our good writer over at GoodEReader.com seems to think self-published books in general "devalue the work of legitimate published authors."
His argument follows the line of thought that because indie authors often price ebooks between $0.99 and $2.99 that it makes readers unwilling to pay for mainstream work that's going for $7.99 to $12.99. I'm sorry, but I don't care if you were published by Penguin or your very own self, I refuse to spend $12.99 on an ebook, except for the one time when I did because I was just so addicted to the series. My excuse is I had a gift card. But in most occasions, I would just rather buy the print edition. You can't lovingly turn the pages of a digital copy or see it age and wear with rereads. It is just not worth it to me no matter who you are to buy an ebook at that price. Unless, like I explained before, I was already addicted and not in my right mind. I mean it was like 1 a.m. and I just had to know what was going to happen next.
Here's the thing, I've read self-published stories that I didn't think were up to par with their editing — a grammar mistake here, a weird space there, or an entire chapter that could have been pulled. I've noticed when more editing should have taken place, but I can't discount that many of the stories have been wonderful. And that's not to say that all self-published works even have that problem.
Joe Vampire by Steve Luna was initially a self-published work, although he is now published under the Booktrope label. He was seriously a little bit of an inspiration in the vampire genre, where so many authors are trying to ride on the coattails of Twilight. It was refreshing to read a different take in a saturated topic.
I've also read truly awful stuff published by mainstream publishers that may have been edited to death, but still have grammatical mistakes. That said, I don't think self-published authors are singlehandedly destroying quality literature, especially beacuse there's plenty of quality coming from that spectrum of publishing.
The one area where I can agree with Kozlowski is the tweeting. I follow a lot of authors on Twitter, many of them probably self-published, and my stream is almost a solid mass of writers trying to get people to buy their books. I completely understand that this is one reason why Twitter is helpful, but as a reader, I'm more interested in what they have to say as people. The constant advertisements just blur together, and it's only when I see someone tweet something interesting that I'll really pay attention. Initially, when I first started my book review blog I caught a few titles off the digital bookshelf stream, but now I really have no need.
Like most things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many would agree that Ernest Hemingway was an amazing literary author, but I've known people who didn't like his writing at all. E.L. James' 50 Shades of Gray certainly seduced readers in droves, but I wouldn't deign to touch the book. So let's give readers some credit for being able to choose their own literature based on their own personal tastes. If they choose a self-published author over a mainstream author, I'm sure the mainstream author will find plenty of other readers being backed by a big publishing house and the grace of newspaper book review lists. And if it's bad, then it'll tank. Like any book.
Just in case anyone thinks I'm writing this because I'm going to hopefully publish my book sometime soon, let me explain. While I respect self-published authors, I in no way want to go that route myself. It just seems like so much work and I want more support for my first book. But it doesn't mean I never would. Publishing today is a whole new game, one that elitists should get on board with soon because the writing is already on the page.
K.M. Randall writes fantasy and paranormal for both a general and young adult audience. Her debut novel, an epic fantasy called Fractured Dream, launched in June 2014, and her second book, The Reaper's Daughter, launched May 2015. Randall also published Fairytale Lost, a prequel to Fractured Dream, as an exclusive on Wattpad. She blogs about dreams, female heroines, and activism and its relevancy to the literary and fictional world. And when in the season, sometimes she just likes to talk about Halloween. She is currently hard at work on the second book in the Dreamer Saga series, Shattered World.
February 2022


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subset: commoncrawl


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We generally follow Ronald Reagan's injunction to "always fight up, never fight down." Consequently, we critique liberal politicians and leading Democratic Party newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and rarely pay attention to the left-wing web sites that blight the landscape. I will deviate from that practice for a moment, however, and comment on a web site called Think Progress.
Think Progress is a creature of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing organization headed by John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and the head of Barack Obama's Presidential transition team. Through Podesta, CAP is closely connected to the Obama administration. It is also part of the George Soros empire. CAP is funded, quite lavishly, by rich liberals like Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, and Herbert Sandler. It also receives donations from companies, including Wal-Mart. (Why would Wal-Mart fund far-left activism? Reportedly, because CAP supports Obamacare and Wal-Mart believes that inflicting Obamacare on its smaller rivals will represent a competitive advantage.)
What is remarkable is how little liberal billionaires get for their investment in CAP and similar organizations. Talent, apparently, is in short supply on the left.
Think Progress has a number of branches, of which, for the moment, I will mention just two. The first is the "Wonk Room." One might expect the Wonk Room to be a home for sophisticated and technical discussion of public policy issues–wonkishness. But no. Today's Wonk Room features a post by one Igor Volsky, who is offended that, because of the recent federal court ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional, Alaska's governor has declined to implement it. The headline on Volsky's piece reads: Alaska Gov Sean Parnell Cowers To Ruling Of Unelected Judge, Refuses To Implement Health Law.
Apparently the "wonks" at Think Progress are unaware that all federal judges are unelected, and that since Marbury v. Madison, it has been the practice of public officials to "cower" before their constitutional rulings. Certainly when unelected judges held, for example, that there is a constitutional right to consensual sodomy, liberals not just expected but demanded that public officials "cower" before their judgment. Whether Obamacare is unconstitutional is a topic for another day, but the fact that federal judges are "unelected" has nothing to do with the merits of that issue or of Governor Parnell's decision. Deferring to the constitutional judgment of the federal courts is not "cowering."
Next we have this fevered piece, by someone named Lee Fang, titled: "How John Birch Society Extremism Never Dies: The Fortune Behind Scott Walker's Union-Busting Campaign." I have no idea who Lee Fang is, but I can tell you this: he was born too late. His paranoid style would have fit beautifully with the John Birch Society, circa 1964. There is no parallel, nowadays, on the right, but you can still find that kind of conspiratorial thinking on the left.
You really have to read the whole thing to get the flavor–take two aspirin first–but here are some excerpts:
Much of Walker's critical political support can be credited to a network of right-wing fronts and astroturf groups in Wisconsin supported largely by a single foundation in Milwaukee: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a $460 million conservative honey pot dedicated to crushing the labor movement.
The Bradley Foundation gave out a total of $38.7 million in 2009, to a large number of causes and organizations, some conservative, some non-political. What is odd about this is Fang's reference to the Bradley Foundation as a "conservative honey pot." George Soros, not to mention other liberals who donate to CAP and Think Progress, is a much bigger "honey pot" than the Bradley Foundation. Glass houses, stones, etc. Fang continues:
[T]he organizations lining up to support Walker are financed by Bradley cash:
The MacIver Institute is a conservative nonprofit that has provided rapid-response attacks on those opposed to Walker's power grab. … The Bradley Foundation has supported MacIver with over $300,000 in grants over the last three years alone.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute is a major conservative think tank helping Walker win support from the media. … The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute is supported with over $10 million in grants from the Bradley Foundation.
Bradley gave the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute $1,475,000 in 2009.
As ThinkProgress has reported, the powerful astroturf group Americans for Prosperity not only helped to elect Walker, but bused in Tea Party supporters to hold a pro-Walker demonstration on Saturday. In 2005, the Bradley Foundation earmarked funds to help Koch Industries establish the Americans for Prosperity office in Wisconsin. From 2005-2009, the Bradley Foundation has given about $300,000 to Americans for Prosperity Wisconsin (also called Fight Back Wisconsin).
Bradley gave the Americans for Prosperity Foundation $20,000 in 2009.
So Mr. Fang poses as a muckraker exposing a nefarious web of high finance. What is bizarre about this is that he himself lives on the largesse of billionaire liberals. According to SourceWatch (linked above), CAP took in over $28 million in donations from rich liberals (and companies like Wal-Mart) in 2008. These figures dwarf the paltry sums about which Fang pretends to be indignant–$20,000! $300,000! That is no coincidence. The big money in politics these days, especially the big money from the rich, is on the left. If the Bradley Foundation is a "honey pot," then what sort of pot is paying Fang's salary?
From here, Fang goes on to spin more conspiracy theories. He relates the history of Harry and Lynde Bradley, as filtered through far-left eyes, and exults over the fact that Harry Bradley was on the board of the John Birch Society. (Remember the title of his post?) Harry Bradley died in 1965. But once Fang is on to the John Birch Society, he doesn't want to let go:
He joined candy manufacturer Robert Welch to be one of the charter members of the John Birch Society (along with JBS board member Fred Koch, the father of Koch Industries executives Charles and David Koch), and financed other right-wing firebrands.
You may wonder, why the gratuitous Koch brothers reference? After all, Fred Koch died in 1967. No reason, except that Think Progress has recently been on a vendetta against Charles and David Koch and their company, one of the most respected in America. This is just a casual smear that he threw in, apropos of nothing in particular. Whatever you think of the John Birch Society, it had nothing at all to do with this week's events in Wisconsin. Fang concludes:
Gov. Scott Walker's current fight to crush labor rights in Wisconsin is the fulfillment of Harry Bradley's John Birch Society dream.
There is definitely some dream-fulfillment going on here, but it isn't Harry Bradley's. What is the sum and substance of Think Progress's expose? Governor Walker's position is endorsed by a majority of Wisconsin voters, as well as several conservative groups, some of which have gotten modest amounts of support from conservative philanthropists. In what world is that some kind of scandal?
Certainly not in the world of Think Progress, which is entirely a creature of the billionaire left. One curious feature of today's left is its obsession with "astroturf." There is a reason why lefties who work for billionaire-funded web sites like Think Progress constantly talk about astroturf: it is the world they live in. They are paid by rich liberals, and the demonstrators who are bused in to left-wing protests are generally union members who are paid to attend. No one on the left does much for free. So lefties find it hard to understand that ordinary citizens ("Tea Partiers") will turn out at rallies without being paid, that conservative voters vote on principle, not financial self-interest, and that conservative activists act out of conviction, not because they are subsidized by a sugar daddy. Failing to understand that conservatism–unlike liberalism–is a movement of principle, not self-interest, they are constantly looking for the elusive, non-existent money trail.
I recently experienced an entertaining example of this phenomenon. A local columnist who covered media for the St. Paul Pioneer Press went to work for a web site called MinnPost, which is funded by liberal sugar daddies. The site seems mostly to publish the work of former Star Tribune employees. Anyway, this reporter referred to me as "one of [Bill Cooper's] high-profile investments." Having no idea what he was talking about, I emailed the MinnPost reporter to ask for an explanation. Bill Cooper is the Chairman of TCF Bank; I am slightly acquainted with him, but we do not move, let us say, in the same social circles. I got this response:
If what you're saying is that Bill never had any involvement in either the creation, development and support of Power Line, I guess I'll take you at your word. Although I must say that assertion has its doubters.
In reply, I assured this reporter that no person or entity has ever provided any material support to this web site. We have been in the black since we started taking advertising in late 2004. And anyway, I don't get the point. What material support would be necessary? We make a good living practicing law, and engage in politics out of conviction, for free–or, better yet, for the few bucks we make on advertising–in order to help make a better world for our children, a motivation that liberals apparently find mystifying. Liberals are always hot to follow the money, except to where it really leads–their own paychecks.


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Thanks to theenchantedlabyrinth's comments I've started to think about how we're seeing material things as signs of how important someone is in society. Apparently, the more money and possessions someone has, the more important that person is. I believe we got this all wrong.
It is true that most successful and important people have lots of money and lots of possessions and that's what we see about them, but we're missing something and that something is value. These people are successful because they brought value to other people. The money is just a consequence. Picture it this way: every fire has a smoke. The fire is the value that person brings into society and the smoke is the money. The money is nothing else than a reward for the value those people bring. And we all do this. Whenever we go to a restaurant and we love how the waiter serves us, we leave a big tip. No one is asking us for this, but we do it as a form of appreciation for the service we received.
That's what successful people do. They find ways to serve us and the better we're served, the more tips we want to leave. The bigger the fire is, the more smoke it creates. Whenever we want to get warm, our goal is to create a fire, not the smoke. Sometimes the smoke is quite annoying (ok, I don't think they find money annoying, but still… you get my point).
The problem with people is that they only see the tips, the smoke. They don't see the actual work and the value those people bring so the chase is for the smoke, not for the fire. We usually categorize someone as successful by the amount of money that person has, not by the value that person brings and it's not quite right.
What value would you like to bring in other people's lives?


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This description originally appeared in slightly modified form, and without the example, in Ho, Moody, Peng, et al. [4].
is a ``regularity statistic'' that quantifies the unpredictability of fluctuations in a time series such as an instantaneous heart rate time series, . Intuitively, one may reason that the presence of repetitive patterns of fluctuation in a time series renders it more predictable than a time series in which such patterns are absent. reflects the likelihood that ``similar'' patterns of observations will not be followed by additional ``similar'' observations. A time series containing many repetitive patterns has a relatively small ; a less predictable (i.e., more complex) process has a higher .
The algorithm for computing has been published elsewhere [1-4]. Here, we provide a brief summary of the calculations, as applied to a time series of heart rate measurements, . Given a sequence , consisting of instantaneous heart rate measurements , , , , we must choose values for two input parameters, and , to compute the approximate entropy, , of the sequence. The second of these parameters, , specifies the pattern length, and the third, , defines the criterion of similarity. We denote a subsequence (or pattern) of heart rate measurements, beginning at measurement within , by the vector . Two patterns, and , are similar if the difference between any pair of corresponding measurements in the patterns is less than , i.e., if
Now consider the set of all patterns of length [i.e., ], within . We may now define
where is the number of patterns in that are similar to (given the similarity criterion ). The quantity is the fraction of patterns of length that resemble the pattern of the same length that begins at interval . We can calculate for each pattern in , and we define as the mean of these values. The quantity expresses the prevalence of repetitive patterns of length in . Finally, we define the approximate entropy of , for patterns of length and similarity criterion , as
i.e., as the natural logarithm of the relative prevalence of repetitive patterns of length compared with those of length .
Thus, if we find similar patterns in a heart rate time series, estimates the logarithmic likelihood that the next intervals after each of the patterns will differ (i.e., that the similarity of the patterns is mere coincidence and lacks predictive value). Smaller values of imply a greater likelihood that similar patterns of measurements will be followed by additional similar measurements. If the time series is highly irregular, the occurrence of similar patterns will not be predictive for the following measurements, and will be relatively large.
It should be noted that has significant weaknesses, notably its strong dependence on sequence length and its poor self-consistency (i.e., the observation that for one data set is larger than for another for a given choice of and should, but does not, hold true for other choices of and ). For an excellent review of the shortcomings of and the strengths of alternative statistics, see reference [5].
An example may help to clarify the process of calculating . Suppose that , and that the sequence consists of 50 samples of the function illustrated above:
(i.e., the sequence is periodic with a period of 5). Let's choose (this choice simplifies the calculations for this example, but similar results would be obtained for other nearby values of ) and (again, the value of can be varied somewhat without affecting the result). This gives us:
and so on. The first question to be answered is: how many of the are similar to ? Since we have chosen as the similarity criterion, this means that each of the 5 components of must be within units of the corresponding component of . Thus, for example, is not similar to , since their last components (61 and 65) differ by more than 2 units. The conditions for similarity to will be satisfied only by , , , , ..., , as well as by itself [i.e., for 10 of the ], so we have
Since the total number of is ,
We can now repeat the above steps to determine how many of the are similar to , , etc. By the same reasoning, is similar to , , , ..., , so that
and in general
(This last statement is true only for the particular example we are considering, since we have specified a sequence with a period of 5, and we have chosen m = 5 as well.)
Hence is either or , depending on , and the mean value of all 46 of the is:
In order to obtain , we need to repeat all of the calculations above for . Doing so, we obtain:
so that
and . Finally, we calculate that
This is a very small value of ApEn, which suggests that the original time series is highly predictable (as indeed it is).
ApEn Software
In view of the weaknesses in ApEn, and in deference to the wishes of SM Pincus, we do not provide an implementation of ApEn here. This description is provided here so that researchers who wish to use ApEn can write their own code for doing so.
An ApEn implementation in Matlab m-code is included in Danny Kaplan's Software for Heart Rate Variability.
1. Pincus SM. Approximate entropy as a measure of system complexity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1991;88:2297-2301.
2. Pincus SM, Goldberger AL. Physiological time-series analysis: What does regularity quantify? Am J Physiol 1994;266(Heart Circ Physiol):H1643-H1656.
3. Ryan SM, Goldberger AL, Pincus SM, Mietus J, Lipsitz LA. Gender and age-related differences in heart rate dynamics: Are women more complex than men? J Am Coll Cardiol 1994;24:1700-1707.
4. Ho KKL, Moody GB, Peng CK, Mietus JE, Larson MG, Levy D, Goldberger AL. Predicting survival in heart failure case and control subjects by use of fully automated methods for deriving nonlinear and conventional indices of heart rate dynamics. Circulation 1997 (August);96(3):842-848.
5. Richman JS, Moorman JR. Physiological time-series analysis using approximate entropy and sample entropy. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 278(6):H2039-H2049 (2000).
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If you have any comments, feedback, or particular questions regarding this page, please send them to the webmaster.
Comments and issues can also be raised on PhysioNet's GitHub page.
Updated Thursday, 9 July 2015 at 11:08 EDT
PhysioNet is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) under NIH grant number 2R01GM104987-09.


text:
MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a test Wednesday of a new hypersonic glide vehicle, declaring that the weapon is impossible to intercept and will ensure Russia's security for decades to come.
Speaking to Russia's top military brass after watching the live feed of the launch of the Avangard vehicle from the Defense Ministry's control room, Putin said the successful test was a "great success" and an "excellent New Year's gift to the nation."
The test comes amid bitter tensions in Russia-U.S. relations, which have sunk to their lowest level since the Cold War times over the conflict in Ukraine, the war in Syria and the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Putin's hopes for repairing ties with Washington under President Donald Trump have fizzled amid investigations into allegations of Trump's campaign ties with Russia, and tensions have escalated as the U.S. administration slapped Russia with new waves of sanctions.
The Avangard was among the array of new nuclear weapons that Putin presented in March, saying that Russia had to develop them in response to the development of the U.S. missile defense system that could erode Russia's nuclear deterrent.
In Wednesday's test, the weapon was launched from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the southern Ural Mountains. The Kremlin said it successfully hit a designated practice target on the Kura shooting range on Kamchatka, 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) away.
"The Avangard is invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defense means of the potential adversary," Putin said after the test, adding that the new weapon will enter service next year with the military's Strategic Missile Forces.
When first presenting the Avangard in March, the Russian leader said the new system has an intercontinental range and can fly in the atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound, bypassing the enemy's missile defense.
He emphasized that no other country currently has hypersonic weapons.
Putin has said that Avangard is designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,632 degrees Fahrenheit) that come from a flight through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.


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This article is more than 1 year old
IBM spooks market with dismal Q1
Beware the Ides of March
A sharp drop in sales during March crushed an otherwise fair first quarter for IBM, the company said today. IBM's inability to close late quarter deals caused it badly to miss analyst expectations.
IBM pulled in $22.9bn during the period - a 3 per cent rise over the $22.2bn posted in the same period one year ago. Removing currency gains, IBM's revenue increased just 1 per cent. Income rose to $1.41bn from $1.36bn in 2004.
These minor gains coupled with IBM's negative take on the quarter rattled analysts and investors. Wall Street had been looking for earnings per share of 90 cents, not the 84 cents per share IBM reported.
"After a strong start, we had difficulty closing transactions in the final weeks of the quarter, especially in countries with soft economic conditions, as well as with short-term Global Services signings," said CEO Sam Palmisano. "As a result, we did not achieve all of our goals for the quarter."
IBM had been seeing revenue growth of 6 per cent in January and February but then noticed a drop off in "small transactions" and was unable to rectify the problems before the quarter closed. Sales were particularly slow in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, IBM said.
IBM's largest business - Global Services - posted a 6 per cent revenue gain, hitting $11.7bn during the first quarter. In constant currency, the gain was just 3 per cent.
The story was less bright for IBM's hardware unit which saw flat sales or a drop off of 2 per cent in constant currency. This group generated $6.7bn on the back of strong Unix servers sales and decent x86-based server shipments. IBM's storage and mainframe sales were disappointing.
Software revenue rose 2 per cent to $3.6bn - or was flat in constant currency. Middleware sales increased a bit, while operating system sales dropped slightly.
IBM declined to speculate about second quarter financial figures due to the rocky March run. Shares of IBM tumbled more than 5 per cent in the after-hours markets, at the time of writing, to $80.31. ®
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Arab leaders attending yesterday's concluding session of the third Arab Economic and Social Development Summit renewed their commitment to fully implement the decisions made at the two previous summits in Kuwait in 2009 and at Sharm El-Sheikh in 2011.
They also agreed to hold the next summit in Tunisia in 2015.
The two-day summit, organized by the Arab League was hosted by the Kingdom with the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, as its Chairman.
On behalf of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, Crown Prince Salman, deputy premier and minister of defense took over the chairmanship from his predecessor, Muhammad Mursi, at the commencement of the summit on Monday.
Leaders from countries including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the Sultanate of Oman, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Mauritania, Somalia, Djibouti, and Comoros Islands attended the meeting held at the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Hall in the capital.
Arab League Secretary General, Nabil Elarabi, who read out the Riyadh declaration, stressed the importance of the speedy implementation of all decisions passed at the two summits.
It also emphasized the determination of the leaders to remove all barriers that stand in the way of inter-Arab trade and support small and medium enterprises in member countries. The leaders have called for strengthening joint Arab work so as to improve the living conditions and welfare of their citizens.
They also welcomed the initiative of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, on the increase of the capital of joint Arab funds by 50 percent to meet the growing needs for the socio-economic development in the Arab countries.
The King's initiative also called for an increase of capital in joint Arab companies by, at least, 50 percent in a bid to develop their potential for establishing of joint Arab ventures.
They also encouraged inter-Arab investments which, they said, would create new job opportunities, reduce rates of unemployment, curb poverty levels, and promote Arab investment within their countries to enhance economic development in the Arab region. To encourage the flow of inter-Arab investments, they adopted a unified agreement for a capital fund in Arab countries to boost Arab, regional and international development that would increase the flow of inter-Arab investments and make the region more attractive to investors.
They also expressed a commitment to create a conducive environment for investment in their respective countries.
Also adopted was an Arab strategy for the use of renewable energy (2010-2030) aimed at meeting the growing demand for energy and diversifying sources to meet requirements for sustainable development. The strategy is also intended to set up an Arab market in partnership with the private sector for renewable energy, which will create new job opportunities.
It was also demanded that constructive measures be taken to combat hunger and to provide instant relief in emergency situations arising from food security.
Realizing the importance of healthcare services in the Arab region, the declaration said that the countries should take preventive and curative measures against non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. It was felt that NCD creates a significant burden on the economies and health systems in the Arab countries.
They also urged the implementation of the Riyadh Declaration issued by the International Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Non-communicable Diseases in the Arab world and the Middle East," held in Riyadh in December last year.
Besides setting up the Arab Customs Union by 2015, the house also insisted that matters regarding the formation of the Greater Arab Free Trade should be finalized before the end of 2013.
• Full text of the Riyadh Declaration


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What we're about
If you've ever visited Hacker News, you've almost certainly seen the "Show HN" or "Ask HN" posts. Well, it's time to get off the Internet and tell us about it face to face. We'll provide you with our honest feedback, you provide us with a great hack or idea.
We'll give you 5 minutes to show off your tool, hack, library (did you just write a library to access the Meetup API in Go!?), whatever. We're language / software/ hardware agnostic, so it's all fair game.
After you present, it's an open forum. The audience will ask questions and provide feedback. We want to enable as much participation as possible at these meetups, so you'd better be able to take criticism and dish it out (all within reason of course).
Our mailing list has a strict no recruiters and no promotion of commercial projects policy. If you think that your message to the list might not be appropriate, either run it by the organizers, or don't send it! Violators will be banned as soon as possible--no questions asked!


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Membership in the Daughters of the American
Revolution (DAR) honors and preserves the legacy
of your patriot ancestor. Over two hundred years
ago, American patriots fought and sacrificed for
the freedoms we enjoy today. As a member of DAR,
through participation in the National Society
DAR's various programs and activities, you can
continue this legacy by actively supporting
historic preservation, promotion of education,
and patriotic endeavor.
DAR members are educators, students,
professionals, mothers, historians,
genealogists, and homemakers, who continue this
legacy. They play an active role in their
communities promoting our objectives of
patriotism, education, and historic
preservation. With about 3,000 chapters
throughout the world, and with over 180,000
members, we are one of the largest women's
service organizations in the world.
Membership in DAR offers a number of benefits,
Promoting American
history throughout the year by honoring
historically significant people, places,
dates, and events
Participating in
commemorative events such as Flag Day,
Veterans Day, and the 4th of July
Participation in
meaningful service projects throughout the
Recognizing students with
awards and scholarships; involving all
family members in promoting service efforts
Supporting the
Constitution of the United States of
America, the patriotic values of our
country, and the military men and women who
serve the nation
Enjoying camaraderie with
other DAR members during projects, events,
and social events
Embracing opportunities
to improve leadership abilities by taking on
responsibilities at chapter, state, and
national levels
Any woman is eligible for membership who is no
less than eighteen years of age and can prove
lineal descent from an ancestor who aided in
achieving American independence. She must
provide documentation for each statement of
birth, marriage, and death.
additional information about becoming a member
of DAR, visit the DAR website.
you are interested in joining the Marion-Linn
Chapter, please contact Judy Bushlack, chapter registrar,
and we will be happy to assist you through all
of the steps.


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Mark Henry -- Color Him WWE Champ
When does being hit with racial slurs improve your career? For WWE wrestler Mark Henry, it may have happened last night on PPV.
In April, the WWE suspended writer Michael Hayes for 60 days for telling Henry, "I'm more n***** than you are." Last night -- and one week after Hayes was reinstated -- the twelve-year WWE vet and former Olympian finally got his big moment by winning the company's ECW world title.
That's where the controversy starts.
There's buzz around wrestling blogs that the 400 lb. wrestler that calls himself "The World's Strongest Man" would never have been in line for a title if the racial controversy didn't exist.
The company has only had three other African-American world champions in its entire history. Anyone 'memba The Rock?
WWE hasn't returned our call for comment.


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Recognizing the need for positive images of black marriage in the media, Ronnie founded BlackandMarriedWithKids.com (BMWK) in 2007 along with husband Lamar. Over the last 13 years, she has grown the site from a personal blog shared by one couple to an international brand with over 600,000 social media fans.
Under the couple's Tyler New Media company umbrella, Ronnie has co-produced seven films that deal with the challenges and triumphs of marriage in the black community. The couple was named one of Ebony Magazine's Power 100 in 2011 and 2012.
Prior to running BMWK, Ronnie spent 17 years with IBM as a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) managing projects with 30 million dollar budgets and up to 30 developers spread across four continents. She now uses her skills and expertise to manage 7-figure product launches and events for Tyler New Media, LLC.
Ronnie believes that, by default, every entrepreneur or small business owner is a project manager at some point in their business. Therefore, she has made it her mission to share project management best practices that will not only increase efficiency but profitability in your business.


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If there's anything we have plenty of in Arizona, it's pests. Here in the Verde Valley, pest control is needed year-round. Keeping your home or business pest-free, and keeping your property free of unsightly weeds, can be a real challenge.
Ironically, our desert environment is one of the reasons why pests and weeds can be so difficult to control here. The pest and weed species that that have adapted to life in the desert are the strongest of the strong, able to survive -- and thrive -- even in the harshest of environments. That hardiness also makes them more difficult to control.
Arizona bugs are tough bugs, and Arizona bug control requires a tough exterminator.
That's one of the ways that being a locally-owned, independent company gives High Desert Pest and Weed Control an edge over the competition. We're not like the big national exterminators, where the manager of the "local" branch may have worked in Massachusetts last year, and Iowa the year before; and service technicians come and go like the wind.
That's not us. We're local. We live here, we like it here, and we're here to stay. We have a knowledge of our local pest and weed species that comes from living here our whole lives, observing the seasonal pest cycles. (It also helps that we're every bit as tough and stubborn as the pests and weeds we deal with every day.)
Another way that we're unlike the big, national pest control companies is that our customers aren't just numbers to us. They're our friends and neighbors, the people we break bread with at picnics and whose kids we cheer on at Little League games. Our customers are our friends and neighbors, and that's how we treat them.
This attitude, along with two decades' worth of experience, skill, and expertise, have made us the Verde Valley's first choice for top-notch pest extermination and weed control services.
We provide a comprehensive package of pest and weed control services, including:
Also check out our special money-saving offers on pest and weed control services.
Whether you are having problems with insects, rodents, or weeds, contact us for the finest quality pest and weed control in the Verde Valley, delivered with the old-fashioned customer service you've come to expect.


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I've always liked doughnuts quite a bit, especially the ones made by Glendora's Donut Man and New York City's Doughnut Plant. However, it wasn't until I explored Seattle's boutique doughnut scene last week that my affections shifted from like to love. Love is an awfully strong word, and I mean it one-hundred percent when it comes to expertly fried dough.
There's an artisanal doughnut movement brewing in Seattle, and Top Pot Doughnuts is leading the way. The first shop opened in 2002 and four more were established thereafter. The Astronomer and I visited the downtown location on our first morning in the city.
Whereas Los Angeles' neighborhood doughnut shops are usually housed in cramped and dingy quarters, the ones we visited in Seattle were bright (weather permitting), well-appointed, and spacious. At Top Pot, huge shelves containing encyclopedia volumes lined the walls, while a glorious window spanned the entire entrance. As is the norm in these here parts, the shop offered free wi-fi and plenty of comfy seating.
Top Pot makes more than forty varieties of "hand-forged" doughnuts. Each one is made from scratch and trans-fat free. After purchasing our goods on the first floor, we hoofed it upstairs to enjoy them. The Astronomer's blueberry cake doughnut with cinnamon sugar ($1.49) had lovely hints of both spice and fruit. Its texture was pleasantly dense and infinitely superior to regular cake, according to The Astronomer.
Stretching nearly a foot long, my maple bar ($1.49) was a delicious bomb of fried dough slathered in crackly frosting. The doughnut's texture wasn't particularly light, but it had a pleasing chew that I found very satisfying. The real-deal maple glaze was just the thing to smooth out the bar's oily undertones.
It's been fun cupcakes, but gourmet doughnuts have officially edged you out as my favorite sweet indulgence.
Top Pot Doughnuts
2124 5th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121
Phone: 206-728-1966


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Last night, the Tony Awards took place in New York City, and celebrities all gathered to celebrate excellence in live Broadway theater.
Accordingly, there was a lot of drama going on fashion-wise: feathers and sequins and plunging necklines, as well as at least one extremely daring hat. Let's take a look!
Maggie Gyllenhaal wore an extremely decadent feathery, beaded dress by Dolce & Gabbana. Normally I'm somewhat skeptical of the whole feather thing, but the effect here is pretty angelic — she looks beautiful!
Here's Emmy Rossum looking very sultry in a sleek, shimmery silk Ralph Lauren collection gown with a sort of deconstructed corset bodice top.
Kate Mara also wore Dolce & Gabbana; her look was much edgier than most and maybe a bit out of place? But she does pull off the bedazzled shoulder pads amazingly, so more power to her.
Fantasia and Patti LaBelle posed for photos together because this world is a beautiful place. Fantasia looked like a 70s mermaid in her glittery teal wrap dress, which is an ideal dress concept.
Here's Patricia Clarkson in ruched Dolce & Gabbana gown. It's not the most ground-breaking look to ever have made it on a red carpet, but she effuses glamor and the hair and makeup complement the dress perfectly.
Daaaaamn, Idina Menzel! She's wearing Zac Posen — the color and neckline look absolutely stunning on her, but the skirt is constructed a bit strangely.
I am obsessed with Anna Gunn's beaded, sequiny golden Jenny Packham dream gown. This is what one would wear to chill on top of Mt. Olympus eating ambrosia, for sure.
Here's Lucy Liu in a plunging, tuxedo-inspired Vivienne Westwood gown that's party on the top and ballgown down below. I'm not a huge fan of how she styled her hair, but the dress looks fantastic on her.
Vera Farmiga was the slinkiest of all in a form-fitting, floor length Stella McCartney dress with sheer paneling. I feel like it would be very easy to drown in all this fabric, but she pulls it off excellently.
SETH AND BLAIR'S FIRST RED CARPET APPEARANCE!! Leighton Meester wore a clean, minimalistic Antonio Berardi dress in ivory. Her husband Adam Brody wore, like, a suit. I love them forever.
Audra McDonald became the first woman in history to win a Tony in each of the four acting categories and looked sublime while doing so. Sigh. She's wearing Escada, and she's accompanied by her husband Will Swenson.
Some simple, minimalistic looks: Lena Hall in Zac Posen, Beth Behrs in Carolina Herrera, Sarah Greene in Thakoon.
Looking lovely in ivory: Estelle Parsons in a winter landscape print; Krystal Joy Brown looks fantastic in that dramatic silhouette; Gladys Knight donned the Blazer of Kings.
Pretty in pink: Alicia Quarles was very princess-y; Kelli O'Hara's dress looked nice on her but it was pretty bland; Sutton Foster really went for it in a voluminous magenta gown.
Sparkles, prints and thigh slits: Karen Ziemba in utterly exquisite sequin gown, Sophie Okonedo in fluttery metallic and Anika Noni Rose in watercolor-esque leopard print.
Here is a photo of Randi Zuckerberg attempting to convince the world that Google Glass is a normal and fashionable thing that people do in public. Also: Judith Light looking like a fashion-sorceress and Thalia looking like a goth Christmas present.
"After Midnight" nominee Adriane Lenox wore quite the hat, in addition to a belted orange coat over some formal shorts. Also in orangey hues, we have Lauren Worsham and Fran Drescher.
Couples!! Here's Hugh Jackman and his wife Deborra-Lee Furness; Bryan Cranston and his wife Robin Dearden; and Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka.
Aaaaand bonus pic of Bryan Cranston and his wife because my parents really liked him in that play about LBJ:
More couples: Chris O'Dowd and his wife Dawn O'Porter, in green because Ireland (probably); Daniel Radcliffe and girlfriend Erin Darke; Rosie O'Donnell and her wife Michelle Rounds.
Musicians and significant others: Gloria and Emilio Estefan; Questlove and an unnamed woman clad in a beautiful dress; Sting and Trudie Styler; T.I. and his daughter Deyjah Imani Harris.
Some men looking very good in suits: Ethan Hawke in all black; Matt Bomer, who is so handsome that it makes my heart hurt to look at him; and Jonathon Groff, all smiley.
More men: Wayne Brady, Zach Braff and Zachary Quinto.
Some bolder sartorial menswear choices: RuPaul looking flawless in pink; Billy Porter rocking an ascot; Orlando Bloom in shades of inky blue.
Images via Getty.


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In what is probably a bit of a big-G whoopsie, the folks at Tech From 10 woke up to find a new, test version of Android Market installed on their Galaxy S.
Visually, the new version is almost identical. The carousel of featured apps has been updated slightly, and apps now have a 'Content rating,' but that's it (image after the break). The interesting bit, however, is the inclusion of alpha and beta apps -- most notably, there's a new version of the Music app, which looks like a scaled-down version of the Android 3.0 Honeycomb Music app (see right).
Also available from the test Android Market is 'Google Gallery 3D New 10.2', 'Google - Camera v12' and 'Google Desk Clock 10' -- but, curiously, all of the apps refused to launch on Tech From 10's Galaxy S (Vibrant) smartphone. Are they Honeycomb apps? Or, more likely, are they destined for the next Android smartphone OS, Ice Cream?
If you want to try out the new Honeycombish Music app, Tech From 10 has made the APK available for download. You can also download the three Google apps, if you want to have a poke around.
Continue reading A sneak peek at the next version of Android Market and Music app
A sneak peek at the next version of Android Market and Music app originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Apr 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/05/a-sneak-peek-at-the-next-version-of-android-market-and-music-app/
Barnes Sadler Johnny Andrew Sauter Kenneth William Schrader Bradley Reed Sorenson Anthony Wayne Stewart Martin Lee Truex Jr


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My daughter is about to turn 13 and I've been smoking a lot recently, and so – in the wee small hours, when my lungs feel like there's a small mouse inside them, scratching to get out – I've thought about writing her one of those "Now I'm Dead, Here's My Letter Of Advice For You To Consult As You Continue Your Now Motherless Life" letters. Here's the first draft. Might tweak it a bit later. When I've had another fag.
"Dear Lizzie. Hello, it's Mummy. I'm dead. Sorry about that. I hope the funeral was good – did Daddy play Don't Stop Me Now by Queen when my coffin went into the cremator? I hope everyone sang along and did air guitar, as I stipulated. And wore the stick-on Freddie Mercury moustaches, as I ordered in the 'My Funeral Plan' document that's been pinned on the fridge since 2008, when I had that extremely self-pitying cold.
"Look – here are a couple of things I've learnt on the way that you might find useful in the coming years. It's not an exhaustive list, but it's a good start. Also, I've left you loads of life-insurance money – so go hog wild on eBay on those second-hand vintage dresses you like. You have always looked beautiful in them. You have always looked beautiful.
"The main thing is just to try to be nice. You already are – so lovely I burst, darling – and so I want you to hang on to that and never let it go. Keep slowly turning it up, like a dimmer switch, whenever you can. Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily, like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy, and to read things more clearly. You will be bright and constant in a world of dark and flux, and this will save you the anxiety of other, ultimately less satisfying things like 'being cool', 'being more successful than everyone else' and 'being very thin'.
"Second, always remember that, nine times out of ten, you probably aren't having a full-on nervous breakdown – you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You'd be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.
"Three – always pick up worms off the pavement and put them on the grass. They're having a bad day, and they're good for… the earth or something (ask Daddy more about this; am a bit sketchy).
"Four: choose your friends because you feel most like yourself around them, because the jokes are easy and you feel like you're in your best outfit when you're with them, even though you're just in a T-shirt. Never love someone whom you think you need to mend – or who makes you feel like you should be mended. There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart. The books about vampires are true, baby. Drive a stake through their hearts and run away.
"Stay at peace with your body. While it's healthy, never think of it as a problem or a failure. Pat your legs occasionally and thank them for being able to run. Put your hands on your belly and enjoy how soft and warm you are – marvel over the world turning over within, the brilliant meat clockwork, as I did when you were inside me and I dreamt of you every night.
"Whenever you can't think of something to say in a conversation, ask people questions instead. Even if you're next to a man who collects pre-Seventies screws and bolts, you will probably never have another opportunity to find out so much about pre-Seventies screws and bolts, and you never know when it will be useful.
"This segues into the next tip: life divides into AMAZING ENJOYABLE TIMES and APPALLING EXPERIENCES THAT WILL MAKE FUTURE AMAZING ANECDOTES. However awful, you can get through any experience if you imagine yourself, in the future, telling your friends about it as they scream, with increasing disbelief, 'NO! NO!' Even when Jesus was on the cross, I bet He was thinking, 'When I rise in three days, the disciples aren't going to believe this when I tell them about it.'
"Babyiest, see as many sunrises and sunsets as you can. Run across roads to smell fat roses. Always believe you can change the world – even if it's only a tiny bit, because every tiny bit needed someone who changed it. Think of yourself as a silver rocket – use loud music as your fuel; books like maps and co-ordinates for how to get there. Host extravagantly, love constantly, dance in comfortable shoes, talk to Daddy and Nancy about me every day and never, ever start smoking. It's like buying a fun baby dragon that will grow and eventually burn down your f***ing house.
"Love, Mummy."
Hi there.
I bet you've seen some great "films for action" that aren't in our library yet.
Why not add that documentary or video directly to our library? Half of our best content was added by members. Submissions just need to be non-fiction, embeddable (like from Youtube or Vimeo), and related to activism or changing the world in some way.
Here are some more tips on adding videos. We'd love you to become a regular contributor!
The Films For Action team


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text: While recently shown as possible, using Facebook to launch a DDoS attack would mean ignoring more effective methods, experts say.An independent researcher reported last month that the way Facebook's internal blogging feature handles HTML image tags embedded by users could be exploited to start a DDoS attack.[Facebook forces some users to reset passwords because of Adobe data breach]The Facebook service, called Notes, copies the image from the external server and then caches it. While Facebook stores the image only once, the cache can be bypassed using random get parameters so the request is made continuously, causing a "huge HTTP GET flood," researcher Chaman Thapa wrote in his personal blog.Using Notes, Thapa claimed that he could generate more than 400 megabits per second of outbound traffic for two to three hours from the browsers of three laptops.Facebook refused to pay Thapa for his discovery under its bug bounty program, saying that there was no way fix the problem to stop attacks "against small consumer grade sites without also significantly degrading the overall functionality," according to the researcher.Facebook acknowledged Thursday talking to Thapa. "Ultimately, we decided against making changes to avoid disrupting intended and desirable functions," a spokesman told CSOonline.While interesting research, would-be DDoS attackers would unlikely use Facebook Notes, given the availability of far more effective techniques, DDoS experts said."This is not something I would pick over other tools to DDoS someone," Keshav Prabhakar, an analyst on Arbor Networks' Security Engineering & Response Team, said.Indeed, such an attack "would be defendable using existing technology," Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor, said."However, that doesn\u2019t takeaway from the fact that the vulnerability and DDoS aspect of it does seem possible," he said.Other experts warned that not changing Notes' handling of image tags could lead to other problems on the site."Facebook is underestimating the seriousness of its Notes HTML flaw," Jeffrey Lyon, founder of Black Lotus, said. "Its failure to fix the vulnerability could result in outages for hosted files, slow loading times and other technical issues" for the targeted site.The attack volume generated by Thapa was tiny compared to what's used in actual DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. In its recent quarterly report, Prolexic Technology said it recorded an attack that generated peak traffic of more than 200 gigabits per second.Typically, attackers lease or create networks of compromised computers, called botnets, to launch DDoS attacks. Compromised servers are the biggest prizes in a botnet, because they generate the most traffic.[FTC warning unlikely to stop Facebook from changing WhatsApp privacy policies]However, Prolexic found that attackers were shifting toward so-called "reflection and amplification" techniques. The method uses the IP address of the targeted Web server in making requests over and over again from commonly used Internet infrastructure services, such as Domain Name System (DNS) servers, the Character Generator Protocol (CHARGEN) and the Network Time Protocol (NTP).The use of such techniques contributed to a 133 percent increase in the average attack bandwidth in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period a year ago, Prolexic, which is owned by Akamai, said.


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Replacing lab rats with lawyers
The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced last week that they were going to start using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments. Naturally, the American Bar Association was outraged and filed suit. Yet, the NIH presented some very good reasons for the switch.
1. The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form for a lawyer.
2. Lawyers breed faster and are in much greater supply.
3. Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won't jump all over you no matter what you're studying.
4. There are some things even a rat won't do.
Follow John J Nazarian On Twitter; follow John on Facebook and see who John J Nazarian is following. Most Important subscribe to John J Nazarian on Vimeo, see John Unleashed on the latest stories of today.
By John Nazarian
Straight Talk with John J. Nazarian, Private Investigator
August 8, 2014
All Rights Reserved, do not reproduce in whole or in part without the express written consent of the author


text:
Handke pits "facts"—biographical details of his mother's life before and after his birth, culled chiefly from conversation and letters—against "formulations," versions of and guesses about his mother enacted against the broad emotional terrain of memory and desire: "[I]sn't all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction?" he asks. "Less, if we content ourselves with a mere record of events; more, if we try to formulate in depth? And the more fiction we put into a narrative, the more likely it is to interest others, because people identify more readily with formulation than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry?"
As in many works of autobiography, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams masquerades as a biography, and the true drama takes place more in the composing, in the wrestling of a writer's materials, than in the life being described. Strewn throughout his essay are laments of language's difficulties. In a fantastic four-page parenthetical near the middle of the book, Handke writes (I'm excerpting):
"(Of course what is written here about a particular person is rather general; but only such generalisations, in explicit disregard of my mother as a possibly unique protagonist in a possibly unique story, can be of interest to anyone but myself. Merely to relate the vicissitudes of a life that came to a sudden end would be pure presumption.
These two dangers – the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences – have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where the facts are so overwhelming and there is hardly anything to think out.
Consequently I first took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach – starting not with the facts but with the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man's social experience. From my mother's life, I sifted out the elements that were already foreseen in these formulas, for only with the help of a ready-made public language was it possible to single out from among all the irrelevant facts of this life the few that cried out to be made public.
In stories we often read that something or other is "unnameable" or "indescribable"; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. It is about moments when the mind boggles with horror, states of fear so brief that speech always comes too late; about dream happenings so gruesome that the mind perceives them physically as worms. The blood curdles, the breath catches, "a cold chill crept up my back, my hair stood on end" – states experiences while listening to a ghost story, while turning on a water tap that you can quickly turn off again; on the street in the evening with a beer bottle in one hand; in short, it is a record of states, not a well-rounded story with an anticipated, hence, comforting, end.
At best I am able to capture my mother's story for brief moments in dreams, because then her feelings become so palpable that I experience them as doubles and am identical with them; but these are precisely the moments I have already mentioned, in which extreme need to communicate coincides with extreme speechlessness. That is why I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: "At that time… later", "Because … although", "was … became nothing", hoping in this way to dominate the horror. That, perhaps, is the comical part of my story.)Handke's grim, Eastern European humor is evident in that last sentence, but his essay is not humorous but bleak, and tremendously sad. And beautiful, packed with telling, evocative details of post-War Germany and Austria, a cinematic re-telling of a period even as that period—and the woman living in it—remain frustratingly unknowable. Near the end he writes, in an oft-quoted passage, "It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupation with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment."
Childhood, written when the French author was in her 80s, and published in 1984. Both books struggle with the burden of remembering, of recognizing the sometimes enormous, unbridgeable distance between the rememberer and the writer. Where Handke attempts a measured, somewhat objective perspective of his troubled mother, tumbling occasionally into emotional moments of affection and grief, Sarraute invites us to overhear her most intimate of recollections as those memories are batted around by competing voices in her imagination. If personal essaying is the shape of thinking on the page, than Childhood is one of the most idiosyncratically shaped memoirs of recent times, nothing short of a conversation between Sarraute and herself(selves): "You really believe that?", "But what could it have been?", "Why, I wonder...", "Where did that come from, all of a sudden," "Be careful, or you'll be getting pretentious...": all of the moments of doubt and self-interrogations left on the essayist's cutting-room floor here become the text itself. David Lazar in "Occasional Desire" (in the strong collection he edited, Truth in Nonfiction) describes the back and forth between these inner voices as "a meditation on memory, a theory of memory by necessity incomplete." Childhood is essentially chronological but, as in any autobiographical chronology, the movement forward is fraught with stops and starts, u-turns, and prized moments or shards of moments glinting brightly against the broad, calendar-driven background.
There are many remarkable passages in Childhood, many of them originating in Sarraute's memories of childhood and her fraught relationship with her mother. In one passage, Sarraute essays an intensely melancholy period where she was beginning to reckon with the power of the imagination and language to conspire against her. "Ideas" begin to plague her, ideas being young Nathalie's word for uninvited thoughts invading her growing, fertile mind, specifically the thought that her doll was more beautiful than her mother, an awful, transgressive thing to have to believe and accept. Excerpts:
How beautiful she is... I can't tear myself away from her, I hold Mama's hand more tightly, I keep her back so that we can stay there just a few more instants, so than I can go on looking in the window at that face... contemplating it...
—It's difficult to see in retrospect what was so fascinating about that doll.
—I can't really manage to understand. All I can see is her rather vague face, smooth and pink... luminous... as if lit from within... and also the proud curve of her nostrils, her lips, with their corners upturned... The thing I especially recall is my wonderment... everything about her was beautiful. Beauty—was that. That was what it was—to be beautiful.
I suddenly feel something like embarrassment, slight distress... it's as if somewhere inside me I have bumped into something, something has come and knocked into me... it takes shape, it acquires a form... a very precise form: "She is more beautiful than Mama."
—Where did that come from, all of a sudden?
—For a long time it was enough, when I happened to think back to that moment...
Now that this idea has entrenched itself in me, it is not just a matter of willpower for me to dislodge it. I can force myself to uproot it, to put another idea in its place, but only for a time... it's still there, crouching in a corner, ready to get up at any moment, to push everything else out of its way, to occupy the whole space... It seems that trying to keep it down, to suppress it, only increases its growth. It is the proof, the sign of what I am: a child who doesn't love its mother. A child who bears the stigma of something that separates it, that outlaws it from other children... the light-hearted, carefree children I see laughing, shouting, chasing one another, swinging in the garden, in the square... and I am on my own. Alone with that something, which no one knows about and which no one, if told about it, would be able to believe.
I give up trying to struggle, trying to conjure up once again the face in the window and to place it side by side with Mama's face... for that, I know, will only entrench the idea more firmly...
And in any case, the doll has vanished of her own accord, carrying with her the idea I had fixed on her... But its place has immediately been taken... another, similar idea has come to replace it. Perhaps it is even this new idea that has dislodged it...
Something that used to be in me has gone, something that is in all the other children, the real children... those rapid, limpid, running waters, like mountain streams, torrents, they have turned into the stagnant, muddy, polluted waters of ponds... the waters that attract mosquitoes. You don't need to tell me again that I wasn't capable of conjuring up these images... what is certain is that they convey the exact sensation produced in me by my pitiable stare,
Ideas arrive at any moment, they sting, ah, here's one...and the tiny barb digs in, it hurts... "Mama's skin is like a monkey's."
That's how they are now, these ideas, they take all sorts of liberties. I look at Mama's décolletage, her golden, suntanned arms, and all of a sudden a little devil in me, a malicious little sprite, like the "domovoi"' that play all sorts of tricks in houses, splashes that idea up at me: "Mama's skin is like a monkey's." I try to wipe it off, to rub it out... it isn't true, I don't believe it... I didn't think that. But there is nothing to be done, the furry coat of a monkey glimpsed in a cage in the zoo came, I don't know how, and alighted on Mama's neck, on her arms, and here is the idea... it hurts me...
I call Mama to the rescue, she must make it better... "You know, Mama, I have another idea now..." She immediately looks annoyed... "Now what is it?" "Well, I think... that your... skin is like a monkey's..." she will look to see what I have there, what has grown in me, against my will, we'll look at it together... it's so ridiculous, grotesque... we can only scoff at it, she will go off into one of her gales of laughter, which always make me laugh with her, we shall both laugh at it, and the idea will go back where it came from...where it was born... somewhere outside me, in a place I don't know... Or else, Mama will say: "Well, I'm delighted. You remember how sweet those little monkeys were."
—A reply that you are imagining now...Later, Sarraute overhears her maid complain that Sarraute's mother is stingy with the help staff, and Nathalie can't bear the thought of having a mean mother. To her great relief, at dinner she watches her mother serve the maid a portion of meat equal to the mother's, but later her mother will serve the maid a smaller, less generous portion. The obsessive way that Sarraute dreads the evidence of her mother's unfairness is translated powerfully, and it's sad to read, for what Sarraute is really dealing with here is her coming-of-age, not only as a growing daughter who's confronted with seeing her mother in an unflattering light, but as a nascent writer burdened with remembering, and naming, it all, and with the unfortunate detachment from the world required of independent thought. Decades later, her memories still pulse as dialogue between the accepting and the unaccepting Nathalie.
I recently flew from New York City to Chicago. Nasty weather required that we fly considerably further north than planned, so when the plane approached Chicago it did so flying due south, heading down Lake Michigan, parallel to the Illinois shore. The lake is breathtakingly large, larger than I imagined or pretended to know from maps. We approached Chicago at dusk, in a misty fog. The skyline came into view as a collection of hulking, brown-gray shapes; I recognized the buildings, but there was an otherness to the city for which I was unprepared. Uncanny, the city's gradual appearance. I wish I'd had my camera. What struck me was the inevitable difficulty and disappointment I knew I'd experience later trying to describe the sight. The cityscape was there, I knew it, recognized it, yet it was filtered through something that seemed to affect its very shape, leaving it only half-recognizable. What do I do with that? How does language make sense of a fact that changes outline and color?


text:
For preparing the USB stick you will need a system where GNU/Linux is
already running and where USB is supported. You should ensure that the
usb-storage kernel module is loaded (modprobe
usb-storage) and try to find out which SCSI device the USB
stick has been mapped to (in this example
/dev/sda is used). To write to your stick, you
will probably have to turn off its write protection switch.
Note, that the USB stick should be at least 128 MB in size (smaller
setups are possible if you follow Section 4.4.2, "Copying the files — the flexible way").
There is an all-in-one file hd-media/boot.img.gz
which contains all the installer files (including the kernel) as well
as SYSLINUX and its configuration file. You only
have to extract it directly to your USB stick:
# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sda
Using this method will destroy anything already on the device. Make sure
that you use the correct device name for your USB stick.
After that, mount the USB memory stick (mount
/mnt), which will now have
a FAT filesystem
on it, and copy a Debian netinst or businesscard ISO image to it.
Please note that the file name must end in .iso.
Unmount the stick (umount /mnt) and you are done.
umount /mnt
If you like more flexibility or just want to know what's going on, you
should use the following method to put the files on your stick.
We will show how to setup the memory stick to use the first partition,
instead of the entire device.
Since most USB sticks come pre-configured with a single FAT16
partition, you probably won't have to repartition or reformat the
stick. If you have to do that anyway, use cfdisk
or any other partitioning tool for creating a FAT16 partition and then
create the filesystem using:
# mkdosfs /dev/sda1
Take care that you use the correct device name for your USB stick. The
mkdosfs command is contained in the
dosfstools Debian package.
In order to start the kernel after booting from the USB stick, we will
put a boot loader on the stick. Although any boot loader
(e.g. LILO) should work, it's convenient to use
SYSLINUX, since it uses a FAT16 partition and can
be reconfigured by just editing a text file. Any operating system
which supports the FAT file system can be used to make changes to the
configuration of the boot loader.
To put SYSLINUX on the FAT16 partition on your USB
stick, install the syslinux and
mtools packages on your system, and do:
# syslinux /dev/sda1
Again, take care that you use the correct device name. The partition
must not be mounted when starting SYSLINUX. This
procedure writes a boot sector to the partition and creates the file
ldlinux.sys which contains the boot loader code.
Mount the partition (mount /dev/sda1 /mnt) and
copy the following files from the Debian archives to the stick:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
vmlinuz (kernel binary)
initrd.gz (initial ramdisk image)
syslinux.cfg (SYSLINUX configuration file)
Optional kernel modules
If you want to rename the files, please note that
SYSLINUX can only process DOS (8.3) file names.
The syslinux.cfg configuration file should
contain the following two lines:
default vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=12000 root=/dev/ram rw
Please note that the ramdisk_size parameter
may need to be increased, depending on the image you are booting.
If the boot fails, you can try adding devfs=mount,dall
to the "append" line.
Now you should put any Debian ISO image (businesscard, netinst or even
a full one) onto your stick (if it fits). The file name of such an
image must end in .iso.
If you want to install over the network, without using an ISO image,
you will of course skip the previous step. Moreover you will have to
use the initial ramdisk from the netboot
directory instead of the one from hd-media,
because hd-media/initrd.gz does not have network
When you are done, unmount the USB memory stick (umount
/mnt) and activate its write protection switch.
If your system refuses to boot from the memory stick, the stick may
contain an invalid master boot record (MBR). To fix this, use the
install-mbr command from the package
# install-mbr /dev/sda


text:
"Van Gogh's 'The Harvest.' In the original, what should be wheat is an orange field; above we have green lines mixed with solar light. In the protanomal simulation, the wheat shade backs up the overall presence splendidly and has given depth to the scene. With the reduced sun, I feel that the twilight of autumn is reproduced."
Left: Original / Right: Protanomal simulation (60%)
See also: a Chromatic Vision Simulator in iPhone app form.


text:
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text:
It's an exciting day. Yes, it is April Fool's Day–which is quite fun, but that isn't what I am referring to. New browser usage stats are out; giving us something other than just the marketing spin Microsoft and Mozilla try so hard to put on their own launch day numbers. These initial numbers, though, are a flash in time and illustrate a sort of tortoise and hare approach that requires taking a longer view.
Net Applications has published its browser statistics for the month of March. Internet Explorer 9 was officially launched on the evening of Monday, March 14, and Firefox 4 wasn't available until about a week later, on March 22, so this month's results don't necessarily paint a full or fair picture of how those browsers are faring thus far.
First, let's just take a look at the Net Applications browser usage data. Looking at the global data, Chrome and Safari are the big winners with gains of 0.64 and 0.25 percentage points respectively. Firefox eeked up 0.06 percentage points, while Internet Explorer fell 0.85 percentage points to a new low for the Microsoft browser.
It is hard to try and spin those numbers from the perspective of IE9 and Firefox 4. Net Applications puts the current Firefox 4 share at 1.68 percent, with IE9 lagging behind at 1.04 percent–up from 0.63 and 0.59 respectively last month for the beta or release candidate (RC) versions. Certainly, the larger month over month gain for Firefox 4 is a contributing factor, but the real issue behind the general decline of Internet Explorer seems to be the 0.54 percentage point drop in IE8–the first loss for that browser in its history.
Now, let's slice and dice the stats a little. There has been a fairly public debate between Ryan Gavin and the Internet Explorer team, and Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla camp. Asa and I also exchanged some tweets in relation to the spin on the launch day figures, and my article putting the launch figures in perspective. The crux of both debates comes down to whether IE9 is measured against the browser ecosystem as a whole, or whether it is viewed strictly as a function of Windows 7 and Windows Vista since those are the only platforms it is available for.
Narrowing the results to just the United States, and just the Windows operating system the picture shifts some in Microsoft's favor. In the US, across all versions of Windows, Internet Explorer as a whole gained share by 0.19 points to 72.44 percent, while Chrome and Firefox both declined–by 0.10 and 0.08 percentage points respectively.
To be honest, I think both Microsoft's and Mozilla's views are right. That is one of the funny (awesome, silly, impressive–depends on your perspective) thing about statistics. Was Firefox 4 downloaded more than Internet Explorer 9 on its launch day? Absolutely. Not even Microsoft can deny that. But, with three times the potential pool of PCs, how could it not be?
That isn't a slam of Firefox 4, or an endorsement of IE9. I am simply pointing out the obvious fact that it is difficult, and somewhat silly, to try to compare the two head to head. It's like comparing how many copies Microsoft sells of Office 2010 for Windows vs. Office 2011 for Mac OS X. The Mac OS X audience only makes up about five percent of PCs, compared with nearly 90 percent for Windows. Of course Office 2010 sells better.
Over time, the numbers could get foggier depending on how you spin them. Mozilla has pledged to pursue a more aggressive cycle of releasing major updates, so Firefox 4 could quickly become Firefox 5, then Firefox 6, Firefox 7, and so on before Microsoft ever gets around to launching Internet Explorer 10. So, Firefox 4 is crushing Internet Explorer 9 today, but when Firefox 5 comes out, that will quickly change.
The more accurate–or more important view–is the long term outlook for the browser as a whole rather than a head to head comparison of specific versions. In that view, Internet Explorer has seen a slow and steady decline–but so has Firefox. The "tortoise" in this race appears to be Chrome–slowly trudging along chipping away market share month by month.
As for the issue of Internet Explorer 9 vs. Firefox 4, I have an appointment scheduled in my calendar to compare notes with Asa after each browser has had a few months, and both vendors go through the process of pushing the browser through update channels. Check back in September and we'll compare notes.


text:
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text:
It's an overlooked skill in this day and age (its predecessor, handwriting, can sometimes seem to be nearly an ancient art form), but whether it's accomplished by thumbs or with proper finger positioning on a full-sized keyboard—typing is inarguably a predominant inputting and communication process that, if done with great speed, can be of great benefit to a person. According to a Pew Internet study, more than 75 percent of teens text and send over 3,000 messages a month on average. But simply look around: nearly every student— all the way down to kindergartners—uses a computer, tablet or some type of device with a keyboard. These facts have not gone unnoticed by Paul Garofano (pictured, right) and Dave Grammerstorf, who both work in the same school district. Although they searched the world over, they had great difficulty finding a keyboarding program that met the needs of our 21st-century students. What to do? "We decided to go out and create that keyboarding program ourselves," says Paul. "We knew all along that students who are fluent with a keyboard will be better prepared for success in school and ultimately in the workplace; their proficiency with online communication tools would give them the competitive ability to adapt and prosper in school and in our ever-changing world." What they came up with is standards-aligned, fun—and not your father's typing class. Read this interview and have a look for yourself.
Victor: I think I get it right away, but let's hear it from you—what does the name mean?
Paul: QwertyTown is a play off of the name of the QWERTY keyboard. It's a "Town" because it's a place where students and teachers interact in a virtual community.
Victor: What is it? Who created it?
Paul: QwertyTown was created by Second Nature Learning, our educational software company. We are both experienced public school educators with advanced degrees in Instructional Technology and Education.
Dave: QwertyTown is an award-winning keyboarding web app that provides a safe, teacher-controlled environment where students can communicate with their classmates, teachers, and friends. While becoming fluent with a keyboard, students are learning how to interact in a digital environment. This environment will prepare them with a fundamental skill set essential for academic and professional success in the 21st century.
Victor: What does it do? What are the benefits?
Paul: QwertyTown teaches fluent keyboarding in an environment where students can communicate with friends, teachers, and classmates online. The benefits are fluency in keyboarding and enhancement of digital literacy skills.
Dave: Keyboarding and online communication skills are recognized by The Department of Education as essential to a student's success. It is from these fundamental 21st century skills that Qwertytown was born. QwertyTown addresses multiple Common Core State Standards in Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language.
Victor: When was it developed? What is something interesting or relevant about its development history?
Paul: We officially launched QwertyTown in September of 2011
Victor: Where did it originate? Where can you get it now?
Dave: QwertyTown can be explored at http://qwertytown.com
Victor: How much does it cost? What are the options?
Paul: As educators, we understand the need for effective instructional tools that also meet budgetary needs. That's why we work with districts to find the package that's right for them.
Victor: What are some examples of it in action?
Dave: One of our biggest surprises this year is the number of students who are logging into QwertyTown outside of school hours. This is the advantage of being a web-based application. Whether engaged in keyboarding lessons, customizing their avatars, or communicating with classmates, students are using QwertyTown around the clock in at a level we hadn't anticipated.
Victor: Who is it particularly tailored for? Who is it not for?
Paul: QwertyTown can be used by any student who can read and write. Many of our school districts use QwertyTown beginning in 1st grade, all the way up until 9th. Because QwertyTown is totally customizable, teachers can adjust benchmarks to accommodate varying student abilities at each grade level.
Dave: Teachers often use QwertyTown as a stepping stone to prepare younger students with the skills necessary to use more advanced online communication and collaboration tools later in their educational careers.
Victor: How does Qwertytown address some of your concerns about education?
Paul: Educators are very good at figuring out how to deliver instruction in a way that makes sense. What we often overlook is making it clear to students why they should care. Simply put, students want and need to learn keyboarding skills so that they can communicate online. QwertyTown taps into this highly motivating principal.
Dave: We also address the safety concerns of young people communicating online. QwertyTown equips teachers, administrators, and parents with tools that make it easy to monitor users' communications and overall experience. We've also been adding lesson plans to our site that help teachers use QwertyTown as a centerpiece of their online safety instruction.
Victor: What is your outlook on the future of education?
Paul: Our outlook on the future of education is both positive and encouraging. As technologies become more of the norm in education, educators are using them to empower themselves as professionals and ultimately their students as lifelong learners.
Dave: With the right kind of leadership, teachers have and will continue to have the ability to provide for their students the skills and resources they will need to succeed both academically and professionally.
Victor: Got any funny stories?
Paul: Back when we were beta-testing the Avatar store (where users can give their avatars new outfits and appearances), one of our students came across a hairstyle choice that unintentionally covered the entire avatar's face with hair. The student loved it, thinking it was some kind of werewolf hair. Instead of fixing the bug, we changed the name of the hairstyle to "Wolfman" and left it in the program.
Victor: What else can you tell educators and other leaders in and around education about the value of QwertyTown?
Dave: Just as we use a pen to write and our mouths to speak, we must be equally fluent communicators with a keyboard.
Victor: Excellent! Thank you, Paul and thank you, Dave!
Victor Rivero tells the story of 21st-century education transformation. He is the editor-in-chief of EdTech Digest, a magazine about education transformed through technology. He has written white papers, articles and features for schools, nonprofits and companies in the education marketplace. Write to: firstname.lastname@example.com