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Honda has taken the bull by the horns after lukewarm reviews of its Honda Civic last year and gone back to the drawing board for a redesign.
It's rare for an automaker to remake a bread-and-butter model just a year after the current generation model hits the road, let alone admit it could have done better. The irony is the 2012 Civic has sold well, posting a 39 percent gain from January-October from the same period a year ago, outselling the hot-selling Hyundai Elantra and the Toyota Corolla, Chevrolet Cruze and Ford Focus.
Consumer Reports failed to recommend the 2012 Civic citing its lower quality interior, choppy ride, long stopping distances and high road noise. Critics said the compact looked dated and had lost the motoring spirit of earlier Civics.
"Our customers frankly had higher expectations of us," John Mendel, American Honda's executive vice president, said of the ninth-generation Civic.
The 2013 Civic has a new domed hood, a more aggressive bumper and sporty mesh grill, polished alloy bent spoke wheel covers, chrome accents and clear tail lights integrated into the trunk lid.
"It appears they heard the criticism about the current model being too 'safe' in styling. The new one will be competitive in what is now a very crowded segment," TrueCar Inc. analyst Jesse Toprak told the Los Angeles Times.
The public will get a chance to judge whether the 2013 Civic addresses the criticisms when the car is introduced at the Los Angeles Auto Show Thursday.
"We underestimated the level of competition. We greatly underestimated the expectations of customers," Mendel said.
Honda said the new Civic would improve safety, comfort and chassis components but made no announcement of engine or transmission updates. The freshened Civic is one of 49 new vehicles scheduled to debut in LA, including General Motors' all-electric Chevrolet Spark EV and the all-electric Fiat 500e from Chrysler.
Germany's Audi will show four new diesel models that share a 3-litre turbocharged V-6 and Jaguar, owned by India's Tata Motors Ltd., is showing its exclusive 2014 XFR-S high-performance sedan, which may feature a variant of a 550-horsepower supercharged V-8 capable of storming from 0 to 60 mph in less than 4.2 seconds.
EPA: Corn-ethanol mandate stands
This year's corn crop may have been reduced by the summer drought, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the damage wasn't enough to lift the mandate for ethanol in gasoline.
U.S. grain farmers support keeping the requirement for use of corn-based ethanol in motor fuel, but poultry and livestock producers wanted the mandate relaxed so prices for animal feed, and ultimately supermarket prices, would fall. The Detroit News said the ethanol issue is likely to end up in Congress next year.
Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Utah and Wyoming had requested a waiver from corn-ethanol requirements.
"We recognize that this year's drought has created hardship in some sectors of the economy, particularly for livestock producers," said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. "But our extensive analysis makes it clear that congressional requirements for a waiver have not been met and that waiving the RFS [Renewable Fuel Standard] will have little, if any, impact."
In 2007, the federal government required use of 5 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in fuels. This year the standard requires use of 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol in fuels which would take about half of the drought-shrunken corn crop to produce.
The 2012 corn harvest could be as much as 1 billion bushels smaller than in 2011.
"If the worst U.S. drought in more than 50 years and skyrocketing food prices are not enough to make EPA act, it falls to Congress to provide relief from our senseless federal support for corn ethanol," Friends of the Earth biofuels policy campaigner Michal Rosenoer said. "Congress needs to cut corn ethanol from the RFS entirely to protect the economy and the environment from this destructive and dirty fuel."
The EPA has approved use of a fuel called E-15 which is 15 percent ethanol despite opposition from carmakers who warn the higher blend of ethanol could harm the engines of vehicles made before 2012.
Good things in small packages?
Ford Motor has introduced a 3-cylinder EcoBoost engine whose block can fit in your carry-on luggage.
A 1.0-liter version of the tiny turbocharged powerplant debuted in European versions of the Ford Focus in March and will be available in the 2014 Ford Fiesta in the United States.
The 1.0-liter engine kicks out 123-horsepower and 148 pound-feet of torque, which should give the subcompact a hybrid-like 40-plus mpg on the highway. The EcoBoost engine is a $995 option in most Ford vehicles.
"Our customers would like the fuel efficiency of a modern diesel or a hybrid, but can't stretch their budgets to cover the cost premium," Joe Bakaj, vice president of Ford's Powertrain Engineering, said in a statement. "That's where the EcoBoost Fiesta fits in. It will offer a highly fuel-efficient alternative at a lower cost."
Bakaj said most drivers won't even think about the number of cylinders under the hood when they drive an EcoBoost Fiesta.
Only one 3-cylinder car is currently sold in the United States.
The two-seater Smart ForTwo, with a 70-horsepower, 1.0-liter engine, gets 39 mpg in highway driving.
GE buying 2,000 Ford C-MAX Energi hybrids
General Electric last week announced it would purchase 2,000 Ford C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrids as part of its effort to convert half of its global fleet to green vehicles.
With a 108MPGe [miles per gallon equivalent] rating , the C-MAX Energi is the most fuel-efficient vehicle sold in the United States and can go 620 miles on a single charge and tank of gasoline.
The C-MAX Energi is rated at 47 mpg in both city and highway driving. Depending on how hard the car is driven, it can go 21 miles on a full battery charge before its gasoline engine kicks on compared to six continuous miles on electricity for the plug-in Toyota Prius in EPA testing.
The C-MAX Energi can reach 82 mph on electricity alone.
"Ford is launching six new electrified vehicles -- a big bet that fuel prices will continue rising and lead to more demand for advanced fuel-efficient vehicles," said Ken Czubay, Ford vice president U.S. Marketing, Sales and Service. "We are pleased to partner with GE, a company that is charting a similar course, to promote advanced technology and energy savings."
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are collaborating with Ford and GE to study the driving and charging habits of employees with data from the MyFord Mobile app.
"Understanding driving and charging habits is key to advancing vehicle and charging infrastructure," said Georgia Tech professor Bert Bras in a release. "Through access to vehicle data, we can accelerate research and development of new technologies to further improve efficiency, driver satisfaction and environmental benefits."


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About eoPortal
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By giving access to a large variety of information and services, eoPortal aims to provide a single access point for Earth Observation information, resources and services including:
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Simply use the "Share Your News" form below; your item will be reviewed and, where necessary, you may be contacted by a member of the eoPortal Editorial Team.

subset: commoncrawl


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E-Bill at BCC
E-Bill is an online presentation of your Bristol Community College billing statement that uses a web-based format to provide secure access your bill. E-Bill is the official means of generating student account statements to all Bristol Community College students. It replaces the printed billing method; paper bills will no longer be printed for enrolled students.
Key Improvements Over Paper Bills
- Faster Turnaround: Once your bill is generated, you can view it, review it, and pay it online. This eliminates mailing wait time, late, or missed payment.
- Authorize Payers: This feature allows the student to give parents, family, or anyone they choose access to their billing statement. There is no limit to the number of authorized payers you can have.
- Greener: E-Bill will significantly reduce costly postage, printing, and personnel services.
- Convenience: Access your bill from anywhere, anytime.
View Your Own E-Bill
- Click here to log in to accessBCC
- Current Student: Sign in with your user name and password
- New Students: Set up your accessBCC account using your student ID number, then sign into your account.
- Click on Student Services Tab
- Click on view e-bill
- Select Click here now to Continue…
- Click on View Accounts
- Account Status shows your account in real time.
- Select Current Statement to view your current E-Bill
- To print bill - click View PDF
Authorize Payer Access E-Bill
Using your personal access information that was sent from the Information Technology Department, visit QuikPAY and log in with your user name and password. To access the E-Bill statement:
- Click on View Accounts on the left column
- Drop down box on the right, Account Actions
- Select Current Statement to view E-Bill
Please note that the student is responsible for checking their latest E-Bill and ensuring that it is paid on or before the due date. Student whose parents or guardians do not have access to e-mail or need to furnish a copy of their bill to a third-party are responsible for printing a copy of the bill and providing it to their parents/guardians or third-party.


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Critical Care Transport Nurse
|Sacramento Division---Sacramento Station
|Job Code:
|# of Openings:
Job Title: Critical Care Transport Nurse
Title: Critical Care Transport – Registered Nurse
Department: Critical Care Transport – Field Operations
Hours/Shifts: Nurses will be scheduled for time on call and may be dispatched for calls any time within their scheduled shift.
Requirements: Registered Nurse Card, ACLS Card (Advanced Cardiac Life Support Certification), Current CPR (Cardio- Pulmonary Resuscitation) Certification, Current California Drivers License, 2-4 years critical care experience (can be any combination of ER, ICU, or Cardiac Catheterization Lab)
Tasks: Critical Care Transport for geriatric, adult, and pediatric patients within the scope of practice for registered nurses. The scope of practice for the CCT-RN is based on nursing standards of practice. Additionally, all RN's are required to follow all standing transport orders as well as orders by the transferring medical doctor (MD). The scope of practice includes, but is not limited to: patient assessment, coordination of care, proper and legal medical documentation, starting and maintaining IV's, ACLS medications, code situations, vital signs and EKG interpretation, medication therapies listed in standing orders, ventilation therapy
Are you a returning applicant?
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So....... Most of us know about the issues that some have had with their instrument cluster going dead. Some have had it happen while riding while others have had it happen after changing the battery, pulling the dash, etc...... My cluster recently took a crap on me after pulling it just to do a headlight bulb change. I pulled the connectors, changed the bulb, and the dash never came back on after I plugged it back in with the exception of the oil pressure, kickstand, and neutral lights. Every other function, including the backlights, were dead as hell. No speedo, no tach, no readouts at all. Incidentally, my dash was replaced under warranty while the original owner had it.........
Anyways, since I head up a rather large electronics repair facility and have dealt with electronics for over 20 years, I figured that I would be better off taking a look to see if I could figure out WTF was wrong. I mean, what's the worse that could happen? I guess I could screw up something that was already broke....... Screw it, I'm going in!
Before I go any further, I have to add an additional thanks to CapoGrandad, another Aprilia owner with the knowledge to check it out, and Joe, a guy that works for me. Without these two guy's assistance, I would not have gotten this solved as fast as I did!
Here we go!
Pulling the dash itself is easy: Remove the fluse cover, dash side panels, you know, those ones that fill in the space around the fairings and dash, and two bolts hold the cluster in place. Once those bolts are removed, it is easiest to move the panel to the right for access to the two connectors on the back. Remove those connectors and pull the dash out.
Pulling the dash apart is not too bad either...... There are retainer tabs around the perimeter of the housing that you can easily unclip and pull the two housing halves apart. From there, it gets a bit more difficult. I found that I could NOT get the speedo and tach needles off the drive pins. I pulled them about as hard as I dared, but they would not come off, so I ended up using an exacto knife to carefully cut them off. This is required in order to gain access to the actual circuit board. A couple other guys have said they had no problems pulling the needles off, but mine were stuck on there good! Once you either pry the needles off, or cut them off, you can carefully pull the retainer tabs away from the board housing to release the circuit board and get to the goodies!
Here is a pic of the whole circuit board. I never took any pics of the board before doing any repairs, so try to ignore those wires up towards the top right now. We'll get to those soon enough......
Next we have a couple pics of the connector pin out diagrams.......
Wiring harness side.........
Cluster side.........
I should note that once you have the circuit board out and if you have access to a multimeter, you can hook it back up to the bike for some additional tests. I used a power supply for my tests, but you CAN do it on the bike with the key on. The biggest thing you need to look for is applied voltage to a couple different places. With the multimeter connected to ground, you can check to ensure that you are getting voltage to the board by checking the 12V+ locations on the connector, then check at the bottom side of the zener diode where you should see 12V, and finally, on pin 19 on the IC chip. At all locations you should see 12VDC. If you have 12VDC at the Zener Diode, but not at the IC chip, then the fault is more than likely a bad solder connection under the large capacitor. You can check this as well by check for voltage on the back side of the board where the capacitor is soldered on. Check from ground to the bottom solder joint for the capacitor and you should see 12vdc. (It goes without saying that these tests need to be done with the key ON!)What is happening is that the top side of the feed through does not have any solder on the feed paths on the top of the board. This is causing the capacitor to loose the connection to the output of the Zener Diode so the IC chip that is the voltage regulator is not receiving any power.
In this pic, it shows the Capaciter (marked) and Zener Diode. (To the right of the capacitor.) The Zener Diode test point is the lower solder joint on the diode.
This next pic shows the back side of the board where the capacitor is soldered. The lower solder joint is your test point.
Once you determine that this is your problem, there are three ways to fix it, one which works, but bypasses the capacitor (Not recommended), one does not require removal of the capacitor, and one that is the technically "correct" way to fix it.
1: You can run bypass wires from the Zener Diode to Pin 19 on the IC chip.
This pic shows the wires going from the Zener Diode to both the IC chip, Pin 19, and the capacitor. I took the cap out for this pic to show things a bit more clear:
2: You can run a feed wire from the Zener Diode to the back side of the board to the lower solder point of the capacitor. This eliminates the need to pull the capacitor and works just as well. THIS IS THE METHOD I USE WHEN I REPAIR THESE DASHES.
This one shows the Zener Diode soldering point:
And the back side soldering point for the wire:
3: You can pull the capacitor (being careful to note which pin is in which hole) apply solder to the mounting pad, and then replace the capacitor and then check your voltages again. I did this the first time I repaired mine, and it quit again a few thousand miles down the road.... This is when I went back to solution #2
This pic shows the clean mounting pads on the upper side of the board which is the cause of this problem to begin with. To fix, use a soldering iron to apply solder to these pads before reinstalling the capacitor:
Here is a microscope view of the capacitor mounting pads. You can easily see that there is NO solder to make a connection:
This is a pic of the micro miniture soldering station I used for these repairs, but you can do it with a low heat soldering iron without too much trouble.
I checked all three methods and they ALL work, but the easiest and fastest is #2.
Once you are getting lights on the board again, you can put everything back together and keep on rocking! For those that have to cut their needles off, I used JB Kwik Weld after making sure I had everything oriented right and it works with no problems!
DISCLAIMER! This may NOT fix your cluster. You may have other issues or you may screw it up worse! If you want, you can send them to me and I can fix it, or, armed with this thread and pics, get someone else to fix it, but play at your own risk here!


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When we were decorating for our baby girl's nursery, my wife and I kicked around the idea of having a mural painted in the baby's room. But one of our reservations was that a mural would be permanent and may not be appropriate as our child grew into a toddler. We also got busy with other family projects and eventually dropped the mural idea.
Since the idea of "the next child" has gotten a little more positive reception in the household lately, I started casually looking into unique art for the next possible nursery-to-be. I found that some really great art can be printed on a removable surface for a great looking design at a much lower cost (and permanence!) than painted murals.
One company I discovered that has a nice assortment of removable, printed art is imaginativemurals.com. They offer a variety of murals for the home but I was especially drawn to the Focal Points ™ designs that are printed on adhesive-backed wallpaper. The Castle Windows mural is an imaginative design for a girl nursery and the Mediterranean Villas design was another personal favorite that would look nice in any nursery.
There are also many different sizes, themes and price ranges available on their website. I will definitely consider their art when I get ready to design the next nursery.


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SanDisk Cards Recognized For Speed, Performance and Versatility
NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 18, 2007- SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today announced that the SanDisk 16-gigabyte1 Extreme® III CompactFlash® card has won an Editor's Choice Award from American Photo magazine. This is one of the photographic publishing industry's most authoritative honors, with judging criteria based on quality and performance. The announcement was made during PhotoPlus 2007 International Conference & Expo, where SanDisk is exhibiting through Saturday in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
"Each year, the editors of American PHOTO select from hundreds of new products for photographers," said Jeffrey Roberts, publisher of American Photo. "Only a handful of products pass the key selection requirement that it make a significant improvement in the lives and workflow of photographers who will use these products."
In explaining the products selected, the magazine wrote of the SanDisk Extreme III 16GB card: "Unlike competitors, it's a tough-as-nails professional version with 'extreme' temperature and shock specifications identical to its 8GB predecessor - and despite its doubled capacity, no reduction in the previous 20MB/second data transfer speed."
"Winning an Editor's Choice award is immensely satisfying," said Tanya Chuang, SanDisk's director of retail product marketing for global imaging. "We believe that the speed and performance of the SanDisk Extreme III card are second to none and we are pleased to have this confirmed by such a highly-regarded publication. Earning this award is a testament to the commitment and dedication we have made to our customers to offer the best possible storage card products for digital photographers worldwide."
The SanDisk Extreme III 16-gigabyte card is ideal for professional photographers who shoot RAW or high-resolution JPG files and need the performance, reliability and capacity to capture these large files. The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards can also be used with the Grass Valley™ Infinity Series Digital Media Camcorder, the first camcorder introduced in the broadcast industry that uses non-proprietary, removable, solid-state flash memory cards as recording and playback media. The card has minimum write and read speeds of 20 megabytes per second (MB/sec.) 2
SanDisk is the original inventor of flash storage cards and is the world's largest supplier of flash data storage card products using its patented, high-density flash memory and controller technology. SanDisk is headquartered in Milpitas, California, and has operations worldwide, with more than half its sales outside the U.S.
SanDisk's web site/home page address: http://www.sandisk.com
Images of SanDisk products are available at http://www.sandisk.com/Products/ProductInfo.aspx?ID=2207
SanDisk, the SanDisk logo, CompactFlash and SanDisk Extreme are trademarks of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective holder(s).
1 1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes. 1 megabyte (MB) = 1 million bytes.
2 Performance based on SanDisk internal testing; performance may be lower depending upon host device.
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for new product introductions, specifications, applications, markets, customer acceptance and customers that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others: these products may not perform as expected, these products may not be available when expected and the other risks detailed from time-to-time under the caption "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We do not intend to update the information contained in this press release.
|SanDisk Corporation
|Ken Castle


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Cdric Andrieux
Jrme Bel strikes again with a new portrait of a dancer.
Tue Sep 7 2010
It was a heart-sinking moment when Cdric Andrieux—a beloved member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—left in 2007 to join the Lyon Opra Ballet in his native France. On September 18 and 19, the dancer returns to New York as a solo artist in Cdric Andrieux, an intimate look at his career by the stellar French choreographer Jrme Bel. The engagement, presented at the Joyce Theater as part of the Crossing the Line festival, features Andrieux talking and dancing his way through his own history. Speaking from Lyon, where he still lives, he fleshed out the details of the project without, of course, giving it all away.
How is this show going?
It's so good. It's a really killer show to do. We were just in Vienna for ImPulsTanz. It's not like it's a premiere, but every time before the show, I get very anxious. Usually around 1:30 or 2pm, I start to be not a very happy camper because I'm nervous. Before the show in Vienna, I was like, God—you have to find a way to enjoy this. You have to be more relaxed. After the show I realized why I'm so nervous. It's not nervousness anymore about how people are going to react to it; it's just getting through it because it's just a hard show. It's an hour and 20 minutes with no break. But it's amazing to do. It's an amazing experience.
How did you meet Jrme Bel?
I met him in Lyon at the Opra. We were doing [Bel's] The show must go on. I think it was one of the first things that I did there. I had seen it when it premiered in Paris, probably ten years ago and I was surprised—I was happy to do this piece, but we're working for three weeks. What are we going to do for three weeks? There isn't much to it. Actually, it ended up being fascinating—to hear him talk about all the ideas behind the piece and just to hear his particular take on dance and on us as a ballet company doing contemporary work. We didn't have a personal relationship, then I ran into him by accident. I think he knew I had been with Cunningham, but we hadn't had that conversation. Merce Cunningham, Trisha [Brown], Pina [Bausch]—they were the people who were very important to him when he was a dancer before he started making work. I think the interest came from that, and it was just a succession of random things. We started talking through e-mails, and we started talking about Cunningham through e-mails. He asked me if I would be interested in just working. We weren't talking performances yet. He had warned me that he had tried this with a bunch of people, and it doesn't necessarily work.
What did you talk about?
It was basically two years of conversations. It was very playful in a way, and it was just telling stories. Pretty soon he started asking me to put it all in writing. For two years, I was writing about my life as a dancer from before Merce to after Merce, and we had pages. There were things he was interested in and things that he wasn't and things that he pushed me to investigate a little bit. Why am I a dancer? Why did I choose dance? Basic questions that were surprisingly hard for me to answer. Of course, there are a lot of things I can't tell you because I talk about them in the show. [Laughs]
Understood. When did you start dancing?
I was 12 and I started with improv and composition in a school of contemporary dance in Brest, which is in Brittany; it was in a very small school. It wasn't even a conservatory, but the teacher I had was very interesting. I started in 1989 and the '80s in France had been very important for dance—a lot of people were making work and the government was starting to give money to culture. My teacher was very aware of what was going on and of Pina Bausch and of Merce Cunningham, so I started in that mentality of finding your own voice through movement. I had very little technical training, which is ironic at this point because now I have very little improvisation skills and much more technical training. Then I went to the national conservatory [Conservatoire National Suprieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris] and spent four years and gained much more confidence as far as technique was concerned. I was doing ballet, which at first I was really bad at.
Why were you bad at it?
Okay. [Pauses apologetically] I keep on editing myself as I think through this because, like I said, I talk about it in the solo. But I was just not a natural at all. I was not flexible. And I came to the conservatory at 16 and the people in my class were rejects from the Paris Opra. Ballet was something that they knew very much, and I was totally new to that vocabulary. I didn't really know how to do a pas de bourre or very simple things. I had to make up really fast for all that, which I think started my obsession with technical dance. Being a good dancer technically.
Why was or is that important?
I think was would be the proper tense at this point. [Laughs] It had to do with recognition, with feeling accepted in the dancer's circle. When I first started at the conservatory, I felt very much like an outcast. I was coming from a very different background. I just wanted to fit in as much as possible, and I think that's why I went onto that path that I've been on for a while now. And I say "was" because now I am trying to break out of it a little bit and to try to make my body unlearn all those things that I've done for so long. Then I was offered a job with Jennifer Muller.
Wow. I didn't remember that about your career.
How did she find you?
The national conservatory had done a couple of her pieces. It was a little jazzy, a little show-offy. Very different from what we would see in France at that time. Jazz-influenced dancing was more for music videos. She asked if I would be interested to join and I said yes, and I went to New York and I did a year with her. I learned quite a lot about partnering skills and phrasing and movement. She was a very good teacher, very demanding, but I felt like I wanted to do other things. This wasn't really the place where I wanted to do my career.
How familiar were with you with the Cunningham technique?
I had had Cunningham training at the conservatory with Susan Alexander. So I was in New York. I was like, You've been here for a year. What are your choices? I've traveled all this way and somehow started a new life here. Which was difficult at first because New York was not at all a dream of mine. I didn't particularly want to dance in the United States, and I'd never been there before I moved to join her company. It wasn't like some of my friends who had dreams to move to New York City. I had not that many dreams about New York City, which is also ironic because a lot of crazy dreams came true there. [Laughs] I was like, What can I do here? There was also something very different for me coming from France—the status of being a dancer in New York in the United States. In France, it was very much a profession and you could earn your living through that. Rehearsals were always paid and when I moved to the United States, I was dancing for—it wasn't a huge company, but she was known. I had to be a waiter and all these things that were very weird to me. Retrospectively, it was great because it was very humbling and it exposed me to other things, but I was like, If I'm staying here, I have to feel like dancing is my profession, and I don't have to do other things on the side. I looked at the companies that could offer that and Merce Cunningham was one of them. I kind of felt like I could fit in because I knew that he liked tall dancers and I went to the studio and I also knew they were looking for men. I went to the studio and they offered me to be an apprentice.
Did you audition?
Yes. They were doing an audition for men. Thirty or 40 guys came and they kept Koji [Mizuta] and me. Koji was to replace Jared Philips. They also knew that Tom Caley and Glen Rumsey were on their way out, so they kept me under their wing for that, to replace one of them. It was fairly quick. It doesn't feel like it's going quick when you go through it [Laughs]. And then I spent eight years in the company.
Apart from knowing that you wanted to be in a place where you wouldn't have to wait tables, what drew you to Cunningham's work? Is that difficult to answer because of the show?
[Pauses] Every time you hear a little bit of the silence I think that's what it will mean. [Laughs] I can say that I didn't know very much about Merce's work and what convinced me that I wanted to dance for the company was seeing an Event at Lincoln Center in August 1998. I felt like it could be a very interesting place for me to be in.
Next

See more in Dance


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CHICAGO -- As President Barack Obama and fellow NATO leaders herald the coming end of the deeply unpopular Afghanistan war, they face the grim reality of two more years of fighting ahead and more of their troops sure to die in combat.
The many partners in the fighting coalition will gather Monday in Obama's hometown to reassert their commitment to ending the war in 2014 and solidify another milestone for next year, when Afghan forces take the lead in combat missions while NATO assumes a supporting role.
So far in the two-day NATO conference, the leaders have voiced hope that a decade of war in Afghanistan will give way to a decade of transition to peace and stability, aided by the U.S. and its allies.
But hard realities intrude.
Some NATO countries, most recently France, have sought to end their combat commitments early. The Taliban and its allies have warned that they are waiting to fill the void in Afghanistan after NATO leaves. And with alliance forces -- the bulk of which are American -- still committed to many more months of fighting, the sacrifices are far from over.
Obama is eager to show election-year leadership on the world stage, and he sought to straddle the line on the war before NATO's formal embrace Monday of a plan to put Afghan forces in control of security next summer and have NATO back them up.
Following a meeting Sunday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Obama said NATO's drawdown plans mean that by 2014, "the Afghan war as we understand it is over." But he acknowledged enormous progress must be made for that vision to become a reality.
"We still have a lot of work to do, and there will be great challenges ahead," Obama said after his lengthy talks with Karzai. "The loss of life continues in Afghanistan."
Obama's words were echoed by other top U.S. officials, who sternly warned that American forces and their allies should still expect to be engaged in battle even after Afghans take the lead.
"After this milestone in 2013 there still will be combat capability, combat authority and an expectation there will be combat," said Retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the top White House national security council official in charge of the war.
Still, NATO leaders have billed the transition to Afghan forces taking the lead as an important benchmark in their plans to wind down the war by the end of 2014. Many of the leaders, Obama chief among them, have a political incentive for trumpeting that drawdown plan, given the growing public frustration with the nearly 11-year-old war.
Sixty-six percent of Americans oppose the war, while only 27 percent support the effort, according to an AP-GfK poll released earlier this month.
In France, voters elected President Francois Hollande in part because of a campaign pledge to pull his country's 3,300 troops out of Afghanistan ahead of schedule. Since taking office, Hollande has said he plans to make good on his promise to bring combat troops home by the end of this year, but will maintain French support for Afghanistan in other ways.
The U.S. and NATO will also maintain a sizeable and lengthy commitment to Afghanistan after combat troops come home at the end of 2014.
Obama, in a surprise trip to Afghanistan earlier this month, signed a deal with Karzai detailing much of the U.S. commitment, including annual financing from Congress and support for development, health and education projects. The U.S. may also leave a residual troop presence in Afghanistan, though any such step would require approval from the Afghans.
At the NATO conference, leaders were also discussing how the international community would finance Afghan security forces after 2014. With none of the NATO countries having the stomach to pursue the war much longer, the only viable option is to leave behind an Afghan army and police force capable of defending the country against the Taliban and its allies.
NATO estimates it will cost about $4.1 billion a year to finance the forces. The Afghan government will pay about $500 million of that and the rest will come from donor countries, many of which are struggling with deficits and the specter of recession.
In a statement issued early Monday, NATO directed a review of the need for continued military support after ground forces depart. The alliance said it would "continue to provide strong and long-term political and practical support" to the government of Afghanistan and would "train, advise and assist" the Afghan military.
"This will not be a combat mission," NATO said.
While the Chicago meeting was not billed as a pledging summit, leaders were discussing where the rest of the contributions would come from. About $1.3 billion is expected to come from NATO members other than the United States. About $1 billion of that has already been pledged, a senior Western official said Sunday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to disclose the figures.
The U.S. and some nations outside the military coalition are expected to make up the $2.3 billion.
The challenge facing Obama and other world leaders will be to convince their own voters that Afghanistan is worth the investment. The war has already claimed the lives of at least 3,000 NATO servicemembers -- more than 1,840 of them American -- and thousands of Afghans.
"I think it speaks to the level of commitment that even in these tough financial times these leaders are willing to make the political commitment to fund the Afghan security forces," Lute said.
Afghanistan's stability after 2014 will also depend on cooperation from Pakistan. While Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is attending the NATO summit, Obama has no plans to meet him privately, a signal of the tensions between their two countries.
The U.S. and Pakistan remain at odds over Pakistan's closure of key routes used to send supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the supply lines in November following a U.S. airstrike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. While both sides have indicated the issue will be resolved, no deal is expected to be reached during the NATO meetings, casting a shadow over the Afghan talks.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Zardari on Sunday to discuss the situation. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said afterward the two sides were "moving in right trajectory."
-- Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.


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Katrina: Unlearned Lessons
Katrina: Unlearned Lessons
Two years on, it's clearer than ever that this was a manmade catastrophe.
Is anyone getting the message?Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, created the costliest disaster in U.S. history, and one of the deadliest. After two years and dozens of post-mortem analyses, it makes sense to ask if we've learned anything from the experience. Sadly, our institutions seem to have had difficulty learning and applying the key lessons-even when those lessons are driven home with hurricane force.
Many media reports have discussed Katrina, first, as an example of what nature can do to people, and second, as being about the uniqueness of New Orleans-just as distinctive as Mardi Gras parades and Creole cuisine. To be fair, this isn't one of those cases where the mass media have been misquoting academics. Instead, they may have been reporting a common academic perspective a bit too accurately. The respected geographer Peirce Lewis, for example, famously proclaimed New Orleans to be an "inevitable city" in an "impossible location," and noted historian Ari Kelman of the University of California, Davis, was working in the finest traditions of geography when he described New Orleans as having an excellent "situation" (high capacity to compete with other cities) but a physical location that is "wretched." New Orleans, he decreed, "has a near-perfect situation and an almost unimaginably bad site."
Such views make it tempting to see the lessons of Katrina as being about what nature did to humans. But while New Orleans may have been the first major American city to be ravaged by natural hazards during the 21st century, it will not be the last. Vulnerability also characterizes places as different from the physical setting of New Orleans as humans can imagine-witness the tornado that recently flattened Greensburg, Kansas, or for that matter the millions of people living in California earthquake country.
At least equally importantly, though, the key lessons of Hurricane Katrina may have more to do with what humans did to nature-and how it came back to haunt us all.
Dangerous Dames
Consider the three most powerful hurricanes that have roared through New Orleans in the last half-century, all following strikingly similar tracks: Betsy, Camille, and Katrina, in 1965, 1969, and 2005, respectively (see map). By a number of measures, the two earlier storms should have caused as much or more damage to the city as Katrina, with Betsy being perhaps the most ominous. Although scientists use wind speeds as a way of measuring hurricane strength, people are most likely to be killed by a hurricane's waters. The deadliest waters are usually driven by a hurricane's "right hook," the storm surge that builds up along the right, leading edge of the storm's central eye, where the counterclockwise winds shove the ocean's waters toward land with the greatest energy and depth.
Both Camille and Betsy did create some flooding, with Betsy killing 76 Louisiana residents and flooding about 20 percent of New Orleans. Betsy also inspired what the Army Corps of Engineers called the Hurricane Protection Program, which built the levees and floodwalls that failed to protect the city from Katrina. Still, they were significantly higher and stronger than the ones in place in the 1960s. Despite the "improved" hurricane protection, Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city, nearly destroying it, and killed roughly 20 times as many people as Betsy. Clearly, something changed between the 1960s and 2005 besides the building of those floodwalls-and if the change took place that quickly, it's a fairly good bet that humans had something to do with it.
A telling clue comes from one key difference across the three canals that experienced the most important failures in their floodwalls-the ones known locally as the London Avenue, 17th Street, and Industrial Canals. All three canals empty directly into Lake Pontchartrain, a large, brackish body of water on the north side of New Orleans that connects to the Gulf of Mexico. The tops of all three canals' floodwalls are roughly equal in elevation. According to basic physics familiar to any small child who has ever played in a bathtub, if the flooding actually did come in from Lake Pontchartrain, then the floodwaters should have been roughly equal in depth across the three canals. In reality, although estimates vary, even the deepest floodwaters in the London Avenue and 17th Street Canals, which contributed to the slow flooding of the main part of the city, stopped roughly two meters below the tops of the walls. In the Industrial Canal, the water came surging right over the top, leading not only to the catastrophic failure of the floodwall but to the stunning destruction that engulfed the Lower Ninth Ward.
The obvious explanation for the
difference is that the water surging into the Indus-
trial Canal came not from Lake Pontchartrain to the north, but from someplace else. The obvious suspect involves the connections to the Gulf of Mexico that were created by another Corps of Engineers project-and from what that project did to the surrounding wetlands. The key reasons for the differing water depths across the three canals, in short, has less to do with the floodwalls themselves than with what took place outside of them.
Degraded Defenses
From the city's founding in 1718, up through the era when a New Orleans bar made "The Hurricane" famous as a drink in the 1940s, New Orleans was protected by two layers of defense: a thin ring of levees, constructed by humans, and a broader band of wetlands, built by the Mississippi River over the last 7,000 years. At least until relatively recently, the wetlands have provided an important shock absorber for storm surges: a widely quoted 1963 estimate from the Corps of Engineers is that a band of grassy coastal marshes stretching 12 kilometers inland from salt water can lower storm surges by about a meter. More recent estimates suggest that healthy cypress swamps can reduce storm surges about three times better, about one meter of reduction for each four kilometers of cypress swamps. As recently as 40 or 50 years ago, Louisiana still had the vast majority of the wetlands that greeted early French explorers four centuries earlier. But by 1960, coastal Louisiana was losing land at a rate of 25-40 square kilometers per year. By the end of the 1960s, the losses were adding up more than three times that fast.
Overall, Louisiana lost an estimated 4,000 square kilometers of wetlands by the end of the 20th century. This represents about one-fifth of the roughly 2 million hectares present at the start of the century, or roughly as much land as had been built up by the Mississippi over the previous millennium. In recent years, land has continued to disappear at the rate of about one U.S. football field (about half a hectare) every 30 to 45 seconds, five to eight square kilometers every month, and a Manhattan Island or more-80 square kilometers-every year. By the time Katrina hit, the state's once-thick band of wetlands was in tatters.
Across the broader region, the key factors in the wetlands losses include the building of upstream dams and downstream levees, which reduced the Mississippi's sediment loads by 70 percent and prevented most of the remaining silt from rebuilding the marshes. To the southeast of New Orleans, however-the direction from which Katrina's deadliest storm surges attacked the city-the key factor in wetlands loss was far more local and specific.
This is the location of one of the most damaging pork-barrel projects ever: a canal known as the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO. This giant ditch is usually pronounced as "Mister Go," but at least since Hurricane Betsy in 1965, it has also been known to locals as "the hurricane highway." Few people outside of the region had heard of MR-GO before Katrina struck, but at least locally, it was the focus of considerable controversy even before the storm.
New Orleans has known canal-digging projects for as long as it has been inhabited by Europeans, but not until the 20th century, and perhaps not until MR-GO, did the projects become large enough to do truly serious damage. The basic idea behind MR-GO was to build a "tidewater" or sea-level canal directly from the Industrial Canal, in the heart of New Orleans, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The channel is some 120 kilometers long, running parallel to the Mississippi but nearly as straight as a gun barrel, with no freshwater flow to keep out salt water. Local promoters promised that it would be incredibly busy-a wet version of an urban freeway at rush hour-because it would allow ships to bypass the last 190 kilometers of what a local editorial called a "crooked, fog-covered, silt-bearing, temperamental" Mississippi River. Environmental groups, on the other hand, expressed grave concerns about carving such a large channel through previously healthy wetlands. Unfortunately, the boosters were almost completely wrong in their claims, while the environmentalists' concerns were largely on-target.
The Corps originally designed the canal to be about 190 meters wide on the surface, on the theory that this would permit a channel 12 meters deep and 150 meters wide at the bottom. Even the initial excavation meant removing more dirt than the Panama Canal, but that was just the start of a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle. Almost as soon as the narrow "interim channel" of MR-GO reached the Gulf in 1963, salinity levels shot up. The salt soon killed the plants that held together the fragile soils, which then slumped into the channel. Digging out that silt meant additional dredging, which meant in turn that MR-GO grew wider and wider, with its banks eroding at a rate of 9-12 meters per year. That, of course, brought still more salt water into the marshes, destroying still more of the remaining plant life, causing the loss of still more land, and so on.
When Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965 and flooded 20 percent of New Orleans, many locals were incensed, blaming MR-GO. At that time, the channel was not even finished to its full width. It would have been close to its original design width by the time Camille struck in 1969, but when Katrina arrived in 2005 some stretches were nearly a kilometer wide. At least equally significant, however, was the damage that MR-GO did to the surrounding wetlands. Even before Katrina, the Corps of Engineers concluded that MR-GO had helped to convert more than 4,500 hectares of fresh/intermediate marshes and cypress swamps to brackish marshes (those with intermediate levels of salinity).
That is no small consideration. Cypress trees are some of the most effective obstacles to hurricane winds and waters ever invented by nature, strong enough to survive hurricanes almost unharmed and able to live well over 500 years in natural conditions. Exposure to the salt water, unfortunately, meant that thousands of hectares of once-sturdy cypress trees were dead by the time Katrina crashed ashore, replaced by scattered skeletons of former trees in what locals call "ghost swamps." Much of the water that drowned New Orleans came straight up MR-GO or across the adjoining wetlands, which no longer had enough cypress trees to slow the storm waters roaring into the Industrial Canal, the Lower Ninth Ward, and adjacent St. Bernard Parish.
In the aftermath of Katrina, one complaint was that the Corps had not received enough money to build flood protection projects. But Louisiana actually received more money for Corps projects from 2000 to 2005 than any other state: about $1.9 billion, well ahead of the $1.4 billion for second-place California, which covers roughly three times as much territory and has seven times as many people. Instead, in a pattern that is also common in other states, the political system chose to "invest" largely in projects that, like MR-GO, were seen as promoting "economic development." Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux (D), for example, told the Washington Post that "we thought all the projects were important, not just levees." Although hindsight might have pointed to different priorities, he said, navigation projects such as MR-GO "were critical to our economic survival."
Perverse Priorities
Actual numbers tell a different story. Traffic on MR-GO started below official predictions-and then dropped. By 2004, a year when taxpayers would spend another $13.4 million to dredge MR-GO yet again, the channel would be used by only about a dozen ships that actually needed the dredging to accommodate their deeper drafts. Even before considering MR-GO's larger human and environmental costs, this "economic development" project was in fact a sad case of water welfare, involving a taxpayer subsidy of over a million dollars per round trip.
Since Katrina, many reconstruction investments have continued to overlook the environmental realities of this site, going largely to rebuild the inner ring of floodwalls, not the broader ring of wetlands. But the need for more rational recognition of the value of natural surroundings is by no means limited to New Orleans. Political leaders everywhere often seek taxpayer dollars for so-called economic development projects, which often create actual environmental harm but only hypothetical economic benefit. For many such projects, as in the case of MR-GO, actual connections to "economic survival" ultimately prove to be imaginary.
MR-GO showed that our technological capacities have risen to the point where we can create some truly spectacular environmental damage. Katrina showed, unfortunately, that we do not seem to have the same level of technological capacity to undo the damage we create-to nature, to humans, or both. Two years after Katrina, the Corps of Engineers recommended that MR-GO be sealed off, but noted that backfilling the channel would require around 200 million cubic meters of material and might take more than 40 years. In practical terms, even though it is now clear that MR-GO was a costly mistake, it is one that may never be undone. It has created a hole in the wetlands, as well as in the life of a great city, that may never be filled.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, what came through the levees was more than just a rush of floodwaters. It was tragically graphic evidence that scientists' warnings about the risks of environmental damage need to be taken seriously, and that boosters' claims of economic benefits need to be subjected to equally serious scrutiny. The leaders of New Orleans ignored that evidence, and the city suffered the consequences. The rest of us watched the painful learning experience. The question is whether we will actually learn from it.
William R. Freudenburg is Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a former president of the Rural Sociological Society. Robert Gramling is an environmental sociologist, a professor of sociology, and the director of the Center for Socioeconomic Research at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Shirley Laska is professor of sociology and director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response, and Technology (CHART) at the University of New Orleans. Kai T. Erikson is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies at Yale University, and a past president of the American Sociological Association.


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There's no pretense to Michael Oher.
The massive offensive tackle for the Ravens enjoyed an offseason during which his autobiography, "I Beat the Odds," peaked at No. 3 on the New York Times bestsellers list and he was the darling of major media outlets like ABC News' "20/20" and Headline News.
But since reporting to training camp Tuesday, Oher's focus has shifted to football and his development as the team's left tackle.
"It was a nice thing," Oher said of the positive reaction his memoir generated, "but I know that football is No. 1. Anything off the field is extra. Being the best player I can be, that's the most important thing to me. It's a great accomplishment, but I'm not focused on that."
Oher's commitment centers on improving his performance at left tackle, where he was saddled with the assignment of keeping the likes of Pittsburgh Steelers outside linebacker James Harrison, Houston Texans defensive end Mario Williams and Kansas City Chiefs outside linebacker Tamba Hali from making mincemeat of quarterback Joe Flacco.
For the most part, Oher was successful, but he did lead the offensive line in two dubious categories: penalties (11) and sacks allowed (7).
The running game also slipped. The offense's rushing average of 114.4 yards in 2010 was a far cry from the 137.5-yard average in 2009 when Oher was the right tackle in his rookie season and Jared Gaither made the majority of starts at left tackle.
The Ravens selected an offensive tackle, Jah Reid out of Central Florida, in the third round of the draft in April, but he is expected to compete with Oniel Cousins for playing time at right tackle. In a recent Q&A with The Baltimore Sun, coach John Harbaugh made it clear that there is no dispute or confusion over Oher's position.
"I think it's at left tackle," Harbaugh said of Oher's future. "He's a very athletic guy. There's no mold for a football player at any position. Michael Oher is a lot more athletic than a lot of right tackles. So, he's got great feet and a great punch. He's very smart and very competitive. I see no reason why he can't be a top left tackle in this league."
While appreciative of the vote of confidence, Oher said he can't afford to be content or complacent.
"Nothing's ever etched in stone," he said. "You're going to have to continue to work and continue to get better. Have to protect guys like Joe Flacco. He's a valuable player, and we need him to win big games."
Offensive coordinator Cam Cameron predicted that 2011 could be a banner year for Oher.
"It's still early, but again, I know I am partial to these guys, but I think Michael is a great player," Cameron said. "I think he has come in in great shape. He is the one guy who was out here in 100-degree heat with a sweat top on because he knew he could withstand it. He is ready. He is a football player. [There is] no doubt in my mind that he is going to have a great year."
Oher has an easy smile and loves to joke with his teammates. But when it's time to practice, go into meetings or talk to the media, Oher's intensity comes to the forefront.
During a 15-minute interview in the hallways of the team's practice facility in Owings Mills on Saturday, Flacco, cornerback Domonique Foxworth and punter Sam Koch each tried to break Oher's concentration by stopping to listen to his answers or staring at him. Oher said, "Hi," or ignored their attempts and never missed a question or asked that it be repeated.
Despite obligations attached to the book, Oher spent a generous amount of time in the offseason honing his craft. Without divulging his training regimen ("a few things that are secret," he said), Oher said he added six pounds of muscle to his 6-foot-3, 313-pound frame.
Oher often declines to evaluate his past performances, but he acknowledged that there is room for improvement if he wants to join the company of Jonathan Ogden and Orlando Pace, two elite offensive tackles he tried to model himself after while he was playing in high school and college.
"Still getting better, still learning," Oher said of his development. "I have a ton of things I need to work on, and I can still get better. I'm trying to help us win the big game."
Left guard Ben Grubbs, one of Oher's closest friends on the team, said last year's troubles weighed on Oher, a perfectionist when it comes to football, basketball and even cornhole.
"I think last year, the transition from right to left [tackle] for him didn't go as he planned," Grubbs said. "So since he's been through a year at left tackle, he knows what to expect. He's willing to take on any and every challenge that may come his way. I know Mike, and I know him well, and I know he'll be one of the best left tackles in the league this year."
One area that plagued Oher was his timing before center Matt Birk snapped the ball to Flacco. Oher was flagged for a team-high eight false starts, which can cripple offensive drives.
Coaches like Harbaugh and teammates like Grubbs defended Oher, asserting that the tackle's reflexes were so quick that it would appear to officials that he was moving before the ball was snapped.
Refusing to pin any blame on the officials, Oher said the onus is on him to cut down on those penalties.
"You've just got to fix it," he said. "You can't be illegal. So you've got to fix whatever you're doing wrong. Got to fix the flags. That's the one thing I'm trying to focus on this year. Fixing the penalties that I had that hurt the team."
Although he is entering his third year in the NFL, Oher has become a veteran on the offensive line and a source of information for younger teammates. One person studying Oher is Reid.
"You know, he helps me with different techniques," Reid said. "He's a great person to watch, you know, when we have our meetings. I'll be on one side not doing so great, and then the coach tells me to look at him, so that helps a lot. He's a great person to model myself after and hopefully live up to how he's been doing. It's good to be in the meeting room with him."
There's no pretense to Michael Oher.


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Elie FM
Joined: 08 Feb 2007
Posts: 5
Location: Totnes, Devon, UK
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 9:53 pm
Post subject: My memories of John Ogdon
I am a pianist of 40 years of age. When I was only 14 years old I had the great good fortune of spending some time with John Ogdon and the opportunity to share in some informal music-making with him in my home. At that time (1983) John had moved temporarily into a house in my area and was just beginning to play in concert again. It was an incredible experience for me as he had been my musical idol since I was a child and somehow the mental suffering he had endured during the 1970s made him even more special to me, showing his vulnerability and human-ness. Indeed, contrary to some people, I enjoyed his late concerts and continue to enjoy his late recordings just as much as his early work, because I can feel in contact with a true human being who has been through so much and who has so much to say. In the time I spent with him he was, in typical John Ogdon style, extraordinarily generous in giving his time and energy and having those wonderful memories will always be so special and important to me.
Around that time, in the early 1980s, I met John Ogdon's son, himself a talented pianist, and I remember on the occasion of a prom concert, he very kindly allowed me to go backstage to see his father, at a time when it was not easy for members of the public to go backstage. I attended almost all of John Ogdon's London concerts in those years, right up to the time of his death. I was deeply sad when he died - John Ogdon always and will always play a vital part in my musical development and development as a human being. I think of him very often and I will always miss him. I often think how wonderful it would have been for me to continue knowing him and sharing music with him.
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Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 3
Location: London
Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:33 pm
Post subject: Ogdon's influence
When I was a boy, my mother worked as the Ogdon's cleaner. John had not-long won the Tchaikovsky competition. I liked 'classical' music from an early age, but knowing my mother was working for a famous pianist furthered my interest. As time went on, and each birthday and Christmas came, I would get records as presents from John and Brenda. I still have those records; some autographed. An autographed picture of John hangs on my wall some forty-odd years after he gave it to me.
I can't emphasise enough the influence that man had, and still does have, on the way my taste and attitude to music has developed over the years.
I was lucky to speak to him about eighteen months before he died, at a solo concert he gave in Hounslow. He asked after my mother and seemed genuinely interested in what had been happening in the intervening years. He remembered a letter that I had written to him about his recording of the Mennin concerto, and how it was a perfect piece for his style, with its passages requiring, both, Busonian feats of strength to execute the motoric rythms, and a delicacy in the many calmer, intimate passages: 'I got your wonderful letter' he said. That moment will stay with me.
The day he died (or was it the day after?), I was at a prom, and the last piece was Edward Downes conducting Ein Heldenleben with the BBC Northern, and having come to the podium Downes said 'We want to dedicate this piece to someone who was a hero of ours: John Ogdon'. It was very moving.
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Publication Date December 4, 2012
Earlier this year, thought leaders in Detroit and nationally gathered to exchange ideas for bringing people together in our increasingly connected world.
One of the best examples was organic: once a year, residents of Detroit's Midtown neighborhood gather for the Marche du Nain Rouge, a mini-Mardi Gras where residents can put on costumes and send the "red dwarf of Detroit" – said to have cursed the city for centuries – back from whence he came.
No chamber of commerce dreamed up the event that helps strengthen the neighborhood. It bubbled up from the people, and serves as a reminder that while the goals of community engagement may be high-minded and serious, the road there may be motivated by, joyfulness and fun.
This was one of the insights from the Detroit Civic Engagement Showcase & Learning Conference, a TED-style learning event organized by Knight Foundation and Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE).
Detroit, with its growing community of social entrepreneurs, proved a perfect setting for a morning of reflection on the best ways to bring communities together around important issues.
The themes and lessons within, though, will resonate with any community searching for new ways to help residents shape their collective future.
Here are seven of the insights gleaned from the morning - and included in the new report, Connected Citizens Detroit: A Snapshot of Civic Engagement, written by the Center for Michigan:
Related CONTENT
Digital Citizneship: Exploring the Field of Tech for Engagmement
Connected Citizens: The Power, Potential and Peril of Networks
1) Presume people want to be engaged
Martha McCoy of the national organization Everyday Democracy, works to create communities where everyone is included in public problem solving. One thing she has learned is that you have to start by assuming people want to be involved. "That is part of what it means to be human," McCoy said. "We care about the things that affect our lives."
2) Recognize
One key way to engage more people is to recognize the work they are already doing, said Darryl Redmond. He served as a project coordinator for BMe, a growing network of black men working to strengthen their communities. BMe works by recognizing men for their everyday community actions, and having them tell their stories on video at bmecommunity.org.
Recognizing their work motivates them even more, and inspires others to be like them. "Everyone has a personal story," Redmond said. "When you see what they're passionate about, you can engage them. If there is no passion, there is not engagement."
3) Leverage the power of networks
Elizabeth Garlow, of Michigan Corps, Trish Dewald of the Coalition on Temporary Shelter (COTS) and Delphia Simmons, of Thrive Detroit spoke of the importance of making connections between people and their networks, as well as breaking big problems into small pieces.
In the Michigan Corps initiative Detroit4Detroit, for example, citizen philanthropists find projects they find compelling, then use the website to reach out to friends and colleagues in their own networks to raise funds. Since the program was initiated in June 2012, 150 citizen philanthropists have contributed $67,000 to 85 Detroit4Detroit projects.
4) Use the digital tools at your disposal
Andrew Rasiej, who leads the Personal Democracy Forum, offered the observation that when Facebook made organ donation a priority, it asked users to state their donor status on their profiles. The response was overwhelming positive. What would happen, he asked, if we all registered our blood types as well – and during a shortage, potential donors could be asked to make an appointment online? The lesson here is to think of ways to employ the social networks we use daily, in new ways, to a greater end.
5) Try a game
Dan Pitera and Priya Iyer used an online game called Community PlanIt to draw Detroiters into a conversation about planning for their city's future. The platform lured players into tackling "missions" through completing challenges that put them in an urban planner's shoes. The effort drew a crucial demographic – young people – into the planning process. More than 1,000 registered players gave the game a try and left 8,400 comments.
6) Make sure it works
Vince Keenan started Publius.org in 1996 as a simple website that allowed people to find their polling locations and see sample ballots. Six years later, it was named a model template for voting information by the Federal Election Commission. He compared good government engagement systems to something we use every day – a toilet. How so? "It's a community good. We don't really know how it works. It becomes a problem when it doesn't work. When it doesn't work, you have to deal with people who want to tell you more than you want to know."
7) Don't forget the fun.
Jerry Paffendorf has been behind a number of innovative websites in Detroit, but he made national news with his crowdfunded effort to privately fund a statue of Robocop, Detroit's fictional cinematic crime fighter. "All hell broke loose, in good ways and bad ways," Paffendorf said, in a clash of "high-pressure and low-pressure fronts of lovers and haters."
Through Kickstarter, he raised $50,000.
The statue is still under construction, but the lesson was learned: Don't underestimate the Internet public.
Dig deeper into the insights by reading the report Connected Citizens Detroit: A Snapshot of Civic Engagement
By Nancy Derringer at The Center for Michigan


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Choosing an RSS reader may seem like a daunting task, but it's actually quite easy, and a very low-risk proposition, as most feed readers are free to try.
Note: Part one of this series is What is RSS, and Why Should You Care? Part two is RSS Search Engines.
Over the past couple of days, I've written about why RSS is important and also described the various options for searching for RSS feeds. The final piece of the RSS puzzle is to make the feeds you want to read on a regular basis easily accessible via an RSS feed reader (sometimes called aggregators).
Most RSS feed readers bear a striking resemblance to email clients. The most fundamental difference is that RSS readers are designed to handle feeds, pulling in appropriately formatted content from a variety of sources, rather than email messages from other net users.
All of the RSS readers I'm going to describe are top-notch products, and all support similar basic features. Each program has unique features that may or may not appeal to you. Choosing an RSS reader boils down to finding one that fits with your own working preferences. The good news is that all of these readers are free to try and use. If you don't like one, simply move on to another.
A fundamental difference between feed readers is whether they are stand-alone clients or are web-based services accessed through your browser. Stand-alone clients are useful if you want to access your feeds even if you're offline. And one feed reader, News Gator, even integrates into Microsoft Outlook, making your feeds virtually indistinguishable from your email.
By contrast, web-based services require you to be online to access your feeds. But they also offer other features such as feed search, the ability to integrate feeds with other sources of information in a portal-like fashion and so on.
In the end, you may find yourself using more than one feed reader for different purposes. For example, I use Bloglines as my primary RSS reader, but I also have feeds integrated into my My Yahoo account and the new Google Desktop.
Here's a look at some popular and useful feed readers. As with yesterday's look at RSS search engines, this is not a comprehensive listing. Rather, these are all tools I've tried and found worth a mention.
If you're interested in researching others, check out Peter Scott's excellent AllRSS.com, a site devoted to all manner of RSS resources.
An RSS Reader Roundup
Ask Jeeves' owned Bloglines is my primary feed reader because it offers a variety of useful features in addition to aggregating all of my preferred feeds in one place. The feed reader itself is basic but easy to use. Your feeds are stored in folders that you can label with relevant names. A number of options let you control how feeds are displayed, updated and so on.
Unlike many stand-alone feed readers, Bloglines doesn't save posts from feeds that you've read. However, Bloglines offers two tools that allow you to save and organize what you've read. You can keep clip excerpts from a feed post that are stored in your "clippings" tab, along with the source URL of the post. Also, when you open an account, you automatically get your own Bloglines-hosted blog, and you can also save clippings to this blog to share with the world.
In addition to being a feed reader, Bloglines offers a feed search capability, and the ability to share what you've found with others.
Bloglines is free and works with most popular web browsers.
FeedDemon is a standalone feed reader with an Outlook-like interface. The program comes pre-configured with a number of popular feeds, making it a good choice if you're just starting out with RSS and wondering exactly how all of this stuff works. FeedDemon also has a built-in podcast receiver that automatically downloads the newest versions of your subscribed podcasts (such as the daily Search Engine Watch podcast).
FeedDemon is a stand-alone application that requires Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP or 2003, and is free to try; $29.95 to purchase.
Google Desktop
Gary Price wrote a great review of the new Google Desktop 2 when it was released last week, so I won't go into a lot of detail here. One of the unique features of Google Desktop is a feature called "web clips" which is essentially a very basic feed reader.
It's not designed to be used as your primary feed reader, but instead "watches" what you do on the web and automatically adds feeds if they are found on web pages that you visit. If you don't pay attention to the feeds, they go away, while those that you do end up following stick around. Some people may find this creepy; I find it a fascinating and easy way to discover new feeds I might not otherwise come across.
Google Desktop 2 is a stand-alone application that requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 service pack 3 or higher, and is free to download and use.
MSN Start
MSN Start is a "preview" site for new features from MSN. Although it's primarily a web search engine, you can also select news or feeds, and if feeds turn up in search results you can easily subscribe simply by clicking a link.
MSN Start is web-based, runs in both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers and is free to use.
My Yahoo
My Yahoo is a customizable version of Yahoo that's been around for a long time, offering a variety of cool features. It's easy to add feeds to your My Yahoo page.
If a feed turns up in Yahoo search results, all you need to do is click the "add to My Yahoo" link; you can then use the editing controls to move the feed display to your preferred position on the My Yahoo page.
Due to the popularity of My Yahoo, many feeds include an "add to My Yahoo" button that allows you to add the feed directly from the original source.
My Yahoo is web-based, runs in most popular browsers, and is free to use.
NewsGator offers both a free online feed reader, and a desktop-based version that integrates into Microsoft Outlook. Most people I've spoken with who rely heavily on Outlook swear by NewsGator due to its seamless integration with the program.
The Outlook version is subscription-based, with several different levels available. The standard version costs $19.95 per year, and offers similar functionality to the online version. Gold, Platinum and Ultimate versions cost more, and offer access to premium content and "smart feeds" which pull information from a variety of sources based on keyword or URL based searching.
NewsGator online works with most major browsers and is free. NewsGator Business is a desktop-based application that requires Microsoft Outlook to be installed.
Pluck is a different kind of feed reader. I reviewed it in detail in the SearchDay article Swiss Army Knife Meets the Kitchen Sink. It's a very attractive option if you're looking for a feed reader that's integrated with all kinds of other features, such as a search toolbar, online bookmark manager and others.
Pluck is web-based, works with most major browsers, and is free.
SharpReader is one of those increasingly rare tools created by a single individual to solve his own information needs. The program seems to be in perpetual beta (current version is 0.9.6.0), but it's been around long enough to be stable, and sports some powerful features not found in other programs.
SharpReader will appeal to serious RSS users more than casual feed readers. The program supports plug-ins based on the IBlogExtension standard, which means you can hack new features yourself, if you're so inclined.
SharpReader is a stand-alone application that requires Microsoft Windows XP and the .NET framework installed on your system. It is free to use, though the author of the program does accept donations if you find the program useful.
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Cameron Park Real EstateCommunities within Cameron Park
Cameron Park is an unincorporated area in El Dorado County, approximately 30 miles east of Sacramento via Highway 50. It's nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, blanketed in oaks and pine trees and boasting a rich history in Gold Rush and Native American life.
Cameron Park is known for its sense of community. The fellowship is evident in summer festivals with fireworks, family movie nights, Halloween carnival, Santa parade, and Easter Egg hunt. Come out for the Annual Show N' Shine & Fly-In event at Cameron Park airport and view vintage airplanes and classic cars. Adjacent to the airport are the Airpark Estates, a unique subdivision with direct access to the airport via aircraft taxiways.
Known as a "Special Place to Live" by its residents, Cameron Park has a rich history seeped in old Western styles. Burkes Junction, a blend of dining, shopping, and day-to-day business, showcases quaint historical buildings and an old-fashioned train which operates on weekends and in the summer. Cameron Park is now home to three major shopping centers – perfect for daily necessities and family-friendly outings. Cameron Park is also renowned for the Marshall Medical Center, which is next to upscale senior and assisted living communities, making this area one of the largest grouping of healthcare industry professionals in the El Dorado County region.
Cameron Park isn't only about business. The Cameron Park Lake recreation area is popular among residents and offers tennis courts, walking paths, fishing, boat rentals, and a swim area. A skate park can be found at Christa McAuliffe Park. An aquatics center and gymnasium allows the community services district to offer basketball leagues, swim programs, and kids summer camp. The Cameron Park Country Club boasts a championship golf course with junior programs and several family-friendly events.
Cameron Park is a rural mix of estates, large ranches, horse properties, gated neighborhoods, and residential homes. For the adventurous, nearby attractions include Folsom Lake, the American River, and Apple Hill; while the slopes and beaches of Lake Tahoe are 75 miles away.
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- Inside Athletics
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The win moved the Buccaneers into the seventh spot among schools eligible for the Conference Championship, two points behind four teams tied for third place. The Buccaneers have three A-Sun games remaining on the schedule. ETSU goes on the road this weekend for matches against two schools ranked higher in the standings, at
Brinkman's first A-Sun Player of the Week award came after she netted a penalty kick to lift the Bucs to a 1-0 victory over
The Atlantic Sun Conference is a 12-member league committed to Building Winners for Life, with a focus on academic and athletic integrity and a balance between the two for the student-athlete, and maintaining a high level of sportsmanship. Headquartered in
Other Top Performers
Megan Armstrong, MER (Jr. - D -
Elizabeth Fink, JU (Fr. - MF -
Lindsay Haw, FGCU (Fr. - F -
Rachel Van Horn, ETSU (Fr. - GK - Thousand Oaks, Calif. - Business Management) -- Continued to step in at goalkeeper due to injury; Made four saves on shots on goal by KSU's Dingle and Phillips.


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I have previously argued at some length that rising inequality is one of the main causes of the economic crisis.
Famed Yale economist Robert Shiller agrees.
As the Browser reports:
Yale economist Robert Shiller argues that rising inequality in the US was a major cause of the recent crisis, and little is being done to address it.
Shiller gave The Browser a reading list of books which explain the economic crisis, including former IMF chief economist Raghuram G. Rajan's book Fault Lines, which gives several causes for the current crisis, explaining:
The first of them is political, and the politics that lead to rising inequality. That's been a trend in recent years in most nations of the world. Inequality has been getting worse, particularly in the US, but also in Europe and Asia and many other places. One thing that this has done is it has encouraged governments, who are aware of the resentment caused by the rising inequality, to try to take some kind of steps to make it more politically acceptable. He gives other examples as well, but historically, that has often taken the form of stimulating credit: instead of fixing the problems of the poor, lending money to them. He has a chapter entitled 'Let them eat credit'.
The US in particular has stimulated the housing market, it has subsidised lending to people, which drove up home prices in an unsustainable way. And there wasn't that much concern about, or understanding of, the sustainability of this. That's his first fault line
Shiller notes:
I think inequality is a huge emerging problem, and that our society has to think about dealing with it in a constructive and real way – not through 'Let them eat credit,' not through wishful thinking. We have to understand how we get inequality and what we can do about it.
Shiller then discusses Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker:
This is a new book – it just came out. It's about rising inequality and it traces back to fundamental causes. I like books that get back to ultimate causes and that think like social scientists about these causes. The question is, 'Why is inequality getting worse in so many different countries?' This book particularly focuses on the US. The traditional answer is – well, there are a number of traditional answers, but the most prominent among them is this idea that in a modern economy there is a skill bias in technical change. Our computers and communications have led to a winner-take-all society, where only the really smart can make money. Everyone else is technologically obsolete, with all these computers that are replacing people. It is, I think, a very important theory.
But Hacker and Pierson point out that it doesn't really fit the recent data. In the US, we've seen a rapid concentration of wealth at the extreme high end. The top tenth of a per cent of the top hundredth of a per cent of the population is getting wealthy very fast. They point out that this is not true in Europe, and yet the economies are very similar and growing at similar rates. If the technology is the same, why would there be a difference at the extreme high end? And they argue that the answer is really political. There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we've let it happen.
The interviewer asks:
So you feel inequality is central to what has gone on and that we really need to address that?
Shiller responds:
Yes – and there is very little concrete talk about addressing it. It's a very difficult problem. You might think that in a system of majority voting, the middle class and the poor would dominate and would prevent this kind of inequality from developing. But it hasn't been that way – it's been even less so that way lately, especially in the US. And once again, we have to attribute that to some change in our zeitgeist, in our way of thinking about what people view as important. That's an underlying theme in all of these works, going back to Adam Smith. I don't think he uses the word inequality very much – but it is about poverty and the alleviation of poverty. In Adam Smith, of course, the wealthy tend to be the kings and lords…


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PHILADELPHIA — The notion that Nerlens Noel has a lot to work on before he's going to be a scorer in the NBA isn't new.
Kentucky coach John Calipari was firing warning shots before the draft in the summer.
"It's going to take time," Calipari
told Cleveland.com in June. "He's been coached at a high level for six months. He has a lot of potential and he was making great improvement before he got hurt."
That getting-hurt part — he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against Florida in February — has kept Noel on the sideline since he was acquired by the Philadelphia 76ers in a draft night trade with New Orleans, who selected Noel sixth overall.
But as he rehabs, the Sixers are rebuilding Noel's jump shot from scratch.
"It's really hard, but if we can, we have the perfect environment to do it — a full year," Sixers coach Brett Brown said.
Noel came to the Sixers with gifted natural abilities. He can run and jump. At Kentucky, Noel kept it simple. The Wildcats wanted him to get down the the floor, dunk, score easy baskets, defend, rebound and block shots.
Noel did not take one shot beyond 17 feet at Kentucky, according to Synergy Sports, which tracks every play in college basketball and the NBA. The three shots Synergy categorized as jump shots were baby hooks in the middle of the lane and not traditional face-up jumpers with a guide hand on the ball.
"Everybody's tweakable," Brown said. "You bucket them into, 'Is it a total rebuild?' I think Nerlens is a total rebuild."
That's not to say Noel isn't a strong offensive player. Synergy rated him excellent near the basket (1.3 points per possession) and good in post-ups (.925 points per possession) last season. He shot 59.0% from the field.
The Sixers want him to develop a shot and expand his game, and at 6-11 and thin, Noel needs more to his offensive repertoire. Philadelphia is returning to basics in the reconstruction of Noel's shot, starting with one-handed shots and the elbow under the basket — the way shooting is taught at a young age.
"What happens is when he does the offhand comes and elbows start going out," Brown said. "When he just goes one-handed, he gets his elbow under it. It's a good-looking shot."
The 76ers are rebuilding and Brown, the team's first-year coach, loaded his staff with strong player development coaches, including former NBA big man Greg Foster. After a recent Sixers practice, Noel spent extra time with Foster, and Brown stopped to watch Noel shoot free throws. Brown thinks that if Noel can improve his shot at the foul line, he will be effective with the shot at other spots.
"You start with the free throws, but that carries over to now he's going to turn and face (the basket)," Brown said. "He really likes Kevin Garnett and those jump-shooting bigs. At some point, he aspires to be one of them even though he's a post player initially. The free throw is the thing that carries over to other parts of his game. Hopefully, we get that right."
Brown has a willing participant. He said Noel wants to improve his shot and is open to advice.
"He's great. It's his future," Brown said. "I really mean that. He's wide-eyed and open. He's a willing learner because he knows. He's looking for advice. He's looking for somebody to help him. That's my job. I'll be really disappointed if in April we don't look back and say we made good ground and we helped his shot."


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Yin and Yang
Yokohama, Vancouver, Twin Pacific Ports, Serve as Polar Opposites for Scientific Advances
Everything About to Change
In a September 1996 report for the Washington Post, science writer Elizabeth Kastor observed, "Hope is a hungry thing, as easily fed by wishful thinking as by certainties" (WP 9/5/96). And so it was, in the fading light of one extraordinary summer, that hope grew fat gorging itself at the twin troughs of imprudent optimism and intoxicated scientific circumspection. While celebratory mobs stampeded aboard the Eradication Express, at least one curmudgeonly Cassandra denied himself a ticket to ride. Shouting obstreperously, "But where's the data?" at every turn, David Barr came perilously close to acquiring an Iris Long reputation as elocutionary broken record. Instead, he put his money where his (big) mouth was, up and left his comfortable post at Gay Men's Health Crisis, and devoted the next four years of his life to facilitating a joint effort of government and industry which promised to shed light on the prickly issues of long-term clinical care in HIV infection. And so, the curtain rises on that "Woodstock of AIDS conferences."
In the words of Mark Harrington, "Never have so many traveled so far for so little." At the last minute, I decided to stay home. We had rented a house in up-state New York, and I spent my time there. Yokohama produced little progress -- either scientifically or politically. The ACTG 076 trial of AZT to prevent perinatal transmission was formally presented there, but everyone already knew the remarkable and unexpected results prior to flying half way around the world.
Vancouver was lovely and the weather was great. Despite my reservations about the treatment hype, there was no question that this was big news -- not only the treatments but also the better understanding of how the virus affects the immune system, and the use of viral load testing in clinical practice. Everything was about to change.
The 1996 Vancouver conference was the Woodstock of AIDS conferences, the "eradication conference," the promise and the glory. But I acted as the curmudgeon. I was nervous that the hype was premature, that we would allow our desperation to guide us and not push for more rigorous studies. I was shouted down everywhere. Even my closest colleagues had jumped on the eradication train.
I had spent the weeks leading up to the conference involved in a series of meetings led by the Keystone Center to discuss how the new drugs, diagnostics and understanding of the virus would affect our clinical research infrastructure. The meetings consisted of treatment advocates, representatives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, academic research centers, Congressional representatives, health care providers and insurers, and treating physicians.
We all seemed to agree that HIV clinical research would move into a new phase, requiring a more collaborative approach. Instead of focusing solely on drug development, we now had to conduct studies that tested the use of approved treatment strategies in large patient populations. The discussion was a good one, and in our final report we recommended creating a body that would continue the discussion to identify the emerging questions in optimizing HIV care and clinical research.
That body became the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research. And I left my job at GMHC after seven years and my home of 41 years to go to Washington, D.C. to start the project. The federal government and the pharmaceutical industry funded the project. It was started with the blessing of then Vice-President Al Gore, and was led by an Executive Committee that included representatives from industry, government, academia, health care provision, and the AIDS activist community. I ran the Forum for four years.
Once it was on its feet and had developed its agenda and a way of working, I felt it was time to turn it over to someone else. Also, I couldn't stand being away from New York. So I left. And it is now quite healthy and productive in the hands of Dr. Veronica Miller.
My concerns in Vancouver continued to drive my ideas for the Forum agenda. While the Forum was not successful in getting NIH and industry to conduct large studies examining when to start treatment and the effects of antiviral therapy over time, some progress in that area was made -- especially through cohort studies. Meanwhile, the Forum focused its attention on the emerging difficulties in using the treatment regimen.
The Forum held the first meeting ever on treatment adherence, which produced a research agenda that guided HIV research funding. It held the very first discussion about fat redistribution and lipid abnormalities, and produced recommendations that led to multiple studies. It outlined the need for, and ways to develop, treatment education programs for physicians and patients (about how to use the new drugs effectively). The Forum also developed a plan for the federal government to provide treatment education for patients (some of which was actually implemented). The Forum developed the first agenda for "outcomes" research in HIV treatment.
Stephen Gendin arrived in Vancouver with his dog in a bag and his hair dyed like a rainbow. Laurie Garrett complained that he needed a shower, and she was not at all pleased to be seated directly in front of him on the British Columbia-bound 737. I spent a good amount of time with him there. I was lucky to have a really nice hotel room with a great view, and so we had a party there. I spent much of it talking with Stephen on the balcony. He was already pretty sick, and the drugs were coming along just in time.
Stephen firmly believed in "Hit early, hit hard," and by the time the protease inhibitors came along he was pretty much resistant to everything else. He was on multi-drug salvage therapy from day one of the HAART revolution.
Stephen created the phrase "barebacking," which means deliberately not using a condom for anal sex. The whole issue created quite a firestorm, and Stephen was in the middle of it all. He was not advocating unsafe sex between HIV-positive and HIV-negative men; but rather, arguing for the importance of allowing people to make their own choices about the conduct of their sexual lives.
The issue started with a reasonable (and I would say, useful) discussion about sexual behavior. But it quickly became sensationalized and Stephen bore the brunt of it. His documentation of his own personal struggles with safer sex and with his illness were published in painfully blunt and self-exposing articles in Poz magazine.
The Geneva AIDS conference was the conference that felt more like a pharmaceutical trade show than any other. Part of this was the set up of the hall: You had to walk through the industry exhibition hall at least twice a day in order to get from the plenary lectures to the other auditoriums and poster exhibition spaces. I don't think the commercial displays have ever been more elaborate. The slogan of the meeting might have been "Bridging the Gap," but there was actually not much of a bridge. It was really "Selling the Pills."
Mark Harrington, Wafaa El Sadr and Eric Sawyer all made good pitches for broader treatment access, but the real push for global access was not to begin for another year when ACT UP Philly and Health Gap began to push hard on Al Gore, Bill Clinton, UNAIDS and industry.
Geneva did pay attention to some of the emerging problems associated with treatment -- particularly adherence. Treatment adherence was becoming a hot issue. Not only because it was causing large numbers of people to develop drug resistance, but also because the development of adherence services was a money maker for health care providers and community organizations -- many of whom were looking for new things to do since so many of their clients no longer required the kinds of late-stage AIDS services they were accustomed to providing.
Adherence was the new "program." Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it was a little odd to see so many community-based organizations jumping on the treatment education bandwagon with such a vengeance after being reluctant for so many years. We couldn't get them to push PCP prophylaxis, even though it probably saved more lives than ritonavir. But once they smelled a funding stream, they were all over it.
I had dinner with Stephen Gendin and his boyfriend, Hush, one night. Having moved to Washington, I hadn't seen Stephen in a while. He had been quite sick during that time. He was thin and gray. I knew he had had a hard a time. It was good to see him. During dinner, we spent a good amount of time talking about his health. Hush watched over Stephen, and it seemed like things were good between them, if difficult.
The next day, Mike Barr and I had a long talk on the grass outside the conference center, where he told me that Hush had recently seroconverted, that Stephen was the person who infected him, and that Hush was infected with a virus that was already resistant to every single drug -- as was Stephen. Later, I would spend much time talking with Stephen about all this. He and Hush both wrote long and personal articles in Poz magazine describing their experience, their unsafe sexual practices, and Hush's infection.
Next month: High-wire impostor Zulu drummers at Durban's Las Vegas style opening ceremony.