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'Fumes' Strategy Provides Dependable Future Contribution Income
In Parts 1 and 2 of this four-part series I introduced a '4-Step Strategy to Cure Your Current Fundraising Headache.' Because the times we're in are trying. Donors, however, are still giving. You can succumb to the crisis, take two aspirin every four hours for the rest of the pandemic, economic recession and period of social turmoil — or you can buckle up and put sensible fundraising strategies in place.
- FORWARD FACE Equilibrium: Balance your fundraising strategies
- FUEL the Machine: Charge your annual contribution income engine
- FUMES Provide Accelerant: Prepare for 'retirement' with future contribution income
- FUTURE Proof the Mission: Leave a legacy for generations to come
If your intention is to be around for the long haul, it's time to assure you don't sacrifice your future for the present. If you keep putting good plans and approaches 'on pause' you're going to get stuck where you are. You can live your life and also prudently prepare for what's to come.
Today it's time to talk about future-proofing your fundraising.
FUMES Provide Accelerant
I think of 'fume strategies' as akin to preparing for retirement.
It's a way to accelerate your contribution income into the future – similar to investing money in a savings account or IRA. Or to earning ongoing royalties off a book, movie or invention. Or creating a YouTube channel, then generating ongoing advertising income. It's all oriented towards setting you up so you don't have to live paycheck to paycheck.
These strategies generate a stream of reliable contribution income that flows into your charity while you sleep.
Income you can count on — even when storm clouds gather and you face rainy days. It may not be enough to expand your mission or ramp up to fund emerging needs (you'll have to actively, and specifically, fundraise for those purposes every year), but you can often survive on fumes.
One such long-term strategy, of course, is building a strong legacy program. But that's for the more distant future, so we'll get to that next (in Part 4). For now, let's focus on the shorter-term kind of accelerant — the passive income you need to live on today and survive for the near tomorrow.
Pump up Monthly Giving
The most robust passive income strategy I know is securing a monthly giving commitment.
I like to think of a monthly gift stream as 'fumes' from your one-time filling of your tank. You asked once, and you got enough fuel to last for 12 months! Pretty darn cool. And extraordinarily cost-effective as a strategy.
Imagine if you had such a program in place pre-pandemic! You'd now have a steady stream of gifts you could rely upon, making planning and programming much more predictable. Sure, some folks might ask to cancel. But most folks will not. Monthly donors are loyal. In fact, retention increases from an average of 45% to 90% when you get folks enrolled in a monthly giving plan. And guess what else?
- Even if your organization is starting from scratch, you can depend on 10% or more of your current donors immediately converting to monthly giving.
- Your file of monthly donors can mushroom to 40- 50% or more with targeted effort.
- A majority of monthly donors will regularly upgrade their gifts and continue to give for 10, 15, or 20 years.
Wonder what donors think of monthly giving?
People love to demonstrate consistent commitment. Here are some donor comments:
"My income last year was unpredictable. I was hesitant to give a lot over the course of the year because I didn't know what my annual income would be. I maintained my monthly giving, but did not give to any new organizations or make incidental donations."
— Anonymous donor, The Burk Donor Survey, Canada
"I ALWAYS donate when an organization I believe in asks me to give, but I think I could do a better job of actually budgeting for philanthropy. Maybe I should sign up for sustaining donations."
— Anonymous donor, The Burk Donor Survey
"Monthly giving improves my level of comfort about giving more. I know that $10 a month extra is the same as giving $120 in one lump sum…but it seems more affordable."
— Anonymous donor, The Burk Donor Survey, Canada
"I give more by making monthly, rather than year-end donations. It's a great strategy"
— Anonymous donor, Burk Donor Survey
Use your Website Home Page to Fan the Flames
Your website home page can be an evergreen sales tool.
I like to think of a home page as a mini-base from which contribution income streams come in as 'fumes' from your one-time set up. When you set up your home page, were you thoughtful about assuring you aren't hiding your need for philanthropy? Or making it seem like an afterthought?
I see too many nonprofit home pages with every menu item but the kitchen sink at the top or down the left-hand side, with "support us" or "donations" just one among myriad choices – often buried someplace in the middle, or even in a drop-down from one of the larger menu items.
You must actively ask for philanthropic support from your home page.
You can't simply bury your 'donate' action as a dropdown – one among many — on your menu bar. You have to make it stand out. Really stand out. If you make it appear donations aren't really that important to you, they won't be that important to prospective donors either.
If you're serious, make it clear the success of your mission relies on philanthropy. Here are some options:
- You can take over a piece of your homepage with a compelling message, photos or video. An example of an organization that does this amazingly effectively is Charity: Water. Here are examples from two different times of the year, each with a message tailored to that time period.
- You can strategically place a big, bold donate button where it's not likely to be missed. An example of an organization that does this well is Invisible Children. The donate button in the middle is a bright green, contrasting with the rest of the page. And the additional donate button on the right-hand side stays with you, even as you scroll down the page.
- You can use a lightbox to highlight a current campaign. Here's an example from the San Francisco Marin Food Bank.
- You can make it your goal to capture visitors' email addresses so you can mail them information and appeals in the future. Not everyone visiting your home page is coming to donate. But everyone is coming to learn more. It's your job to take advantage of this. If you set this up right, you'll be able to collect new prospect names, and even donations, all while you sleep. Include a big, noticeable form at the top of your website and consider a pop-up box as well. Click here for a good example.
Prioritize DIY peer-to-peer fundraising
DIY peer-to-peer fundraising leverages the power of your network on your behalf. And once you've set it up, you don't even have to be paying attention for the money to come rolling in. Of course you'll want to steward these donations and cultivate these P2P donors so they'll renew, but you don't have to actively ask. That's why it's called 'DIY.'
I like to think of a DIY P2P gift stream as 'fumes' from your one-time set-up of this program and your evergreen promotion of it on your website home page. You make it super-easy for would-be donors to find this giving option when they visit your website, and then equally easy for them to implement their own P2P campaign.
In other words, people can easily go to your website and ask their friends to give to you ("in their honor" in lieu of presents for themselves) for important life cycle events.
One of the best at this is Charity: water. They say the average amount donated to their birthday campaigns is $770.
While our average donation size online is similar to most charities I have benchmarked, our average fundraising campaign is worth many times more. But even more importantly, every fundraising campaign brings in, on average, 13 new donors.
— Paul Young, former Director of Digital at Charity: Water
Turn your Newsletter into a Passive Contribution Income Engine
Your newsletter can become the source of a steady stream of donations. Even though you're not asking directly as you would with an appeal letter – where giving is your sole call to action — you should be including an opportunity to give. For a hard copy newsletter this will be an inserted remit envelope. For an e-newsletter you can include a button with a link to your donation landing page. In fact, you can include several!
EXAMPLE: 'Organization C' had a $2+ million annual fundraising goal from individuals; they raised $120,000 of this goal through their newsletter – without asking. They reached this goal largely through three mailed appeals and targeted in-person and telephone asks. In between appeals they mailed a quarterly newsletter into which a 4"x6" tribute giving envelope was inserted. No direct ask was included. On average, every newsletter yielded $40,000 in tribute gifts. The money – passive income — just rolled in. (This is an organization where I used to work). Every time we thought about discontinuing the newsletter, this fact stopped us. Sure, we weren't raising as much as our direct appeals, but it wasn't chopped liver either.
Can you Think of other Passive Income Strategies?
There are all sorts of ways to generate ongoing contribution income. Think of this strategy a bit like buying an annuity. Or putting money into a 403 (b) or IRA. Once you make the front-end investment you're assured a steady source of income – without having to pay in more or do much further work.
What about:
- Developing a saleable product?
- Recruiting renewable corporate sponsors or underwriters?
- Cause-related marketing with businesses looking for relatively inexpensive local marketing opportunities?
- Renting your facilities (once COVID-19 abates)?
- Piggybacking on another organization's event (once COVID-19 abates)?
- Registering on shopping portals like AmazonSmile, grocery store or dining programs?
- Licensing of technology or intellectual property?
- Developing a podcast, with advertising?
NOTE: If you seek to create new nonprofit revenue by establishing a commercially-driven enterprise, speak to your legal and tax advisors to ensure you comply with the IRS and other legal obligations.


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Andy Florance On Buying STR, WeWork's Failed IPO And What CoStar Buys Next
Andy Florance has had an eye on Smith Travel Research for over a decade, ever since it bought a relative's research company.
"My aunt owned a similar business in Scotland that covered hotels in Edinburgh and Manchester and Glasgow, and I thought it was a fascinating business," the founder and CEO of CoStar Group told Bisnow in a phone interview Wednesday. "But obviously I was not going to acquire my aunt's business."
Florance was in London, two blocks from the local offices of STR, a day after his company announced it had reached a deal to buy the leading hotel research firm for $450M in cash.
"The Smith family really had zero interest in selling the family business for a long time," he said. "So we kept a dialogue open, but it's only really just this summer that they decided they wanted to sell the business so it would move into its next phase."
If the deal closes as expected later this year, CoStar, a publicly traded company with a market value of more than $21B, will add STR's 30-year trove of confidential hotel information to its dominantly positioned commercial real estate data empire.
Florance founded CoStar in 1987, gathering information on office buildings around Washington, D.C. He had one of the first companies that digitized and aggregated data on property before the internet had even been widely adopted. Randy Smith and his late wife, Carolyn, founded Smith Travel Research two years earlier, as a hotel census and data benchmarking company.
"We share a similar background," Florance said. "Both Randy Smith and I were starting companies up, doing digital real estate-related stuff back in the '80s. Not a lot of us were doing that, so there's a shared connection there."
Both companies rose to prominence as commercial real estate moved out of the Wild West 1980s and became a more institutionalized business. As early, reliable sources of market data, CoStar and STR both rose to the top of their respective asset classes.
"To say the results of these past three decades have been gratifying would be a great understatement," Smith said in a statement. "But in the end, I'll be most proud of knowing that so many people were able to build long-lasting careers with our company — and that, as a team, we were able to make significant contributions to the advancement of the hospitality industry. While it is hard to step aside from our life's work and the STR family, I can do that with the confidence that this move will allow the next chapter of STR to be written."
Florance said STR will continue to operate as a separate division of the CoStar Group, with its in-place leadership team out of the Nashville area, much in the same way Apartments.com operates out of Atlanta and LoopNet operates out of Los Angeles.
STR will still have its current offerings for the hotel industry: data about room rate, revenue per available room and occupancy, broken out by market and hotel class and made strictly confidential. That platform "is a critical function" to the hotel industry, Florance said.
"That will remain STR forever and will remain a separate company that's focused on that requirement," he said.
Where CoStar and STR will intersect more directly is in the use of that data. CoStar will now be able to incorporate hotel data at a global — STR has 15 offices worldwide — and market level.
For each market or submarket, CoStar subscribers, who pay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a year for the platform, will be able to see what hotels are under construction, how much the open ones charge, their rates over time going back decades, and which ones are luxury, select service and everything in between.
"That's exactly what an investor, lender or broker needs," Florance said. "If it's commercial real estate, that will be in CoStar. If it's for hotel operations, it will be with STR."
STR has more than 350 employees, and Florance said he doesn't anticipate any merger-related layoffs. Rather, he expects to increase STR and CoStar's staffs globally, putting more people in Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and other markets.
STR's acquisition is just the latest for CoStar, which has expanded steadily through acquisitions and organic growth since entering the public market 21 years ago. Since then, it has occupied a position of largely unchallenged dominance in commercial real estate data.
Its acquisition of LoopNet in 2012 triggered a Federal Trade Commission inquiry, which resulted in the spinning off of Xceligent to preserve a competitor in the market. Four years later, CoStar sued Xceligent, alleging theft of intellectual property. The spat escalated into an antitrust lawsuit lobbed by Xceligent, and ended a year after it began when Xceligent liquidated in December 2017.
Critics in the industry have said CoStar has developed into a monopoly, charging high prices for its services, which it raised this year, and snuffing out competition through acquisitions and litigation. CoStar has filed dozens of intellectual property lawsuits over the years, but it has contended that it spent decades building up its proprietary data, which is its lifeblood.
Florance told The Wall Street Journal the STR acquisition shouldn't trigger antitrust concerns because the firms weren't competitive to begin with. As for where it fits into CoStar's history of acquisitions — STR is its biggest since it paid $585M for Apartments.com in 2014 — Florance said that much like that pivotal deal, it is a chance to leap into an asset class it hadn't covered before by acquiring its industry leader in data.
"We presented this yesterday to the investors, and it made total sense to them. They're like we get it, hospitality is a large CRE asset class," he said. "It wouldn't be hard to predict that we would expand our coverage to other segments and improve our coverage in more areas. You could easily write out a list of 10 other categories with capital flows that you can call real estate."
When Florance took CoStar public 21 years ago, the company raised $22.5M selling 3 million shares at $9 each. After markets closed Wednesday, its share price was $587.15 after starting the year priced below $350.
CoStar wasn't making a profit when it went public, Florance said, something his company shared with a recent high-profile attempt at going public in real estate. WeWork filed its initial public offering prospectus in August, but by the last day of September, its CEO had lost his job, its valuation was slashed and the IPO had been pulled.
"The advantage we had was we could clearly show strong profit margins in markets we had been in for more than two years," Florance said. "They're telling the same story but with a very different conclusion than we did."
WeWork's founder, Adam Neumann, was lambasted for his possible self-dealing, millions of dollars in selling shares, expensive taste and erratic behavior. Florance couldn't help but chuckle at the contrast in lifestyle when he was leading his startup to the public marketplace.
"By the time we went public in 1998, my salary was $150K and I was driving a Honda," Florance said. "When we went public, I wasn't flying a G5 or G650 or whatever he was flying. I didn't have a Maybach, I hadn't sold any stock, I was all-in. That's a little different."

subset: commoncrawl


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CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Carolina head coach Ron Rivera isn't about to give up on the Panthers' chances of a winning season and making the NFL playoffs.
After Carolina's 28-10 loss to the New Orleans Saints on Thursday night, Rivera said Friday the Panthers will need to "figure some things out" before either can happen.
"We're by no means out of the (playoff) race," he said. "I've been in a race like this before, we all have. . It ends up being the team that comes back, that gets up and keeps fighting. The next thing you know, you're right in the thick of things."
After a 2-0 start, Carolina (3-5-1) has lost five of the last six games, four by two or more touchdowns. Thursday night's loss knocked the Panthers from atop the NFC South and put New Orleans there.
AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org and www.twitter.com/AP_NFL


text: No hotel combines better ultraluxury digs with incredible views than this gem. Heaven begins after a rocketing ride on the elevators to the rooms, located between the 38th and 48th floors of a high-rise. The opulent rooms feature soothing contemporary and out-of-this-world bedding (including a pillow menu), but the best details by far are the huge windows with superb city views, particularly when the fog rolls in. Not all rooms have bathtub-side views (incredible and standard with the signature rooms), but every one does have a luxurious marble bathroom stocked with terry and cotton cloth robes, and a makeup mirror. The 2,000-square-foot Regency SKyline Terrace Suite suite -- which has a living room, dining area, bedroom, roomy bathroom, and bay-view balcony half the size of a football field -- is twice as big as my entire house.


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College Students Are Smoking Tons of Weed in Legal States and Binge-Drinking Far Less
A new study suggests that students in states where cannabis is legal are binge drinking less.
(TMU) — The legalization of recreational marijuana in states across the U.S. is leading students to puff, puff, and pass on the booze.
A new study suggests that undergrad students in those states where cannabis is legal are smoking weed more and binge drinking less.
The Oregon State University study published this week in the journal Addiction found that legalization has blazed a trail for a steady increase of college-aged pot smokers—both frequent tokers and those who smoke only occasionally—who opt not to imbibe of booze at the Animal House rates of yesteryear.
The study looked at the smoking habits of college students aged 18 to 26. The researchers found that many students in states where the plant has been legalized are opting for cannabis over alcohol, meaning that cannabis smokers are "less likely to binge drink." Researchers defined binge drinking as having five or more drinks in a single setting.
Students in states that have legalized cannabis were found to be 46 percent more likely to have smoked the sensimilla—a highly concentrated type of cannabis—than their peers who smoked six years prior during the prohibitionist era.
The study noted that the effect was more pronounced among students aged 21 to 26 rather than those aged 18 to 20. It added:
"In US states that enacted recreational marijuana legislation from 2012 to 2017 [such as Washington and Colorado], there was evidence for a general trend towards greater increases in marijuana use."
The trend appears to be a reversal of the traditional rite of passage where students who reach the age of 21 take a turn toward aggressive boozing.
In a press release, Zoe Alley—an OSU doctoral candidate and author of a companion study—said:
"In most states, once you reach in a press release 21, a barrier that was in the way of using alcohol is gone, while it's intact for marijuana use. But when marijuana is legal, this dynamic is changed.
For marijuana we saw state-specific increases that went beyond the nationwide increases, whereas binge drinking was the opposite: a greater decrease in the context of nationwide decreases."
The findings came as a surprise to the study's authors who said that they need to further study why legalization has had this impact. Study author David Kerr said:
"It is surprising and important that these young adults are sensitive to this law. And it's not explained by legal age, because minors changed, too."
According to cannabis reform advocacy group NORML, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have either legalized or decriminalized possession and use of marijuana for adults over the age of 21, while medical marijuana is legal in 33 states.
Recent data from the Pew Research Center shows that two-thirds of the public in the U.S. favors the legalization of cannabis—a sure sign of the anti-prohibitionist mood of most Americans and especially millennials.
By Elias Marat | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
Typos, corrections and/or news tips? Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com


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"But we can't afford to rest. Our archnemesis has indoor space and they're training twice a week. Plus, they've registered for two indoor leagues and a futsal session. We can't rest; we'll lose ground." If this is going through your … Continue reading
Tag Archives: rest
If I told you that rest builds and work breaks down, would you rest them more? This is the question I pose to the well-intended but extremely competitive AAU basketball coach who is negotiating with the families of his starters. … Continue reading


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PewDiePie reveals why he's chosen to stream on DLive over YouTube or Twitch
Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg, the world's largest YouTuber, has chosen to live stream on DLive over top competitors such as Twitch, YouTube and Mixer.
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In a video released on April 9, the Swedish YouTuber revealed that he had a big announcement on the future of his livestreaming plans.
Currently, whenever PewDiePie does decide to livestream, he does it on YouTube but he has now revealed that won't be the case going forward – as he is making the switch to DLive for all of his future streams.
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What is DLive?
The big selling point of using DLive is the fact the platform won't take any cut of your earnings. If you're just getting started out on Twitch, you will have your subs split 50/50 with Twitch until you become partnered where you'll then be able to negotiate a different contract.
As a hugely popular platform, Twitch has a ton of established creators that have loyal audiences, so those looking to make it in the streaming world might actually consider a switch to DLive – especially if PewDiePie is able to bring a lot of new eyes to the platform.
You can read much more about DLive by checking out their welcome letter.
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Why PewDiePie using DLive is a big deal
While PewDiePie does have a following on other social media platforms, Twitter, for example, he has, by and large, made a name for himself on YouTube. With that said, he explained that he is excited to make a leap to DLive for live broadcasts.
"I'm really excited about DLive and I'm really to finally be livestreaming again," PewDiePie said in his announcement video.
YouTube does feature its own livestreaming service, but Pewds has opted to ditch the platform and switch to DLive for regular streams. He will still make YouTube videos regularly so you don't have to worry about those ending any time soon.
We want to welcome a new member to the DLive family- @pewdiepie will now be streaming exclusively on DLive. https://t.co/XeQvXXCoOI
He will #SupportCreators by donating up to $50,000 to a maximum of 100 streamers. https://t.co/uDBWnCiBY1
— DLive (@OfficialDLive) April 9, 2019
When will PewDiePie's first stream be?
The Swede announced that his first stream on DLive will be on Sunday, April 14, at 10 am PT/1 pm ET/6pm BST and he will give away up to $50K to a max of 100 streamers.
He has not yet announced what viewers can expect on the platform, such as whether he'll be playing a game or just talking with viewers, so we might have to wait until the actual stream for information on that.
What we can expect, however, is a lot of monetary donations to other creators so it'll be worth tuning in just to see what ideas Pewds has to redistribute the cash with.


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Kajol all set to be free at last
After photojournalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol was "found" near the Indian border in the middle of the night 53 days after his disappearance, his family thought he would be coming home soon.
Kajol's son went to Jashore to bring him, while his wife and daughter waited in Dhaka.
Then as the day progressed, the photojournalist was suddenly whisked off to jail, under Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). The police informed the court that he was being arrested since he was facing three cases under the Digital Security Act (DSA) filed separately by a lawmaker and two activists of Jubo Mahila League.
Thus began the long legal battle for his bail which lasted more than half the year. It has been 280 days since he has not been home.
Yesterday, the High Court cleared the way of him to walk out of jail as it granted him bail in two of the three cases.
Kajol had already secured bail in the other case recently.
The HC bench of Justice M Enayetur Rahim and Justice Md Mostafizur Rahman granted the bail following two separate bail petitions filed by Kajol in the cases lodged with Hazaribagh and Kamrangirchar police stations.
Kajol's lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua told The Daily Star that there was now no legal bar to his client's release following the HC verdict.
Kajol's son Monorom Polok said, "I am happy that my father will be released … but I cannot be totally happy unless he comes home from jail. That might happen sometime in the middle of next week, or maybe there will be some delay in it."
Polok's apparent skepticism stems from the way this year has turned out to be for his family.
For a single Facebook post, Kajol was denied bail a total of 13 times, according to Article 19, a human rights organisation.
In the meantime, Polok waged a solitary war on social media, on the streets and in front of video cameras to get his father released.
As the days wore on, the protests sparkled with innovation -- in one instance he organised a street theatre performance in front of the Shaheed Minar, in another he influenced people to post photos holding placards written "Free Kajol" in them,
To the media, he distributed their childhood photos with Kajol's silhouette blurred out to show the impact of a missing father. Public submissions of cartoons depicting the family's strife, and demanding freedom of expression also poured in, flooding social media.
International human rights organisations like Amnesty International took note of it, releasing a short-illustrated movie on Kajol's ordeal.
The HC bench yesterday granted the bail as the investigation officers failed to take permission from the cyber tribunal to probe the two cases within 75 days of their submission.
The court said it would direct the inspector general of police to take necessary steps for training the two officers regarding provisions of the relevant law.
Justice M Enayetur Rahim said the accused (Kajol) could question the jurisdiction of the investigation officer to continue the probe as he did not take the cyber tribunal's permission within those 75 days.
Deputy Attorney General Sarwar Hossain Bappi told the court that the investigation officer did not take the permission as he perhaps did not know the relevant provision.
Investigation officer Md Russell Mollah is a new police officer, he added.
Lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua told the HC that his client, who is a renowned photographer, had been abducted and kept confined for 53 days.
Kajol has been languishing in jail for a long time, but the IO was going on with the probe in violation of the law.
The accused petitioner has right to life as per the constitution and therefore, he might be granted bail in the cases, Jyotirmoy told the court.
DAG Sarwar Hossain Bappi, who represented the state, could not be reached instantly over phone for his comment on whether the government would move any appeal before the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court challenging the HC verdict.
On November 24, the same HC bench had granted bail to Kajol in one of the three cases filed under the DSA.
The same day, the HC bench also asked the investigation officers of the other two cases to inform it whether they took permission from the cyber tribunal within the 75 days.
The investigation officer and the Cyber Tribunal were ordered to submit separate reports to the HC.
The HC bench passed the order after Jyotirmoy told the court that the investigations of the two cases were illegal as the probes had to be concluded within 75 days of filing of the cases.
The investigation officers have not completed investigations of the cases in 75 days, which is a violation of the relevant provision of the law, Jyotirmoy argued.
Ruling Awami League lawmaker from Magura-1 Saifuzzaman Shikhor filed one of the three cases with Sher-e-Bangla Nagar Police Station on March 9 against Kajol and 31 others alleging that the accused had defamed him by publishing a report on crimes of expelled Narsingdi Juba Mahila League general secretary Shamima Nur Papiya.
The two other cases were filed against Kajol on March 10 and 11 with Hazaribagh and Kamrangirchar police stations. One was filed by Hazaribagh unit Juba Mahila League leader Yasmi Ara Belly and the other by Sumaiya Chowdhury Banna, a member of Bangladesh Juba Mahila League's central committee.
March 9: Digital Security Act case field by lawmaker from Magura
March 10: Kajol goes missing. Later CC camera footage revealed his motorbike was tampered with by two unidentified individuals
March 10-11: Two more DSA cases filed against him by two Jubo Mahila League activists
May 3: BGB "found" Kajol wandering about the Indian border in the middle of the night
May 4: Kajol charged with trespassing and illegal entry for which he gained bail, but at the last-minute police arrested him under Section 54
May 18: Bail denied by Jashore District Chief Judicial Magistrate Court
June 14: 3 separate virtual courts in Dhaka did not accept bail hearings because police had not officially arrested him in the DSA cases
June 24: Metropolitan Magistrate Dhiman Chandra Mondol of Virtual Court-4 denied him bail
June 28: Metropolitan Magistrate Debdash Chandra Adhikary denied him bail. Placed him on two-day remand instead
July 29: Metropolitan Magistrate Baki Billah of Virtual Court-6 denied him bail
August 24, Sept 9 and Sept 14: Judge KM Emrul Kayesh of Metropolitan Sessions Judge's Court denied him bail thrice
October 19: High Court questioned why Kajol should not be granted bail
November 24: HC granted Kajol bail in one case and ordered investigation officer and Cyber Tribunal to submit progress reports
Yesterday: Kajol released


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The conventional wisdom that taking a daily aspirin will help prevent heart attacks and strokes in otherwise healthy people is under renewed challenge.
A major international study led in part by a Minnesota physician has found that healthy people over age 70 got no preventive benefit from aspirin and were at greater risk for harm such as stomach bleeding. It's the third major study this year to reach a similar conclusion.
"We hope this shifts the paradigm for people 70 and older who are considering taking aspirin," said Dr. Anne Murray, a geriatrician at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis who led the research along with Dr. John McNeil in Australia.
"We found no measurable benefit to taking aspirin to prolong healthy life, and actually it may induce harm," Murray said.
The study did not include people who have heart disease, and Murray cautioned that anyone currently taking aspirin, especially if they are at high risk, should consult their doctor before making any changes. The study, released Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 19,000 older healthy people enrolled for nearly five years.
In August, two other large studies produced similar results. One tracked 12,000 middle-aged people with cardiovascular risk factors, the other looked at 15,000 patients with diabetes.
To varying degrees, the research found that those taking low-dose aspirin had a higher risk for developing bleeding in the stomach or the brain, both of which could require hospitalization.
There was little benefit to their heart health for people at low or moderate cardiovascular risk.
Aspirin's reputation as an inexpensive and effective medicine to prevent heart attacks and strokes came from studies conducted decades ago.
Since then, the profession has placed a greater emphasis on prevention, including new medications to control risk factors and an emphasis on a better diet and less use of tobacco, which addressed the risks for many of those patients.
"The rate of heart attack and stroke has decreased dramatically as we got better at controlling high blood pressure and high cholesterol," said Dr. Michael Miedema, a cardiologist at Allina Health in Minneapolis.
"At some point, we were considering recommending aspirin for everyone," said Miedema. "The benefits that we had initially seen, we just don't see any more."
Aspirin helps dissolve clots that form in arteries of those with heart disease.
But those same anti-clotting properties can aggravate internal bleeding. Aspirin also irritates the lining of the stomach, even the low-dose aspirins that come with a protective coating.
"We have a lot of patients that say 'I take an aspirin to be safe,' " said Miedema. "Based on recent data, that may not be the case. Just because it is over-the-counter doesn't mean it is safe."
He said, however, that patients with known heart disease should not stop taking aspirin.
Murray said many patients she sees take low-dose aspirin even though a doctor had not recommended it.
In her study, which looked at both Americans and Australians, about 37 percent of the Americans had already been taking aspirin, compared to just 8 percent of Australians.
Murray did not routinely prescribe aspirin for elderly patients because there had been no published evidence that it was effective, which is one reason she and the Berman Center for Outcomes and Clinical Research, which is affiliated with Hennepin Healthcare, pursued the study.
"Keep in mind that geriatricians are trained to be very aware of potential adverse events or side effects of any medication," she said. "One of the first things we do when we see a new patient is wean them down from their medication lists."
The study released Sunday also tested whether aspirin helped prevent dementia and disabilities, two major conditions that affect quality of life in the elderly. It found no preventive effect.
The findings are likely to touch off reviews by medical associations and government agencies about revising existing guidelines.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a group convened by the federal government to make recommendations on preventive care, currently says that people between the ages of 50 and 59 should take low doses of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular problems, as well as colorectal cancer, if they have some risk factors.
The recommendation for those aged 60 to 69 is that it should be an individual choice, while there was no recommendation for those 70 and above.
Miedema, who sits on an advisory committee for the American Heart Association, said discussions about altering its recommendations have already begun, although he said it is too early to comment.


text:
We examine two histories in this paper. First, we briefly look at a North American history, in which we look at the relationship of free software with the founding principles of democracy. Second, we examine recent Brazilian history, especially the most policy decision to adopt free software, affirming technological autonomy. Democratic ideals, defended by the free software movement, are transformed in Brazilian politics, leading both to further free software development and a stronger democracy.
When democracy takes the open road
Free software translations
Brazilian translations revisited
In this paper, we first sketch an interpretation of North American history in which we attempt to develop connections between the free software development and the founding principles of democracy. Akin to Walt Whitman's "grass fields of the world," Jack Kerouac's libertarian road, and the counterculture's dream of computers to the people, free software expresses democratic ideals of citizenship by affirming individual rights and freedom. Notably, the history of the GNU project provides evidence of a defense of those ideals.
Second, we examine recent Brazilian history in which we intend to verify how, from the beginning of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's Presidency of Brazil in January 2003, adopting free software became an important government strategy for stimulating economic growth and affirming technological autonomy. Free software in the new government is the focus of a variety of policies for national development. IT policy change is possible because the federal government is one of largest purchasers of software and hardware in the country. With an interest and focus on free software, the state is, in a sense, creating a new market to encourage the development and use of this software. These actions are reminiscent of governmental policies in the 1970s and 1980s, which attempted to stimulate the minicomputer market [1].
Finally, we will argue that the Brazilian government, through its intervention with specific policies aimed at encouraging the use of free software, encourages democratic ideals and the building of a stronger democracy.
When democracy takes the open road
"Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not goodfortune, I myself am goodfortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road."
"Song of The Open Road" — Walt Whitman
"For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs."
"For you, O Democracy" Walt Whitman
"To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!"
"One Hour To Madness and Joy" Walt Whitman
"I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals (...)
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things."
"Song From Myself" Walt Whitman
"I'm the last survivor of a dead culture."
Richard Stallman, quoted in Levy (1994)
Walt Whitman is one of the greatest North American poets. His book Leaves of Grass (Whitman, 1982), is considered a great tribute to democracy. It was published while the United States was still experiencing its growth pains, developing its own identity in a variety of ways.
To Whitman, democracy is the creative force of a new world. Democracy seemed a form of society based on "natural" facts and by itself scientifically justifiable, indeed a supposed absolute negation of social fairy tales, superstitions and obscure traditions. Whitman's visions about society were not limited to just a North American reality. In a society idealized by Whitman, democracy would spread out like grass covering the world, a planetary metaphor supporting the supranational scope of a democratic experience.
"This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe."
"Song From Myself" Walt Whitman
In his poetry, Whitman exults the individual, freed from religious and political conditionings. In his article "Democratic vistas," he extends this individualistic view, explaining that citizens would move away from the confines of political parties, since individual political acts, not parties, make for a strong democracy.
"Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the everoverarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them."
"Democratic vistas" Walt Whitman (1982)
True democracy, that is democracy for those who would find it on their own, was truly on the open road.
In On The Road (1984), Jack Kerouac expresses a romantic ideal, eager for simplicity and marked by an absence of pretension, to live an intense and fully individualistic experience. Kerouac mixes the individualism of American culture, a recurrent theme in Walt Whitman's poetry, with a mechanical extension of this freedom, in the form of the automobile. For Kerouac, the freedom of the open road translated into emancipation and a search for oneself. The open road became the means to free the soul from the confinements of a consumerbased, Cold War society.
How do computers fit into this picture? Paul Edwards (1996) describes how computers emerged from military efforts during the Cold War. Cold War politics necessitated a central computer, serving the military as a tool to support a failsafe command and control system. At the same time, the computer itself would result in what Edwards calls "a closed world" [2] discourse, with strong investments by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in projects at laboratories belonging to universities, research institutes, and specific defense industries.
Advanced computers were largely resources limited to those facilities with connections to the military establishment. Theodore Roszak (1988) suggests that antimilitarism, mobilized by the Vietnam War, eventually encouraged the idea of democratizing and humanizing technology, including computers.
In the middle of the 1970s, some members of the hacker community (born in academia), joined forces with hobbyists to create software and hardware for what we now know as personal computers. The possibility of creating a domestic computer, together with the idea that anyone could build it, quickly granted to the computer an aura of libertarian technology.
These early personal computers were being constructed at the crossing of two discourses, a closed one from the Cold War, and another found in Whitman and Kerouac, a discourse for an open and libertarian world. These conflicting themes over closed and open technologies have repeatedly been in conflict for the past few decades.
The architecture of the earliest personal computers attracted a number of individuals to develop programs for a variety of purposes for these devices. Much of the software was originally freely shared among hackers and hobbyists; it quickly transformed into a consumer good, protected by copyright, nondisclosure agreements, and other devices.
After being a victim of a secrecy agreement and witnessing the decline of the hacker community at MIT, Richard Stallman began to encourage a new blossoming of the hacker community. He launched GNU (GNU's Not Unix), an operating system. He defined GNU as free software, preserving the the programmers' freedom to manipulate and study code but imposing conditions so that future modifications would remain free (Stallman, 1983).
With the catalyst of free software, Richard Stallman encourages us to question the very meaning of freedom. He asks us to really understand what freedom means at a technological and personal level, fighting against restrictions of individual rights, especially as they relate to software (Williams, 2002).
The history of GNU can be seen as a fight for democratic freedom in the creation of scientific and technological information. Stallman's humanitarian individualism is reminiscent of the emphatical poetry of Whitman and the roads of Kerouac's writings.
Free software translations
In January 2003, a new presidential term began in Brazil when the leader of the Worker's Party, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, was elected based on a campaign featuring largely a leftist political agenda. Free software, which had already been used successfully in some states and cities governed by the Worker's Party, acquired the status of a national effort."(...) Jose Dirceu [3], when answering to a question on the policies and criteria for the use of Free Software by Federal Government as a way to achieve development and independence, affirmed that Free Software is part of government's structural policies, so there's no risk of removing them from these policies or of having the Government moving away from them." [4]
In order to make a free software policy a reality in Brazil, it was necessary to create a strategy to encourage the adoption of free software. Our perspective is based on Michel Callon's (1998) concept of market, in which goods to be traded must be disentangled from their links to other objects and people. This work of disentanglement is described as transaction framing, allowing market transactions to be free of external and restrictive connections [5]. This framing, however, generates an overflow, a "reentanglement" provoked by an unexpected bond. In this environment of framings and overflows, the market is always in a process of constant negotiation.
Policy decisions by the government frame the free software market, because the government uses its own purchasing power to essentially establish a position economically. In Brazil, nonauthorized copies are used by almost 55 percent of IT users [6], so a customer on the scale of the government provides great incentives to software companies.
The development of free software needs to be stimulated by different actors: governments, the private sector, and civil society.
Since 2003, the federal government has been, in a series of public announcements and sponsorships to various events, revealing its new IT policy. The list of governmental IT initiatives is quite diversified. For example, in June, 2003, the government announced that it would be developing its purchasing portal, ComprasNet, with free software with the intention to distribute it to state and municipal governments. The government's Electronic Government Committee was reorganized and renamed the Free Software Technical Implementation Committee. A Federal Government Free Software Sharing Meeting was promoted. SERPRO [7] launched the SERPRO Free Software Program and Site Factory for building federal government portals. All of these initiatives generated a cascade effect in diverse areas. In August 2003, the government promoted Legislative Free Software Week, including the launching of a Mixed Parliamentary Front for Free Software (with 125 representatives and 22 senators), and a commitment to accelerate the passage of federal laws indicating a federal free software preference. The Ministry of Science and Technology, in October 2003, announced the availability of some US$2.1 million for research projects based on free software. SERPRO began construction of a national database composed of companies offering free software consulting and services, and the National Institute of Information Technology (Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação or ITI) announced a project for a certification authority in free software.
In December 2003, during a new federal Free Software Sharing meeting, the government launched two portals for free software cooperation projects. In April 2004, the government provided training for some 2,100 municipal, state and federal public employees in the implementation and management of open source platforms for government administration. During the Fifth International Free Software Forum in June 2004, the federal government's "Migration Guide to Free Software" was released.
In December 2003 during the Information Society World Summit, Ambassador Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães Neto, interim Minister of Foreign Affairs, reaffirmed the position of Brazil on this issue:"Brazil sees free software as emblematic of the Information Society and of a new culture of solidarity and sharing, as an instrument to guarantee for all the access and domain of this universal language. The development of free software needs to be stimulated by different actors: governments, the private sector, and civil society." [8]
Among the effects of this framing, we note the reconfiguration of human resources (training and education) for the new market; the incentive to organizations to promote free software [9]; and, a lively debate in society about national technology policies.
The free software market
Even with the presence of the State's "visible hand" in the construction of a market for free software, there are no guarantees that its demands and incentives will be effective. The success of government actions will depend on the way that free software will be developed by the market's current business model, up to the point where a new actor takes place: the free software entrepreneur. Although rather implicit, the State's efforts to help in the creation of this entrepreneur occurs throughout translations [10] that tie the development of free software to the establishment of regional economies, the conquest of technological independence, the increase of software exports, and the generation of new businesses. Such translations develop in tension with problems marked by a lack of human resources, resistance by entrepreneurs and government agencies, and basic differences between divergent models of software development and distribution, as well as between traditional and free software markets.
In the proprietary software market, copyright is a source of financial benefits. Its business model depends on a strategy which strives to increase the number of units sold in order to secure the greatest reduction in costs per unit. Therefore, as more consumers enter the market, perunit costs decrease.
Since free software licenses allow modifications and distribution by third parties, it is difficult to calculate the exact and direct market value of free software. Therefore, a business model for this market would concentrate on a "service" based on providing added values, since the access to the source code is free.
As all change involves risk, those companies subscribing to a proprietary model tend to consider free software as a threat. They do not see any economic viability in abandoning copyright [11].
In order to encourage the development of free software, the government has stimulated partnerships with private initiatives. In Rio Grande do Sul (the most southern Brazilian state), the local Data Processing Companies Committee (Sindicato das Empresas de Informática do Rio Grande do Sol or SEPRORGS), together with a variety of government agencies and local universities, have created a cluster of organizations to encourage software development.
Brazilian translations revisited
In creating a free software market, current government policies can be viewed in part by past policy initiatives in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. These policies were an attempt to develop an industrial base of information technology in Brazil, with emphasis on the manufacture of minicomputers.
These policies ended in 1990, and were viewed by some as the frustrated adventures of an authoritarian and interventionist State. Ivan da Costa Marques (2003) provides an alternative view:"The many perceptive histories and analyses of the market reserve, written by Brazilian and foreign researchers, recognize its phase of success but they tend to explain its exhaustion and consequent abandonment in 1990 as a consequence of the combination of a market based on high priced technical backward products with North American pressures to open Brazilian computer's market. These factors are of no little importance, but in their conclusions, these histories and analysis nevertheless do not undo a current conviction that the market reserve was no more than an uncommon alliance, said to be made within military dictatorship environment, between parts of the left wing, clever entrepreneurs and nationalist right."In this "alliance," entrepreneurs were assumed to play an important role. Marques (2003), when describing the necessary associations to support the Informatics National Policy, emphasizes that"(...) for the information technology professional community of that time, the logical conclusion was practically imposed as a consensus in 197677: it was necessary to introduce an "artifice" in the game of the market so as to make investment in minicomputers conception and local design in Brazil more attractive to the national private capital."
According to Marques (2003), it was a general belief that"(...) without a technological product being produced, sold and supported, the full product cycle is not completed, so it becomes uncertain the effective ownership of its technology. Surely public universities and entities that until then had been involved with minicomputers conception and design did not have the conditions to complete the product cycle; (...) ."
The IT entrepreneur needed to be created and the market reserve was seen as the vehicle to stimulate the creation of these entrepreneurs. Without this reserve, there would not be a market in which they would be able to compete. The government opened a competition to select companies which would be authorized to manufacture and sell minicomputers in Brazil, that is national companies committed to local investments in R&D. National groups were attracted and private companies were formed, initially licensing foreign computer architectures [12]. The Brazilian IT entrepreneur was finally born.
The actions of the Brazilian government towards the use of free software give the impression of rehabilitating these former policies, encouraging technological independence, national autonomy, and the development of regional economies. Would the free software entrepreneur be a reinvention of the IT entrepreneur, initiated by these former policies? This leads to several questions.
Does the public support free software as a de facto representation of a new market reserve? A number of opponents of the current policy argue that a preference for free software over proprietary software promotes protectionist practices. However, a market reserve based on the development of free software does not make sense, given the mandatory free and open distribution of source code and documentation. Therefore, any argument about supposed restrictions to the free software market arer illogical, since the fundamental knowledge base is available to all.
A second concern is over the longterm impact of the current policies, if they will eventually lead to the same results of those former policies relative to minicomputers. Marques (2003) attributes to the military certain deviations in decisions made by CAPRE/SEPLAN [13], the agency that managed IT national policy at the time. After that intervention, a new department was created, called the Special Secretariat of Informatics, directly subordinated to the President. The experience of the market reserve had been directly linked to a community of scientists and computer science professionals, examining the national technological policy within a "relative democracy," a concept proposed by the military to indicate that some issues could be debated with some freedom (but not all the issues could be discussed, and not all the people could have access to these discussions). Unfortunately, at the time scientists and computer science professionals were beginning to be suspected of sheltering "left ideologies," so the government decided to investigate the IT sector. This military intervention eventually led to an authoritarian model for all IT decisions and, consequently, the dispersion of this community. According to Marques:"It is exactly the absence of transparency, the lack of accountability and the inexistence of a decentralized configuration of control that transforms the democratic instrumentalism into authoritarian technocratic centralism not reconcilable with the liberal democratic tradition. Demobilized, the community that configured the decentralized control, and absent from its ethos the obligation for transparency and for reporting to society, the colonels of the Security Agency, in a typical movement of authoritarian technocratic centralism, without consultation and explanation, had extended to the personal computer market the same procedures that had been adopted successfully to stimulate the conception, the design and the manufacture of minicomputers in Brazil."
At the present moment, although IT policies are being implemented in a democratic way, this lack of transparency persists as a threat.
With the appropriation of free software by both the market and the government in Brazil, there is certainly a need to stimulate and encourage the free software community. This community is the basis for improvements in, and contributions to, free software. The mobilization of this collective will depend on the transparency of relations between those who appropriate free software and those that develops it.
Like Whitman's grass fields, Kerouac's open road, or the counterculture's personal computer, free software brings back a sense of democracy and individual freedom. Through the support of the free software community, the increasing reliability of free programs provide an outlet for an enormous dissatisfaction with control imposed by proprietary software companies.
Many controversies have developed as a result of the rise of free software relative, with the emergence of old and new allies and foes. In the "old" camp, there is the presence of the military encouraging efforts to develop a secure GNU/Linux, as well as some former administrators of the market reserve, involved in decisions surrounding technological policies and also some entrepreneurs developed under former policies. New allies include the community of free software developers, NGOs, and national and international personalities.
The future is free.
Some segments of the Brazilian free software community still fear the current policy, finding it rather opportunist and therefore not worthy of serious effort. In order to overcome those concerns, there needs to be a certain degree of transparency between the government and this community, in order to mobilize this collective to support free software both inside and outside Brazil.
In this context, a most telling episode recently occurred, involving Microsoft Brazil and ITI's President, Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, demonstrating how democracy and technology, as well as community and government, reveal themselves.
Microsoft filed a lawsuit on 15 June 2004 [14], demanding an explanation of a statement made by Amadeu in an article published on a weekly magazine. Amadeu compared Microsoft's practice of donating licenses to digital inclusion projects and city halls to "drug dealer practices," in which the gratuitousness of the first dose aims at eventual drug dependence [15]. A petition supporting Amadeu gathered more than ten thousand signatures in only three weeks. Amadeu received official support from a variety of institutions and from local and international personalities involved in the free and open source software movement. Amadeu made a brief statement:
"In special response to national and international enquiries from the press, that have been supportive with the Brazilian government in this unprecedented moment in which the president of an important public institution in this country suffers personally the action of those interested in keeping an hegemonic model, I come forward, after listening to my lawyers and federal solicitors, to say that the judicial provocation imposed against me is, by its own, so unusual and improper that it does not deserve any answer.
On the other hand, I'd like to register that the purchase of software that preserves the values of openness and freedom is, for the Brazilian government, a subject unavoidably connected to the democratic principle. And as it has been a long and painful path to reach our current democratic developmental stage in this country, we will not walk out our fight.
If democracy is a value full of ideology, it will never be an insignificant value. If democracy is a dream, it's the one dream this country will never wake up from.
The future is free."
Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, president of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação or ITI (our emphasis)
Current government policies in Brazil are linked essentially to the principles of freedom as expressed in free software, inseparable from the kind of democracy that the nation wants to establish. It remains to be seen if these policies will be successful.
About the authors
Alexandre Silva Pinheiro is a M.Sc. graduate student at the COPPE Graduate School and Research in Engineering of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Email: alesilpi [at] cos [dot] ufrj [dot] brHenrique Luiz Cukierman is Professor at the COPPE Graduate School and Research in Engineering of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Email: hcukier [at] cos [dot] ufrj [dot] br
1. See, for example, "Computer Technology and Telecommunications in Brazil," In: Information Society in Brazil Green Book, at http://www.socinfo.org.br/livro_verde/ingles/anexo_3.htm, accessed 4 November 2004.
2. Following Edwards, the expression closed world discourse would serve to describe the amalgam of practices, metaphors, techniques, fictions and technologies that supported North American Cold War politics, relating this discourse "with a hightechnology military strategy, an ideology of apocalyptic struggle, and a language of integrated systems."
3. Although very imprecise, an analogy to U.S. government would identify Dirceu as Brazil's Secretary of State.
4. "Minister Jose Dirceu affirms that Free Software is part of structural policies of the Federal Government," at http://www.softwarelivre.gov.br/noticias/declaracao/view, accessed January of 2004.
5. For example, suppliers' attempt to perpetuate a transaction, for example, through affinity programs.
6. According to Brazilian Association of Software Companies, "Repression against piracy will be increased," at http://www.dannemann.com.br/site.cfm?app=show&dsp=751&pos=1.4.2&lng=pt, accessed 13 December 2003.
7. The Federal Data Processing Service is the biggest public information technology company of Latin America. Created in 1970, in the middle of the most repressive period of a military dictatorial regime, it addresses the information technology needs of important agencies and ministries in the federal government.
8. Ambassador Samuel Guimarães Pinheiro Neto's remarks at the Information Society World Summit on 10 December 2003, at http://www.iti.br/twiki/bin/view/Main/DiscursoCupula, accessed 22 January 2003.
9. After the commitment of the federal government, the Brazil Free Software Project PSLBR (http://www. softwarelivre.org) was created as a NGO with the objective of promoting the use of free software in Brazil. The PSLBR was established following the pioneer example of PSLRS, the Design Free Software Project of Rio Grande Do Sul, and is in charge of organizing the greatest event of free software in the world: the Free Sofware International Forum. After its creation, the Free Software Project spread out to other states. Today 12 of the 27 Brazilian states have an active PSL.
10. According to Bruno Latour (2000), a translation is a mechanism that allows the enlistment of allies and the control of their behavior in the construction of facts and artifacts.
11. http://slashdot.org.
12. Curiously none were from United States, surprising sice Digital Equipment Corporation and its PDP/VAX, were the leaders of minicomputers market.
13. CAPRE Coordination of Electronic Data Processing Activities was created in 1972, and reported to the Secretary of Planning (SEPLAN). It was responsible for rationalizing the use of computers in the federal administration.
14. Two weeks before the suit was filed, Microsoft Brazil's president, Emilio Umeoka, declared to Reuters (eventually published in the New York Times) his criticism of the government's support of free software, stating that "in 10 years we will have a dominant position on an insignificant thing." See http://wwww.a42.com/node/view/419, accessed 3 November 2004.
15. One of the arguments presented by the community was based on Bill Gates' declaration about Microsoft's strategy for China: "Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade ... ." Bill Gates, address to University of Washington business school students, quoted on 20 July 1998 in Fortune. See http://p2pnet.net/story/1819, accessed 3 November 2004.
M. Callon, 1998. "An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology," In: M. Callon (editor). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell.
P.N. Edwards, 1996. The closed world: Computers and politics of discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
J. Kerouac, 1984. Pé Na Estrada. Translation of On the road by Eduardo Bueno. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
B. Latour, 2000. Ciência em ação: Como seguir cientistas e engenheiros sociedade afora. Translation by Ivone C. Benedetti, revised by Jesus Paula de Assis. São Paulo: Editora UNESP.
S. Levy, 1994. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. New York: Dell.
I. da Costa Marques, 2003. "Minicomputadores brasileiros nos anos 1970: uma reserva de mercado democrática em meio ao autoritarismo," Revista História, Ciências, SaúdeManguinhos, Roi de Janeiro, volume 10, number 2 (maioago), pp. 657681.
T. Roszak, 1988. O culto da informação. Translation of The cult of information by José Luiz Aidar. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
R.M. Stallman, 1983. "GNU initial announcement," at http://www.fsf.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html,, accessed 10 November 2004.
W. Whitman, 1982. Complete poetry and collected prose. New York: Library of America.
S. Williams, 2002. Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for free software. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates.
Editorial history
Paper received 22 September 2004; accepted 19 October 2004.
Copyright ©2004, First Monday
Copyright ©2004, by Alexandre Silva Pinheiro and Henrique Luiz Cukierman
Free software: Some Brazilian translations by Alexandre Silva Pinheiro and Henrique Luiz Cukierman
First Monday, volume 9, number 11 (November 2004),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_11/pinheiro/index.html


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- Eva B says people don't recognize her when she walks the streets of Karachi.
- "It's strange living two lives. People know me, but at the same time they don't really know me," she says.
- "The media focused on my hijab rather than me…they do it for the hype," she adds.
KARACHI: Pakistan's breakthrough rapper, Eva B, has racked up millions of views online, but wandering the maze-like streets of her Karachi neighborhood leaves her anonymous.
With her hair covered in a hijab and a veil falling below her eyes, she escapes the notice of fans and detractors alike.
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Afraid of angering her family, she would sneak into music studios to record full length tracks with the help of other up-and-coming artists in her neighborhood, under the guise of studying.
But when the news reached her brother, she received backlash from her family who considered the gender indecent for a young girl and feared she would find it difficult to marry in deeply conservative Pakistan.
"Later they realized I was quite persistent so they turned themselves in. They realized I couldn't be stopped," she said with a laugh, adding that her mum now supports her in the studio. and on the board.
Eva B's rise to fame accelerated this year when Coca-Cola's international music franchise Coke Studios – one of Pakistan's most popular TV programs – invited her to collaborate on its series 2022.
The music video for "Kana Yaari", which features Eva B rapping in a bright orange hijab about a love betrayal, has over 16 million views on YouTube.
But unlike the other performers on the show, she shunned celebrity status.
"It's strange living two lives. People know me, but at the same time they don't really know me," she said.
She finds it fun to wink at conversations in cafes or at friends' weddings when people are talking about the latest Eva B.
On rare occasions, she says people recognize her by her eyes, but she always denies her stage identity.
"I'm okay with who I am. I can't handle everyone," she says of the media and fan attention she would otherwise get.
Industry 'amazed' by hijab
Most women wear some form of hijab in Muslim-majority Pakistan, but there are very few local pop culture musical artists who are veiled.
Walking into studios for the first time, industry producers and managers have often been "astonished", she said.
"They reacted like 'what is this? ", She said. "But everything quickly became normal."
For Eva B, the hijab has always been part of her Muslim identity, but it has also defined her image as a rapper.
"These days I wear more stylish clothes for music videos so I stand out. But even then I still wear my hijab," she said, adding that she sometimes swapped the face veil for a pandemic era mask.
However, she grew tired of the conversation about the way she dresses.
"The media focused on my hijab rather than me…they do it for the hype," she said. "It's normal in my society. Don't let it be breaking news.
What she does delight her is the stream of Instagram posts from girls and women who are thrilled to see a woman in a hijab portrayed in mainstream media.
"I'm happy to inspire them…make them proud of me," she said.
But as a hijab-wearing rapper, the disapproval of not being "a good girl" is never far away, she says.
"There is nothing harmful in what I do, I openly sing songs and there is nothing wrong with that."
Straight out of Karachi
Eva B grew up in Lyari, a Karachi neighborhood haunted by gang violence and poverty for decades and once considered one of Pakistan's most dangerous areas, but which inspired a generation of artists and spawned a booming hip hop scene.
With its proximity to the sea and history of smuggling, the largely ethnic Balochi district of Karachi is notable for its history of violence and lawlessness – even by Pakistani standards.
But the worst of the violence has subsided and an increase in security has led to flourishing creativity.
The beleaguered neighborhood now clings fiercely to its reputation for producing top footballers, iron-chinned boxers and, more recently, socially conscious rappers.
"We didn't attend prestigious music schools, we learned everything by ourselves, driven by our passion. So I keep pushing Lyari forward and I'm proud of that," she said.
The rise of hip hop in Lyari reflects the genre's birth decades ago in New York's Bronx neighborhood, where it was largely centered around street performances and featured lyrics that addressed social ills and life in urban ghettos.
Eva B also talks candidly about the difficulties faced by women and the disparity of wealth in Pakistan, even the sensitive issue of local corruption.
Her favorite song, "Bayani Rog," in her native Balochi, tells the story of her development from a shy and nervous teenager to the confident and outspoken woman she is today.
"I realized that keeping quiet wouldn't work, so I better speak up," she said.


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Who will the Classic?
Everybody has an opinion, even Major League Baseball players.
ESPNOutdoors.com polled a few of those who would rather be casting for bass than running drills in spring training. In their spare time they play Fantasy Fishing, so we asked them who they think is the odds-on favorite.
Wes Helms, 3B, Philadelphia Phillies
"Steve Kennedy is going to win. I'm sorry to see there isn't anyone from my home state North Carolina in the finals, so I have to go with the guy from Auburn, Alabama, since I reside near there now."
Kyle Davies, starting pitcher, Atlanta Braves
"Terry Scroggins. He had a strong start in 2006 and then fell off a bit, so I'm expecting him to come through with a big victory early in 2007."
Brian Moehler, starting pitcher, Houston Astros
"Kevin VanDam. He's the fisherman that always goes crazy, right? I love the passion."
Kevin Barry, relief pitcher, Atlanta Braves
"Definitely Michael Ianconelli. I've got to go with Michael, because we're both from New Jersey. It's all about the local guy. Michael is going to go out there and prove that there are good fresh water fisherman from New Jersey."
McKay McBride, relief pitcher, Atlanta Braves
"Kevin VanDam. I'm going with the underdog."


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Former chancellor Kenneth Clarke today said that police had assured him that they were never investigating him for sexually abusing a boy.
A spokeswoman for the Conservative grandee contacted Exaro today following our report at the weekend about how the Old Bailey was told that South Yorkshire Police was investigating Clarke over an allegation that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy.
Read more http://exaronews.com/articles/5626/ken-clarke-police-assure-me-that-they-are-not-investigating-me


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Lovers in the Locket in Gold
*This product is not eligible for discounts or promotions*
You'll love the Zen simplicity of two moons gently touching, capturing the essence of your romance. Our Lovers in the Locket Necklace features a pair of mini-moon phase charms in a silver locket honoring two dates of powerful meaning in your life.
Maybe it's your birthday and that of your lover's, your engagement and wedding anniversary, or the first time you met — matched with the date of your first kiss. Whatever the milestones, they deserve to be celebrated and kept close to your heart.
You can wear the Lovers In The Locket Necklace around your neck or hang it on your mirror to remind yourself of your loved one every day. Style it alone, or mix and match it with other necklaces from our collection. We also love to see it paired with the Astral Dyad Cuff in Gold and the Carina Hoops in Gold.
And like the moon itself, our awe-inspiring lunar charms catch the sun rays during the day to illuminate in darkness. Witness the soft, soulful glow that quietly reminds you of your love. Select two special dates and display your cherished moon phases on your Lovers In The Locket Necklace.
- Two 10mm moon images
- Glass-centered gold-plated locket
- Locket dimensions: 1 3/8" height, 1 1/8" diameter, 1/4" thickness
- Adjustable chain
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Made With Love
30 Day Returns Policy
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"Personalized Jewelry with a cosmic touch. Moonglow offers a more subtle approach, replicating the moon phase from any date."
"Layered necklaces with a charm of the moon from the exact date and time that means most to your mom (might I suggest, the day she gave birth to you?!)."
"Finance boyfriends shopping for their astrology girlfriends, you've come to the exact right place."
Let Your Moment Glow
Like the moon itself, Moonglow lunar charms absorb light by day to glow in the dark. We're on a mission to light up the world with the moments that matter most - what's yours?
What Moment Matters Most to You?
- Birth Date
- Anniversary Date
- Baby's First
- Wedding Date
- Life Milestone
- Any Meaningful Moment
- Memorial Date
Carry Your Most Meaningful Moment
in Your Favorite Piece of Jewelry
Hand Finished with Care
Custom Engravings & Birthstones
Swarovski & Zircon Crystals
Genuine Gemstone beads
30 Days Return Policy
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Asked Questions
Will My Moon Glow?
Yes! All Moonglow moons absorb the light during the day and will glow in the dark, keeping your Moment shining bright! If your moon seems to not be glowing, hold it near a bright light and let it 'charge' back up!
Will My Moment be Engraved?
Many Moonglow Moments offer engravable options on either their pendant or a tag. Each product that offers engraving will have more information in their description on where the location of your engraving will be. Chat with us today about any questions you have about specific pieces.
What is the Blue Moon?
The New Moon is represented with a special blue moon! For any date with this phase you will receive the 'dark side of the moon' in a brilliant turquoise color.
I Want to Gift Moonglow but I Don't Know Their Date?
If you are unsure of the date for a Moment you would like to gift please consider sending a Moonglow Gift Card! Our gift card is delivered straight to their inbox with a special message from you, allowing them to find their special Moment.SHOP NOW +


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The longest, and most difficult of the ten. Mizuho no Sato Road has numerous hilly sections so this course is recommended for those looking for a challenge and sense of accomplishment.
80.8km | SEMBOKU・DAISEN・MISATO
Smaller circuit inside the Mizuho no Sato Long Ride Course. Early summer is the best time to ride, where the rare white lavender blossoms can be seen.
23.5km | MISATO
Sightseeing course overlooking beautiful Lake Tazawa. The satisfying distance between
Kakunodate Station and the lake will suit those wanting to take in the scenery over a long ride.
42.3km | SEMBOKU
Full circuit around the azure Lake Tazawa featuring stunning views, sightseeing spots, historic
ruins and satisfying hills.
34.1km | SEMBOKU
Fulfilling sightseeing course including the famous Kakunodate Samurai District.
Perfect for taking your time and breaking up the ride with walking.
38.1km | SEMBOKU
Relaxing ride through the rice fields to the ancient Heian period ruins at Hotta no Saku.
Suitable for families.
20.6km | DAISEN
A peaceful cycle through the rice fields leading into Hanabi Town, Omagari.
Good opportunity to interact with the locals.
27.9km | DAISEN・MISATO
Refreshing course following the riverbank to Kakumagawa.
Enjoy the cool breeze and be sure to bring some water with you.
26.0km | DAISEN
A ride through Rokugo, known for its plentiful springs.
There are many stylish cafes and long-established sweet shops to discover along the way.
27.2km | MISATO
This course is quiet throughout, weaving through rice fields past a tranquil shrine and
sprawling park. Recommended for beginner cyclists.
23.8km | MISATO


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Places to SkiBaker Creek Banff Bill Milne Blueberry Hill Brewster Creek Canmore Nordic Centre Cascade Valley Castle Lookout Confederation Park Golf Course Dog-friendly Elk Pass Emerald Lake Evan-Thomas Frozen thunder Goat Creek Golden Great Divide Hawkridge Healy Creek Hydroline Kananaskis Kananaskis Fire Lookout Kananaskis Village Lake Louise Lake O'Hara fire road Moraine Lake road Mt Shark Nipika Pipestone PLPP Pocaterra Races Redearth Creek Ribbon Creek Sandy McNabb Shaganappi Golf Course Skogan Pass Spray River Tyrwhitt Watridge Lake Road Wedge connector West Bragg Creek Wheeler Whiskey Jack Yoho
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Tag: Fairview
A waxless ski day at Lake Louise
Another 10 cm of fresh snow We had plans to ski the Great Divide today, but upon arrival it was buried in about 10 cm of fresh snow. That, despite being trackset just yesterday. The tracks had been skied in pretty well on Moraine Lake road(MLR) so we skied there….


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4th of July Archive
Latest Posts
[FREE Pattern] Celebrate with this Red, White and Blue Crochet Wine Bottle Cozy!
If you're looking for the perfect patriotic crochet wine bottle cozy you just found it! Put your love of country on full display with this beautiful and creative cozy that evokes the Star Spangled Banner. It's perfect for summer parties and
[FREE Pattern] These Star Spangled Crochet Bottle and Coffee Cup Cozies Are Fun & Easy Projects!
It's the Stars and Stripes Forever with these wonderful cozies! Yes, your handmade red, white and blue crochet cozies will be the hit of the party! And so fast and so easy to make, which is perfect if you're in a
[Free Pattern] Fabulous Crochet Patriotic Bunting — Fast & Easy & Perfect for 4th of July Festivities!
You can crochet this wonderful bunting that evokes the Stars and Stripes! Blazon with the red, white and blue of the American Flag makes for an awesome work of decorative crochet. Of course you don't have to wait for the 4th
Red, White and Blue Patriotic Crochet Bunting! – Free Pattern
on: by Crochet Maze
The red white and blue never looked so good! This is a perfect decoration for the Fourth of July or any time you want a patriotic theme! Truthfully, there doesn't even need to be an occasion. We can display the colors


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When you are currently employed, managing a job search comes with additional complexities. Along with having to juggle your work responsibilities, home life, and a job search, you are also faced with questions other job seekers may not have to consider. As a working professional, it is common to wonder if telling your boss you… Read more »
Posts Tagged: McComb MS Jobs
Do You Have Confidence in Your Career?
Want to be viewed as a professional worthy of respect from your peers and managers? The secret to success is developing confidence in your career. You may already have confidence in certain areas of your career now, which is a great start. But what would it mean if you had the courage to be confident… Read more »


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Knee Popping: What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? – Part 2
In the first part of our knee pain series, we explored information about some of the most common conditions that can plague knees. While the knee can sometimes be affected by age and natural wear-and-tear, in many cases, pain can be prevented. What can you do to keep your knees healthy and as far from injury as possible? Part two of our Knee Popping series has all the tips you need.
Don't let your life be hindered by your pain. Complete our FREE pain assessment today.
Simple Tips for Healthy Knees
As with most forms of injury/disease prevention, a healthy lifestyle is a must. This means proper and frequent exercise along with a balanced diet. The following are just a few tips to follow to keep your knees healthy and pain-free:
- Exercise – Regular (twice a week) workouts, such as lunges and squats with resistance bands or weights, help keep your legs and knees strong. You can give your knee the muscle support it needs simply by walking up stairs or riding on a stationary bike.
- Warm up – Working out with cold muscles and joints is a recipe for injuries. You should additionally make sure to stretch your quadriceps and hamstrings before and after a workout to stay flexible.
- Adapt to your workouts – Slowly building up your workouts to more difficult exercises can be a great way to stay strong and healthy. Remember, wearing the right shoes during your workouts is a must.
- Watch your weight – Maintaining a healthy weight will help keep excess pressure off your knees. Obesity is one of the major factors in the development of arthritis in knees.
Keep the Pain at Bay
Your mobility is the most important factor in helping you lead a healthy and active life. Let Total Pain Care keep you on your feet to enjoy everything you love to do. Our pain-management specialists are ready to evaluate the source of your pain and provide custom treatment to help you take the first step toward normality. Contact our location in New Jersey for more information today.
Category: News


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In this eSeminar we will discuss the thermo-mechanical method as it is used in the context of various types of manufacturing processes and simulations.
After introducing some technological and implementation background, we will illustrate the simulation process by means of examples, covering the process end-to-end from planning through simulation to post-processing.
Join our e-seminar to learn how additive manufacturing processes can be simulated accurately using thermo-mechanical methods. Researchers and managers will gain an overview over the simulation process, helping them to understand the technology and its potential applicability to their businesses and organizations.
Engineers, researchers and managers who are interested in learning about simulating additive manufacturing processes using thermo-mechanical method.


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Recently finished this book by Ed Smith. When he first burst on to the scene, at least in my eyes, I was rooting for him like a passionate fan in a World Cup final. That was a few years ago. He was introduced on the Telly as the man with a Double First (still need to get my head around that one) from Cambridge and a promising batting career ahead of him.
Since that day, when he scored a fitfty for England on debut, he has gone on to write books, columns and kept me and thousands of others company through many a night (oo-er) whilst England were in New Zealand last Spring time. He has all but coined the phrase "Morning Everyone, Evening Everyone back home!".
But aside from his new natural home on TMS, what of this book? Well, fresh out of Tonbridge, Cambridge and a well trodden middle class upbringing, his tutor tells him that if he ever gets a few weeks spare he should head to New York City, as nothing, simply nothing, can compare. He takes his Tutor's advice and being Ed Smith writes a book about the similarities and differences between Baseball and Cricket; whilst training with the Mets.
It is very enlightening.
But here is my favourite passage :
'….In 1858, when the landscape architects of New York's new Central Park had to name the area allocated for ball games, they came up with 'the Cricket Ground' – much to the despair of baseball's early supporters'.
I will be reading more of Ed Smith's books.