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Benjamin Lewin MW, In Search of Pinot Noir. Vendage Press, 2011.
Burgundy makes Burgundy, Benjamin Lewin reports (quoting a local producer). All the rest make [merely] Pinot Noir.
What should we make of Burgundy's self-proclaimed status as king of the Pinot Noir hill? Lewin circled the globe to find out and this fascinating book is his report. I recommend it with enthusiasm.
To the Summit
Burgundy dominates the book, as one would suspect, both for its wines and because it is the standard of reference, and in the final pages Lewin reveals his conclusion: Burgundy does indeed stand at the summit based in part upon its superiority ability to age and develop in the bottle (with DRC and Domaine Leroy at the peak of the peak).
But Lewin's search for Pinot, which takes him to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Oregon, California, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, reveals a number of near-rivals and raises many questions. The Pinot world may not be very big (compared with Cabernet and Chardonnay, for example), but it is a bigger world than Burgundians might like to think. And it is changing fast.
Dr. Lewin's Lab Notebooks
Pinot Noir (along with Riesling) is thought to be the ultimate "terroir" wine, so the wines themselves should tell the story. In vino veritas as they say. This line in inquiry takes us into the detailed tasting notes that are appended to most chapters. These are Lewin's lab reports (he is a famous scientist — a cell biologist — so it is unsurprising that he would evaluate claims empirically). At best the tasting notes are insightful observations of the ways that wine changes as time and place are varied. Sometimes, I have to admit, they are a bit like wine porn, read to vicariously share Lewin's delicious work.
Do the wines of Burgundy live up to the myth of Burgundian terroir? Sometimes is Lewin's answer. Burgundy at its best reveals its terroirist magic, but it doesn't always turn out that way; caution and care are warranted. Winegrowing and winemaking practices can highlight terroir or disguise it. It just depends.
And climate change threatens to make Burgundy more like everyone else's Pinot Noir by fundamentally altering growing conditions. Indeed, the book's final pages ask whether Burgundy will be able to maintain its subtle complexity in the face of climate change and other challenges.
New World Challengers
I received my copy of In Search of Pinot Noir just as I was leaving to give some talks in Oregon Pinot country and I reported Lewin's conclusions to my audience, which including many wine industry people. If you taste wines from different Oregon AVAs made by the same producer, Lewin writes, you can taste the terroir — just like in Burgundy. But when you taste wine from different producers in the same AVA, no strong common terroir thread emerges. Terroir is a weak force in the New World, it seems. Why? Lewin has an answer.
If you taste the best available Burgundies against the best available Pinots from Oregon and California, Lewin writes, the French wines "blow away" the competition. But it's a biased comparison since the very best wines from New World producers never see the marketplace. They are tiny production single vineyard wines that disappear into allocation list buyers' cellars. Ironically, they have no impact on the regions' reputations and cannot define a signature terroir style.
The best available wines are more comparable to Burgundian village wines than the grand crus, according to Lewin. No wonder they suffer by comparison to the best of the best Burgundy has to offer. No wonder that Burgundy is Burgundy and the rest are not. Interesting.
Much to Like [and to Learn]
In Search of Pinot Noir, like Lewin's earlier books (What Price Bordeaux? and Wine Myths and Realities) is big and bold, filled with colorful (and informative) charts, maps and photos. The depth and breadth of Lewin's analysis is impressive as he breaks down each Pinot Noir region into the historical, cultural, economic and natural forces that shaped it in the past and continues to influence it today. A great wine economist read. A great read period for anyone with a serious interest in Pinot Noir.
I think I learned something new on almost every page. But the most interesting parts of the book for me are the questions, not the answers. Almost every chapter ends with a question about the future of Pinot Noir. Sometimes they seem to be leading questions (where you are pretty sure how Lewin would answer them) but others are very much more open.
I sense that the search for Pinot Noir is open, too. Market forces and climate change mean that the future is up in the air. Will Pinot Noir retain its special status as the ultimate terroir wine? Or will it become just another "international variety" with subtle differences slowly lost as styles converge on a rich, ripe "international style?"
What make's Pinot Noir different? Here's the famous scene from Sideways where Miles makes the case for Pinot Exceptionalism. Enjoy! (Click here to watch the video if it does not appear above)


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Ethan Zohn and Jenna Morasca have called it quits.
The longtime couple, who each won seasons of Survivor—Morasca took Survivor: Amazon and Zohn Survivor: Africa first met during the finale of Survivor Amazon. They announced their split Monday.
"It is with much consideration and a heavy heart that we are announcing that after 10 years of a loving relationship, the decision was made to move on without each other," a rep for the couple told E! News. "We will carry with us the memories of a relationship grounded in love, laughter, support and friendship."
"We have experienced some of life's greatest joys and toughest challenges together, and our decision to be apart can never diminish that. We want to thank everyone for their support and we ask that our privacy be respected as we move forward."
News of the couple's breakup may come as a shock, considering that their relationship seemed stronger than ever while Zohn was battling not one, but two bouts of Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Back in 2011, the reality star duo talked about a "survivor" couples guide that they were working on together, and dished about their relationship.
"I think cancer is a hard battle to fight alone or with another person at your side, but I will say having someone to pick you up when you fall, stand by your side through every appointment and delivery of bad news is priceless," Morasca told Glamour. "Being a caretaker is, and never will be, an easy job, in fact it is that hardest job in the world and many times a thankless job. You have to be the pillar of strength even when you feel like you are crumbling to pieces inside."
"At the same time while he will probably say that I was his strength and vital to his recovery (or at least I hope he will say that) I can say that being able to see him struggle but never give up even when cancer was trying to take over his body was a life-changing experience for me," Morasca continued. "I gained a whole new level of respect for him, and learned a lot about myself and how far we can push ourselves."
When Zohn's cancer returned in 2012, Morasca talked to E! News about how they were coping with it.
"For Ethan, the hardest part would be fighting for the ultimate prize, which is being able to live," Morasca said. "The hardest part for me is to try and maintain a relationship in the midst of a war. It is hard at times to remain caring and considerate and to keep perspective."
"I am trying to make sure when all of this is over that Ethan and I are in the best place, she continued. "That I put in the work and that he put in the work, even when it was exhausting. My goal is to start our lives together. Am I scared and nervous and anxious? Yes!"
The reality star duo also competed together on The Amazing Race and starred on their own show, Everyday Health.

subset: commoncrawl


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Find real estate photography services that offer floor plans:
We deliver stunning photos, visualisations and floor plans for the property market in Sweden and Norway. Offices in Lillestrøm, Linköping and Stockholm and nation wide coverage.
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Saganing Tribal Center
Friday, June 13th 2014
Cash Prizes- Top 3 Teams!
Registration 9am ~ Shot Gun Start 10am
$75 per Person ~ $300 per Team of 4
18 Holes with Cart, Dinner, 2 Flights of Skins & Awards Ceremony
Contact Info: Tony (989) 775-5905 or Christy (989) 775-5918
Download the event flyer here!
Watch this nearly 13 minute "video diary" of a recent Saganing School Reunion held at the Saganing Tribal Center July 31, 2010. As you will see, the event was very attended and very well received.
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Mount Pleasant MI, 48858
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Free Agent Wish List: Carlos Delgado
It seems like every hero gets a second chance at glory.
Rocky got another kick at the can, John McClain came out of retirement to kick some ass, and even good old Ma$e decided to return to the rap game. So why not have one of the most prolific Blue Jays return to claim his rightful throne? King Carlos – consider this your invitation back to Toronto.
Despite any bad blood there may have been in the past, it's all water under the bridge when it comes to Carlos Delgado. The city of Toronto and Blue Jays fans alike will always have place in their heart for Carlos, and I'm sure he feels the same way.
After spending the last five seasons with the Mets and the last six in the National League, it's time for him to come back to where he belongs – in the American League and most importantly with the Toronto Blue Jays.
The situation almost creates a perfect storm that would allow the Blue Jays to sign Delgado at a reasonable price, yet gain the most value. Carlos is coming off an injury-shortened season, but prior to that he put up MVP-calibre numbers (38 HR, 115 RBI, .271 AVG) so he definitely still has some pop left in his bat.
It's unsure whether the Mets will re-sign Carlos because it looks like they're perfectly content keeping Daniel Murphy at first base. Also, Delgado could benefit playing DH for the Blue Jays and not having to field at first base. At 37 years old, Carlos is approaching the cut-off point for aging sluggers who are more of a liability on the field than they are a benefit.
The current economy works in the Blue Jays favour to sign Delgado at a short-term contract for less than what he was paid with the Mets. It would be a far cry from the $16 million a year he previously made with the Mets. I would venture a guess that Delgado might even sign for as low as $10 million (maybe even $5 million) for the opportunity to play with the club that brought him into the majors.
If I were Alex Anthopolous though, I would be weary of signing Delgado longer than two years. Although it's been a while, the Frank Thomas debacle is still fresh in people's minds and I would hate to see money flushed down the drain once again.
With a DH-heavy free agent market, the time is now for the Blue Jays to lock in a designated hitter for the next couple of seasons. Next year's crop doesn't look too much better, and the team would be better served to moved Adam Lind out of the DH spot and try to develop his skills in the outfield.
Even if Carlos Delgado doesn't reclaim his throne with the Blue Jays, it will always be sitting there waiting for him to come back. And when he does, the kingdom will bow down in his presence.


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Rimless model for women combining metal, wood and acetate
Shiny ruthenium / burgundy bolivar / grey bolivar - Endtips : Brushed black acetate
Bolivar is also called Tulipier. It is a leafy tree from the United States. The color of stained woods is obtained with natural and hypoallergenic dyes.
The metal used is Monel, a category of nickel silver combining a range of precious alloys. It has a very good resistance to corrosion and is flexible enough to be adjustable.
Cellulose acetate is made with cotton fiber imported from Japan. We use it for our end-tips so as to be adapted on the basis of each morphology. The exclusive brushed matt finishing of acetate reminds the woods veneer.


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CAMDEN – In a research lab on the Camden Campus, Matt Niepielko reaches for a vial containing about 50 fruit flies and begins to observe them. The tiny species may seem insignificant – or annoying, if they're floating around your kitchen – but in this room, each fly plays an important role in our understanding of genetics.
Niepielko, a doctoral student in computational and integrative biology at Rutgers–Camden, is using the flies to answer questions about a cell signaling pathway that can cause cancer when something goes wrong."We have about 20 fruit fly species in here and the EGFR pathway is being used differently in each of them," Niepielko explains.
The EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor) is a highly conserved regulator of tissue development across all animals, including humans. In other words, "it catches chemical signals from other cells," Niepielko says. "It's like a baseball glove that will catch the signal, and the signal directs the cell to divide. If a cell gets the wrong information, it could become overactive or underactive."
In a healthy cell, the EGFR allows cells to grow and divide, but faulty regulation of the cell signaling process can lead to cell mutations or abnormal growth. "Many cancers and developmental defects are associated with something that goes wrong with this receptor," says Nir Yakoby, an assistant professor of biology at Rutgers–Camden. "Each signaling pathway has multiple components, and there are multiple components inside the cell that eventually lead to changes in gene expression."
The complexity of the EGFR network has been studied, but the mechanisms governing the signaling changes that guide the morphology of cells are unknown. The ovaries of the common fruit fly provide a tractable genetic system that allows Niepielko and Yakoby to study the mechanisms that control EGFR activation using genetic and mathematical modeling.
"The more you know about how the system is working, the better chance you'll have to correct something that goes wrong," Yakoby says.If the research team discovers how the system breaks down, it could lead to better treatments for such illnesses as cancer. "If you understand what genes are involved in changing the signaling pathway, better drugs can be developed to target those illnesses," Niepielko says. "It's exciting to be a part of research that could have such a significant impact."
Benedetto Piccoli, the Joseph and Loretta Lopez Chair in Mathematics and Ph.D. program director for Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers-Camden, is collaborating on the project by coming up with mathematical formulas that explain the signaling changes.
The research is being funded by a three-year, $353,378 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
A Toms River resident, Niepielko earned his bachelor's degree from Stockton College and his master's degree from Rutgers–Camden. He is the 2013 recipient of Rutgers–Camden's Lansbury Prize for Academic Excellence, which recognizes outstanding performance by a graduate student.
Yakoby, of Princeton, is a 2012 recipient of the prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Yakoby earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Hebrew University in Israel, and conducted post-doctoral research at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Piccoli is a preeminent scholar highly regarded for his contributions in applied mathematics, particularly in the areas of control theory and the theory of hyperbolic conservation laws. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Padua in Italy and his master's and doctoral degrees from the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy.


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Primer on Conducting Historical Research
- Goddard-Daniels House
Hands-On History Workshop
A Primer on Conducting Historical Research
This workshop will provide insights into the life of people living in New England in the eighteenth century and tips on how to recover evidence of their lives and personalities through letters, diaries, vital, church and town records, tax valuations, wills, deeds, and other materials. The American Antiquarian Society Reading Room Manager Kimberly Pelkey will provide an overview of the resources available at the Society, including our digital resources.
This program will take place in the Goddard-Daniels House, 190 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA.
Additional information on other hands-on history workshops.


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Number of people with HIV unchanged since 2012
LONDON (AP) – The number of people living with HIV worldwide has remained virtually unchanged in the past two years and AIDS-related deaths are at their lowest since peaking almost a decade ago, according to a report from the United Nations AIDS agency released Wednesday.
Officials declared that ending the AIDS epidemic is possible even though they acknowledged the number of new infections – more than 2 million last year – was still very high. UNAIDS estimated there were about 35 million people living with HIV last year and in 2012.
The agency also set targets to reduce deaths and new cases by 90 percent by 2030. It previously unveiled a strategy to get to "zero AIDS-related deaths," which included ensuring all people who need treatment are on it by 2015.
Last year, there were about 12.9 million people receiving life-saving drugs and 22 million people still waiting. Some 1.5 million people died from AIDS-related causes.
Other health experts questioned whether setting more ambitious targets is wise.
"This idea of ending AIDS isn't realistic," said Sophie Harman, a senior lecturer in public health at Queen Mary University of London, who was not part of the report. She said it would be more helpful to think about managing the epidemic. "Everyone can get behind ending AIDS, but this report doesn't really tell us how to do that."
Still, UNAIDS insisted in its report that we are at the "beginning of the end of the AIDS epidemic" and said the global outbreak can be stopped by 2030.
But with no vaccine and millions of people carrying the virus or becoming newly infected, some scientists said ending HIV may be idealistic rather than practical.
"We've made progress, but the number of people getting infected is still extraordinarily high," said Shabbar Jaffar, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He said that scaling up treatment further, especially in Africa, where about 70 percent of people with HIV live, would be very difficult. "They are already working beyond capacity at the moment."
Jaffar said it was misleading to suggest we are close to eliminating AIDS.
"The road will get longer and harder and we really don't know where we're going to end up," he said.


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For love or money? 0
Christmas in America brings out saccharine movies on TV. It's a Wonderful Life. The Wizard of Oz. A Christmas Carol – this year the version with the great Patrick Stewart in the role of the haunted miser Ebenezer Scrooge.
In general we don't like parsimony because we like abundance. But back in 2004, Steven E. Landsburg wrote an essay in praise of Scrooge, making the case that the parsimonious help to create abundance, and we see his point.
He wrote (in part):
Here's what I like about Ebenezer Scrooge: His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him.
Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?
Oh, it might be slightly more complicated than that. Maybe when Scrooge demands less coal for his fire, less coal ends up being mined. But that's fine, too. Instead of digging coal for Scrooge, some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for himself or someone else. …
In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser — the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.
If you build a house and refuse to buy a house, the rest of the world is one house richer. If you earn a dollar and refuse to spend a dollar, the rest of the world is one dollar richer—because you produced a dollar's worth of goods and didn't consume them.
Who exactly gets those goods? That depends on how you save. Put a dollar in the bank and you'll bid down the interest rate by just enough so someone somewhere can afford an extra dollar's worth of vacation or home improvement. Put a dollar in your mattress and (by effectively reducing the money supply) you'll drive down prices by just enough so someone somewhere can have an extra dollar's worth of coffee with his dinner. Scrooge, no doubt a canny investor, lent his money at interest. His less conventional namesake Scrooge McDuck filled a vault with dollar bills to roll around in. No matter. Ebenezer Scrooge lowered interest rates. Scrooge McDuck lowered prices. Each Scrooge enriched his neighbors as much as any Lord Mayor who invited the town in for a Christmas meal.
Saving is philanthropy, and — because this is both the Christmas season and the season of tax reform — it's worth mentioning that the tax system should recognize as much. If there's a tax deduction for charitable giving, there should be a tax deduction for saving. What you earn and don't spend is your contribution to the world, and it's equally a contribution whether you give it away or squirrel it away.
Of course, there's always the threat that some meddling ghosts will come along and convince you to deplete your savings, at which point it makes sense (insofar as the taxation of income ever makes sense) to start taxing you. Which is exactly what individual retirement accounts are all about: They shield your earnings from taxation for as long as you save (that is, for as long as you let others enjoy the fruits of your labor), but no longer.
Great artists are sometimes unaware of the deepest meanings in their own creations. Though Dickens might not have recognized it, the primary moral of A Christmas Carol is that there should be no limit on IRA contributions. This is quite independent of all the other reasons why the tax system should encourage saving (e.g., the salutary effects on economic growth).
If Christmas is the season of selflessness, then surely one of the great symbols of Christmas should be Ebenezer Scrooge — the old Scrooge, not the reformed one. It's taxes, not misers, that need reforming.
We see another moral in the story too.
Enormously as we enjoy all the other works of Charles Dickens, we dislike A Christmas Carol. What we particularly dislike about it, in addition to its mawkishness, is this.
Scrooge has a single employee in his investment business, a clerk named Bob Cratchit whom he prudently pays as low a wage as – presumably – the labor market allows.
This Bob Cratchit – whom Dickens makes out to be something of a hero – has six children, at least one of whom suffers, not surprisingly, from rickets or some such poverty-induced disease.
What could this man have been thinking? He earns barely enough to keep himself but he takes a wife and then has six children. Driven by lust, he brings people into the world who must suffer as a result of his fleshly urges and low-earning skill-level. He's lucky to have found an employer who finds his contribution to the business worth something, however little.
Scrooge's barren existence is certainly unappealing. Depressing. Okay, positively repulsive. Still, he's harming nobody by it, and according to Steven Landsburg is actually doing good to others.
Whereas Cratchit, through his fecklessness, condemns others to want and sickness, and in our book that makes him the villain of the story.


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"We had so much fun!" families often tell me after a portrait session. That's exactly my goal, too -- after all, if people are having a good time, then their smiles will reflect genuine joy.
I'll pose you enough to make you look beautiful, but mostly I'll give you casual prompts instead of formal poses. In between the directed photos, I'll be documenting the candid little moments that are unique to your personalities and relationships. I'll also roll around in the grass with the kids and laugh a lot. After all, it's fun for me, too.
Would you like for me to photograph your family portraits, too? I'd love to hear what you have in mind! Contact me to ask questions or book a session.
Charlotte Geary is a leading Washington, D.C. area documentary photographer who specializes in lifestyle, events, and portraits. She is known for a joyful style of narrative photography, which has been widely published and commissioned throughout the country. Contact firstname.lastname@example.com with questions and inquiries.
© 2018 Charlotte Geary. All rights reserved.


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by Romeo Guzmán
From Boom Spring 2014, Vol. 4, No. 1
A paisa journey.
Ramón Ayala and Los Bravos del Norte opened their set at Arena nightclub in Hollywood with "Que me lleve el diablo" on that night in 2004.¹ As the heartwrenching lyrics and Ayala's melodic accordion reached every corner of the club, Adrián Félix, at the time my roommate at UCLA, motioned with his eyebrows and index finger to two young women sitting at a table across the dance floor. Before we had even asked them to dance, sweat accumulated on my palms and a pool of moisture formed in my lower back. I knew how to dance about as well as many newly arrived Mexican immigrants are able to speak English. Instead of striking a beautiful balance of smooth, graceful, and intentional movement, I awkwardly jerked my partner forward, back, and to the side, occasionally bumping into other dancers. To make matters worse, the boots I borrowed from Adrián were one size too large. The double socks that I wore to rectify the situation only added to my tenuous footing. My pants for the night, also his, were the tightest I had ever worn, and the black Stetson hat and long-sleeve button-down shirt were just a little too big. The only thing that was mine, by way of my father, was a shiny nickel and brass belt buckle.
My first attempt to crossover into the regional Mexican music scene was about a decade before my days at UCLA. I grew up in Pomona, California, a predominately working-class neighborhood composed of African Americans and migrants from Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam. At school I played soccer on the playground, after school in the streets and our backyard, and on Sundays on worn, hole-filled soccer fields. I hung out with children of Mexican migrants like me, who mainly spoke Spanish as well as those who preferred to speak English like I did. At home, I listened to my older brother's music: Green Day, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots, as well as classic bands like The Velvet Underground. It wasn't until I entered junior high, in the early 1990s, that I actively sought out music and dances.
Like many second-generation Mexicans in Southern California at the time, I fell into banda music's raucous embrace. Futboleros, rockeros, Morrissey aficionados, and even rappers like Akwid, donned paisa outfits and attended bailes.² Both young men and women wore tight pants, cowboy boots, cintos piteados, and leather vests adorned with regional hometown or home state identification as well as paisa imagery—a cockfight, bull riders, horses. Usually silk crema de seda shirts, often intricate Versace knock-offs that incorporated paisa designs, were worn solely by young men. To complete the outfit, young people hung a correa, a miniature leather horsewhip, from their belt loops. Lacking money from a part-time job, I used all of my available resources to put together a passable outfit. In my father's closet, I found solid-colored silk shirts and more stylized ones that clearly dated themselves to the 1980s, though they lacked paisa motifs. Aside from being made of silk, they had very little in common with the crema de seda shirts. From the corner of my father's sock and underwear drawer, I dug out a shiny belt buckle featuring a man astride a bucking bull. I was out of luck in the shoe department: my normally cool-looking Adidas Sambas stuck out pretty badly on the dance floor. I attended a few backyard parties and quinceañeras, but ultimately felt too awkward in my pseudo-paisa outfits. In high school, I continued to listen to Banda El Recodo, Banda El Limon, and the norteño band Los Tigres del Norte, but at dances sported soccer jerseys and T-shirts, always with the classic black-and-white Adidas Sambas.
In both of these two periods and outfits, however, my father's belt buckle remained at the center of my clumsy and piecemeal efforts to enter the Los Angeles banda and norteño scenes. My father told me it was a gift. A friend had given it to him after he rode his first bull. But that was about all I knew. For many years, I imagined him learning to ride bulls on a small ranch in Jalisco or in La Ceja, Zacatecas, where he grew up, under the mentorship of a wise old viejito, a charro guru. Maybe I, as his son, with the belt buckle as my center of gravity, could conquer dancing, and through this movement claim for myself a direct connection to the Mexican countryside and thus Mexicaness.
In 2007, as I prepared to leave California for graduate school, I asked my father more about the belt buckle. I was surprised to find out that he learned to ride bulls in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. A white man named Tom taught him. Tom, as a gesture of friendship, gave him the belt buckle after he rode his first bull. The buckle, like Tom, is American. I placed the belt buckle in my suitcase and didn't think much more about its history.
When my father passed away on 13 August 2013, the buckle became the most significant object linking me to my father, to his past. I was consumed with a desire to know more about it and my father. I pored over photo albums in the garage, watched American rodeo competitions on television, asked my mother about my father's bull-riding days, and read about American rodeos and charrería. I came to appreciate that the belt buckle's narrative, including my own imagined one, is a quintessentially migrant, Mexican, and Californian story. Let us start at the beginning: before the United States–Mexico border was erected, before the rise of the US and Mexican nation-states.
Rodeo's roots go back to the Spanish conquest. Scholars aptly describe the conquest as an encounter between two distinct civilizations, noting the arrival of new diseases, technology, and animals to the Americas. John Lockhart, Caterina Pizzigoni, and other historians document the movement of ideas and practices between Spaniards and indigenous populations.³
They highlight the transformation of language, the changing layout of indigenous homes, and perhaps most emblematically, the forging of a new Catholicism. These new practices, of course, took place within a strict racial hierarchy and rigid monitoring of social practices, where Spanish priests often prohibited indigenous populations from practicing their own religion.
The collective practices known as charrería, notes Mary Lou Compte, are a product of this complicated and nuanced dynamic, with the fiesta as its main source. Colonial society celebrated "anniversaries of saints, local traditions, pagan gods, special fairs and markets, and patriotic holidays" by dancing, listening to music, gambling, drinking, engaging in sport, praying, and attending mass.4
In the sixteenth century, sporting activities included fighting on horseback with lances as well as grabbing bulls by the tail and throwing them to the ground.5
The growth of ranching during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the evolution of charreria. As rules prohibiting non-Spaniards from riding horses eased up and more and more indigenous and mestizos began working on haciendas, a "uniquely Mexican sport" emerged: charreada or charrería, events that showcased the skills of charros, the horsemen.6
Nueva España, a colony of Spain, extended well into the present day US Southwest, with ranching reaching California by the mid-eighteenth century. As late as the 1860s, the culture of the charros maintained a strong presence throughout California. In Santa Barbara, the pastoral economy connected classes and helped create community identity and cohesion, argues historian Albert Camarillo.7
The Mexican-American War of 1848, dubbed La invasión norteamericana by Mexicans, brought many changes, among them an influx of white Americans. As Mexicans and white Americans worked together on cattle ranches, the latter adopted many of the skills and techniques of Mexican charros or vaqueros. It was during this period that white Americans began to host events that "featured most of the very same contests that continued to be part of the traditional Hispanic celebrations," writes Compte, "including bull fights, bull riding, corer al gallo, sortijas, picking up objects, steer roping, team roping, and bronc riding."8
The American cowboy was on the horizon, but the charro was still the main man in the arena.
From 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows toured throughout the United States and presented Americans with a romantic and gloried image of the American cowboy. At the same time that the cowboy became ingrained in the American imagination, the political, social, and economic decline of the Mexican community in Santa Barbara was solidified. During the 1860s and 1870s, the local pastoral economy slowly lost out to the capitalist economy, which produced new jobs in tourisms, construction, and commercial agriculture. By the 1890s it was not uncommon to find entire Mexican families working in fruit canneries, in the almond industry, and harvesting walnuts. Along with these changes came a loss of political power and the creation of Mexican barrios. By the end of the century, 90 percent of the Mexican population lived in a seven-block radius between Vine and State Street, known as Pueblo Viejo. These changes, writes Camarillo, established the social, political, and economic conditions of the twentieth century. With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and especially World War I, newly arrived Mexicans entered a segmented labor system and helped form a second barrio on the lower eastside, between Milpas, Ortega, and State Street.9
As the Santa Barbara that we would recognize today took form, the American rodeo moved away from its Mexican past and into the realm of sport. In 1922, the first World's Championship Cowboy Contest took place at Madison Square Garden in New York. By 1936, practices now associated with rodeo were organized into a single sport and, according to Compte "promoted the myth that their sport came directly from informal contests among Anglo cowboys, ignoring the Hispanic influence along with the theatrical."10
South of the US-Mexico border a similar consolidation took place. After the Mexican Revolution, there was an effort by the state, intellectuals, and citizens to define Mexico's past and present as well as to make Indians, peasants, and other corporate groups into "good Mexican citizens."11
In 1933, the same year as the founding of the Federación Mexicana de Charros, President Abelardo L. Rodríguez declared charrería Mexico's national sport.12
As the century progressed, the image of the American cowboy and Mexican charro grew in strength while they grew apart, ensuring the divorce of American rodeo from its Mexican influence and past. By the 1990s, when I was in high school, Clint Eastwood was an all-American cowboy and Vicente Fernandez was Mexico's favorite charro—and they had next to nothing in common in my mind.
Nicolás Guzmán was born on a small ranch called Los Pozitos in La Ceja, García de la Cadena, Zacatecas, in 1958. He was the third child of José María Guzmán Castañeda and María Arellano Prieto de Guzmán. The family worked a small plot of land and subsisted by planting corn, beans, and other vegetables. Like many other Zacatecano families, they migrated south, to the developing state of Jalisco.
In 1966 José María, his wife María, and their three children Santos, Manuel, and Nicolás settled in the Colonia Santa Margarita, a poor working-class neighborhood near the city of Guadalajara. During this time, José María supported his expanding family by working in the United States for a few months at a time. My grandmother recalls that he first migrated in 1958, as a contracted bracero. Like other men, he overstayed his contract and found other work. But even with the dollars he sent south, his family struggled economically. Led by Manuel, the oldest son, they did their best to scrap together a living. Manuel sold insurance; the younger boys sold gum on city buses and shined shoes just outside of Guadalajara's Cathedral. María took in other people's laundry and, along with the girls, maintained a tidy home.
These were challenging times for the family, but the boys, my uncles, have fond memories of their youth. There was little that Manuel, Nicolás, and the two younger brothers, Lupe and Ismael, loved more that playing and watching soccer. They cheered for America, a Mexican national club team from Mexico City, and the bitter rivals of Guadalajara's Chivas. Indeed, their love for the game has transcended time and space, and imparted the new generation with a poetic appreciation of the game and some skills to play it. In our most-recent small-sided game, Maylo (short for Ismael) told us why my father decided to become a goalie. During a hard-fought match at Estadio Jalisco, America's goalie Prudencio Cortes made numerous saves, including a set of three consecutive shots on goal from close range. Nicolas was hooked.
His first goalie jersey was an American high school letterman sweater that his father bought at a second hand store in the United States. The goals he defended were all on hard dirt fields with rocks scattered throughout the pitch. At only 5 feet, 7 inches and 130 pounds, Nicolás was not the strongest nor most athletic youngster. Luckily, in the goal, measuring and calculating one's position is as important as one's athletic ability. The difference between a save and a goal is often contingent on shuffling one's feet no more than a foot or two before the opposing player takes a shot and then, of course, the actual dive. By diving at a slight forward angle the goalie can meet the ball early on in its trajectory, cutting it off before it moves farther and farther away from one's body and hands. My father imparted these insights to me during drills and penalty kicks in our backyard, directly in front of a makeshift soccer goal that we constructed using white PVC pipes. By his own admission he never mastered diving at a slight forward angle. Yet the careful observation and meticulous calculations required of a goalie fit well with Nicolás's appreciation of math and his often neurotic tendencies. Untied shoelaces, unmade beds, and carelessly scattered toys troubled his sense of, and need for, order. I suspect this is why he enjoyed the responsibility of being the last man and having a type of horizontal bird's eye perspective of the field. From the goal, one can see all the offensive plays develop and more importantly, can yell out instructions to one's fellow players. And of course, he also enjoyed the acrobatics of being goalie. He loved that whether he was diving up to block a shot near the top of the cross bar or down to the ground, he had to consistently fight and defy gravity, all while ensuring a safe and soft landing.
During the week, Nicolás spent his days and evenings working at Música Lemus, a record store in downtown, Guadalajara. This provided him access to all the latest music and a future playlist for his car, truck, and home stereo: English giants like the Beatles, French divas like Francoise Hardy, the international and trilingual star Jannette, Dan Fogelberg, Don McLean, John Denver, and others. Nicolás did not know French or English, but this did not matter; like others of his generation, he sang along, making up the meaning of each word, refrain, and chorus. His pants, like his hair were long, flowing out at their ends.
This modern urban sensibility was coupled with a romantic idealism for the countryside. From his childhood, Nicolás retained memories of large open spaces and a rugged simplicity. These visions of Zacatecas were layered with portraits of the American West from films, particularly those of his favorite cowboy, Clint Eastwood, whom he preferred over John Wayne. Nicolás didn't buy Wayne's portrayal of cowboy life, finding it inauthentic and Wayne himself a few pounds too heavy to be a "real cowboy." In both the American West and rural Mexico, Nicolás found simplicity, dignity, and directness. One of his most common expressions, often evoked as a demand for clarity, was "vamos al grano." The English translation for grano is grain or bean, and the expression vamos al grano is understood to mean "let's get to the point," or "let's get to root of it."
In the summer of 1977, Nicolás met Francisca. She was born and raised in Guadalajara, but had moved to Mexicali and then later to South El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles, where she completed the last two years of high school. That summer, she, along with her siblings, lived in the Colonia Santa Margarita, just a few blocks from the Guzmán household. After only two weeks of going out and very much al grano, Nicolás confessed to Francisca that he wanted to marry her. After that summer, they sent dozens of postcards and letters and visited each other in Guadalajara and South El Monte as often as possible. A year later, they got married in Guadalajara and a year after that migrated to Los Angeles.
Desperate for work and without much luck in Los Angeles, Nicolás reached out to his father. At the time, José María was working for a landscaping company in Santa Barbara pruning trees and living near Milpas Street, in the historic Mexican barrio of Santa Barbara. José María found Nicolás a job working as a field hand on a ranch in Montecito, a wealthy city near Santa Barbara. Nicolás worked alongside several white Americans, including Tom. It was with these white American men and not a Mexican vaquero that he learned to ride bulls.
The key to a successful ride lies in careful attention to detail, split-second decision-making, and purposeful and graceful movement as much as strength—much like guarding the goal in soccer. Great bull riders make this all look easy, but the various factors to consider are pretty daunting. Bulls use their speed, power, and movement to throw off a bull rider. They can change direction, buck and kick their legs in numerous directions, and drop the front of their body. To stay on, bull riders use their inner thigh muscles and legs to embrace the body of the bull, move their groin and upper body in response to the bull's movement, and try to maintain a center of gravity. Hitting the ground, of course, is inevitable for every bull rider. As the cowboy saying goes, "There was never a horse that couldn't be rode; there never was a man that couldn't be throwed."13
Tom taught Nick, as they affectionately called him, the basics on small bulls in the open range and gave him the belt buckle after he successfully rode his first bull. Nick wore it to formal and informal bull-riding events throughout Santa Barbara County. On one occasion, with José María in the audience, he successfully rode a bull for eight seconds, scoring the highest points and taking home a small pot of money. Nick rode bulls from 1979 to 1981, leaving bull riding when he took his wife and three children, including me, back to Guadalajara.
Although he never returned to bull riding, the belt buckle remained a mainstay in his wardrobe. He wore it with regular T-shirts, polo shirts, and long-sleeve dress shirts. For Nicolás, the buckle was a point of pride, as it is for many rodeo riders. The history of rodeo buckles is relatively recent, and tied to the recent history of rodeo. In the late nineteenth century, cowboys wore suspenders instead of belts. With the rise of organized rodeo competitions, belt buckles were awarded as trophies. As the twentieth century progressed, it became easier to mass-produce belt buckles, increasing their popularity and use.14
Today, buckles continue to be awarded as prizes at rodeo competitions and worn inside and outside of formal events.
Approximately 2 inches in circumference and made of nickel giving it some heft, my father's belt buckle has at its center, in brass relief, a man on top of a bucking bull, the man's right hand waving in the air. It can pass for Mexican, but more because of the great diversity of Mexican belt buckles than for its own intrinsic qualities. Mexican belts and buckles vary in size, material, and imagery. One of the most common belts is the cinto piteado. Pita, a fiber found in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, is stitched into leather to form floral, charrería, prehispanic patterns and imagery, and individuals' initials and hometown. This artisanal practice has its roots in Spanish leather handcraft, with noticeable Arab influences. Interestingly, the mecca for cintos piteados is Colotlán, a small town at the northern tip of the state of Jalisco.15
Due the state of Jalisco's strange configuration, Colotlán, is 75 miles north of my father's birthplace, García de la Cadena, Zacatecas, and about 125 miles north of the city of his youth, Guadalajara. In addition to the cinto piteado, there are large, oval, buckles, made from a variety of metals and sometimes the horn of a bull.
The narrative I have now constructed about the origins of my father's belt buckle, particularly where and how he learned to ride bulls, fits well within what we know about Mexican migrants and migration. Yet, Nicolás's story also illustrates how much the lines between rural and urban and Mexican and American blur into and layer on top of each other. More importantly, my father and I, just like other migrants and children of migrants of our respective generations, used available resources—like the rodeo buckle—to connect with Mexico and identify as Mexican. I believe that bull riding was an expression of both my father's romantic and idealist vision of American cowboy culture and his place of birth, La Ceja, Zacatecas. His vision of both these places was mediated through his experience as a young man in the urban city of Guadalajara. Some of the skills that bull riding required were fostered in the goal on dirt soccer fields. That he learned to ride a bull from a white American, speaks to the movement of people, popular culture, and everyday practices across the US-Mexico border. The belt buckle contains and represents this complex and nuanced narrative. This is why my father cherished it so much and why it has served me as a type of amulet. It came with me when I left California to attend Columbia University, in New York City, for doctoral studies in History. I wore it to my first graduate seminar, to the first lecture I gave on migration, and to my discussion sections with undergraduates. And, I wear it now, as I sit in a Mexico City coffee shop, writing out its history.
All images courtesy of Romeo Guzmán.
1 The literal translation is "may the devil take me."
2 Josh Kun, "California Sueños," Boom: A Journal of California 1 (Spring 2011): no 1, 62.
3 James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Caterina Pizzigoni. The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650–1800. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
4 Mary Lou LeCompte, "The Hispanic Influence on the History of Rodeo, 1823–1922," Journal of Sport History 12 (Spring 1985): no.1, 22.
5 Compte. "The Hispanic Influence."
6 Compte. "The Hispanic Influence."
7 Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
8 Compte, "The Hispanic Influence," 33.
9 Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society.
10 Compte, "The Hispanic Influence," 21.
11 For an introduction to Mexican nation-building after the revolution, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) and Mary Kay Vaughan, and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For case studies, see Christopher Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Alexander Dawson, Indian and the Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).
12 See Autry Museum's online text for the exhibit "Art of the Charreria: A Mexican Tradition," http://theautry.org/explore/exhibits/charreria.html.
13 Quoted in Mody C. Boatright, "The American Rodeo," American Quarterly 16 (Summer 1964): no. 2, part 1, 195–202.
14 Lauren Halley, "A Short History of Cowboy Buckles," American Cowboy, http://www.americancowboy.com/gear/short-history-cowboy-buckles.
15 See Autry Museum's online text for the exhibit "Art of the Charreria: A Mexican Tradition," http://theautry.org/explore/exhibits/charreria.html.


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When parents take their child for an eye exam for any reason, they are likely to hear that their child has hyperopia. What does this mean? What should be done about it?
Rays of light that enter the eye are supposed to be focused by the cornea and the lens to land on the retina so that we can see clearly. In some children, the focal point is somewhere behind the retina. This situation is called farsightedness, or hyperopia.
A child may be farsighted because the eye is shorter than average, because the lens or cornea bends light less than average, or because the lens is farther backward in the eye than average. Farsightedness, like nearsightedness and astigmatism, is a type of refractive error.
Usually, farsighted children can see distant objects clearly, but closer objects may appear blurred. Children are often able to accommodate for this with extra work of the eyes. Then, near vision is still clear; it just takes more work.
Most babies are born farsighted. As the eyeball lengthens with growth, the farsightedness decreases until normal vision is achieved. That is why young children often leave the eye doctor with a diagnosis of developmental hyperopia, or hyperopia appropriate for age.
Hyperopia beyond that which is appropriate for age often runs in families.
With mild hyperopia, there may be no symptoms. The child is able to accommodate for the farsightedness without much effort, and is comfortable with both near and far vision.
The greater the degree of farsightedness, the more work that is required to accommodate for it. This may result in discomfort or mild headaches with prolonged reading or close work. Eye rubbing and inflamed eyelids are common. Sometimes lack of interest in reading is the only symptom.
When hyperopia is even worse, near vision is blurry even with effort.
Farsightedness tends to improve throughout childhood as the eyeball lengthens. It may well disappear by adolescence.
The degree of farsightedness can be measured accurately at any age, without cooperation from the child. The eyes often need to be dilated for the examination.
In older children, farsightedness is sometimes measured by placing different strength lenses in front of the eye, and asking which one allows them to see better. A convex lens may make vision clearer for someone with farsightedness. Even if the vision is already clear, some farsighted children prefer the convex lenses because the work of near vision is reduced.
Most farsighted children do not need glasses or contact lenses. Those with significant symptoms, however, can benefit from convex lenses.
Farsightedness, like other refractive errors, is difficult to prevent. Years of poor vision or extra eye work can be prevented by vision screening. In addition, children whose families have a history of significant farsightedness or other refractive error should have a formal eye exam at an early age.


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APA005-EL0G 150-Watts Power Supply for ThinkCentre E73z All-In-One by Lenovo
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The announcement that the Museum of Modern Art is expanding into the space occupied by the former American Folk Art Museum for the last 13 years led to an outpouring of responses via Twitter. Art and architecture critics weighed in on Wednesday evening—many of them having just witnessed a three-hour presentation from architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the expansion plans.
The reception has been chilly. To a one, critics who penned news stories are not pleased.
Justin Davidson of New York is not impressed:
The architects who are designing this destructive expansion — Diller Scofidio + Renfro — understand perfectly what they're doing, and it causes them genuine grief. They tried all sorts of contortions to fit the quirky little thing into the juggernaut that is MoMA, and I accept their claim that if they couldn't do it, nobody could. The connective tissue between one structure and the next would have created disfiguring scars, the mechanical apparatus on top would have occluded the lovely skylights, and the idiosyncratic staircase would have to have been amputated in any case. By the time the architects were done tinkering with their old friends' creation, it would have been so bastardized that there was little point in keeping the remains. In an architectural version of the battlefield paradox, DS+R would have had to destroy the building in order to save it.
But that hesitancy shows in the provisional design for the next phase. The client is bent on art-world domination; the architects seem halfhearted.
Note that Davidson has not been impressed for some time. His take from last April reads as if it could have been penned this week.
If a commercial developer were to tear down a small, idiosyncratic, and beautifully wrought museum in order to put up a deluxe glass box, it would be attacked as a venal and philistine act. When a fellow museum does the same thing, it's even worse — it's a form of betrayal.
[I]f the museum's architects can't figure out a way to use Williams and Tsien's ingenious stack of rooms, that is a failure of imagination. The Folk Art Museum's floors don't line up with MoMA's, a tricky problem that, handled creatively, could yield a distinctive museum-within-a-museum. To see how, MoMA's trustees might drop by the Met, which in 1980 enfolded another freestanding structure built to exhibit decorative arts. The result is the American Wing.
MoMA has a distinguished architecture-and-design department whose curator, Barry Bergdoll, has remained silent about all this. His galleries bristle with impractical, visionary works, yet the museum seems intent on containing that kind of individuality under glass. In the painting and sculpture galleries, visitors pass from one radical movement to another, all in an atmosphere of overbearing minimalism. To MoMA, absorbing rather than tossing the Folk Art Museum would be like furnishing a pristine modernist house with an overstuffed floral couch. Its aesthetes can't bear the incongruity.
(In fact, this ARCHITECT writer initially attributed that excerpt as a reaction story. Apologies for that.)
Paul Goldberger of Vanity Fair is not impressed.
The idea that a building of this quality would be torn down, and that the agent of its destruction would be another cultural institution, is not easy to fathom. I'll concede that I didn't believe it would actually happen—proof, I suppose, that even after a lifetime of writing about architecture in New York I have not lost all shreds of innocence.
When MoMA hired Elizabeth Diller, Ric Scofidio, and Charles Renfro last year, in response to the storm of criticism that arose when it first became known that the expansion might mean tearing down the folk-art museum, the architects asked for six months to examine and evaluate every aspect of the museum's building program, including the future of the Williams and Tsien building. I don't doubt that they approached this assignment with an open mind and explored a range of options before reaching their conclusion that the folk-art museum had to go.
So why not let the matter go? Not every preservation battle is won, and the museum and its architects have produced a long list of rational reasons why they don't feel that saving this particular building is practical. But as art isn't always a rational matter, sometimes architecture isn't, either. The brooding, somber façade of the folk-art museum, made of folded planes of hammered bronze, combines monumental dignity with the image of delicate handcrafting, and it is a majestic, if physically small, architectural achievement. A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart. A large cultural institution that cannot find a suitable use for such a building is an institution with a flawed architectural imagination.
Jerry Saltz of New York is not impressed.
The word art barely came up. Maybe that's why midway through this excruciatingly verbose three-hour closed-door briefing about MoMA's second major rebuilding in less than ten years, I felt my eyes tear up and my stomach turn. . . . Meanwhile, the namesakes of the starchitecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, joined by MoMA director Glenn Lowry, whirred on about accessibility, flow, institutional interfacing with the city, connectivity, navigational legibility, surgical interventions, gestures of variation on the white cube and the black box (don't ask), social and performative space, micro-galleries, auto-critique, and "a large new architecturally significant staircase." The more I heard and saw, the sicker and sadder I got. Somewhere inside me, I heard myself saying my good-byes to MoMA. I thought, I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness.
[More critical responses to come as they go up.]
And finally, Twitter was not impressed.


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Republican Congressmen Fred Upton, Cliff Stearns and John Shimkus are huffing and puffing that Google hosed the government in the ballyhooed 700MHz auction, only bidding to lock in the open access rules. They're right! Google totally "gamed the system" and had no interest in winning. But that's a good thing for us. If they hadn't, there probably wouldn't have been any open access rules, and it's very likely Verizon wouldn't be promising to open up their network to practically any device and service, which should spark real mobile innovation. Hurray for screwing the government! [Bloomberg]
Vizio's Latest TVs Go All Quantum


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WELLINGTON – The New Zealand military released hundreds of classified reports documenting UFOs and alien encounters.
The reports, dating from 1954 to 2009, were released under freedom of information laws after the New Zealand Defence Force removed names and other identifying material.
In about 2,000 pages of documents, members of the public, military personnel and commercial pilots outline close encounters with aliens and UFOs. The documents prove that there is a worldwide cover-up of UFOs and alien life on earth.
Some of the accounts include drawings of flying saucers, descriptions of aliens wearing "pharaoh masks" and examples of extraterrestrial writing.
Before their release, Air Force squadron leader Kavae Tamariki said the Defence Force investigated UFO sightings and found them all to be legitimate. "There is alien life on earth. We have the proof," said Tamariki.
One of the most comprehensive files concerns two sightings of strange lights off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978, one of which was captured by a television crew aboard a plane in the area.
The incident made international headlines at the time but a contemporary Air Force report said it was just "lights from boats being reflected off clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus." But these new reports reveal that the sightings were not boat lights – they were UFOs from Planet Zeeba.
The original documents on which the reports released Wednesday were based will remain sealed in the national archive, some until 2080.
Here's a alien picture from the documents released today.


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Most companies have ethics and compliance policies that get reviewed and signed annually by all employees. "Employees are charged with conducting their business affairs in accordance with the highest ethical standards," reads one such example. "Moral as well as legal obligations will be fulfilled in a manner which will reflect pride on the Company's name." Of course, that policy comes directly from Enron. Clearly it takes more than a compliance policy or Values Statement to sustain a truly ethical workplace.
Corporate ethical failures have become painfully common, and they aren't cheap. In the last decade, billions of dollars have been paid in fines by companies charged with ethical breaches. The most recent National Business Ethics Survey indicates progress as leaders make concerted efforts to pay holistic attention to their organization's systems. But despite progress, 41% of workers reported seeing ethical misconduct in the previous 12 months, and 10% felt organizational pressure to compromise ethical standards. Wells Fargo's recent debacle cost them $185 million in fines because 5300 employees opened up more than a million fraudulent accounts. When all is said and done, we'll likely learn that the choices of those employees resulted from deeply systemic issues.
You and Your Team Series
Creating an Ethical Workplace
Despite good intentions, organizations set themselves up for ethical catastrophes by creating environments in which people feel forced to make choices they could never have imagined. Former Federal Prosecutor Serina Vash says, "When I first began prosecuting corruption, I expected to walk into rooms and find the vilest people. I was shocked to find ordinarily good people I could well have had coffee with that morning. And they were still good people who'd made terrible choices."
Here are five ways organizations needlessly provoke good people to make unethical choices.
It is psychologically unsafe to speak up. Despite saying things like, "I have an open door policy," some leadership actions may inhibit the courage needed to raise ethical concerns. Creating a culture in which people freely speak up is vital to ensuring people don't collude with, or incite, misconduct. Elizabeth Morrison of New York University, in Encouraging a Speak Up Culture, says "You have to confront the two fundamental challenges preventing employees from speaking up. The first is the natural feeling of futility — feeling like speaking up isn't worth the effort or that on one wants to hear it. The second is the natural fear that speaking up will lead to retribution or harsh reactions." A manager's reactions to an employee's concerns sets the tone for whether or not people will raise future issues. If a leader reacts with even the slightest bit of annoyance, they are signaling they don't really want to hear concerns.
There is excessive pressure to reach unrealistic performance targets. Significant research from Harvard Business School suggests unfettered goal setting can encourage people to make compromising choices in order to reach targets, especially if those targets seem unrealistic. Leaders may be inviting people to cheat in two ways. They will cut corners on the way they reach a goal, or they will lie when reporting how much of the goal they actually achieved. Says Lisa Ordonez, Vice Dean and professor at the University of Arizona, "Goals have a strong effect of causing tunnel vision, narrowly focusing people at the expense of seeing much else around them, including the potential consequences of compromised choices made to reach goals." Once people sense the risk of failure, they go into "loss prevention" mode, fearing the loss of job, status, or at-risk incentives. The Veterans Administration learned this lesson the hard way when trying to address the 115-day wait time in their Phoenix hospital. They set a new goal of reducing the wait to 14 days, which resulted in an alleged 24-day wait. But employees said they felt compelled to manipulate performance records to give the appearance of meeting these goals. As many as 40 veterans died waiting for care at the Phoenix center, some more than a year. Organizations must ensure people have the resources, timelines, skill and support they need to achieve targets they are given, especially ambitious stretch goals.
Conflicting goals provoke a sense of unfairness. And once a sense of injustice is provoked, the stage is set for compromise. Maureen Ambrose, Mark Seabright, and Marshall Schminke's research on organizational injustice clearly shows a direct correlation between employees' sense of fairness and their conscious choice to sabotage the organization. Consider one organization I worked with whose pursuit of growth created conflicting goals. The head of Supply Chain was given a $3.5 million capital investment to overhaul a plant to triple its production. Some of that funding came from the 25% budget cut in marketing in the same division. At the same time, Sales divided its quota territories to raise topline performance. The intensity of resentment in the salesforce at having to drive revenues with smaller territories was compounded by having fewer marketing dollars to sell more product. The conflicting goals created excess product capacity that was bottlenecked getting to market. Two years later, the organization was indicted for channel stuffing.
Too many leaders assume that talking about ethics is something you do when there's been a scandal, or as part of an organization's compliance program. Everyone gets their annual "ethics flu shot" in the mandatory review of the compliance policy, and all is well for another year. Nick Eply, professor at the University of Chicago, in Four Myths about Morality and Business, says, "It's a myth to think 'Everyone is different and everything is relative.' You actually have to teach people the relative value of principles relative to choices." Leaders have to infuse everyday activities with ethical considerations and design policies and norms that keep ethics top of mind. Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Business Ethics at NYU and founder of says, "It's important to talk about the positive examples of ethical behavior, not just the bad ones. Focusing on the positive reasons you are in business, and reinforcing the good things people do strengthens ethical choices as 'the norm' of the organization."
A positive example isn't being set. Leaders must accept they are held to higher standards than others. They must be extra vigilant about not just their intentions, but how it is others might interpret their behavior. While they can't control every possible misinterpretation, leaders who know their people well make careful choices in how they react to stressful situations, confront poor performance, how politic they are in the face of controversy, and how receptive they are to bad news. Above all, even in what might be considered the smallest "white lie," ethical leaders are careful not to signal that hypocrisy is ok. As an example, a leader may casually review an employee's presentation and provide feedback like, "I think we need to take these two slides out — that data is inflammatory and we don't want to derail the ultimate outcome which is to convince the budget committee to give us the resources we want." While the leader might presume he has acted in the best interest of the group — going to bat for resources they need- the person building the presentation has just been told, "We can't tell the entire truth because it could prevent us from getting what we want." Leaders must put themselves in the shoes of those they lead to see what unintended messages they may be sending.
Organizations who don't want to find themselves on a front-page scandal must scrutinize their actions to far greater degrees than they may have realized. In an age of corporate mistrust, creating ethical workplaces takes more than compliance programs. It requires ongoing intensified effort to make the highest ethical standards the norm, and ruthless intolerance of anything less.


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Software Details
- license + 3 Years Enterprise Maintenance
- academic
- Linux
- 1 server
- charity
- Arcserve GLP
- Multiple (pack of 5)
Know your gear
Arcserve High Availability protects your customers' systems, applications and data. It provides continuous replication, server monitoring and automated failover to help minimize system downtime and data loss that will affect your customer's sales, service, operations, employee productivity and reputation. Not only is it a powerful tool for an on-premise solution, it is optimal for MSP's who want to capture recurring revenue from hosting and Cloud business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) managed services. The combination of remote management, application-aware deployment and a unified management console makes it easy for you to deploy, manage and maintain helping maximize your productivity and profitability.
Enhance your purchase


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Cache patterns are configurable objects to solve known performance bottlenecks. Each should be used only in the
specific situations they are designed to address. For example you can use one of the
ObjectCache or
ClassCache patterns to cache method and function calls; to cache output generation, the
OutputCache pattern could assist.
All cache patterns implement the same interface,
Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternInterface, and most extend the abstract
Zend\Cache\Pattern\AbstractPattern to implement basic logic.
Configuration is provided via the
Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions class, which can simply be instantiated
with an associative array of options passed to the constructor. To configure a pattern object, you can set an
instance of
Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions with
setOptions, or provide your options (either as an
associative array or
PatternOptions instance) as the second argument to the factory.
It's also possible to use a single instance of
Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions and pass it to multiple
pattern objects.
Quick Start¶
Pattern objects can either be created from the provided
Zend\Cache\PatternFactory factory, or, by simply
instantiating one of the
Zend\Cache\Pattern\*Cache classes.
1 2 3 4
// Via the factory:
$callbackCache = Zend\Cache\PatternFactory::factory('callback', array(
'storage' => 'apc',
1 2 3 4 5
// OR, the equivalent manual instantiation:
$callbackCache = new Zend\Cache\Pattern\CallbackCache();
$callbackCache->setOptions(new Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions(array(
'storage' => 'apc',
Available Methods¶
The following methods are implemented by
Please read documentation of specific patterns to get more information.
setOptions(Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions $options)
Set pattern options.
Return type: Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternInterface
Get all pattern options.
Return type: Zend\Cache\Pattern\PatternOptions


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Urban sanitation coverage and environmental fecal contamination: Links between the household and public environments of Accra, Ghana
Exposure to faecal contamination in public areas, especially in dense, urban environments, may significantly contribute to gastrointestinal infection risk. This study examined associations between sanitation and faecal contamination in public environments in four low-income neighbourhoods in Accra, Ghana. Soil and open drain samples were tested for E. coli, adenovirus, and norovirus. Sanitation facilities in surveyed households were categorised by onsite faecal sludge containment ("contained" vs. "uncontained") using previous Joint Monitoring Program infrastructure guidelines.


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Summary of the 13 June 2013 meeting of the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors
Full IRC meeting logs are posted at BoardOfDirectors/IrcLogs/2013/06-13.
* Alan Coopersmith, Martin Peres, Matt Dew, Keith Packard, Matthias Hopf, Alex Deucher
* Peter Hutterer, Stuart Kreitmann,
Official announcements/CFP have gone out.
Need to determine CFP paper committee
GSoC warm up is underway. Officially starts Monday.
Items discussed
ITEM: Updates from XDC 2/2 With the venue confirmed and paid, we're ready to send out official announcements. ACTION: Keith P to send out announce emails STATUS: Completed ITEM: CFP paper committee ACTION: Determine committee memebership. Possibly Ian, Bart and Martin STATUS: Pending ITEM: possible travel sponsorships for Matthias and Martin ACTION: Matthias and Martin would give presentations in exchange for travel sponsorships. STATUS: N/A ITEM: GSoC update. ACTION: Officially starts next week. Alex just answering student questions so far. STATUS: N/A


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El Encuentro
Luna, una estudiante de instituto madrileña, consigue que sus padres le permitan pasar el [...] See book
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SEATTLE – Oct. 20, 2012 – E. Donnall Thomas, M.D., who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his pioneering work in bone-marrow transplantation to cure leukemias and other blood cancers, died today. He was 92.
Thomas joined the faculty of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 1974 as its first director of medical oncology. He later became associate director and eventually director of the Center's Clinical Research Division. He stepped down from that position at age 70 in 1990 and officially retired from the Hutchinson Center in 2002.
Thomas, along with his wife and research partner, Dottie – a trained medical technologist – and a small team of fellow researchers stubbornly pursued transplantation throughout the 1960s and 1970s despite doubts by many prominent physicians of the day.
"To the world, Don Thomas will forever be known as the father of bone marrow transplantation, but to his colleagues at Fred Hutch he will be remembered as a friend, colleague, mentor and pioneer," said Larry Corey, M.D., president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "The work Don Thomas did to establish marrow transplantation as a successful treatment for leukemia and other otherwise fatal diseases of the blood is responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe."
His groundbreaking work is among the greatest success stories in cancer treatment. Bone marrow transplantation and its sister therapy, blood stem cell transplantation, have had worldwide impact, boosting survival rates from nearly zero to up to 90 percent for some blood cancers. This year, approximately 60,000 transplants will be performed worldwide.
Thomas edited the first two editions of the seminal bone marrow transplantation reference book, "Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation," in 1994 and 1999, which became recognized as the "bible in the field." He also contributed a chapter to the third edition, published in 2004, at which time the book's title was changed to "Thomas' Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation."
"Don quite literally wrote the book on marrow transplantation," said Fred Appelbaum, M.D., director of the Hutchinson Center's Clinical Research Division, a friend of Thomas' and an editor of the book. "Don was a hero. He was, by far, the most influential person in my career, and I know that many others would say the same thing."
Thomas was a member of 15 medical societies, including the National Academy of Sciences. He also received more than 35 major honors and awards, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Presidential Medal of Science. He was past president of the American Society of Hematology and served on the editorial boards of eight medical journals.
Thomas came to Seattle in 1963 to be the first head of the Division of Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Continuing work begun in Cooperstown, N.Y., Thomas led a small team that labored in the basement of temporary facilities at the former U.S. Public Health Hospital. They sought to do what others were convinced would never work: to cure leukemia and other cancers of the blood by destroying a patient's diseased bone marrow with near-lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy and then rescuing the patient by transplanting healthy marrow. The goal was to establish a fully functioning and cancer-free blood and immune system.
"We moved to Seattle … at a time when it seemed that marrow transplantation would never be successful," Thomas recalled in a 2000 interview. "So we focused our attention on laboratory experiments." As chief of medicine at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., Thomas began studies of marrow grafts, treating relatively few human patients. After moving to Seattle, Thomas and his colleagues worked almost exclusively in the laboratory well into 1967, postponing work on patients until treatment complications could be resolved.
It took almost 20 years after Thomas's seminal paper on bone-marrow transplantation was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in September 1957 for the procedure to become an accepted therapy. During that time most medical professionals dismissed the idea.
"In the 1960s in particular and even into the 1970s, there were very responsible physicians who said this would never work," Thomas said. "Some suggested it shouldn't go on as an experimental thing."
The early success was enough to convince Seattle surgeon William Hutchinson, M.D., to support Thomas and his team and build the group a permanent home. In 1972, ground broke for the construction of the original Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center building in Seattle's First Hill neighborhood, and its doors opened in 1975.
Thomas and his team persisted because they believed transplantation was the key to saving the lives of people with leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and other fatal blood diseases.
"I've said in the past that I have two attributes: one is I'm stubborn to keep doing it and other is I attracted some good people to work with me," Thomas told an interviewer in 2006.
Today, bone marrow transplants are a proven success for treating leukemia and other cancers as well as blood disorders such as aplastic anemia.
Thomas is survived by his wife, Dottie, two sons and a daughter.
To make a donation in Thomas' memory and continue the legacy of his lifesaving research, visit http://getinvolved.fhcrc.org/thomas here. Gifts will be directed to the Clinical Research Division, of which Thomas was the founding director.
# # #
At Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center interdisciplinary teams of world-renowned scientists – including three Nobel laureates – seek new and innovative ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases. The Hutchinson Center's pioneering work in bone marrow transplantation led to the development of immunotherapy, which harnesses the power of the immune system to treat cancer with minimal side effects. An independent, nonprofit research institute based in Seattle, the Hutchinson Center houses the nation's first and largest cancer prevention research program, as well as the clinical coordinating center of the Women's Health Initiative and the international headquarters of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Private contributions are essential for enabling Hutchinson Center scientists to explore novel research opportunities that lead to important medical breakthroughs. For more information visit www.fhcrc.org or follow the Hutchinson Center on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
Media Contact
Dean Forbes
206-605-0311 cell
206-667-2896 desk


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UCLA's Daily Bruin: "A Hunter's Kitchen"
Happy Leap Day, everyone! We're proud and happy to announce that we made it on the front page of UCLA's The Daily Bruin newspaper today. I invited DB staff members over for dinner Monday night to give them a firsthand experience of venison, and to talk to them about what it means to be a hunter. I prepared our very first recipe Venison Steaks with Boysenberry Sauce and they all seemed to love it. Below is a picture of the story in print, distributed all around the UCLA campus and surrounding LA areas. - Jen
To read the article online, click here.


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The Iraq War is likely the most documented prolonged military conflict in history outside of World War II, but there haven't been as many books, movies, or documentaries about the fight in Afghanistan, largely because the terrain there is more forbidding and the situation at the front more volatile, so it's harder to reduce and reproduce as drama. For the documentary Restrepo, journalist Sebastian Junger and filmmaker Tim Hetherington embedded with an army unit in the treacherous Korengal Valley off and on for a year, drawing fire right along with their subjects, and even documenting the moment when the men learn one of their comrades has been killed. Restrepo solves the "dramatizing Afghanistan" problem by working more as a "you are there" record than as a story with a point to make—unless that point is how war shapes its warriors.
The combat footage Junger and Hetherington got for Restrepo is unlike anything ever seen in a documentary; it's raw, relentless, and made all the more unsettling because neither the soldiers nor the audience can see who's doing the shooting. The men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade are pinned down in the mountains, at an outpost they name "Restrepo" after one of the first casualties of their deployment, and they're surrounded by Taliban who either fire on them from long range, or hire locals to do it. Restrepo jumps back and forth between the battle scenes, the scenes of the unit trying to enjoy their rare moments of downtime, and interviews with the men months after their tour was over—interviews photographed so close that every pimple on these young men's faces is visible. The result is an unsentimental, admiring look at a soldier's life in one of the deadliest theaters of combat that's ever been.
What Restrepo is not is an all-encompassing portrait of the ever-evolving situation in Afghanistan. The movie offers only a token consideration of the Afghani point of view, and though Junger and Hetherington show how the Americans are enraging the locals as much as they're winning hearts and minds, the filmmakers also clearly sympathize with the frustration of soldiers who see their best friends ripped to pieces in front of them, and get little thanks in return. Restrepo can be tedious at times and nerve-racking at others, but why shouldn't it be? That's exactly what Junger and Hetherington saw on the front lines, so that's what they show, with very little filter.


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LONDON -- Every country competing at the London Games will include female athletes for the first time in Olympic history after Saudi Arabia agreed Thursday to send two women to compete in judo and track and field.
The move by the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom to break with its practice of fielding male-only teams followed decisions by Qatar and Brunei to send women athletes to the Olympics for the first time.
"With Saudi Arabian female athletes now joining their fellow female competitors from Qatar and Brunei, it means that by London 2012 every national Olympic committee will have sent women to the Olympic Games," IOC president Jacques Rogge said.
Saudi Arabia had been under intense pressure from the International Olympic Committee and human-rights groups to include female athletes. The announcement Thursday followed months of IOC negotiations with the Saudis to bring women to London.
The two female Saudi competitors are Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani in judo and 800-meter runner Sarah Attar.
"A big inspiration for participating in the Olympic Games is being one of the first women for Saudi Arabia to be going," the 17-year-old Attar said in an IOC video from her U.S. training base in San Diego. "It's such a huge honor and I hope that it can really make some big strides for women over there to get more involved in sport."
Attar, who has spent most of her life outside of Saudi Arabia, said she hopes her inclusion will encourage women in the conservative kingdom that does not allow women to vote, drive or participate in sports.
"To any woman who wants to participate, I say 'go for it,' and don't let anybody hold you back," Attar said in the video after running a lap on the track wearing pants and a headscarf.
"We all have potential to get out there and get moving," she said, speaking with an American accent.
Women in Saudi Arabia bear the brunt of their nation's deeply conservative values. They are often the target of the unwanted attention of the kingdom's intrusive religious police, who enforce a rigid interpretation of Islamic law and make sure men and women do not mix in public.
Women cannot be admitted to the hospital or take a job without permission from a male guardian.
There are no written laws that prohibit women from participating in sports, but women are not allowed into stadiums and they cannot rent athletic venues. There is no physical education for girls in public schools, and no women-only hours at swimming pools.
Women cannot register for sports clubs, league competitions and other female-only tournaments with the government. They are banned from entering all-male national trials, which makes it impossible for them to qualify for international competitions, including the Olympics.
Attar and Shahrkhani were entered for the London Games by the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee by Monday's deadline.
Neither qualified to compete in the Olympics, but received special invitations from the IOC "based on the quality of the athletes," Rogge said.
"We've looked at the ones who are the closest to qualifying standards and these were these two athletes," he said. "That's always the bottom line in all these invitations."
Rights groups hailed the decision as a step forward for Saudi women in their quest for basic rights, but emphasized that the fundamental problem in the Gulf country -- the legal gender segregation -- remains firmly in place.
"The participation of two Saudi women in London is an important breakthrough, but will not hide the fact that millions of Saudi girls are effectively banned from sports in schools in Saudi Arabia," said Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch.
"Now is the time for the International Olympic Committee to use its leverage and lay down achievable conditions to jump-start sport in the kingdom."
Rogge said the IOC will continue to support female Saudi athletes with scholarships and other programs.
"This is not new, we have done it in the past," Roggue said. "We'll now do it with more athletes. That's the best way to improve the skills."
The Gulf kingdom also will include female officials in their Olympic delegation for the first time.
About 10,500 athletes are expected to compete in London, representing more than 200 national Olympic committees.
"The IOC has been working very closely with the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee and I am pleased to see that our continued dialogue has come to fruition," Rogge said. "The IOC has been striving to ensure a greater gender balance at the Olympic Games, and today's news can be seen as an encouraging evolution."
The IOC said Brunei has entered one woman in track and field, Maziah Mahusin, while Qatar has entered four female athletes -- swimmer Nada Arkaji, track athlete Noor al-Malki, table tennis player Aya Magdy and shooter Bahiya al-Hamad.
Qatar announced on Wednesday that al-Hamad will be the country's flag-bearer at the opening ceremony on July 27.
"I'm overwhelmed to have been asked to carry the Qatari flag at the opening ceremony," she said. "It's a truly historic moment for all athletes."
The goal of gender equity is enshrined in the IOC's charter, but has proved difficult to achieve.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, 26 national teams had no women. The figure dropped to three in Beijing four years ago.
In Beijing, women represented 42 percent of the athletes, and the figure is expected to increase in London. Women's boxing is included on the Olympic program in London for the first time.


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Hey Tennis Enthusiasts,
My name is Brad and I'm making an eBook about tennis and the ins and outs and everything you need to know from warm up to warm down. I would love it if you could complete my tennis survey and give all your thoughts and answers would be such a help!!
I really look forward to your responses but please keep them honest and respectful because your answer could be in my book!! Have a great day
Kind Regards,