text: Review : Motorola Droid RAZR updated 09:25 am EST, Sun November 13, 2011 by MacNN Staff Motorola breaks the rules on a slim 4G Android phone. MacNN Rating: Product Manufacturer: Motorola Price: $300 (2 yrs, Verizon) The Good Incredibly slim, memorable, and tough design. Good battery life for an LTE-equipped phone. Reasonably fast, including LTE on Verizon. Good call quality. Motorola UI generally helpful; quick keyboard. Smart Actions may clinch the phone for some. Camera is fairly fast; good sound in videos. Easy-access HDMI, micro SIM, and microSDHC slots. The Bad PenTile-based AMOLED screen is fuzzy and slightly garish. Bad still photo quality; somewhat blurry video. Doesn't compare as well to Galaxy Nexus, iPhone, or peers. Android 4.0 will take months to arrive. Battery is sealed in, and can drain quickly in heavy use. Expensive. The rule of thumb for 4G Android phones in 2011 has been that they must be tanks: bulky, rounded-off devices that show exactly what sacrifice you're making to get the faster speeds. Motorola with the reborn Droid RAZR (just RAZR elsewhere in the world) not only bucks that, but has what it claims is the world's thinnest smartphone. However, it's coming into especially fierce competition with the Galaxy Nexus, Rezound, and the iPhone 4S. We'll see in our Droid RAZR review if it's competitive enough to swim with the pack. Design It's hard not to launch into a discussion of the Droid RAZR without discussing its ancestor. The 2004-era original RAZR V3 might seem relatively thick today at 0.54 inches. At the time, though, it was a minor revolution for people used to either bricks or awkwardly thick blobs, and it did so while having competent (though not groundbreaking) specs. It arguably defined phone culture for the following three years. The new RAZR might be a bar-shaped smartphone, but it certainly ups the ante for slim design. At 0.28 inches thick across most of its body, it's nearly half as deep as its predecessor, and one of the few phones to feel thin day in, day out. That's about a tenth of an inch thinner than the iPhone 4S and, depending on where you live and what your options are, at least slightly thinner than the 0.33-inch Galaxy S II. What's more distinguishing is just how little sacrifice Motorola has had to make to get that thin profile. The chassis uses a steel frame and a Kevlar back, and while we doubt the Kevlar would help it survive a bullet, it easily survived our pockets and was very solid. The screen is protected with Gorilla Glass, which should help against casual scratches. And that the phone manages to fit LTE-based 4G on the Verizon model almost appears to defy logic: at a time when most LTE phones have to add thickness just to last more than a few hours on battery, slimming down without shredding battery life is a testimony to some sincerely clever engineering. That said, holding it in the hand makes it clear how Motorola got there. The Droid RAZR is wide -- very wide. Even though Motorola's phone starts at 4.3 inches, it's wider even than the 4.5-inch HTC Vivid, which we already thought was too big. In practice, it's more bearable than it sounds, but combined with the thinness, you end up changing how you hold the phone. You can cup it, but we more often found ourselves holding it like we would a very small tablet. That actually has some advantages for typing, as you end up bracing it with your fingers in a way you couldn't with a narrower, thicker device, but it also means the phone periodically feels less stable in the hands. Another, more visually conspicuous 'cheat' is the camera hump on the back of the phone. To get the eight-megapixel camera and flash into the body without making it taller, the phone suddenly bulks up at the top by about 50 percent. As such, if you were counting on that 0.28 inches to slip the phone into very tight jeans, you'll be disappointed. It does show Motorola using a weakness to its advantage, though. Because of that bump, the phone rests on a flat surface at a slight angle and prevents accidental scuffs. A tour around the edges of the phone is generally positive. The touch-sensitive Android controls below the screen occasionally produce accidental touches, but they're well-placed for when you want to quickly back out of an app. The wake button is placed well enough that you won't accidentally put your phone to sleep. We wish the volume controls were more distinct, but they're acceptable. The thinness has somehow produced easier expansion. We liked having both a mini HDMI and micro USB connector at the top; the Galaxy S II makes you use an MHL adapter cable to get HDMI. Motorola even includes the mini-to-full HDMI cable in the box, and we found that it worked well with 1080p video. Moreover, it's much easier to get at cards that would normally require opening up the back. In part by using a micro SIM like Apple and Samsung do, all that's required to get at the SIM card and the microSDHC slot is to pop open a small door on the left side. Motorola builds an adequate 16GB of storage inside, and on Verizon, you get a 16GB microSDHC card already installed beyond this. We do wish it was contiguous space like it is on the iPhone and a handful of Android phones. There is, however, one major expansion option that isn't present that may sting for Android users: a removable battery. Taking a page from Apple's book, Motorola gets the Droid RAZR thin by sealing in the battery and eliminating the extra space needed for a battery door. That wouldn't be as much of an issue if it weren't that Verizon's model uses LTE and will drain the battery quickly under certain conditions. It's more excusable on the international RAZR, which is 3G only, but it could mean hunting down a micro USB-compatible external battery pack if you're on a long trip or need heavy data use, somewhat defeating the point of having a slim phone. The qHD Super AMOLED display Much like the Droid Bionic that came just weeks before it, the Droid RAZR has a 4.3-inch, quarter HD (540x960) screen that's suitably sharp for the size, although not as much as the 720x1280 HTC Rezound or (soon) AT&T's LG Nitro HD. In this situation, however, it's using Super AMOLED, a technology normally reserved for Samsung, to help get its record thinness instead of the Bionic's LCD. Apart from not needing the thickness of a backlight, AMOLED gives Motorola some inherent benefits, such as true blacks, ghost-free movement, and fairly vibrant colors. In using Super AMOLED and not Super AMOLED Plus, however, Motorola has also taken a significant step back in terms of absolute image quality. It's using a PenTile RGBG (red, green, blue, green) pixel layout that shares the green pixels in an interleaved pattern. What that amounts to for the eye is a visible fuzziness to the picture that diminishes its real-world sharpness, not unlike an old cathode ray tube display. While we got used to it, we'd have been willing to trade some thickness for an upgrade. The Galaxy Nexus actually uses a similar PenTile array, but because it's a much higher 720x1280 resolution, the pattern isn't as visible and hides any flaws. AMOLED gives it very good viewing angles, and it's fairly visible in most sunlight. Color uniformity at off-angles isn't its strong suit, though. Tilting the Droid RAZR slightly off-angle quickly produces a faint but noticeable greenish tint. And, as with most such screens, the colors might be vivid but are also slightly lurid from oversaturation. Some like that punched-up color, but we'd be willing to trade some contrast for accuracy. The fairly wide ratio of the display, though, is again good for typing. Motorola has managed to create one of the few Android smartphones where it's possible to type fairly quickly and instinctively without perpetually hitting the wrong keys. Some of this is owed to software, as we'll touch on soon, but it's better than some of HTC's taller but narrower screens. Android 2.3, Motorola's custom UI with Smart Actions, and Android 4.0 upgrading Android 2.3 is now a year old, so it's been well-covered by this stage. On a base level, there are some elements of interface polish, front camera support, and useful tools to manage battery and apps, but the fundamental mechanics are the same. If you like the (relative) flexibility, cloud awareness, and elements such as the notification bar and widgets, you'll still like it here. A note, though, is that iOS 5 has caught up in some respects and still has a stronger web browser and media playback, so it's a good idea to try an iPhone unless you're wedded to Android or can't live without things like the free, built-in turn-by-turn navigation. As with other Motorola phones from mid-2011 onwards, the interface has been given heavy customization in hopes of standing out. Motorola no longer calls it Blur like it used to; even so, it's often been nicknamed "Gingerblur" since it has only shown up on Android 2.3 devices. On a superficial level, it's a considerably simpler interface and skin than for earlier phones. Earlier devices had borderline intrusive visual elements and made users sign up for a special account if they wanted to tie in their social networking services. This is subtler and focused more on being useful than being arbitrarily different. The overall interface is consistent and simple to understand; we liked that the lock screen now has quick shortcuts to the camera and toggling vibrate. Apps are put into an iPhone-style horizontal page-by-page scroll list that requires a bit of work if you have many apps, but is also relatively organized and allows for groups. Some of the widgets are particularly useful, such as the pop-up options for favorite contacts and the individual toggles for Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi. Social Location is potentially quite handy for melding services like Yelp or even Match.com by letting users hunt for every place or person of interest nearby. Some of the common fallbacks of custom Android builds still show here, however. The most conspicuous is the social networking: as with virtually every OEM-made Android layer, the attempt to integrate Facebook, Twitter, and other services falls apart if you have any more than a few dozen friends on either network. The social widgets are also paradoxically split into one for just reading updates and another for updating; we're not sure why. That's somewhat true of the music and image gallery apps as well. Both are generally straightforward, but they're focused too much on visuals, such as 3D carousels, over raw functionality. Each has its convenient Internet-aware sides, though, which might suit some. The music player has built-in access to podcasts, ShoutCast radio, and DLNA media sharing on the home network, while the gallery app can show just those photos that you or your friends have posted on an online service like Facebook or Flickr. But in terms of sheer depth, you might be better off with a third-party app, or an iPhone. The keyboard goes a long way towards redeeming those weaknesses. In our experience, it's one of the best touchscreen keyboards outside of an iPhone. The keys are properly spaced and organized. Once turned on, the auto-correction is also very thoughtfully done. The keyboard generally corrects the right words with little intervention, and it gives a very easy way to manually override selections as well as remember words for later. Along with the comfort of the wider screen, the Droid RAZR encourages fast typing and can be faster than a hardware keyboard if you use auto-correct to your advantage. One single feature might be worth it for some users: Smart Actions. In a sense, it's the smartphone equivalent of a macro command, or maybe scripting like Automator in Mac OS X. At its root, it lets you build actions that always happen under certain conditions, using a list of pre-defined options. For example, you can tell it to always turn the ringer off late at night, to turn off Wi-Fi when you plug your headphones in for a run, or to launch an app when you arrive at work. At least some of the time, it's surprisingly powerful. More than anything, it's useful for speeding up those things that you know are your habits, or to make the most of your hardware. If you tend to come home from work and just want to plug back into power, or to use your phone with Google Maps Navigation and want the Car Dock app to launch in a fully optimized setting, you may have found your phone. Lest you get too enthusiastic, though, there are some definite limitations that limit its usefulness. You can't, for example, tell it to perform any actions within an app. You can tell it to start a playlist, but you can't load TuneIn Radio (or Motorola's own music app) and have it start playing a given station, for example. You can still load multiple commands into one action and stack multiple actions, so it's still quite useful. With all the relative positivity about Motorola's special work, though, we have to add a concern about the long-term relevance of the OS itself. Motorola may have unintentionally chosen the worst possible time to launch a high-end Android 2.3 device: the Droid RAZR was unveiled just hours before the Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0, instantly making the OS out of date. The company has promised an update in early 2012, but that's a few months later. With a few features like the home screen camera access already on the new Nexus and improvements over Motorola's interface like simple folders, resizable widgets, and better media apps, it's hard to wait to get all the benefits Android 4.0 will bring, especially knowing that Motorola might also delay future updates by a few months just by having to adapt its own interface and wait for carriers to approve it. Performance, MotoCast, apps, and the death of Flash Like virtually every device Motorola is launching at the end of 2011, the Droid RAZR has a dual-core, 1.2GHz TI OMAP4430 processor. For day to day, subjective experiences, it's perfectly fast, with only a small hint of Android's characteristic lag in certain transitions. On Wi-Fi, where the bottleneck is usually the processor, web page render relatively quickly, although we'll note that Android 2.3 doesn't use a second core and is noticeably slower than an iPhone 4S. Pinching and zooming, though, is unusually choppy, even relative to most other Android phones. We suspect that's a lack of software optimization, though, since the HTC Vivid is a bit more responsive with a slower processor and the Galaxy S II is much more fluid. In abstract performance terms, the TI chip shows just how little clock speed matters relative to graphics power and optimization. Although the RAZR runs at the same 1.2GHz at the Galaxy S II and Vivid, it slots neatly in between the two in terms of Quadrant Standard benchmarks: at 2,654, it's much higher than the 1,933 of HTC's device, but much lower than the 3,216 of Samsung's phone. Graphics performance is about on par with the others in Neocore, at 58 to 59 frames per second. Subjectively, we didn't have any problems with more visually demanding games like Dungeon Defenders or Wind-Up Knight. Internet performance depends on who your provider is. Only Verizon has the LTE model, and there the speeds are about as fast as on the Vivid. In good conditions, it's not out of the question to get over 20Mbps and rival your landline in raw speed, though not latency; Ookla's Speedtest app won't yet give accurate upload speeds. Speed on Rogers, which has to make do with 'just' HSPA, hovered around 5.5Mbps down and 800Kbps to 1Mbps up, which is certainly usable but not on the level of full HSPA+ or LTE. Along with the other customizations, there are a few preloaded apps. Motorola's attempt to push into the working world is in evidence with preloaded copies of Citrix Receiver (for remote access to PCs or resources), GoToMeeting for joining into live presentations, and QuickOffice for documents. We didn't much care for the rudimentary voice control app Motorola uses beyond the stock Android app -- neither comes close to Siri on the iPhone 4S -- and the carrier apps, as always, are mostly just clutter, whether you're on Verizon or Rogers. Thankfully, Motorola and the carriers have eased up on policies around removable software, and you can either hide or outright delete some of the non-essential apps. Of Motorola's contribution, the biggest is MotoCast. It's actually a heavily customized version of ZumoCast, an initially iOS-only remote media streaming service. It takes a very different approach to getting your local music than Apple's iTunes Match, Google Music, or similar: it uses your computer as the server and pipes music, photos, videos, and general documents without needing a go-between after signing in on both devices. Setting it up usually just involves plugging in to a computer over USB, getting an account, and making basic settings choices. Unusually for Motorola, it has surprisingly robust Mac support and, on both Macs and Windows PCs, can serve as a conduit for syncing content over USB from iTunes and other sources, not just the Internet sharing. Where ZumoCast required that all sharing go through its own app, MotoCast is valuable in integrating shared media into the regular apps themselves. Go into the music app, and your MotoCast songs are marked with a symbol next to those on the phone itself. The gallery and file management apps break documents, photos, and videos out into their own separate sections, but they're still inside the apps. It's transparent, as you'd hope for. Our testing did give mixed results, though, and underscore the inherent limitations of using your own computer as the host, even as it has its advantages. Music and photos load up with delay, but photo album thumbnails and whole videos take a long time to load. Collections have to sync, too, so you can't necessarily listen to a new album as soon as it's on your computer. The main concern for us is simply having to leave a computer on and largely untouched as long as MotoCast is running. It's not just that it's not a very eco-friendly move; it also makes assumptions about your daily patterns. You're not going to leave your computer on during an entire vacation, and families with a shared computer will create problems if someone else has to log in or reboot. We'd definitely rather have MotoCast than nothing, especially as it's free, but it doesn't have the ubiquity of the Apple or Google services. A related app, MotoPrint, is also on the Droid RAZR and does much the same thing for remote printing, although it too requires that you install an app on a computer, here on the same local network as a printer. As it's more generalized than Apple's AirPrint, it's more practical, although all the printing is confined to one app where Apple just requires that developers build in the support. We would be remiss to go without mentioning the bittersweet inclusion of Flash Player 11. The plugin does help fill in some holes in certain websites, most often restaurants or others that still rely on the plugin as the main content. But it's now a technological dead end: Adobe has dropped mobile Flash as of 11.1, leaving the shipping Android 2.3-based implementation found on the Droid RAZR the last significant update that will ever be released. Adobe now largely agrees with Apple and has decided that HTML5 is both more efficient and more of a truly universal standard than the proprietary code of Flash. Having Flash will give Motorola's phone a bit of an edge for compatibility, but because of Adobe's one decision, it's no longer a selling point, even if you're adamant that Flash is needed for a 'real' web. To be honest, we won't miss it much. In its final state, mobile Flash still frequently bogs down, doesn't have many touch-optimized websites to work with, and usually just ends up showing banner ads and draining the battery faster. It will be interesting to revisit the mobile web a year later and see how many pages have dropped Flash altogether. Camera app and image quality The Droid RAZR is following after a particularly sore point for Motorola in the camera department. The Droid Bionic, having just shipped in September, has one of the slowest cameras to start and shoot in the industry. It was bad enough that it gave Apple's Senior VP Phil Schiller a large bullseye during the iPhone 4S debut event, when he suggested that Droid Bionic users might "go get coffee" in between shots. Thankfully, the newer phone has fixed most of this. It's not as immediate as the iPhone 4S or the Galaxy Nexus, but launching the camera from the lock screen is considerably shorter, and the shot-to-shot performance is fairly brisk. It's fast enough that you can often shoot multiple shots quickly, even without using the multi-shot mode. The app sits in between those of Apple and Samsung in complexity. You can't set the ISO sensitivity or tune the white balance, and exposure is unusually limited to an abstracted slider, but you can tap to focus on specific points and choose scene presets that tend to favor genuinely different shooting conditions, such as macro photos. Motorola has a fairly clever implementation of a sweep panorama mode that auto-stitches photos as you pan across the scene. When it comes to actual output, though, the camera tends to fall short. Although it's eight megapixels, the rear camera is definitely not on a par with that of the iPhone 4S, Galaxy S II, or HTC's newer crop of smartphones. It can produce detailed close-ups with soft backgrounds, and it's competent for street scenes, but its color accuracy is often poor. We saw many scenes where the colors were muted and often just didn't come close to what we really saw. Flash output was acceptable and unusually uses a two-stage blip of the light that's easier on the eyes rather than the single, prolonged burst. The Droid RAZR was also susceptible to blurring in light where its peers would have kept focus and detail, and while it did do a good job of retaining some of the highlights in dark scenes, it wasn't quite as astute at picking up the right contrast levels and tended to underexpose. Autofocusing is a bit slow. The front camera was just strictly adequate for video chats, too, and despite the 1.3-megapixel sensor lost more detail than we'd expect. For a camera system that bulges out from and disrupts what's otherwise a very thin phone, we'd have hoped for more. Video does fare better, with one exception. Here, colors don't seem as affected, and it handles changes in contrast well with few compression artifacts. There's an image stabilization option, that we wish was available to still photos, to cut down on the jitter. Audio is surprisingly good, too, and through an option to use one of its two microphones for noise cancelling very clearly picked up subtleties in the environment without being overwhelmed by the bluster of a windy day. The Droid RAZR's motion response, however, is noticeably sluggish. Moderate movement triggers blur that's quite visible on a large screen, and fast movement rules it out. We'd take the video from the Droid RAZR over that on the Vivid, but it's not quite reference grade. Call quality and battery life Motorola is largely responsible for inventing the cellphone as we know it, so it was somewhat reassuring to find that the Droid RAZR has good voice quality. Sound wasn't pristine, but it was clear without being tinny, and loud without being shrill. Your experience will vary slightly depending on whether you're using CDMA (on Verizon) or GSM and HSPA (on Rogers and most everywhere else). The speaker is fairly loud and will do a decent job for an environment with a mild amount of background noise, although we wouldn't try to compete with a noisy office. For many, the real test of the phone's design will be its battery life. From the experiences of phones like the HTC Thunderbolt, an even thinner phone like the Droid RAZR should be out of battery within a few hours. The truth is that it's actually quite usable. Motorola's optimizations mean you can, in fact, get through a typical day of moderate use without the battery dying, although you'll be cutting it close. You'll want to plug in every day. Slightly disconcerting, though, is how ravenous the phone can be if you do something intensive. Heavy Internet use, such as frequent Google+ photo uploads and constant Twitter checks, can drop the battery life much faster. On LTE, it's not out of the question to run out five to six hours into the day. Those on the international RAZR can get significantly more because of the less demanding HSPA chip; we got an hour or so more. Battery drain appears to come in fits and starts, and we saw the battery drop from around 40 to 50 percent to 20 within minutes of a heavy upload. The battery, then, isn't flawless and will still raise some concerns from those who need both intensive use and long life that would want a battery swap. We're still happy that it's one of the few LTE-equipped phones that doesn't need to be recharged before you've left for home. Motorola really needs to provide an option to turn off 4G altogether, though; those who don't live in LTE coverage areas, or who only selectively need the extra speed, could claw back some extra longevity. Wrapping up In isolation, the Droid RAZR is something to be proud of for Motorola. In less than a year's time, it has gone from having no 4G phones at all to having one that appears to break the laws of physics to get LTE while still being entirely usable, even preferable, as a phone. More importantly, it has character. At a time when Android phones often risk being slight variants on the same brick-with-rounded-corners design, there's no mistaking the Droid RAZR for anything else, even while you're just holding it in your hands. It does beg the question of why Motorola soldiered on with the massively delayed Droid Bionic if it knew the Droid RAZR was coming to the same network just two months later. We don't think like some iPhone fans that having a large variety of Android devices to choose from can be too confusing, but there's variety and then there's needless differentiation. Anyone who bought a Droid Bionic in September is going to feel burnt for having picked up a thicker, slower phone, and they might remember that apparent snub when they're next eligible for phone upgrades. What knocks the phone down most is that you simply can't consider it in isolation. The elephant in the room is, unambiguously, Samsung's Galaxy Nexus. Verizon will be carrying the LTE version of the Google flagship, and it will have not just a larger and sharper screen but possibly the deadliest weapon of all: a completely stock, Google-blessed version of Android 4.0. Galaxy Nexus users won't just get the newer OS first, they'll get updates within weeks instead of months, and they'll likely get both more updates and a longer update coverage period. That might not matter as much for features, but Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and others making custom Android interfaces regularly leave their users vulnerable to security exploits that are only patched in the builds that go out to Nexus phones. There's also other phones to consider, both on and off Verizon. At the least, there's the Rezound, which has a visibly higher-resolution, clearer display as well as a better camera, albeit in a thicker body. If you're not locked into any one carrier, we'd consider the Galaxy S II Skyrocket or Galaxy S II LTE equivalent on AT&T and Rogers, respectively; they have lower-resolution screens, but they use better Super AMOLED Plus displays and should be faster while staying thin enough. And yes, there's the iPhone 4S, which is faster than the Droid RAZR, has a more attractive display, and takes dramatically better pictures, even if its being on 3G limits some of its potential. Giving a truly high rating to the Droid RAZR is difficult as a result. It's a decidedly enjoyable phone to use, but everywhere you turn, there's a feature that often two or more manufacturers have done better, especially considering the $300 contract price on Verizon. Go for Motorola's phone if you love creative yet practical ergonomic design first -- and that can be sincerely important. If you want speed, a good camera, or a top-tier screen, you're best served elsewhere.


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Value Line is regarded as the best independent research available. More than just recommendations, Value Line provides the rationale behind its picks for greater understanding.
The Pharmacy Services Industry has historically been viewed as a safe haven for investors seeking steady growth and preservation of capital. However, things have changed a bit in recent times, owing to the aging of the American population and an altered industry landscape. These stocks now have more of a growth profile than they had in the past. There is much opportunity for expansion, with billions of dollars in business up for grabs. But there is also greater competition, coming from every direction, as even non-traditional channels are looking to get in on the act. Below, we discuss an evolving industry and provide a guide as to what to consider before committing funds here.
Traditionally, this industry has been divided into two main categories: pharmacy services, which consists of pharmacy benefits managers, or PBMs, (along with clinical services providers), and large drug chains. Although both groups distribute prescription drugs to consumers, they differ in that PBMs are mail-order operations and chains sell from storefronts. The numerical arrays on the Value Line pages of companies in these groups are largely similar. However, the pages of PBMs, which are somewhat more capital intensive, list capital spending per share and depreciation, and the pages of drug chains include the number of stores and gross margin.
Lately, the dividing lines of these two categories have become less clear. For a number of years, drug chain stores have recognized an increasing threat to their business share from the PBMs. Also, the chains have eyed the attractive PBM market with particular interest. Indeed, many chains have launched their own PBMs. Pressure to stay competitive has prompted some in the industry to think outside the box and use acquisitions to gain access to a bigger scope of business.
Given the industry dynamic of assimilation, it's important to consider a company's position in the merger & acquisition arena. Cash flow and financial strength are two key indicators. Ideally, the cash flow of companies wishing to combine should be sufficient to fund existing operations and to take advantage of growth opportunities. Too, the merged capital structure should not be overburdened with debt. There must also be well-defined benefits to a union.
Deals should offer greater scale in terms of geographic market coverage and offered services. Acquisitions, if done successfully, may provide quick, economical access to new markets, some with challenging barriers to entry. Well-executed combinations can immediately add to earnings. The traditional alternative of new store development entails high start-up costs and may take a few years to pay off in net-profit growth. Either way, it is imperative that pharmacy services companies have the financial wherewithal to expand their footprint.
M&A activity will probably remain fairly intense going forward, as stockholders are pressuring companies to boost their return on investment. In the past, most have shied away from the acquisition game, but many have recently changed their tune. The inability of small entities to adequately address increased operating costs has created the opportunity for large players to step in and gain access to previously untapped markets that would otherwise be difficult or expensive to break into.
While many underperforming operators are looking to mergers as a way to boost growth, others are still relying on more traditional industry methods to strengthen their businesses. But the environment is growing more hostile for those who resist consolidation, with bidding wars over prospective takeover targets more commonplace than ever before. That said, the consolidation trend might well open some doors for small, struggling players. Industry behemoths seek the advantage of scale, though, if they stand to gain too great a presence in a certain market, antitrust regulators may call for the divestiture of some assets.
Within the business description on the Value Line page, investors will find a company's mix of pharmacy and general merchandise sales. A heavy weighting of wide-margined pharmacy business is vital to a company's well being. Pharmacy business is less sensitive to economic cycles, and a sales slowdown here could indicate a serious problem. The prescription growth rate is another noteworthy figure in measuring the health of a company, and it is gaining prominence. Demographics point to a rise in the number of Americans aged 65 and older over the next two decades. Increasingly, Baby Boomers will require medical care and pharmaceuticals, auguring well for the industry's sales and earnings prospects. The largest pharmacy services providers are best positioned to reap the coming rewards.
Pharmacy companies have to deal with significant overhead, and operating margins are relatively thin. Expense management is extremely important. Serious missteps could potentially cost a company hundreds of millions of dollars. Cost control is particularly significant when an operation is undergoing considerable expansion, which can involve many moving parts. Companies with wide operating margins obviously have more cushion for error.

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In this problem-based learning unit, students learn about the causes and impacts of urban heat islands. Numerous studies have shown how concrete pavements and buildings retain heat in cities, making cities several degrees warmer than the surrounding... (View More) countryside. Students investigate the role of cities in our climate, specifically how the urban heat island affects climate. Instructions to access NASA data are provided along with additional resources and activities. This module was developed for use in the Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) professional development courses for middle and high school teachers and is also available to teachers to adapt for general classroom use. See Related & Supplemental URLs for a demo course showing how this module is integrated into an ESSEA course for teachers. (View Less)
Materials Cost: Free per group of students
This is a activity about applying the scientific method to a design challenge. Learners will design and build a platform that will be placed on a heat source. The platform is expected to serve as an insulator for a cube of gelatin. The goal is to... (View More) keep the inside temperature of the gelatin cube as cool as possible. Materials cost will vary, depending on materials chosen by group (within budget set by the teacher). Ties are made to the Mercury MESSENGER mission. Note: the student guide starts on p. 17 of the PDF. (View Less)
Materials Cost: $1 - $5 per group of students


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Volume 18 Issue 42 | March 3 - 9, 2006
Downtown Express photos by Tequila Minsky
Action-packed parking in Soho
It was quite a first day on the job last Thursday for Soho parking lot attendant Manuel Roca, at left. When someone stole a Jeep S.U.V. that was waiting at the curb to be put into the parking lot at 81 Mercer St., Roca jumped into his own S.U.V., which was also parked on the street, and gave chase in hot pursuit. Within about six blocks, Roca cut off the stolen vehicle on Broadway on the north side of Canal St. Meanwhile, police had heard a yell for help, broadcast the car theft over their radio and quickly converged on the scene. When the suspect jumped out of the Jeep and took off on foot, a swarm of plainclothes and uniformed police were there to arrest him, above. The suspect was identified by police as Johmal Enoe, 28.
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Shanghai PPTV Grand Slam | 29 April - 4 May 2014
Lausanne, Switzerland, January 22, 2014 – The FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour will once again be the centrepiece of the international beach volleyball calendar in 2014.
From Long Beach in California to Shanghai in China and many places in between players will compete for their share of the $10.2m in prize money on offer from 10 Grand Slams, an inaugural FIVB Grand Slam Final and 10 Open tournaments. The Grand Slams conclude with the first ever FIVB Grand Slam Final, which will offer $500,000 in prize money.
Last year the men's tournament went down to the wire as Latvia's Janis Smedins and Aleksandrs Samoilovs held off the challenge of Brazil's Pedro Salgado and Bruno Schmidt at the Durban Open in December. Brazilian fans did have something to celebrate though as Talita Antunes and Taiana Lima won the women's crown after dominating all season.
It means that both sides will be pushing hard to retain their titles, while the depth of the teams chasing them grows ever deeper.
Initially nine Grand Slam events were named, but in recent weeks the total went up to the maximum of 10 when the Klagenfurt returned as a host following a year off the Tour when the Austrian venue hosted the CEV Beach Volleyball European Championships.
The lake-side resort will once again welcome the crème-de-la-crème of the beach volleyball world as the Austrian city gets set to host the ninth double-gender Beach Volleyball Grand Slam of the 2014 season from July 29 to August 3.
This year will mark the 17th time that the Lake Worthersee site has hosted a stop on the international circuit. With the exception of last season, the men's World Tour has stopped in Klagenfurt every year since 1997 and the women's since 2001. In 2001 Klagenfurt also hosted the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships and this year's tournament will make Klagenfurt the most experienced host in the World Tour's history with 16 men's and 12 women's tournament to its name.
"Beach volleyball players and fans have come to expect the best from Klagenfurt," said FIVB President Dr. Ary S. Graça F°. "I am proud to have the opportunity to now build on the previous successes of this stop on the World Tour and look forward to once again experiencing all that this excellent venue has to offer."
"We are very happy to organise the A1 Beach Volleyball Grand Slam in cooperation with the FIVB at Lake Worthersee in Klagenfurt, Carinthia again this year," said Hannes Jagerhofer of the ACTS Group, the official promoter of the event.
"The dates for the Grand Slam are hereby confirmed and official. We are sure that this year's Grand Slam will exceed all the expectations of all athletes, fans, sponsors and partners by offering an exceptional week in Carinthia."
Earlier in the month, the organisers of the Moscow Grand Slam announced a date change to June 11 to 15 so as to accommodate Klagenfurt's inclusion in the 2014 beach volleyball calendar.
Also making a return to this year's calendar is Stavanger in Norway, another popular stop on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour. The unique dockside venue, which hosted the 2009 World Championships, was last present on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour in 2011, after 13 straight seasons, but returns with a Grand Slam from June 24-29.
The ever-popular Stare Jablonki, returns as a Grand Slam after hosting the World Championships last year. The venue on the banks of Lake Mazury will now welcome beach volleyball players and fans from August 19 to 24.
Through the year there are a host of familiar cities hosting Grand Slams; Long Beach in the USA continues for a second season after a successful debut in 2013, while The Hague in the Netherlands is planning on spreading the tournament over four different cities in preparation for their hosting of the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships in 2015.
There are also Grand Slams in Fortaleza in Brazil, Berlin, Moscow and Gstaad in Switzerland before the FIVB Grand Slam Final.
The participants in the FIVB Grand Slam Final, for
which the location and dates are still to be confirmed, will be made up of the
top eight nations on the FIVB Beach Volleyball Grand Slam ranking with a
maximum quota of two teams per country, per gender. The newly conceived Grand Slam Final has yet to be assigned and the FIVB
is in negotiations with the promoters who have shown an interest in staging
this event.
Fuzhou in China, Anapa in Russia, Xiamen in China and Phuket in Thailand will once again host Open tournaments with a further five organised in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, Czech capital Prague, Parana in Argentina and Qatari capital Doha with Durban in South Africa once again bringing the season to a close in December.
The newest addition to the 2014 beach volleyball calendar, the FIVB U17 Volleyball World Championships will be held in Bahia Banderas in Mexico, providing yet another opportunity for young beach volleyball players to come to the fore and gain international experience in their sport.
Polish town Myslowice will once again do the honours of hosting the FIVB Beach Volleyball U23 World Championships while Oporto in Portugal will put its previous experience of hosting the FIVB Beach Volleyball U19 World Championships to practice yet again in 2014. Cypriot resort Larnaka will host the U21 World Championships.
The second edition of the Youth Olympic Games are set to take place from August 16 to 28, 2014 in the Chinese city of Nanjing and it will be the first time beach volleyball will be included in the sporting line-up.
2014 Beach Volleyball Calendar
08.05.2014 09:47:58
Chinese beach volleyball pair Li Jian and Chen Cheng answer fan questions
Lausanne, Switzerland, May 8, 2014 – Chinese beach volleyball fans were in for a treat this year, as the first two FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour ev... More...
04.05.2014 23:42:07
FIVB World Tour season update after two events in China
Lausanne, Switzerland, May 4, 2014 - Following two very busy and exciting weeks in China, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) has succe... More...
04.05.2014 11:47:36
Ludwig/Walkenhorst clinch first ever Grand Slam title in Shanghai
Shanghai, China, May 4, 2014 – Germany's second seeds Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst held off Chinese dark horses Wang Fan/Yue Yuan in the thrillin... More...
03.05.2014 12:31:23
Nicolai/Lupo land back-to-back World Tour title in Shanghai
03.05.2014 09:14:21
Defending champs Talita/Lima storm into Shanghai Grand Slam semis
03.05.2014 07:15:10
Walkenhorsts enjoy sunshine and Beach Volleyball in Shanghai
02.05.2014 12:52:50
Pedro/Emanuel claim full-set thriller to make Shanghai Grand Slam semis
02.05.2014 11:22:33
Home favorites Xue/Xia crash out of Shanghai Grand Slam
02.05.2014 02:49:06
Emanuel never stops love for beach volleyball
01.05.2014 12:33:11
Australian qualifiers Artacho/Laird shine at Shanghai Grand Slam
01.05.2014 08:58:13
Gibb/Patterson lead three American teams into Shanghai Grand Slam top 16
30.04.2014 11:39:35
Lucky losers Bourne/Hyden start well in Shanghai Grand Slam Main Draw
30.04.2014 09:02:19
Hermannova/Bonnerova make Shanghai Grand Slam Main Draw with upset win
29.04.2014 15:39:01
Brazil's Ricardo/Alvaro withdraw from Shanghai Grand Slam
29.04.2014 14:38:33
Juliana/Antonelli start from qualification tournament again
29.04.2014 11:10:01
Vitor/Evandro battle into Shanghai Grand Slam Main Draw
28.04.2014 20:04:11
Talking Stats: 2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour
28.04.2014 14:33:23
Vitor/Evandro lead men's qualifiers at Shanghai Grand Slam
28.04.2014 06:31:16
2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour underway in China
28.04.2014 01:15:47
2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour at FIVB Shanghai PPTV Grand Slam
03.04.2014 23:39:36
World Championships medallists lead German teams at Shanghai Grand Slam


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Public Safety at Lehman College
Lehman's Department of Public Safety supports the College's mission by helping to maintain a safe environment for its students, faculty, staff, and visitors. We aim to create a student-centered and learning-centered campus where students from all backgrounds feel welcome and able to achieve their educational goals.
- To preserve a campus environment that is conducive to the pursuit of educational goals in support of the College's mission.
- To ensure the personal safety of all College constituencies and protection of all College facilities and equipment.
- To support a campus culture that values the diverse backgrounds of all College constituencies.
- To keep abreast of emerging technologies and practices in the public safety field.
Core Values
The Department of Public Safety's core values are harmonious with the College's values, which include integrity, teamwork, dedication to excellence, leadership, service to the college community and respect for the individual. Our core values provide us with a means of not only guiding, but also evaluating our operations, our planning, and our vision for the future.
2018 Jeanne Clery Annual Security Report


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Hello Community,
I got myself a Messor barbarus colony (1 queen + 11 - 25 worker) and put them into a small box to make it easier to feed them during their beginning phase. I'm using a 3 Watts heating pad during day which I turn off during night. Every now and then I put a little bit of water on the soil to keep a certain level of humidity.
Within the last few days they keep blocking up the entrance with soil. I barely even see an entrance hole but there are workers outside every now and then. My question is if this is a normal behavior or am I doing anything wrong?
Help | Messor barbarus blocking the test tube entrance
Frequently Asked Questions About Ants
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Vintage 1960's Bespoke Light Brown Doeskin Waistcoat 38 S
By Brick Vintage From United Kingdom
|Shipping Destination
|Single Item
|Additional Items
|United Kingdom
|+ £0.00
Delivery Information
The estimated delivery time is (Mon-Fri) until the seller will dispatch the item. Actual delivery time will depend on your delivery location
Vintage 1960's bespoke doeskin waistcoat in a light brown colour. Pearl front buttons, four front pockets and satin back with adjustable back strap.
Condition: Excellent vintage condition.
Chest: 38in
Length: 25in
Brick Vintage
United Kingdom
Brick Vintage is vintage clothing and accessories business, where we hope to inspire people to create unique street style with our great selection of hand picked vintage clothing and accessories. We all know that nowadays vintage is a key look in many wardrobes, mixing up high street and vintage to create your own stylish look. We hope at Brick Vintage that we can help you achieve this.


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Banking with us
If you've only dealt with traditional banks or credit unions in the past, you may be wondering what makes Manulife Bank different. What sets us apart is our belief that how a person manages their savings and debt has a very direct impact on their long-term financial success. In other words, we believe that all Canadians should have flexible, efficient, integrated banking solutions that make their money work harder and help them to achieve their broader financial goals.
It's for this reason that most of our clients come to us through their financial advisors. An independent financial advisor can help you see the big picture – they understand your financial goals and can help you find the banking products and services that are right for you. And, most importantly, they can help you integrate your banking into a broader financial plan so that all of your financial resources are working toward the same goals.
What to expect
What is it like banking with Manulife Bank? While Manulife Bank doesn't have any physical branches, you have many convenient options for conducting transactions, such as:
- Internet and telephone banking options, including bill payments and transfers
- Convenience-fee free transactions at more than 2,300 ABMs across Canada through The EXCHANGE Network®2.
- Direct payment purchases and chequing
Our Service Centre is ready to help you over the phone if you need any assistance. And, if you work with an advisor, your advisor can provide you with ongoing advice regarding your debt management and cash flow as your needs and circumstances change.
Ready to get started?
Ask your advisor about integrating Manulife Bank products and services into your financial plan. If you don't have an advisor, we can help you find one.
If you don't have an advisor and would like to speak to someone about our integrated banking solutions, you can simply call 1-877-765-2265 to get started.
Learn more
Our thoughts on tied selling
Manulife Bank's Voluntary Codes of Conduct and Public Commitments
1Not all transaction options are available for all Manulife Bank products.
2THE EXCHANGE® and THE EXCHANGE & Design® are registered trademarks owned by Fiserv Inc., licensed for use in Canada by FICANEX Services Limited Partnership. Manulife Bank of Canada is an authorized user of the mark.
Note: When using your card outside Canada, a convenience fee may be charged when using THE EXCHANGE ABMs or when making a debit transaction at a vendor displaying the ACCEL logo.


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The coffee industry is an 80 billion dollar industry, but while consumers pay a high price for their lattes and cappuccinos, coffee farmers are paid so little that some may have to give up their coffee fields. Black Gold follows the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, Tadesse Meskela, as he travels from Ethiopia to London and Seattle fighting to save the coffee farmers he works with from bankruptcy.
From the directors:
We decided to make BLACK GOLD after it was announced at the end of 2002 that Ethiopia was facing another famine. Twenty years earlier in 1984, people across the world had been motivated to respond to this crisis by giving aid.
The difference this time was that Ethiopian coffee farmers, known for producing some of the best quality coffee in the world, were also caught up in this new food crisis. Given that the global coffee industry was booming, making record profits for the largest multi-nationals, we felt that this was a story that had to be told - a story that could expose the exploitation in the coffee industry as well as highlight that the developing world want a fairer trading system rather than aid.
We are thrilled to have Rik Kleinfeldt of New Harvest Coffee Roasters speaking after the presentation of the movie. Rik has recently returned from Honduras and Colombia on a coffee sourcing trip and will share his experiences - as well as his delicious fair trade coffee - with us.
You can have a look at the Black Gold trailer by clicking here.
Local 121 will provide a buffet of locally-sourced food for $15 as well as a cash bar. Admission to the movie is free.
The room will open at 6pm and the (quite delicious, might we add!) buffet will be served starting at 6:15pm. The movie will start at 7pm.
Please RSVP to Local 121 at 401-274-2121.
We hope to see you at Local 121 on April 29!


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Moderators: Zahru II, Natalya, RedRover
Zupponn wrote:Colette wrote:You're free to make your own map from scratch, however.
All you have to do is flatten his head.
Silverdream wrote:TL;DR Be like Scratch.
Captain-Camper wrote:tl;dr I'm just going to assume don't be like voin and be more like scratch.
The Shadowscythe wrote:
Empire of Luchardsko WIP wiki pageBrikWars 2010 Rules wrote:BrikWars ... stands in pretty direct opposition to many fundamental elements of the LEGO® philosophy, such as "Not Teaching Kids How Funny It Is to Set People on Fire."
samuelzz10 wrote:you'll fit right in here. Welcome to the forums!
Falk wrote:Instructions or pics without the armor please.
Apollyon wrote:It was about time someone put the old DSM sets to battle. That' what will happen, won't it?
Silverdream wrote:Forum battles are pretty easy to set up. All you need to make sure of is that you are portraying everything in a manner that's easy to understand.
Scratch wrote:This is incredibly badass.
BFenix wrote:This.
Yet I think you should get those classic creepy smiley heads, for ultimate nostalgia.
Zahru II wrote:'HEROIC MEAL TIME DRUNK OFF THAT YE OLDE JACK DAGNALS. HATER PREPARED TO BE MASHED LIKE TATERS, CUZ WE DON'T F*** AROUND. Ah whaddup, dwarf SAWSE.'
Bragallot wrote:BFenix wrote:This.
Yet I think you should get those classic creepy smiley heads, for ultimate nostalgia.
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< India Won't Give Snowden Asylum
Jul 03, 2013 06:38
Category: General News
Category: General News
Western Utilities Want To Make Small Nuclear Reactor
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) — A consortium of Western utilities and a nuclear reactor designer have submitted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy to build a small nuclear reactor. The proposal aims to satisfy increasing demand for carbon-free power. Energy Northwest and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems have teamed on the proposal with NuScale Power, a modular reactor designer based in Corvallis, Ore.


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Event: B-town bigwigs like SRK, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Kajol and many others were present actress Amrita Arora's sangeet party held in Mumbai.
Guest List: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Kajol, Tanisha Mukherjee, Sohail Khan, Suniel Shetty, Arjun Rampal, Dino Morea, Priyanka Chopra, Hrithik Roshan, Dia Mirza, Amrita Arora, Shakeel Ladak, Malaika Arora Khan, Arbaaz Khan, Ritesh Deshmukh, Karisma Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Lara Dutta, Zayed Khan, Sanjay Kapur, Kim Sharma, Arshad Warsi, Maria Goretti, Suzanne Roshan Khan, Karan Johar, Meher Rampal, Aditi Govitrikar, Ashish Chaudhary, Samita Bangargi, Soniya Mehra, Twinkle Khanna, Mana Shetty, Gauri Khan
Date: 05-Mar-2009
Bollywood celeb Aamir Khan along with wife Kiran Rao were spotted at PVR.
Bollywood producers-directors Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Krishan Kumar, Ravi Bahl, Divya Khosla Kumar, Sajid Nadiadwala, Wardha Nadiadwala celebrate diwali with Bhushan Kumar
Bollywood celebs Kareena Kapoor Khan, Malaika Arora, Sonali Bendre, Nimrat Kaur among others were snapped by paparazzi.Bebo looked super cool in a casual look. She wore a white t-shirt with yoga pants...
Bollywood actress Shama Sikander celebrated Diwali festival at her residence.
Bollywood celebs Aamir Khan, Zaira Wasim, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Anil Kapoor, Nitesh Tiwari, Aparshakti Khurrana, Bhushan Kumar, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Sachin Tendulkar, Rajkumar Hir...


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The Big Flunk
An interview with Anita Forte, the teacher at the center of APS' grade change scandal
We all talk the talk. We all say our kids need to learn that if they screw up—or screw off—there are going to be consequences. You don't show up. You don't do your work. You don't get a free pass, no matter who your parents are. The world outside the sanctuary of the classroom doesn't offer free passes. If we want our kids to become functioning members of society, the world inside the classroom shouldn't offer free passes, either.
Of course, stating principles and living up to them are two entirely different things. We all got a harsh lesson in the division between the two this year, courtesy of the Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) bureaucracy, which merely talked about holding students accountable, and a Rio Grande High School English teacher named Anita Forte, who demanded her kids live up to the expectations we set for them.
The new school year starts this week. We thought now might be a good time to sit down with Ms. Forte to talk about her story as well as her views on the shortcomings of our troubled educational system. First, though, let's rehash the debacle that brought us to this point.
The whole sordid story broke last May when local media began reporting that a Rio Grande High School student's grade had been changed from an F to a D so he could graduate. The change was made at the insistence of an APS administrator, Rio Grande cluster leader Elsy Fierro, over the objections of both the student's teacher, Forte, and the high school's principal, Al Sanchez. Outgoing superintendent Beth Everitt signed off on the change.
The main reason the story got so much press is because of the student's parents. His dad is former APS board member Miguel Acosta. His mother is County Commissioner Teresa Cordova, who represents the South Valley district in which Rio Grande High School resides. The teacher's union soon filed a complaint on Forte's behalf, arguing the student's parents had exerted political influence to get the grade changed.
APS Superintendent Everitt then requested that the state education department conduct an investigation into the matter. In June, that investigation concluded the student and his parents had been properly notified—on numerous occasions—that he was failing. The report also found Forte had bent over backwards to give the student special opportunities to improve his grade, and, because of this, APS never should have gone over the teacher's head to change the grade.
Almost all observers were appalled by a scenario that seemed to suggest a student's politically powerful parents had garnered him special treatment. That feeling intensified when Wally Salata, Rio Grande's head basketball coach, went on a local talk radio show. Salata claimed he and Cordova got together on two occasions for meetings in which the coach thought they would be discussing her son's questionable eligibility for the team based on his alleged misbehavior and inadequate grades. Instead, Salata says Cordova directed the conversation toward his coaching skills and implied that if her son didn't get more play time on the court, she would make sure he lost his job. Cordova denies the charge.
It's been an ugly couple of months for Forte, but she hasn't lost any of her enthusiasm for teaching. She moved to New Mexico from Illinois in 1981 when she was 16, attending Manzano High School and UNM. She's been teaching for nine years.
"I was looking into getting married and having kids," she says, "and I thought this would be the perfect job for having kids. So I tried it, and I loved it. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever done."
Forte hasn't succumbed to the burnout so often suffered by public school teachers. "We've seen lots of teachers come in, do it for two or three years, then say, 'OK, that's enough. I've got to find something else to do.'"
Her view has always been that she'll continue teaching as long as it continues to fulfill her. "I have options," she says. "I tell the kids every year: When I stop enjoying what I'm doing, I'll do something else. But it's fun, it's enjoyable, and I like the kids, and the kids like me. We have a rapport. It's good all the way around."
Although Forte still loves teaching, this ordeal has been unnerving for her, an unwelcome distraction from her job. Still, she's largely satisfied with the way things have turned out. "For me, at least," she says, "the press was very kind. I didn't really have to say anything."
Most media observers took her side from the beginning, a fact that surprised her mainly because she works at a high school that's considered underperforming. "It was shocking," she says. "It wasn't necessarily shocking to me as a teacher. It was shocking to me as a Rio Grande teacher, because people don't say very many positive things about us. My expectation would've been, 'Oh, well, it's a Rio teacher, I'm sure she must have done something wrong.'" (laughs)
That didn't happen. "When all of Albuquerque stood up," she said, "and there wasn't any mention of where this was coming from, I was very impressed. To me at least, it means that the public doesn't necessarily look down on Rio Grande."
When asked what role she believes the political clout of the two parents played in all this, Forte points out that in her meetings with the student's mom, Cordova didn't once mention she was a county commissioner. "I didn't know who she was until 10 days before graduation," says Forte. "She never threw anything in my face. She was just a parent to me, concerned with her student's education."
Yet Forte speculates the parents' political positions probably had an influence at some point in the process. "The way our society seems to work," she says, "I'm sure either her job or her husband's job as a former member of the APS board helped in some way, shape or form. But that's just me looking from the outside, assuming that's what happened."
Last week, Cordova stated that leaking her son's grade change to the media violated federal law, which requires schools to preserve the confidentiality of students' educational records. Cordova implied that teachers at Rio Grande High School leaked the information.
Forte agrees that in a better world the episode wouldn't have become a big media spectacle, but she also points out the student's name has never been used in any media reports. She says if the story hadn't gone public, the matter would have been buried and most likely ignored.
"I don't think anything would have happened if this hadn't been a big, splashy media show," she says. "My personal opinion is that nothing would have happened. It would've stopped with me and APS butting heads, because they overstepped the union contract."
Public perception of APS is at an all-time low. Years of scandals, from the six-figure contract buyout of former superintendent Brad Allison to the alcohol-related car wreck that killed lead superintendent Joseph Vigil have created a negative public perception of the school district.
Superintendent Everitt, who is leaving her position next year, has had a tough time of it, too. In addition to the grade-change fiasco, Everitt has struggled to deal with other controversies, such as a much-criticized plan to shuffle principals around the district to aid low-performing elementary and middle schools, and a scandal involving APS Police Chief Gil Lovato, who's being investigated for alleged misconduct and mismanagement. (Lovato is also suing the school district.)
"My personal opinion?" says Forte, empathizing with Everitt's plight. "APS is too big. [It's the 26th largest school district in the nation.] We're huge. How can one person take care of all that? Is it even fair that one person should have to? But then how would you split it up? From the umbrage that comes from people talking about splitting up APS, you'd think there was some kind of major surgery involved, that you might kill somebody by splitting it up."
As far as Forte can tell, teachers in the trenches aren't getting much support from that bloated bureaucracy anyway. Her school seems to deal with the bread-and-butter problems associated with educating one of the less affluent sections of the city on its own.
Simply keeping kids in class is one of the biggest obstacles. "Attendance is huge," Forte says. "If the kids don't show up, you can't teach them. Last year, I had a couple kids that had 30 or 40 absences."
Other problems are harder to pinpoint. "There are kids that are dealing with adult issues," Forte says. "One of the things I say at the beginning of my class is that if you're having a problem, and it's something you can share with me, I understand life. Life happens. So I can make allowances for you. But for the most part a lot of kids aren't interested in sharing, so unless it's really bad, they just don't. But there's anything from teenage pregnancy to they're living in a box on the street. Some of them want help, and some of them don't."
In the South Valley, poverty can be a major issue affecting students, but Forte says that doesn't explain every troubled situation. "Theoretically, that's what's going on," she says. "On the other hand, there are lots and lots of these poor kids that are coming in, and they're doing just fine."
In her opinion, the biggest problems are often associated with a lack of parental involvement. "Reading is central," Forte says. "If we could get all of the parents to get all of their kids to read somewhere between two and five hours a week, that problem would go away. It's an issue because we have kids that have to go to work right after school, or they have to go home to watch the kids so mom can go to work right after school. So money is an issue, but if you can read, you can educate yourself. If the student gets nothing more from us than the ability to read, we've handed them a working ability that they can build on."
Forte likes to share academic studies with her students that show that if you have an education you're generally going to make more money once you enter the workforce. "I do that with all my classes, not just the seniors, but it's pretty fresh for them because they're thinking of moving out. I had eight kids move out in the middle of the year last year. It was up close and personal for them. They knew exactly what I was talking about."
With just a week before school starts, Forte is still reeling from her time in the spotlight. "It took a long time for me to relax," she says, "because things were so up in the air."
That said, she's eager to get back in the classroom. "I've never met a student at Rio Grande who doesn't have the ability to do whatever I ask them to do in class. A number of students choose to do something else instead, and hence they fail my class. But I haven't had any stupid students come in. Not one. I don't think Rio Grande kids are any worse than anywhere else. I don't think they're any better than anywhere else. They're just students."


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Channing Tatum Won the Lottery
And here's how: At 18, washed out of college in West Virginia and ended up in South Beach. Worked in construction and as a perfume spritzer at Dillard's. Walked into a modeling agency and got a job with Abercrombie. Went to Hollywood. Stayed handsome. Launched a bunch of roles—two, oddly, with the name of "Duke." Is now being called the next big thing. Is not complaining
"Hey, it's Chan. I'm at the bar."
I'm not expecting a cell-phone message from Channing Tatum when I land in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sweet day in June. The plan was to hook up at his uncle Bruce's ranch, forty-five minutes from the airport, each of us arriving separately. But Chan ("Nobody calls me Channing"), being at that stage of celebrity when he doesn't mind spending time with a reporter, has taken it upon himself to redo the plans his publicist made. Even if that means sitting in the Montgomery airport, where he has flown from L.A., an extra hour until my flight gets in from New York City. "I hope it's okay that I canceled your car so you can ride with me," he says. "There's only one bar in the airport, so you should be able to find me."
That's easy. He's the only person there. Well, aside from the bartender and a lovely woman in her forties with one arm who, much to his embarrassment, has just paid for his fourth Coors Light. (It is close to five o'clock Alabama time.) "Aw, man, you shouldn't have done that," says Chan, going over to her table, where she is sitting alone with her Subway sandwich. "But, um, thanks." It's hard to tell whether she knows he's somebody or just thinks he's cute. He has her all shy and giggling, though.
His driver, from Touch of Class limo service, is waiting by the door. "This is Thomas," says Chan. Thomas, who's decked out in a pressed black suit and cap befitting the royal guard, and who speaks with a proper Scottish accent, tips his hat. "He just moved here from Scotland," says Chan, clearly impressed.
"It's quite…different," says Thomas.
Chan slouches down in the backseat of the black town car. He has an iPhone in his hand and a Kindle poking out of his bag.
What are you reading?
"I got two books on this thing," he says, "about the start and finish of the Roman Empire. I don't have to read this stuff, but I love it." (It's in preparation, he says, for a role.) He's wearing the standard young-guy-in-Hollywood uniform—ripped jeans hanging off his butt, sideways baseball hat, cotton button-down shirt—which, oddly, also turns out to be pretty close to the standard young-guy-in-rural-Alabama uniform. "You ready to get all country?" he asks.
We're headed thirty-three miles northeast, to what Chan calls his "favorite place on the planet, by far": his uncle Bruce's ranch. Three hundred acres in the middle of nowhere. Wetumpka, to be precise. It's where his mama was raised. And though his formative years were spent in Tampa, Wetumpka is what Channing Tatum calls home. He escapes here every chance he gets, and that's not bullshit. " 'Cause it's real, you know? You'll see." But first, he needs to "take a pee" and pick up a couple of six-packs for his uncle Bruce. Thomas steers the town car into a Citgo station with a minimart. While Chan is in the loo, a few truckers buying chew at the cash register size up his ride. "Good-lookin' black car sittin' there," says one. "Is that there yer limo-zeen?" says the other.
Not mine, I say. It's Channing Tatum's.
"Hmmph. We don't see a whole lotta those round here. Who'd you say that was?"
Channing Tatum. He's an actor.
Blank stares.
You ever see A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints? Or…Step Up?
Blank stares.
He's gonna be in_ G.I. Joe_ this summer.
Ah, okay, him they've heard of.
Chan comes out of the restroom, gives a wave to the truckers, and tosses a couple of six-packs of Bud into the backseat, and we take off. He rolls down the window, sticks his head out. "I love the smell of country." He turns to me. "It's just one of those really quiet places," he says, "and there's real folks here. Just, you know, real people. We're probably gonna shoot some guns when we get to Uncle Bruce's. You ever shoot before?"
A few miles later, we pull up to the ranch. It is some gorgeous country. "That's his house over there," says Chan, pointing to a log cabin in the distance. "And that used to be my nanny's house." (He means nanny as in grandmother.) "And that porch right there was, like, my childhood. And that pond was where I used to fish with my nanny, right there. We used to fish with liver as bait."
We're heading down a long gravelly dirt road. "Just pull up next to the shed," Chan tells Thomas. It's like a big open barn, a former tractor shed with an outdoor kitchen, a stone fireplace, and a stage for when the wagon trains come through and they have a little entertainment. Bruce is waiting by a smoker made from an old propane tank, where he has six chickens roasting for dinner. Aunt Dot is at the outdoor stove whipping up corn bread and peach cobbler. Twenty-four of Channing Tatum's relatives—including Denver the fireman and Dustin the professional bull rider—are due here any minute. But that's not unusual. Most of these relatives live on the ranch; the rest are a stone's throw away.
"Boy!" says Uncle Bruce, when he spots his nephew. They hug like they both just got out of prison.
"This is Uncle Bruce," Chan says proudly.
"How you doin', son?" says Bruce.
"Doin' good. How you doin', sir?"
From behind us, a noise. "Ahem." It's Thomas, who's still here. Standing at attention next to the smoker, with Chan's bags hanging from one arm and mine from the other. "Sorry, mate," says Chan, pressing some bills into Thomas's hand.
"Thank you, sir," says Thomas.
"Come on, Bruce, let's show her the house," says Chan. Bruce goes to get the Polaris, a funky little ranger that they tool around the ranch on when they're not using the four-wheeler. "We don't want the lady havin' to walk too far." On the way here, Chan had described Uncle Bruce as the rock of his life, the definition of decency. He told me how Uncle Bruce fell off his horse and broke his neck in three places ("Just like Christopher Reeve," Bruce says) but recovered enough to still do the buck dance. He's a rugged-looking 65-year-old with a white handlebar mustache, dressed in tight Levi's, a studded belt, and a Wrangler shirt with iron horse ranch, the name of his spread, embroidered on the front.
Bruce pulls the Polaris up and hops off. He tells Chan to chill for a minute. Gotta check on the chickens first.
"Aw, man," says Chan as Bruce lifts the lid off the smoker. "That smells good!"
"Darn right," says Uncle Bruce.
A few minutes later, we drive off to Uncle Bruce's cabin. "He built it himself," says Chan, "and I'm a-gonna build mine right about there." He points to a little spot under the trees. (About the thickening accent: He'd warned me that he slips into country talk within minutes of being with his family.)
"That's right," says Bruce. "We gonna build him a little cabin, right there, overlookin' the pond."
"Nothin' big," says Chan.
"Just enough for him and Jenna to come and relax, and for Jenna's folks to visit. Ride horses, four-wheelers…"
Bruce already has the plans drawn up for Chan's cabin; it's going to be part of his wedding present to his nephew. (In July, Channing is going to marry his girlfriend, Jenna Dewan, whom he met when they co-starred in Step Up.) Bruce thinks it'll be good, as he gets more and more famous, to have a place to go, away from the phonies. Where he'll always be protected. "Ain't nobody gonna mess with nobody up here," Bruce says. But these days, when Chan visits, he sleeps in Uncle Bruce's second bedroom or the bunkhouse, where there's a trough that has been refashioned into a tub. "It's bigger than the tub at the Soho Grand," Chan says.
"The who?" says Uncle Bruce.
We're on the porch of the cabin now. "You come right in and make yourself at home," Bruce says. "Don't let that buffalo scare ya."
Wait. Is that…?
"Yup, killed 'em all myself," he says, referring to the buffalo, the two bucks, and the turkey stuffed and mounted on his living room wall. "I have a motto: You don't kill anything you ain't gonna eat."
And the chickens we're having tonight?
"Oh, Dot got those at the Winn-Dixie."
"I remember when you killed your first deer up here," Uncle Bruce says to Chan. And to me: "He was wild as a buck." Chan, he means, not the deer. "He'd take off running. Three hundred acres here and he can run them all." He says he never thought Chan would go off and be a movie star—he was a restless kid with dyslexia and ADD who did lousy in school—but he's not worried about him turning into one of those Hollywood phonies. "That's all I told him when he got into this: 'Don't forget your roots, son.' "
The week before, Channing Tatum strolls into the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood in a lush Armani sweater and sunglasses. Heads turn. He's that good-looking. He's on some nutty diet to look extrabuff for a photo shoot, so he sits at the poolside restaurant and orders…a water. "I have a special meal plan that I'm on," he says. "It's pretty much just chicken and broccoli and brown rice. Four times a day. And egg whites." All this for a photo shoot? "Just to get lean. I got a job coming up, too, that I'm starting in August, that I'm starting to train for. It's called The Eagle of the Ninth. It's a Kevin Macdonald film. He did The Last King of Scotland."
He has gorgeous green eyes.
"Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you so much, ma'am," he says, as though he never heard such a thing before. "That was really sweet." Every once in a while, you meet a guy like Channing Tatum, a kid on the cusp of stardom who seems so decent, humble even, that you hope Uncle Bruce is right and that he won't turn into a jerk.
And he might not. When I ask him, for example, to tell me the story of his life, he shrugs and says, "I got crazy lucky. Like, sometimes I think I won the lottery or something." He pauses, takes a look at the crowd at the Sunset Marquis—the usual smattering of agents and celebs. (This is a guy who will later admit that his favorite restaurant is Cracker Barrel.) "At times it feels like the bottom's gonna fall out. Just 'cause I don't really know how I got here. But I just keep moving forward, and it just keeps getting better and better."
He has three movies coming out in the next eight months. He's about to marry a woman he calls, in all earnestness, "the love of my life." And the best part? He doesn't have to spritz perfume at the Tommy Hilfiger counter at Dillard's anymore—which, aside from dancing at a club in Tampa, was his last real job before making it big.
He's 29. A part Native American son of a roofer who fell through a roof, broke his back, and ended up a traveling salesman, and of a mother who never doubted him. "If it wasn't for her literally doing my homework for me, I would not have even graduated high school. Guaranteed." Ten years ago, he was an unemployed college dropout. He had been good enough at football to land a partial scholarship to Wake Forest. But shortly before freshman year started, he got called with the bad news: Though he tested high, his grades weren't good enough. So he ended up taking a scholarship at Glenville State in West Virginia. "A tiny little school," he says. "You know, small small town. I liked the people and the players and stuff, but I got there and I was like, this is not what I wanted. The reality started to sink in about, you know, doing football as a job." He lasted one year. Went home to Tampa and got a job framing houses, "pounding nails in the sun," for $7.75 an hour. Then one night, out drinking, a buddy told him that Dillard's was hiring at the perfume counter for $10 an hour. "I was like, $10 to sit in an air-conditioned place and spray cologne on a piece of paper? Yeah, I'm gonna do that."
He got fired from the perfume counter—"Actually, I quit the day they were going to fire me"—for breaking into dances in the department store. And he went to work in a Tampa club, where he actually got paid to dance. Then he quit that, too, deciding to take his shot in the land of opportunity: South Beach. His first week there, as he wandered around looking for a job, "a creepy old man" stopped him on the street and told him he could be a model. Told him he could make $1,500 a day. Told him that all he had to do was…come back to his apartment.
Chan took off in the other direction. But when he got to his dumpy rental, he thought about what the guy had said. Maybe he could be a model. The next day, he walked into a modeling agency and got hired. Soon he was doing soda commercials (Mountain Dew and Pepsi); then he got picked up as a face (and body) of Abercrombie & Fitch. Then Armani. Back in Wetumpka, no one knew what to make of this, but they were darn proud. He was making real money. But he didn't want to be a model for the rest of his life. So, of course, he moved to L.A. to be an actor.
And the next lucky thing happened: He was good at it.
But he also worked his ass off to get here. "My mom always said, 'Luck is nothing but preparation and opportunity.' " In a week, he's going to start training with a mid-martial-arts instructor for his next role (though he's already a black belt), and he'll keep reading about the Roman Empire. "I think because I've had that history of not really being great in school, I probably try to overcompensate. That's why I try to read so many books. Just so I don't feel…uneducated."
The producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who lobbied to have Tatum cast in one of his first roles (the romantic comedy She's the Man), saw the quality in him that she thinks "all our big superstars have: an unpredictableness. Like Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson. There's an unpredictableness inside that makes them mesmerizing to us, and Chan has that."
In his few years in Hollywood, Tatum has managed to star in a broad range of films, some of which (like A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) were a hit with the critics, if not the box office. Others, like Step Up and Coach Carter, were what he calls "tweeners—you know, those midlevel-budget movies that just kinda do good." But he is fully aware that the pressure is on with G.I. Joe. "This is, like, my first step out into the whole commercial realm," he says. "I hope it does okay." (But the early reviews are dismal. Even his co-star, Sienna Miller, who adores Channing, admits that, "you know, G.I. Joe, it's not going to be the best acting work we've ever done.")
Halfway through our dinner, I persuade him to eat something, so he orders a piece of chicken. "Just plain," he tells the waiter. "No seasoning, nothing." Don't worry, he assures me, "I'll eat like a real person when we get to Alabama. We're gonna have so much fun. You wanna pull out all the stops?" Um, okay. "You don't want to get on a bull, do you?" Um, sure. "You want to get on a bull?" The agent at the next table does a double take. "No, you don't want to get on a bull. You might get hurt. But we'll do it up big, and you'll see a totally different side of me. I talk different, I walk different, everything. I don't have one single bad memory to where I'm gonna take you. Not one. It was my sanctuary. I hated school, wasn't good in school, and me and my dad butted heads about that. But nothing mattered when I went home to Alabama."
He wants to tell me more, but his publicist has arrived and he needs to go get fitted for his cover shoot tomorrow. "All I had was chicken!" he tells her.
Back at the ranch, Chan is insisting I get on the back of the four-wheeler so he can drive me out to the edges of the property. "Just hold on," he instructs, wrapping my arms around his waist and tearing off through the woods. It's bloody terrifying, particularly when we end up in a muddy ditch far from the shed and he can't get the thing started up again. The sun is setting. We're stuck. My cell phone doesn't work. I'm thinking the bull might have been a better option. "We're not gonna die here," says Chan. "You gotta calm down. You never been in the country before, have you?" He pushes it out of the ditch and gets it started again. "Toldja."
Back at the shed, his family is discussing the upcoming wedding. Chan has invited every relative who is here tonight to come to Malibu in July. They are all flying out on the same commercial flight. A couple of his cousins took extra jobs to save up. Almost none of his relatives have been to L.A. before, and there is much angst over what to wear. "Wear whatever you want," says Chan. "Wear jeans if you want."
"It says cocktail attire on the invitation," says his cousin Sheryl, Bruce's daughter, who works on political campaigns in Alabama. A few other cousins have been trying on gowns, and the men are contemplating going to that place down in Montgomery that rents tudos. "Really," says Chan, "don't go renting tudos."
"I think Daddy should wear a tudo," says Sheryl.
"I ain't wearing no tudo," says Bruce. "I'm wearing my black jeans and black hat."
"Perfect," says Chan. "If Uncle Bruce don't do the stanky leg and the buck dance at my wedding, I'm gonna be pissed off."
Sheryl rolls her eyes and says to me, "I just don't want us showin' up like the Clampetts, you know? I mean, my daddy never even seen a homosexual before."
A little smile from Chan, who quickly changes the subject to bull riding. He wants me to sit down next to Dustin's buddy Sid, who made him get on his first bull. "Ask him how he lost his finger," says Chan, and Sid mimes picking his nose—a booger bit it off—and…booger jokes ensue. Everyone is laughing hysterically. As the sky goes black, the family is gathered around in a circle, in folding chairs, with Dot and Bruce sitting on the swing in the middle of the shed, rocking and holding hands. Chan takes turns bouncing various kids in his lap. Another case of Bud is pulled out of the fridge. A few of his cousins tell him they just went to the movie theater to see him in Fighting and didn't much care for all the gore. Then someone brings up politics.
"Do not say you voted for Barack Obama," says his cousin Sheryl.
"I voted for Barack Obama," says Chan.
"Don't you go saying that around here," says Sheryl. "You'll be like everybody else out there." She means in Hollywood. "Nobody around here wants to hear that you voted for O-ba-ma."
"But I did," says Chan.
"Well, then, shush," says Sheryl. "You gotta have respect for the people who live here."
"I don't care. If they don't like me because I voted for Obama, then fuck them. I like horses and I like Obama. Nothin' wrong with that."
It's getting late. Close to midnight.
Chan has promised to drive me back to my digs at the Drury Inn & Suites. "That is a beautiful hotel," says Sheryl. "It's seven stories." But Chan, who's had "a few too many beers," is worried about driving, so he asks Uncle Bruce, who's sober as a stick, to deliver me back to Montgomery.
Uncle Bruce obliges. An enormous pickup truck (the kind with six wheels) is pulled up to the shed. He and Aunt Dot get in the front seat, and Chan and I sit in the back.
"You really live in New York City?" asks Uncle Bruce as we head down the highway. "I been there." It was around 1957, he says, and he and his mama went to visit his aunt Merle. On the train. Days and days on the train. And when they arrived, "I was like, Shee-it. There were all these fellas laying on the street. I said, 'Whatcha all, dead? Are they all dead?' And somebody says, 'No, they ain't dead, they homeless.' " Aunt Dot laughs; she's heard this story before. "And I says, 'Well, then, get 'em homes!' You still got that up there in New York?"
We pull up to the Drury Inn & Suites, next to Sam's Club. Chan insists on walking me in. At the counter, he says good-bye.
"You see why I love it here, right?"
I do.
lisa depaulo is a gq correspondent.


text:
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GP — Girls Ride Day
Hello wakeskate community (emphasis on community!) Not wakeskate elite club, but community, because that is what we are and should aim to be.
Yes, I am a girl and this is the "Girl's Page," but hear me out because what I have to say affects us all – girls and guys. In all sports, wakeskating included, there are two major categories in which progression occurs: 1) Progression of the athlete as an individual and 2) evolution and advancement of the sport as a whole. And these two forms of progression feed off of each other. It seems obvious that as individual athletes become better and better, they push and expand the sport. But it works the other way around too.
As wakeskaters, we've hit a gold mine, we've discovered something that relatively few people in this world know about, which is downright one of the raddest frickin sports on the planet. The thing is, unlike gold in a gold mine, there's plenty of wakeskating to go around and the more we share our sport with other people the more we have to gain from it.
Here's an example of how it works. Let's say you take your neighbor Sally and teach her to ride, well now Sally thinks wakeskating is even cooler than MTV. So she tells Jenny and Michelle that instead of sitting inside and watching the Hills all day that she's taking them wakeskating. Next thing you know Jenny loves wakeskating so much that she dumps Bobby, the football star, and starts dating you, Mr. McShredface. Bobby realizes he's on the wrong path so he buys himself a seadoo and now he's a wakeskater too. Now look at what this has done for you.
Let's say all the girls ask their parents for their very own wakeskates that year. That money goes to the board company which grows and in turn has more money to invest in sponsoring upcoming shredders like you, the reader! Maybe Bobby buys your old board off of you and now you can go get yourself a freshy – again money invested in the industry. And maybe all four of our new shredders buy themselves a cable pass. Now the cable park has got more money to spend on building new sliders for the whole community! Not to mention you've got one more dude you know with a seadoo to ride behind and a hottie wakeskater girlfriend. Didn't that work out well?
Do you catch my drift? We all have more to gain by expanding our sport and getting more people involved. Not just because it brings more money into the sport, but also new ideas, new styles, and it diversifies and expands the competition forcing the sport to progress. That being said, women are a huge part of the population on this earth. In fact there are well over 3 billion of us. That's a huge pool of potential wakeskaters. Why not tap that?
So here's what I propose we do: Institute a Girl's Ride Day. Whether it be once a week or once a month, organize the female riders in your area to get together on a regular basis and ride. You can do it on a boat or at your local cable park. For instance in Orlando we are starting a weekly girls ride day at OWC. Every Monday from 4 until closing we are getting all the girl shredders to meet up and ride cable together. Riding together is important because you can feed off of each other's imaginations and skill to learn and improve. And guys- help us out here! If you have a boat, institute your own GRD and bring all the ladies out on your boat to catch a ride (what a great excuse to spend a day — just you and a boatload of girls!) Or come out to the cable and give us some pointers. I know I appreciate any advice I can get! As we enter the new year, let's bring in a new era for wakeskating, an era of progression and growth, both as individuals and as a community.


text: Please consider attending this great event: The American Solar Energy Society (ASES) will hold its 19th annual National Solar Tour, across the country on October 4-5, 2014. Homeowners and businesses in neighborhoods across the country opened their doors and to show what they've done to slash utility bills and help cut pollution from electric generating plants. The ASES National Solar Tour is the largest grassroots solar event in the nation, involving about 150,000 participants and 5,000 solar-energy sites nationwide. It offers the opportunity to informally tour innovative green homes and buildings, and see how solar energy can be used efficiently. The tour hopes to inspire people across the nation to make sustainable energy choices that reduce costs, support energy independence, protect against power outages, and reduce carbon emissions. This is a chance to see affordable and practical technologies, in your neighborhood, that benefit the environment and are part of the solution to our nation's energy problems. If you are considering solar energy, please consider visiting a business or resident participating in the National Solar Tour to learn more. If you're a tour organizer, or would like to be, or have a high-efficiency home or business you'd like to showcase — then mark your calendar now for the first weekend of October. That's when thousands of people will open their homes and offices across the country, to show their neighbors what distributed power and efficient design can do to reduce utility bills and clean up the Earth's atmosphere. This event is coordinated nationally by the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society in collaboration with dozens of outstanding partner organizations. It takes place annually during the first Saturday in October in conjunction with National Energy Awareness Month. The 19th National Solar Tour | American Solar Energy Society