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Off the southwestern shore of the Spanish island of Ibiza, a hump of limestone rises more than twelve hundred feet out of the sea. It is called Es Vedrà and is said to possess extraordinary powers. Sailors and scuba divers have described compasses and gauges going haywire in its midst. Through the years, there have been reports of strange emanations of light and of sightings of U.F.O.s, and in the mid-nineteenth century a Carmelite priest who spent several weeks on the rocks claimed to have been visited there by the Virgin Mary.
Es Vedrà is also the centerpiece of the view from the terrace of a house on Ibiza that belongs to the fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Mert and Marcus, as they are known (Mert is pronounced "Matt"), live and work in a whitewashed ten-bedroom Moorish villa situated on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean. After sharing an apartment in London for seven years, they bought the house last fall and have been using it since then as a photography studio and base of operations, a mini-Cinecittà. It is called Palacio de Salomon and is supposedly built along the lines of Solomon's palace in Jerusalem. One of Mert and Marcus's favorite things about the place is the way that variations in the wind and the light cause the character of Es Vedrà to change, from beacon to beast and back again. Recently, they hired a boat and went out there to take pictures, but the steep and rocky terrain proved inhospitable to fashion photography. When I visited them, this summer, in order to watch them shoot a twenty-page spread for Pop, an arty British fashion magazine, Es Vedrà was the first thing Mert pointed out to me, to let me know that it was also reputed to be the Isle of the Sirens, from the Odyssey.
"There are supposed to be the Sirens living there, trapping the salesmen," Mert said. "Magnetic energies luring people." By salesmen, Mert, who is a native of Turkey and is prone, in English, at least, to occasional idiomatic deviations, meant sailors, but there are many ways in which the current incarnation of Ibiza—isle of hulking night clubs, all-night Ecstasy raves, foam parties, and fashion shoots—might represent, for a traveller from London or Madrid, a potentially hull-dashing diversion.
Mert and Marcus have been luring a lot of people to Ibiza recently. Success has elevated them into the ranks of those to whom the world must come—the world, in this case, being hairdressers, stylists, models, makeup artists, and manicurists. Katie Grand, the editor of Pop and Mert and Marcus's longtime friend and collaborator, told me, "Their finances have changed and their power has changed, which is why we're here and not in a studio in King's Cross."
Throughout the spring and summer, the pair had a new shoot nearly every week. They photographed fall advertising campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Roberto Cavalli, Missoni, Giorgio Armani, Hugo Boss, Bulgari, and Gucci perfume, as well as editorial spreads for Vogue, W, and Pop. Suddenly, their pictures are everywhere—or, at least, that is what is said of them. It is fair to say, anyway, that Mert and Marcus have been turning up increasingly often. The other thing that is said of them is that they came out of nowhere. "They seem to have just appeared," Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, said. Or, as Ivan Bart, the director of IMG Models, told the Times not long ago, "They are the new fabulous."
Mert, 33, is Turkish; Marcus, 34, is Welsh. Mert is short and chubby; Marcus is tall and slim. Mert is jovial, with a husky laugh; Marcus is measured, with a mischievous grin. When they work, they take turns with the camera—sometimes snatching it from each other—and although Mert's taste may incline a bit more toward campy glamour and Marcus's more toward ironic cool, the results rarely, if ever, betray the dominance of one man's aesthetic over the other's. "When you're looking at the film, you can't tell which of them had the camera," Grand said.
Their pictures tend to be luminous, as though the subjects were lit from within, and to feature odd backgrounds, stark contrasts, and rich color. The models' flesh and hair can appear to be made of plastic. Many of the images have a staged, formal quality, like the nineteen-thirties Hollywood photographs of George Hurrell, but with a sheen that suits the video-game age: Jean Harlow meets S1m0ne. At times, the women seem almost synthetic, and in some respects they are, because Mert and Marcus do a great deal of post-production work. They are known for manipulating their pictures. They shoot digitally, and then alter the images on a computer screen, using Photoshop to brighten or change colors and contours. They do not hide the fact that they do so. "It's very fakey, fakey, fakey, but that's what it's supposed to be," Coddington said. Even real things seem fake: a year ago, they travelled, at great expense, to the desert of Dubai to shoot a campaign for Louis Vuitton. In the end, the dunes looked computer-generated anyway.
"It's like a painting," Mert told me. "You can paint a scene. The next day, you think, I wish I had a dog. So you draw a dog on it. You can achieve what you want eventually, even if you didn't do it that way. You seem freer than when 'what you shot is what you got.' "
You can also enhance the appearance of your subjects. "Mert and Marcus are at the top of the list," Patrick McCarthy, the editorial director of W, told me. "One reason is that they make people look magnificent." Consequently, the line on Mert and Marcus is that they are restoring glamour to fashion photography (after a period of relative grubbiness), but this, according to Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, is "a simplistic and superficial response to their work." He said, "There is a veneer, certainly, of glamour, but, if you look more closely, it is darker than that. There is an artificiality about it that can be upsetting."
Freedman likened a spread in this month's issue of W, shot on the rocks of Ibiza, to the surreal dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, but Mert and Marcus owe a lot more to the confections of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. When Newton died, last winter, they made a little shrine to him out of cactuses, in back of the house in Ibiza. "I loved his photography," Mert said. "When I was a kid, I thought it was all real. I thought, Wow, what things are happening out there! Look at that woman nude in the hotel walking in heels!"
Before my visit to Ibiza, I'd heard about a shoot at the house earlier in the year, during which a member of the production crew had come around a corner and stumbled on Marcus, in his and Mert's bedroom, trying on a green Cavalli dress. (When I asked Mert and Marcus about this, Mert said, "Marcus, your father's going to kill you!") Soon, everyone who was staying at the house was raiding the racks of clothing that had been provided by designers for the models to wear during the shoot. The men squeezed into dresses, blouses, and skirts, and submitted to Mert and Marcus's directions for an impromptu runway show. One of the photo assistants, a young Italian named Federico, seemed a little too manly in a lace ensemble from Dolce & Gabbana, but for the most part the fellows managed to look splendid.
I was thinking of this story, and of how I'd look in lace, when I arrived for the first time at the vast gravel parking lot of Palacio de Salomon. When I got out of the car, a tall, lanky woman, wearing a bright-green terry-cloth robe and chalky white face paint, with a great mane of blond hair and long pale feet, emerged from the house, crossed the lot, and stooped to reënter the house through a squat blue door. She looked, oddly, like a man in drag. After a moment, I followed her. The door opened onto a cloistered, sunlit courtyard cluttered with palms, laurel, bougainvillea, and, in the middle, an empty fountain ringed with potted plants. At the far end of the courtyard, through a series of Moorish archways, was a marble pavilion that gave way to a swimming pool and a spectacular view of the coast and the sea. More than a dozen people milled about, among them two more skinny girls in brightly colored robes. The one I had seen in the lot was now lounging on a daybed in the pavilion, partially veiled by mosquito netting that luffed in the breeze. She no longer looked anything like a man. Nearby, in an open-air kitchen at one end of the pavilion, a woman in an apron was making fresh orange juice and a batch of zucchini fritters. Another woman, in a skimpy green Peter Pan outfit, was bent over a pair of iPods, choosing songs. The current selection was Kate Bush: "Ooh, there is thunder in our hearts." Coming upon this place, one half expected to be greeted by Auric Goldfinger or Hugo Drax.
Mert and Marcus were in the pavilion, taking pictures. Mert, in a French sailor's shirt and baggy terry-cloth cargo shorts, had the camera, and Marcus, in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and pin-striped cotton pants, stood off to the side, observing the results on a monitor—a laptop on a tripod, with a light shade over it. Mert was directing a model, in thick makeup and a vintage Valentino dress, who stood in front of a background that consisted of a giant sheet of heavy white paper. "A little bit higher the mouth," he called out. "A little less teeth. That's lovely." He snapped a shot, then stopped to look at the monitor. "I've got a doubt with the eyes. I've got a doubt with the glitter."
"It's a bit Kiss at the moment," Grand (who, in appearance, is a bit Natalie Merchant, with an endearing gap between her front teeth) said.
"I'd rather it was more New Romantic," Mert said.
In previous weeks, Mert and Marcus had talked often on the phone with Grand and e-mailed old pictures and references back and forth to develop ideas for the shoot. Now they were planning to spend this first day experimenting with hair styles and makeup, in order to establish the models as characters and refine their working theme.
"New Romantic—it's a look from the eighties," Mert explained to me.
"Human League, Adam Ant—did you not have that in the States?" Marcus said.
They had fixed on this look after watching the runway shows in Milan and Paris last spring. "There was something Pre-Raphaelite about the shows," Marcus said. "And we were thinking, How could we do it more clubby, a little younger, a little more self-made?"
"Today, we're trying to make something different that's not stupid—something strange but not weird or silly," Mert said. "It's a bit like the movies. I hate it when they dress the girls in the best clothes, the highest fashion, the best hair. We want to play with character. We want to know the girl. It adds a meaning to all the paint on her face."
The face painter was Charlotte Tilbury, an affable, prankable redhead from London, who is the creative director of Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics firm. Tilbury's mother, Patsy Dodd, has lived on Ibiza for thirty years and serves as Mert and Marcus's den mother, fixer, and Ibizan head of production. Dodd, who declared herself "infamous," is a veteran of the scene, though it's unclear exactly what scene she's a veteran of; it involved various Rolling Stones and Continental princes. The hair man was Guido Palau, another Londoner, who had a dark beard and a nicely parted flop of hair that looked as casually prepared as it was designed to. He had on a plain gray T-shirt and baggy cargo shorts slung low to expose the band of his Calvin Klein skivvies. Guido and Charlotte, along with Grand, have been Mert and Marcus's closest collaborators through the years. Each of them had a pair of assistants, who seemed simultaneously harried and morose in a way that suggested an unflappability peculiar to fashion shoots and big-city hospitals. Among the other helpers were Federico and his mustachioed sidekick Ascanio, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Palacio de Salomon, and Semra, the iPod d.j. and fetcher of juice and tea, who grew up in Turkey with Mert. The models were Raquel, Romina, Lily, and Xenia, a pale, rather featureless crop. "These are all new girls for us, except Raquel," Mert said. "We usually use big girls for Pop." The big girls they tend to work with are Kate Moss, Gisele Bündchen, and Amber Valletta. There was also a long-haired Brazilian teen-age male model named Robson, who spent the entire shoot sitting cross-armed in a deck chair, speaking to no one, reading nothing. The curious combination of glumness and vivacity around the house brought to mind an abject dictatorship gussied up for the benefit of a visiting dignitary.
When a new model, with a new outfit and new makeup and hair, comes on the set, Mert and Marcus take fewer than a dozen shots, because with the digital setup they can see what each one looks like as soon as they take it (the camera, a modified Hasselblad, is connected to the laptop). They take their time making adjustments before capturing each shot. They are a long way from the old stereotype of the fashion photographer as profligate soloist shooting roll after roll, like David Hemmings in "Blow-Up." Their photographic process more resembles a movie set, or even a football game: Mert or Marcus takes a picture, then everyone huddles around the monitor to look at the result and discuss the next shot, as the assistants run to and fro like water boys.
"I like that one. One more, Marcus?"
"Or do you want to try what's-her-name?"
Marcus moved languidly, hips out, shoulders back, and often had an apple or a nectarine in his hand. As he ate, he tucked his elbow into his hip and appraised whatever needed appraising: model, makeup, Mert. Mert bounced, broke into sing-along ("I'm your Venus / I'm your fire / At your desire"), and cadged cigarettes, packs of which were everywhere. Between photo sessions, the men occasionally repaired to another part of the house with Grand to hash over their progress. "Maybe it'll be easier for Charlotte if we go and talk about eighties débutantes," Grand said at one point, as the three of them took the sun on the patio outside Mert and Marcus's bedroom. They trooped over to the makeup-and-hair station, in a part of the cloister across the courtyard from the racks of clothes. Lily, in the green robe, sat expressionless in a chair, as Charlotte, leaning in close, darkened her eyes with eyeliner.
"Maybe it's quite nice for her to look as though her innocence is gone," Charlotte said. "I'm trying to get a sense of where this is going."
"I thought the New Romantic was quite nice," Mert said. "I don't think we should have any rules. I don't want people to look and say, 'Remake of New Romanticism.' I think we should do this how you feel. See where your hands take you."
One of the challenges of fashion photography is the difficulty of putting into words, for the benefit of your collaborators and assistants, what you want things to look like. It isn't easy to describe makeup and hair. This is further complicated when there are two photographers. Nonetheless, Mert and Marcus are uncannily capable communicators. As a taxonomist, Mert is especially prolific: "How about something more Japanese street? And glamorize that a little? Not the thirties." "We don't want 'Galactica' or 'Star Trek.' " "I feel like the geisha was too kooky." "She looks like a granny." Occasionally, Mert gets new terminology from Marcus:
"Mert, let's spray her hair, spread it wide, make it a little bit ghoulish."
"What is 'ghoulish'?"
"Like a ghost."
Mert and Marcus met eight years ago, during a party on a pier in Hastings, when, as Mert remembers it, "Marcus came toward me and said, 'Do you have a lighter?' " They soon discovered that they had a great deal in common. For example, they both loved fashion, and each was the son of a fighter pilot.
Mert's father had been in the Turkish Air Force, before retiring to open a restaurant on the Mediterranean coast. Mert's mother had been a prominent Turkish model, in the sixties. As a boy, in Ankara, Mert was a pop-culture maven who eagerly awaited the arrival, each month, of Turkish facsimiles of British and American fashion magazines. "We were so hungry," he said. "We had nothing. We were seeing it on TV. We would go to a café to watch MTV." They got "Dallas" and "The Love Boat" at home, at least. Mert liked to dress up and bleach his friends' hair. ("You knew when he was young that he was going to be something," Semra told me.) When he turned nineteen, he moved to London, in order to study English, and suddenly he was hungry no more. "I was amazed," he said. "The clubs, the shops, the galleries. I was like a chicken out of an egg."
Marcus's father served in the Royal Air Force, and then became a dealer in art and antiques. "My mum was a hairdresser," Marcus said. "I'd hang out at her salon and see looks being created. I knew straightaway that fashion was my thing." Unlike Mert, who was an only child, Marcus had four siblings. "Marcus's family is like the Waltons," Mert said. "I used to be obsessed with the Waltons. They had the geeses in the garden, and the grandma and the granddad." Marcus, who moved to London in 1992, decided fairly early that he wanted to focus on fashion photography. He learned the technical aspects as an assistant to a still-life photographer and earned a little money taking press photos for bands like Duran Duran and the Brand New Heavies.
When Mert and Marcus met, they were keen participants in the London club scene. "In the nineties, we went out a lot," Mert said. "We were party boys." The crowd, Katie Grand recalled, included "P.R. girls, shop workers, etc.—anyone who could stay out for days on end and make it into work when they had to."
At the time, Mert was working, intermittently, as a stylist. He had never even held a camera. He and Marcus moved into a derelict loft in a warehouse on Old Street, in East London, and converted it into a studio, doing most of the work themselves. Mert began to learn from Marcus. Initially, they just took pictures of each other and their friends. They weren't making much money at it, though, and Marcus's parents urged their son to consider shooting weddings instead. "But, Dad," he insisted, "I want to be a fashion photographer."
Although Mert and Marcus were a couple before they were collaborators, once they got started taking pictures together they became well known enough, in a local kind of way, for people to see their names before hearing them, and thus to fall prey to predictable mispronunciations. "Everyone used to call me Murt," Mert told me, at one point. "My name is Maht."
"It's definitely not Murt," Marcus said.
"Then people spelled your name 'Matt.' "
"I'm not Matt, I'm Maht. Maht. Maht. It means honest and brave, like the man. Uh-oh, my mother wished."
Marcus smiled and said, "Shall we take another picture?"
Grand was the first to publish their work, in 1997, in the British magazine Dazed & Confused, where she was the fashion director. (In her recollection, Marcus was the photographer and Mert was the stylist.) Their big break came when they got a call in 1998 from Visionaire, a limited-edition art-and-fashion publication. At first, they thought the call was a prank. On the basis of the Visionaire shoot, the London fashion agent Kim Sion took them on. By 2001, they were shooting ad campaigns for Missoni and Louis Vuitton and Hugo Boss. These days, like most prominent fashion photographers, they make the bulk of their money from ad campaigns—tens of thousands of dollars a day. Editorial work hardly pays a thing, but, as an expression of aptitude and sensibility, it is what attracts the lucrative jobs. Years of unpaid labor have now yielded something like fame and fortune, though they aren't party boys anymore.
"It's not like Liberace or anything, as much as I'd wish it to be," Mert said. "This kind of thing doesn't come like a piece of cake at the table from the waitress to you. It's hard work."
The next phase, typically, is that in which other photographers are influenced. "Their work has moved the goalposts," Grand said. "Prior to Mert and Marcus, digital retouching was invariably used as a bit of a trick, to create something weird—Björk with two heads, models cut out and placed onto weird impossible backgrounds, etc. Mert and Marcus used digital technology in a different way, much more as a hand retoucher would have done—to make the girl perfect."
Mert and Marcus, though not exactly defensive about their reliance on Photoshop, insist that their methods fall well within the bounds of traditional photographic enhancement. "There are old techniques you could use in the darkroom, bringing things in or burning things out," Marcus said. "It takes that picture somewhere else. You become like a painter."
"People used to spray-paint their pictures," Mert said.
"A friend of mine had old photos that weren't fixed properly, and the photos faded, leaving lines of ink where the eyebrows used to be," Marcus said.
Still, for some, there is a lingering distrust of post-production augmentations. During a quiet stretch in the shoot, Guido told me, "Hopefully, they won't do too much post on the hair, do you know what I mean, for my pride." When I mentioned this to Mert and Marcus, they glanced at each other. "He said that?"
Mert and Marcus's photographs encompass a wide range of styles and influences. What they tend to have in common, besides a digitized glaze, is a fascination with a certain kind of woman. "The woman type is the common thread," Marcus told me. "A woman that's quite sexually charged, confident, not too over the top. I look for something that's slightly strange. I don't want to see a normal everyday girl in my pictures." ("Invariably, there's a Madonna reference somewhere in their photographs," Grand added. She was referring to the mother not of Jesus but of Lourdes.)
"We like powerful women, women with a meaning, a you-don't-have-to-talk-or-move-too-much-to-tell-who-you-are kind of woman," Mert said a little later. They were sitting on one of the daybeds in the pavilion, taking a break—a cigarette for Mert, an apple for Marcus. "Even if the subject is innocence, I like to see something powerful. I love Marlene Dietrich, Madonna, Faye Dunaway, Elizabeth Taylor. Ladies who dressed for a thrill. We love Charlotte Rampling."
Their Vuitton campaigns have featured some of the world's more prominent non-everyday girls, among them Jennifer Lopez, whom Mert characterized, admiringly, as "a diva with a baby's heart," and the quartet of actresses (Scarlett Johansson, Christina Ricci, Diane Kruger, Chloë Sevigny) in this fall's ads, lying languorously on couches and beds. After Ricci's Vuitton shoot was over, she stuck around and posed for a Pop cover, impressing Mert and Marcus with her ability to cry on command. And they impressed her with their ability to get along on the job. "Most couples can't even shop together," she told me.
Things started coming together late on the first day of the Pop shoot, with the sun setting off Es Vedrà. Semra was on a hot streak—Deee-Lite, Salt 'N' Pepa, Handel—Mert and Marcus passed the camera back and forth, and Lily was on the set, in pigtails, high-heeled boots, and a black taffeta Cavalli dress and cape. "Lily, it's not about modelling," Mert admonished. "It's about strange." A moment later, he had her cross her legs and pull the dress up around her waist, exposing her garter. "Oooh, I love that one," Mert said. As darkness fell, they knocked off for the day.
Dinner was a lavish buffet, as lunch had been. Mert, Marcus, Katie, and Guido took their plates into the house to talk about their plans for the next day: what to do with the models, whether or not to go on location somewhere.
"I'd like them to look like a gang," Mert said.
"The boy is easy," Guido said.
"We could get a nice rowing boat," Mert suggested.
"A nice picture of four people passed out," Grand said.
"My mind is going to less makeup and more hair," Mert said.
"Is that because you don't like the makeup?" Grand asked.
"It's just too eighties," Mert said. "It's just, like, we need a little click moment."
The next morning, over pancakes, the decision was made to keep shooting at the house, rather than at an abandoned soccer stadium, which might have required some trespassing. "It's all about the characters, isn't it—not just the clothes and the fashion," Marcus said. "I remember seeing Helmut Newton's pictures, at a very early age, of Grace Coddington in a pool with sunglasses on." (Coddington used to be a model.) "That image really stuck with me. Then I saw that picture again a few years ago, realizing what I do now, that we're creating these characters for the purpose of a fashion picture. You want to convince people it's a real-life scenario. That's what gives a picture longevity."
An onshore breeze had kicked up, flattening the light and imparting a hint of menace to the flanks of Es Vedrà. Semra had Santana on the iPod. At one point, a gust ripped apart the giant sheet of paper that served as a background, so that it flapped around thunderously, as assistants scrambled to furl it.
"No, leave it!" Mert exclaimed, bunching the paper up around the model's shoulders. "Gimme." He grabbed the camera from Marcus and moved in close.
Marcus stood back, eating a nectarine. "We decided that we want to see more faces," he explained. "She has something New Romantic about her, without being New Romantic in an old way."
The shoot achieved a rhythm: faces, songs, and cigarettes. "That's it!" "We're happy to move on." "A little more boob. A little less. A little less. A little more. Hands up. Evil face." "Let's play with the guy, see what we can do!" Now and then, the group gathered around the laptop. "We were thinking of turning her eyes from blue to black," said Mert, who had put on a beret and was nibbling at a bowl of Cheetos. "To make it New Romantic. Or like a Dutch painting."
Grand said, "She's very 'Picnic at Hanging Rock.' "
"Just don't touch the hair," Guido said, facetiously.
Twilight prompted a jump into the pool and a momentary dispersal to private quarters. The models and the crew were at the south end of the courtyard, in a two-story wing that was laid out like a motel, with its own pool, this one empty. Mert and Marcus retreated to the north end, their part of the house, a series of spare white rooms decorated with old magazines, ashtrays, and furniture that had belonged to previous tenants. When dinner was served, Mert and Marcus emerged, dressed in plush white terry-cloth robes. The mood was congenial, in a weary kind of way. Guido, Katie, Mert, and Marcus ate by candlelight and told stories about shoots gone by: snakes and lightning with Gisele in Death Valley, fart-machine pranks with Naomi in Dubai. Somehow, the conversation veered off into current events, to everyone's whereabouts on September 11th—a few had been in New York for Fashion Week—and then to the situation in Iraq. "They released those pictures from that prison?" Mert asked, referring to Abu Ghraib. "Weren't some of them fake or something?"
The table did not linger long on this particular subject. "O.K., enough about that," someone said, after an uncomfortable silence. "Let's talk about Versace."
The shoot wrapped the next evening at seven-fifteen, to the strains of Peaches' "Set It Off." Everyone applauded, then immediately began packing up. The day had been a great success, but there was little time to dwell on it. Instead, Mert and Marcus sat down at a table off the courtyard to edit the previous shoot, a twenty-two-page spread for the August issue of W, which they'd photographed at the house two weeks earlier. It featured the model Guinevere van Seenus posing around the house and by the pool, in black-and-white pictures that were evocative of thirties Hollywood pinups and the work of Jean Cocteau and Herb Ritts. The task was to sort through the pictures on a laptop and cull the ones that they wanted W to use. Mert manipulated the cursor with a pen on a digital tablet, opening picture after picture on the screen, as Marcus looked on. They referred to each image of Guinevere as though it were a different woman.
"Get rid of?"
"Get rid of."
"Keep—for the moment."
"Get rid of."
"Oh, I love her."
"I like her, too."
"She's cute."
"Yeah, I like her."
"A bit Man Ray."
"A bit too Breathless Mahoney."
"She's quite nice without the jewels."
"Keep her."
"Get rid of her."
"I quite like her. It feels like reportage."
"It's a fine line between Jean Harlow and Cyndi Lauper. We don't want it to be too eighties."
"Get rid of."
"Too seedy."
"Woop—as we're talking about seedy."
"Heavy bum."
"I like her."
"I find her a bit horsey."
Mert began retouching a photograph onscreen of Guinevere gripping a bougainvillea vine, elbows shielding bare breasts. "What I'm seeing, Marcus: she could get less dark under the eyes. We get rid of her wig lines." He added highlights to the lower lip and rubbed away shadow from beneath the eyes.
"Shall we lighten her skin, make it more alabaster?" Marcus asked.
Mert tilted his head appraisingly. "She looks good, doesn't she? She looks like a strange Hollywood star. Like Hedy Lamarr or something."
"We wanted to go back in time," Marcus explained. "A twisted thirties Hollywood character—Hollywood photography combined with twenties gentlemen's photography, with a bit of naughtiness to it." He watched Mert play. "Shall we move on?"
"The eyes look a little mean."
"Get rid of?"
"Get rid of."
"Keep her for now."
"I don't like her. I find her quite round."
"Woop, now she's got black hair."
They came upon a photograph of Guinevere in which, by some trick of the light or the angle, one of her breasts appeared to be hanging lower than the other. "Should we lose the boobs?" Mert said. "I think we have to change the boobs, unfortunately." ♦


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3Power wrote:Me personally? Yep. Would I expect everyone to, including new players? nnnnnnope.Ah, on the volunteer donation part, let me ask you a question: if you didn't have to pay for it would you pay it?
Well there you go. Since you are willing, you can pay for it now and those who you don't expect to pay for it don't have to. Easy as pie.
3Power wrote:While it is true that some people might donate, there's quite frankly no guarantee that they would, especially considering the fuss some people are raising over the price tag now. This method, while somewhat heavy handed, will guarantee that people who are serious will make that commitment.
It also guarantees that not many commitments will be made. Which means less money for kern. This isn't a difficult concept, but you seem to be struggling with it.
Ah, but while fewer those commitments are still guaranteed money and makes a more likely chance that those who become nobles will not flake out on their responsibilities which in turn will make for a better game atmosphere.
3Power wrote:You believe, I have shown. This will not be beneficial to the site short or long term.Not so much indifferent as we see the validity of both points of view. The reason why we support the current option is because we believe that it will be beneficial to the site both in the short and long term.
Oh so? Again, I'm sorry you feel that way.
3Power wrote:Sometimes you can though. But only if people work together. You aren't. You are running interference, you are not keeping your indifference to yourself, you are encouraging others to be indifferent. You're like someone who vocally tells people not to vote.*nod nod* And for the record I voted for Option 1, but said I could live with 2. And that's what I'm doing. Living with it. Because I accept that I sometimes (hell, often times) cannot get my way.
Oh? In that case, would you be willing to put the poll back up so we may resume finding out what the rest of the clan thinks on this matter?

subset: commoncrawl


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Plutonia (novel Vladimir Obruchev, Misha # 9, 1987)
Igor Oleynikov (alternative spelling Oleinikov) studied at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering. In 1979 he started working with the Russian animation studio Soyuzmultfilm based in Moscow. Igor has been working as children's periodicals illustrator and then in book publishing since 1986. He was one of the artists of the multilingual Soviet children's magazine Misha. Misha appeared in English, French, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish during the 1970s and 1980s and contained articles and comic/picture stories based on folktales and novels.


text:
I'm a freelance experience designer
and I would love to bring the practice
of Informed Design to your project.
In-depth discovery and ideation
Every project and its users are unique. I employ an ever-growing set of creative and analytical methods to inform my understanding of your business and the problem you are trying to solve.
My ideation process is collaborative and focused on documenting the journey so you feel confident in the decisions that are made.
Results oriented architecture
Sounds pretty basic, but all too often information architecture, messaging and feature presentation are muddled, resulting in poor performance and a lack of passionate users.
Paying attention to the details from the inside out while ensuring at every step that your users fully comprehend your product and how to use it, gives you the ability to to scale smartly and enjoy sustained success.
Emotionally engaged design
You're passionate about your product. Your users should be too.
I design meaningful experiences led by a sound understanding of who your users are and what they desire.
By crafting each tiny interaction with care and then tying them together in a way that feels natural, your users will think you can read their minds.


text:
Police are hunting for a trio that apparently pulled off a home-invasion robbery on Noyes Street in Pacific Beach on Jan. 2.
Investigators said the trio — made up of two men and one woman — met up at a local 7/11 store and went to the address in the 4200 block of Noyes around 6:30 a.m., where the woman suspect went inside. Police said she then left the home and the two men burst into the residence with handguns and robbed the victims of several undisclosed items.
The woman is described as a Hispanic suspect about 5 feet 8 inches between the ages of 30 and 35, weighing about 160 pounds, wearing a light-green sweater and blue jeans.
One of the men is described as a black male between the ages of 26 to 34, weighing about 185 pounds, wearing all black clothing.
The second man is described as white or Hispanic, about 5 feet 9 inches, 220 pounds, between the ages of 26-34, with brown hair. He was last seen wearing a bandana and all black clothing.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call police or Crime Stoppers at (888) 540-8477.
Homeless man stabbed by girlfriend at bay
Police officers arrested a homeless woman Dec. 30 after she allegedly stabbed her boyfriend in the chest and back while the couple camped in a restroom at Bonita Cove at Mission Bay.
Though details were sketchy, police said the 39-year-old woman stabbed her 24-year-old boyfriend around 1 a.m.
Police said the man's wounds were not considered to be life-threatening. The woman was arrested at the scene.
UCSD students' kidnapper eyes 14-year sentence
The man who kidnapped and robbed two UCSD students in La Jolla before forcing them to drive him to Pacific Beach to escape pleaded guilty and has agreed to accept a 14-year prison term at his sentencing on Jan. 9.
Miguel Torres Espinoza, 29, of San Diego admitted to kidnapping Raymond Chung and his girlfriend, Jessica Liu, both 20, in the parking lot of the CVS Pharmacy on Villa La Jolla Drive on Sept. 11 around 11 p.m.
He forced the couple to drive to their bank ATM and withdraw $420. Both students believed the gun Espinoza displayed to them was real, but it later turned out to be an air pistol.
Espinoza also stole Liu's laptop and Chung's wallet and cell phone. After taking the money, he demanded to be let out of the car in a residential area of Pacific Beach. The students called police, who found Espinoza running up Loring Street at Soledad Mountain Road.
Espinoza pleaded guilty to two kidnapping counts and two robbery charges. He could have received two life terms on the kidnapping-for-robbery charges.
— Neal Putnam Man treated for gunshot wound at marina
Police are investigating a gun-related assault case in which a man claimed to have been shot on a boat in the marina of the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay on Quivira Road on Dec. 27.
Investigators said the wounded man appeared in the lobby of the hotel after 1 a.m. and was taken to the hospital for treatment. Police said the man's injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, but investigators did not release additional information regarding the case.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call police or Crime Stoppers at (888) 540-8477.
Police seek pair after armed heist at store
Investigators are probing a Dec. 27 armed holdup at the GJ Wireless store on Mission Boulevard, during which one of the suspects pointed a handgun at the store clerk.
Police said two men entered the store shortly after 1 p.m. and demanded cash from the clerk at gunpoint. The robbers may have been spooked off when some customers looked into the store, according to police. At that point, one of the suspects reportedly punched the clerk and both suspects fled.
Witnesses said one suspect got into a dark-grey vehicle and fled northbound in the west alley of Mission Boulevard. He was described as a black man in his early 20s, about 6 feet tall, weighing about 200 pounds. He was last seen wearing a red hat, a black bandana over his face and black pants.
The other suspect was seen running northbound along Mission Boulevard. He was described as a black man also in his early 20s, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing about 170 pounds. He was last seen wearing a dark jacket and dark pants.
According to police, the clerk had a complaint of head pain and the case remains under investigation.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call police or Crime Stoppers at (888) 540-8477.


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Is there anything better about American adults than their collective willingness to film children and domestic animals hurt themselves while attempting to perform tasks far too advanced for their underdeveloped cognitive abilities and motor skills? On this day of unrepentant footballing and snacking, let's all remind ourselves that the drunk parents of America are probably saddling up the family Lab so their toddlers can take turns riding it through the living room.
via Buzzfeed


text:
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PET-G (Polyethyleentereftalaatglycol) is a very strong, water resistant thermoplastic, with beautiful shiny result. PET is a well known plastic, as it's mostly used in production of soda bottles. In recent years this material has become a very popular material for 3D printing as it combines a number of great properties of both ABS and PLA. Printing with PETG is almost as easy as PLA and requires little more effort. As the bonding with itself is very strong, the first layer should be squished as much as PLA, as the material may blob around the nozzle ruining your print. The layer adhesion is great, making the end result very strong, and bendable instead of breakable as opposed to PLA. PETG doesn't adhere very well to other materials, as glue doesn't have much grip on the material. Another great property of PETG is that the neutral pallets are almost glass like transparent, giving us the opportunity to deliver awesome translucent colors.
PET-G can be printed with or without heated bed with little to no warping, using 3DLAC, We recommend using a 65 degrees heated bed however, as the print will come loose automatically when cooling down. For extrusion temperature 245 is the optimum temperature, as lower temperature will result in more stringiness and worse adhesion. During printing no distinguishable smell should be noticed, however we do recommend to print in a well ventilated area.
Real PET-G filament is available directly from stock in a large number of colors. For larger quantities and custom batches, feel free to contact our sales department.
Real filament is an independent manufacturer of high quality filament, produced locally in The Netherlands with a specific emphasis on thermoplastic purity. There are no cost-saving "filler" additives that may impact performance or reliability. Real gives you consistent print conditions at a low price, making it amongst the highest value filaments on the market.
The range of thermoplastic filament choices continues to multiply at an increasing rate, ranging from established brands to highly specialized compounds. For this reason, Real has created a broad catalog of options, and developed the flexibility to produce customized batches tailored to your preferences in color, material or diameter. Contact our sales team for more information, or review the product data sheets and specifications directly on the Real filament website.
Whether you're part of the DIY RepRap community or use a high end professional 3D printer, Real filament is universally compatible to give you great results.
Dimension de la bobine
|Diamètre extérieur
|200 mm
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|50 mm
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|Poids de la bobine
|300 g
|Poids du filament
|1000 g
|Longueur du filament
|340 m


text:
- Font:
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The nation's shortage of nurses continues to worsen, and the trend shows no signs of reversing — not because too few young people want to become nurses, but because there aren't enough nursing teachers to train them, medical researchers and administrators say.
Medical administrators have warned for years that the crunch was coming. As the shortage reaches crisis levels — estimated at a quarter-million by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on its way to half a million by 2025 — the impact on mortality is stark.
The Joint Commission, a national hospital accrediting agency, calculated that the shortage of nurses contributes to a quarter of the country's nearly 100,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.
But the consequences can be dire even for less critical patients. HHS's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found last year that adding just one patient per registered nurse per shift in U.S. hospitals raised the risk of all hospital-acquired complications by 17 percent, including pneumonia (7 percent) and "unplanned extubation," which is doctor-speak for when a breathing tube is knocked out by accident (45 percent).
The study found that the risks fell by similar rates when nurses' patient loads were reduced.
At least 20 states have passed or are considering legislation to lower the number of patients per nurse. The ideal proportion differs from specialty to specialty, but researchers at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing concluded that 4:1 was generally the best ratio.
At hospitals across the country, the reality is nowhere close.
At the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus last month, nurses organized a rally to urge legislators to relieve average patient-to-nurse ratios of 14:1 in some hospitals.
Betsy Morville, a registered nurse at St. Mary's Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., joined a similar campaign to persuade Florida legislators. "I had 22 patients on the weekend" at a previous job in Pennsylvania, she said.
Too many students, not enough teachers
The problem is not, as many people assume, that no one wants to go into nursing. In fact, enrollment at nursing schools was up in 2007 for the seventh straight year.
Instead, the problem is that there aren't enough qualified teachers.
Don't miss these Health stories
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Rates of women who are opting for preventive mastectomies, such as Angeline Jolie, have increased by an estimated 50 percent in recent years, experts say. But many doctors are puzzled because the operation doesn't carry a 100 percent guarantee, it's major surgery -- and women have other options, from a once-a-day pill to careful monitoring.
- Larry Page's damaged vocal cords: Treatment comes with trade-offs
- Report questioning salt guidelines riles heart experts
- CDC: 2012 was deadliest year for West Nile in US
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- More women opting for preventive mastectomy - but should they be?
More than 30,700 qualified applicants were turned away, according to figures compiled by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
"It's the nursing faculty shortage that's exacerbating the nursing shortage at the bedside," said Susan Otto, chief of the Nursing Division at Thomas University in Thomasville, Ga. "We simply don't have enough nursing faculty to teach all of the people that want to become nurses."
In a survey of chief executives of medical, dental, nursing and other health-related teaching institutions last year, the Association of Academic Health Centers found that 81 percent said the lack of qualified nursing teachers was a problem at their schools, ranking first on the list of their biggest concerns. Nearly half said it was a severe problem.
In Oklahoma, officials said state colleges start out by assuming they will have to reject a third of fully qualified applicants to bachelor's-degree nursing programs because there aren't enough instructors to teach them.
Last year in Hawaii alone, "we had 524 qualified nursing applicants who could not go to school — not accepted into nursing schools — because we didn't have the faculty to support that," said Suzann Filleul, chief nursing executive at Kaiser Permanente Hawaii in Honolulu.
It's hard to find the teachers. Nurses and administrators said teaching nursing at the college level requires an advanced degree — 50 percent require an earned doctorate, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing found — and proven achievement in the field. Those nurses are the same ones who are in the highest demand in hospital emergency and operating rooms.
"Part of it is that faculty salaries are much lower than clinical salaries, so a nurse with a master's degree can probably make $30,000 more in general out in clinical practice than she'll make teaching," said Carolyn Yucha, dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
That means that every year, as more nurses retire or leave because of burnout, there are fewer newly minted nurses to replace them, even as the enormous baby boom generation reaches retirement age and puts more demands on the health care system.
"I think the ramification is the quality of care that is provided to our patients in the setting here at the medical center," said Cindy Kamikawa, vice president of nursing at the Queens Medical Center on Oahu in Hawaii. "We need nursing care 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to care for our patients, and we know that nursing makes a difference."
Too many openings, not enough supply
Another ramification is cannibalization. Hospitals with severe shortages are casting wide recruiting nets, luring nurses from other hospitals and causing resentment among fellow administrators.
In May, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York caused an uproar in Indianapolis when it placed an ad in The Indianapolis Star offering senior registered nurses $15,000 signing bonuses to pack up and move north.
Similarly, St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., raised eyebrows last month when it held a recruitment drive offering a buffet table and free $25 gas cards just to get experienced nurses to walk in.
St. Joseph's administrators said they needed nurses in the operating room, the dialysis unit and other departments, and they are offering hefty signing bonuses in a city where competition for nurses is fierce among four major hospitals with significant staffing shortages.
Hospitals and nursing schools are also pursuing nurses with untraditional backgrounds. An especially attractive market is men, who make up only 6 percent of the nation's nurses, according to figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Case studies by the University of Virginia School of Nursing uncovered recruitment efforts by some Southern hospitals at NASCAR races and among men with technical skills or service-oriented backgrounds, such as Boy Scouts or military corpsmen.
George Rouse, a father of four in Cleveland, left his career as a computer programmer to go to nursing school.
"It's very, very, scary switching careers. It's very scary going into the unknown," Rouse said. But with a large family, he was attracted by the promise of job stability in a field where his skills will be in demand.
"There's so much opportunity," he said. "It's a career of what you make of it."
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints


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Arriver 08:00
Sydney belongs to the exclusive club of cities that generate excitement. At the end of a marathon flight there's renewed vitality in the cabin as the plane circles the city, where thousands of yachts are suspended on the dark water and the sails of the Opera House glisten in the distance. Blessed with dazzling beaches and a sunny climate, Sydney is among the most beautiful cities on the planet.With 4.6 million people, Sydney is the biggest and most cosmopolitan city in Australia. A wave of immigration from the 1950s has seen the Anglo-Irish immigrants who made up the city's original population joined by Italians, Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, and Indonesians. This intermingling has created a cultural vibrancy and energy—and a culinary repertoire—that was missing only a generation ago.Sydneysiders embrace their harbor with a passion. Indented with numerous bays and beaches, Sydney Harbour is the presiding icon for the city, and urban Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip, commander of the 11-ship First Fleet, wrote in his diary when he first set eyes on the harbor on January 26, 1788: "We had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbor in the world."Although a visit to Sydney is an essential part of an Australian experience, the city is no more representative of Australia than Los Angeles is of the United States. Sydney has joined the ranks of the great cities whose characters are essentially international. What Sydney offers is style, sophistication, and great looks—an exhilarating prelude to the continent at its back door.
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text: If you want to re-live the iPhone 5 announcement and/or measure the total amount of time Tim Cook took a breath during the keynote, Apple just released the entire iPhone 5 announcement on its website. Watch it here and vote for who dressed best among Cook, Phil, Forstall and crew below. [Apple]


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text:
Gland, Switzerland (IUCN) 06.06.02. Today marks the start of an intensive three months for IUCN's Wildlife Trade Programme and TRAFFIC as a major project begins providing technical reviews of proposals submitted to change the listing of plant and animal species on the CITES Appendices.
A species may be listed on one of three Appendices which offer varying degrees of trade regulation. These proposals are to be considered by the CITES member countries when they meet for the 12th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Santiago, Chile in November. Today (6 June) is the deadline for them to be submitted to the CITES Secretariat.
IUCN and TRAFFIC prepare the Analyses of Proposals to Amend the CITES Appendices in the run-up to every COP (which take place every two and a half years). IUCN's Species Survival Commission (SSC) collects information on the status and biology of species from its Specialist Group network and the broader scientific community, while TRAFFIC collects data on the trade and use of species, using its own sources as well as the CITES trade database. More than 60 proposals are expected this year covering a broad range of species from Asian freshwater turtles to the monkey puzzle tree.
As well as core staff, the project will involve a team of consultants and a large number of specialists from the IUCN/SSC and TRAFFIC networks. The entire Analyses will be posted on the IUCN website in English by 9 September (French, and Spanish versions will be posted soon after) so that the Parties have time to consult them before the Conference. From that date, the Analyses can also be accessed from the TRAFFIC COP 12 Conference Room. The document, also available on CD, will be circulated at the COP as an information resource.
The Analyses aim to ensure that the decisions made at the COP are based on the best available scientific information. They provide as objective and factual an assessment as possible of the amendment proposal against the requirements of the Convention as laid out in the CITES listing criteria and other resolutions.
Compiling the Analyses is a Herculean task but one that is essential in helping CITES remain a credible and effective instrument for conserving species affected by trade. A survey carried out at the 11th COP found them to be highly valued by the CITES Parties.
On 13 September TRAFFIC Recommendations on Proposals to Amend the Appendices will be published in English in the COP 12 Conference Room. French and Spanish versions will be posted soon after.
IUCN and TRAFFIC are also working on a special CITES issue of World Conservation, the IUCN magazine that will be circulated to all Parties at the COP. The IUCN/SSC Wildlife Trade Programme has also produced the seventh edition of CITES: A Conservation Tool, a guide to amending the Appendices to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. This publication guides the CITES Parties through the Convention's articles and resolutions. It covers the process for the submission, presentation, and adoption of proposals to amend the Appendices for the 12th CITES COP. As well as in booklet form, the seventh edition has been produced on CD for the first time. Both CDs and booklets have been distributed to CITES Parties in time for their preparations for the COP.
For more information:
IUCN/SSC Wildlife Trade Programme, E-mail: [email protected]
TRAFFIC, Email: [email protected]


text:
Epiroc's training products add value to your business by preparing your employees for the hard challenges they face in their jobs on a daily basis. The focus on maximizing and optimizing productivity is one of the most important strategic elements within the mining and construction industry. By running Epiroc training programs you will see equipment utilization and productivity levels rise to completely new heights. Skilled operators will safeguard efficient production methods, meanwhile trained technicians ensure lowered down times and reduced unscheduled maintenance interventions.
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We are continuously improving our service offering to meet the market demand, please contact your local Epiroc Customer Center to find out what is available for your machine model on your market.


text:
Architecture Council/Things Committers Should Know/Staging
On this page, members of the Architecture Council assemble the notes that are sent out to committers as part of the Architecture Council/Things Committers Should Know effort, designed to arm Eclipse Committers with as much information about the Eclipse Development Process as possible.
Here are some ideas for future notices.
- The My Foundation Portal
- Contributing to Eclipse Corner
- Contributing Resources
- What is a Contribution Questionnaire?
- What does the PMC do anyway?
- What does the Eclipse Foundation Do?
- Finding answers to legal questions
- What belongs in the repository?
- How do I contribute bundles to Orbit?
- Aggregate your blog on planet Eclipse
- How do I propose a new project?
- How do I get free Eclipse Swag?
- Getting started with CBI
- Where I can find download statistics for my project?
- How do I 'listen in' on Bugzilla conversations
- How do I ensure API Compatibility in a new version
- How do I treat dependencies to external libraries
- How do I build a Community for my project
- How do I encourage users to submit patches
- How do I get useful bug reports from users
- How do I get started with unit tests
- How do I report a problem with Eclipse web infrastructure
- How do I suggest an improvement to the Eclipse Foundation
- Can I commit code that I wrote before becoming committer?
- How do I get my Strings externalized and translated by the Community
- Use Import-Package instead of Require-Bundle
December 2008
Intellectual Property Due Diligence
Hello Eclipse Committer. This is a first note in a new series of "Things Committers Should Know". Each month, the Architecture Council [1] sends out a short note describing some important aspect of life as an Eclipse committer. We hope that these notes are valuable and informative. For more information, please see the "Things Committers Should Know" page[2].
This month, we're going to touch briefly on Intellectual Property (IP) Due Diligence.
As an Eclipse Committer, you certainly know about IP Due diligence. But did you know that the "Eclipse Legal Process" Poster [3] (the definitive guide to the Eclipse IP Process) has been updated several times in the past year to pick up new special cases? In fact, the document is currently under review for its next iteration (see bug 256789 [4]). Did you also know that you're also required to move 3rd party dependencies [4]—whether or not they are to be included in your project's CVS/SVN repository or made accessible for download—through the IP Process?
In the coming months, we'll talk more specifically about these important resources. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the IP Due Diligence process, please ask your project leader, your PMC, or one of your project's Architecture Council mentors.
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php?title=Architecture_Council [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php?title=Architecture_Council/Things_Committers_Should_Know [3] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/EclipseLegalProcessPoster.pdf [4] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=256789 [5] http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Eclipse_Policy_and_Procedure_for_3rd_Party_Dependencies_Final.pdf
Do I need a Contribution Questionnaire?
Several of these "Things Committers Should Know" messages will deal focus on the Eclipse IP process. We'll start the series with the simplest possible scenario.
You're an Eclipse committer. You've created a contribution that provides some significant new functionality (i.e. it's more than just a couple of lines of code written as part of the ongoing development of an existing component). The new contribution was developed from scratch and you have consented to releasing it under the Eclipse Public License [2]. The contribution has been written under the supervision of the Project Management Committee (PMC), and contains no cryptography. If this describes what you've done, then a contribution questionnaire is not required; you can commit into CVS/SVN. You must record the contribution in the project's IP Log.
Here are some clarifications:
For IP due diligence purposes, the definition of contribution means any content, including code, data/metadata files, images, fonts, etc.
In this scenario, "developed from scratch" means that all content is new; no existing content from other sources has been included (i.e. no copy and paste). Further, "developed from scratch" means that the content does not rely on the IP of others. That is, the content relies only on existing
What it means for a contribution to have been developed "under the supervision of the PMC" can vary from PMC to PMC. "Supervision" could mean that the functionality provided by the contribution is described in your project plan or in an existing Bugzilla record. Alternatively, it could mean that the functionality has been openly discussed in your project's mailing list, or that the PMC has been directly informed of the ongoing work. Ultimately, you should ask your PMC how they define "supervision".
[1] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/EclipseLegalProcessPoster.pdf [2] http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-v10.php


text:
Cyber Security Acad needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 181 designs submitted by 27 freelance designers.
CSA will offer the only comprehensive training and laboratory facility dedicated to expert digital forensics knowledge and experience. CSA will provide one-of-a-kind immersive learning experiences and digital forensic services, graduating digital forensics investigators, while providing extensive digital forensic services to both private and public sector organizations. Combining classroom and case-based experience, our
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- Don't want magnifying glass or any other cartoonish icons
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text:
Dan Walters
Dan Walters: Perhaps Brown's tax hike wasn't needed after all
When Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled his proposed 2014-15 budget this month – one based on estimates of sharply increased state revenues – a reporter asked him whether, in retrospect, California needed the tax increase he had persuaded voters to approve in 2012.
Brown's response, in essence, was that the tax boost's money is needed to pay off the debts that the state had incurred, not only for past budget deficits, but for long-term future obligations that total about $350 billion.
Certainly paying off accumulated debts is a worthy goal. But the tax increase is temporary and, unless continued by voters or the Legislature, will have very little impact on the long-term debts that Brown lays out in the budget.
The question, really, was whether Proposition 30's sales and income tax increase was needed in the immediate future, especially in light of the union-backed campaign that told voters it was vital for the schools.
The school pitch was always somewhat bogus, since education was already guaranteed a major chunk of state revenues. Clearly, Brown et al. chose education as the focal point of the campaign simply because it is, by far, the most popular category of state spending.
They would never have told voters to raise taxes to give more money to prisons or welfare.
Proposition 30 is generating about $7 billion a year for the state and is due to expire just about when Brown would be ending his last stint as governor in 2019. But an improving economy is also producing a bumper crop of tax revenues. Had the tax hike not been enacted, the state would still have seen a sharp increase in revenues, roughly $14 billion more than it had during Brown's 2011-12 budget.
The state's constitutional obligation to schools was increased by having Proposition 30's revenue in the calculation, but only about a third of the temporary tax money is actually going to the schools – a sharp contrast with the campaign rhetoric.
The rest is being used for other purposes, including a boost in welfare grants, prisons, state employee pay hikes and other categories that the campaign carefully avoided mentioning.
Therefore, the answer to that reporter's question is that, in retrospect, because of the ensuing economic rebound, Proposition 30 was not needed to close the budget deficit – although when it was proposed, no one could have said, with certainty, that the sharp recovery would occur.
Moreover, it appears that the state may see several billion dollars above the current revenue estimates, which would further diminish Proposition 30's relative impact.
The rising revenues, however, also fuel demands from liberal groups and Brown's fellow Democrats for raising spending even higher, and fending off those pleas looms as a major headache for the remainder of Brown's governorship.


text:
Serves - 4
Total cooking time :- 30 minutes marination + 1.5 to 2 hours cooking time
- Know the strength of your gas flame , before making this and adjust the cooking time thus!
- Using heavy bottomed cooking vessel is very important for slow cooking , else the water will be absorbed fast.
- Check for water in between to avoid curry sticking to the bottom!
- I made in a cast iron cooking pot or Dutch oven which can be used both in oven and stove top!
- Add spices as per your taste and the recipe calls for medium spicy beef curry.
- Those who cant handle the heat , substitute chilli powder with kashmiri chilli powder or paprika
Happy Eating !


text:
Tuesday, 08 October 2013 05:11 AM
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Doctors prepared to drill into President Cristina Fernandez's skull Tuesday morning to siphon out blood that is pressuring her brain two months after she suffered an unexplained head injury.
Experts described the procedure as generally low risk and almost always having positive results, but the surgery on the 60-year-old leader worried many Argentines, who have struggled to imagine their country with anyone else at its center.
Fernandez was diagnosed with "chronic subdural hematoma," or fluid trapped between the skull and brain. This can happen when the tiny veins that connect the brain's surface with its outermost covering, or dura, tear and leak blood. As people age, it can happen with a head injury so mild that they don't remember it.
In the president's case, doctors initially prescribed a month's rest, but decided surgery was required after she complained of numbness and weakness in her upper left arm Sunday. A medical team rushed to the presidential residence, confirmed the new and worrying symptoms, and scheduled the surgery at the Fundacion Favaloro, one of Argentina's top cardiology hospitals.
While messages of sympathy poured in, the president's critics were questioning the secrecy that has surrounded her health recently.
Her condition was announced in a three-paragraph statement late Saturday after she spent more than nine hours in the hospital, attributing the injury to a blow to her head on Aug. 12. It gave no details on how the injury happened, and government officials declined to comment.
That would have been the day after primary elections showed a significant drop in support for her party's congressional candidates despite her intensive campaigning.
Fernandez, who followed her highly popular husband into the presidency, is the dominant figure in Argentine politics after nearly six years in office, and now she'll be off the campaign trail just three weeks before elections that could loosen her party's hold on Congress.
As she returned to the hospital Monday in preparation for surgery, Vice President Amado Boudou made no mention of the planned operation. He said in a speech that top officials would run the country as a team "while she gets the rest she deserves."
"What Cristina wants is for us to maintain the administration, and to carry on this project that [her late husband] Nestor Kirchner began and that Cristina has continued," said Boudou, whose popularity has sunk amid ongoing corruption investigations.
There was no official announcement about a transfer of power, but there were reports Boudou signed a document formally assuming control shortly after his speech, and government websites described him as "the vice president in charge of the executive branch" late Monday.
Argentina's constitution provides for, but does not require, a formal transfer of power in case of health problems, said Daniel Sabsay, a constitutional lawyer. A full medical leave would require congressional approval, but short of that, "she alone decides, according to the problem she faces and her doctors' advice, if she needs to delegate some powers to the vice president," he told Radio Continental.
The president's critics said the government should be more transparent. Saturday night's statement contradicted earlier claims about her health. During one visit in August that had been described as gynecological, a brain scan was performed that didn't find anything wrong, her doctors revealed over the weekend.
"There needs to be more information to lower the people's anxiety," said Fabian Perechodnik, who directs the Poliarquia political consulting firm.
Experts said it's not unusual for symptoms of a chronic subdural hematoma to take weeks to appear. Many patients don't even recall injuring their heads, according to the Mayo Clinic in the United States.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health said symptoms can include confusion, decreased memory, difficulty speaking and walking, drowsiness, headaches, and weakness or numbness in the arms, leg or face.
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Chard is a type of beet, which along with spinach, is a plant in the goosefoot family; so named because some of the plants in this category have leaves shaped like their namesake.
Unlike traditional beets, chard roots are inedible. Chard is prized for its large leaves and crunchy stalks. The two main types found in most supermarkets are red chard and green.
The red has red stems and dark green leaves with red veins. The green has lighter green leaves with white stalks. The red variety has a stronger flavor.
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Job Description
Performs all procedures necessary to ensure the safety of information systems assets and to protect systems from intentional or inadvertent access or destruction.
1. Performs Computer Security Incident Response activities for a large organization, coordinates with other government agencies to record and report incidents.
2. Monitor and analyze Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to identify security issues for remediation.
3. Recognizes potential, successful, and unsuccessful intrusion attempts and compromises thorough reviews and analyses of relevant event detail and summary information.
4. Evaluate firewall change requests and assess organizational risk.
5. Communicates alerts to agencies regarding intrusions and compromises to their network infrastructure, applications and operating systems.
6. Assists with implementation of counter-measures or mitigating controls.
7. Ensures the integrity and protection of networks, systems, and applications by technical enforcement of organizational security policies, through monitoring of vulnerability scanning devices.
8. Performs periodic and on-demand system audits and vulnerability assessments, including user accounts, application access, file system and external Web integrity scans to determine compliance.
9. Prepares incident reports of analysis methodology and results.
10. Maintains current knowledge of relevant technology as assigned.
11. Participates in special projects as required.
Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or the equivalent combination of education, professional training or work experience.
2-5 years of related experience in data security administration.
As a trusted systems integrator for more than 50 years, General Dynamics Information Technology provides information technology (IT), systems engineering, professional services and simulation and training to customers in the defense, federal civilian government, health, homeland security, intelligence, state and local government and commercial sectors.With approximately 32,000 professionals worldwide, the company delivers IT enterprise solutions, manages large-scale, mission-critical IT programs and provides mission support services.GDIT is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer – Minorities/Females/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities.


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End-of-life notice: American Legal Ethics Library
As of March 1, 2013, the Legal Information Institute is no longer maintaining the information in the American Legal Ethics Library. It is no longer possible for us to maintain it at a level of completeness and accuracy given its staffing needs. It is very possible that we will revive it at a future time. At this point, it is in need of a complete technological renovation and reworking of the "correspondent firm" model which successfully sustained it for many years.
Many people have contributed time and effort to the project over the years, and we would like to thank them. In particular, Roger Cramton and Peter Martin not only conceived ALEL but gave much of their own labor to it. We are also grateful to Brad Wendel for his editorial contributions, to Brian Toohey and all at Jones Day for their efforts, and to all of our correspondents and contributors. Thank you.
We regret any inconvenience.
Some portions of the collection may already be severely out of date, so please be cautious in your use of this material.
Connecticut Rules of Professional Conduct
Commentary - Rule 5.3
[1] Lawyers generally employ assistants in their practice, including secretaries, investigators, law student interns, and paraprofessionals. Such assistants, whether employees or independent contractors, act for the lawyer in rendition of the lawyer's professional services. A lawyer should give such assistants appropriate instruction and supervision concerning the ethical aspects of their employment, particularly regarding the obligation not to disclose information relating to representation of the client, and should be responsible for their work product. The measures employed in supervising nonlawyers should take account of the fact that they do not have legal training and are not subject to professional discipline.


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Dangerous Stunt - Video Shows Man On Dirt Bike Flying Over Freeway In Moreno Valley
There's no doubt that laws were broken. Probably several. It will be interesting to see what kind of trouble the guy gets into. My prediction is that it will be a moderate fine somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 to $2000, but you never know how authorities are going to react to stunts like this. Sometimes the nip-it-in-the-bud approach is taken and the penalty is very harsh and other times it's a no-harm-no-foul attitude. You never know.


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In Search of the Novel: Eight Workshops
Workshop 1Who
Owns the Novel?
This workshop probes the living nature of the novel by illustrating how each reader makes a novel his or her own. It shows that the interpretation of a novel changes, depending upon the reader's culture, class, generation, sex, and personality.
Workshop 2Whats the Story?
Many different ways of telling the story are discussed. What are the conflicts, the crises, and the resolutions? This workshop explores how an author spins a story and why it is the most important aspect of the novel.
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Characters, their motivations, their stories, and the times and places should bear some likeness to reality. Or should they? This program explores how novels connect with the reader.
Workshop 4Where Do Novels Come From?
This program explores the genesis of the characters, plot, themes, and interpretation from the novelist's point of view.
Workshop 5Why Do I Have to Read This Book?
The qualities of the ten novels chosen are explored to see why they appear on recommended reading lists and what makes them award winners. The program also looks at the essential elements of good writing and storytelling.
Workshop 6Whats In It for Me?
A novel can transport readers to other places and times, real or imaginary, allowing them to meet people and experience life in many different ways.
Workshop 7Who Am I in This Story?
The reader steps into the novel in various roles: the protagonist, the narrator, the author, or another character.
Workshop 8Am I Getting Through?
In this summary, teachers examine their own effectiveness in helping students comprehend and appreciate novels and in setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.


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Coral Reef chorus students chosen for All-State Chorus
Nineteen Coral Reef Senior High School chorus students have competed and have been selected as members of the 2012 Florida All-State Chorus.
Coral Reef High chorus students are members of the Visual and Performing Arts Magnet Program under the direction of John Rose. The Florida Music Educators Association evaluates students from throughout the state and each student was evaluated on his or her mastery of music theory and sight reading, as well as vocal ability.
They will work with nationally known clinicians and perform with the best singers in the state during the January 2012 Florida Music Educators Association's All-State conference in Tampa. In addition, 12 students from Coral Reef High School were placed in the top 100 sight-readers in Florida and were selected for the elite Reading Chorus, more than any other high school in the state.


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Willie Nelson's Braids Up for Grabs in Waylon Jennings Auction
Ever wanted to own Willie Nelson's braids? Now is your chance.
A collection of items from Waylon Jennings' personal inventory will be on the auction block this Fall, including Nelson's hair. More than 2,000 items are being sold off Oct. 5 at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
Most of the items come from Jennings' close music business friends, including Buddy Holly. The icon's Ariel Cyclone motorcycle is one of the biggest items being auctioned. The bike was given to Jennings after Holly was killed in a plane crash. Jennings' relationship with the late star stemmed from the two playing together early in his career -- the singer was a member of Holly's band, the Crickets.
Other hot items include a robe and boxing gloves from the great Muhammad Ali, Hank Williams' Nudie cowboy boots and a handwritten letter from John Lennon to Jennings. The country legend's personal items, like handwritten lyrics, are also in the auction.
The set of Nelson's braids -- famous in their own right -- were chopped off in 1983, a message of support from the 'On the Road Again' hitmaker to Jennings while he was trying to maintain sobriety.
Jennings died in 2002 at the age of 64 following complications from diabetes. The upcoming auction of his belongings is a means of bringing awareness to the Phoenix Children's Hospital and the work they do. Later this month, the items will be available for viewing in a catalog collection.
See the Worst Country Tattoos Ever


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This guy walks into a bar and goes up to a man sitting at the bar. He says, ''I just fucked your mother and I did it in your bed and I fucked her doggie style and I even made her give me a blowjob. What do you think about that?'' The other guy says, ''Shut up Dad, you're drunk again."
© 2019 Comedy Partners. All Rights Reserved. Comedy Central and all related titles, logos and characters are trademarks of comedy partners.


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Perinatal depression is a significant problem facing women of childbearing age. The Perinatal Depression Program at Healthcare Alternative Systems (HAS) in Chicago provides screening and assessment, treatment, and psychiatric care to women who suffer from perinatal depression.
All women of childbearing age.
DHS provides contact information only.
If you are in need of assistance, please call the DHS Help Line at
For more information on perinatal depression, please visit the following websites;:
Please use the DHS Office Locator


text: Mohammed Badr, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, appears at a court in Cairo, on Dec. 4, 2013. He is among the journalists referred to the Egyptian criminal court Wednesday. Ahmed Omar/AP hide caption toggle caption Ahmed Omar/AP The Two-Way Detention Of Al-Jazeera Journalists Strains Free Speech In Egypt January 29, 2014 Canadian-Egyptian journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy has been accused of running a terrorist cell with the help of four foreigners; allegations the news agency calls "baseless and false." The case has shown just how far Egypt has backslid on the goals of an uprising that began three years ago this week.


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The Competition Commission of India's (CCI) decision to modify realty major DLF's apartment buyers agreement in relation to a case involving Rs 630 crore penalty on the firm has sparked a debate about the fair-trade regulator's jurisdiction and other matters concerning the real estate sector.
CCI passed a supplementary order last week to modify the agreement between DLF and its apartment buyers, following a direction from Competition Appellate Tribunal (COMPAT) that is hearing the company's appeal against monetary penalty and other sanctions imposed on it by CCI for abuse of market dominance.
Legal experts and former CCI functionaries, however, are of the view that COMPAT needs to first decide on issues such as jurisdiction, relevant market, dominance and abuse of dominance before deciding on modifications in model agreement.
According to former CCI Chairman, Vinod Dhall, competition authorities are usually not required to indicate how an agreement, held to be anti-competitive, should be modified as that exercise is to be undertaken by the parties concerned.
"This case therefore seems to be taking a strange course, and it is clear that the case still has a long journey ahead till it reaches a final conclusion," Mr Dhall said.
Senior lawyer and an eminent competition law expert, Anand Pathak, said that the CCI's supplementary order of January 3 in DLF case "interprets and applies the Competition Act incorrectly for at least three reasons among many others". He added that the Competition Act does not give the CCI the liberty to redraft an entire agreement for the parties and its decision to modify the DLF-buyers' agreement is "internally inconsistent" with its own decisions.
Mr. Pathak further said that CCI was asked by COMPAT to merely determine the "manner and extent of the modifications" and it was not required to re-write the entire agreement.
"In conclusion, antitrust intervention must be tempered and tailored to achieve competition goals. One such goal is freedom of negotiation and contract -- only then can parties achieve the efficiencies envisioned by the Act," Mr Pathak said, adding that DLF case was always in essence a consumer protection case and not a competition law case at all.
According to Mr Dhall, CCI's supplementary order has been passed consequent to a COMPAT direction to specify the extent and manner in which the terms of the agreement between DLF and the buyers should be modified keeping in mind modifications suggested by the parties to COMPAT.
"Thus this supplementary order continues to be part of the appeal before the COMPAT, which will pronounce its verdict in the matter," he added.
CCI, in 104-page supplementary order on January 3, said that the apartment buyers' agreement has been amended to remove the "abusive and unfair conditions present in the original one-sided agreement" and the modifications have been done taking into account the interest of both parties.
The original order was passed by CCI on August 12, 2011 following its inquiries into complaints filed by flat buyer associations of two DLF projects in Gurgaon - DLF Park Palace and The Belaire - alleging delays in the project and increase in the number of floors than planned earlier, among others.
According to senior Advocate, Meet Malhotra, who represents the flat buyer's association, CCI's latest supplementary order validates the case of the flat owners.
"In the face of a clear indictment of their conduct, DLF are now clinging to straws and banking on technicalities to rescue them from the rapidly tightening noose of the law," he said.
CCI has been flooded with complaints against various builders since it passed an order against DLF in August 2011, but many of them have been dismissed on various grounds.
Recently, Ashok Chawla, chairman of the CCI, had said the modified agreement in the DLF case could work as a model framework for commercial agreements between real estate developers and property buyers and could serve as a benchmark for the industry, if it stands judicial scrutiny.
"Whether a real estate company is dominant or not, DLF was found to be dominant because it was big, most of them follow the same format pattern that flows from big players in the market," Mr Chawla had said.
However, legal experts are of the opinion that COMPAT also needs to decide on various issues like jurisdiction, relevant market, dominance and abuse of dominance, besides any modifications in the model agreement.
It has been said that the CCI's definition of relevant market has been inconsistent in different cases, although the regulator has been flooded with cases against various builders post DLF case.
According to sources close to DLF, the company is of the view that CCI is interpreting laws related to apartment ownership in Haryana, but it is up to the state agencies to decide whether the developers are in compliance with the laws related to them.
They also said it is difficult to understand how a model agreement can be implemented in other states, as each state has its own laws for real estate development, while adding that Compat had only directed CCI to express its views on the modification suggested by the parties without prejudice to the rights of either the complainant or the developers.
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