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After a heated discussion Monday, council members voted 4-3 to further talks about banning the use of plastic bags in Huntington Beach.
With Mayor Pro Tem Matt Harper, Joe Carchio and Dave Sullivan dissenting, the council agreed to reexamine a previous proposal and environmental impact report concerning use of single-use bags. They will vote on the issue at the March 18 meeting.
If it passes, businesses can charge customers a fee to those who choose to use plastic bags, Councilman Joe Shaw said.
"I don't know why we argued on this so much as we did," he said. "It's pretty much something that's a feel-good for everybody. It will have a positive effect on the environment."
Shaw added that mom-and-pop stores would benefit from this by being able to charge customers for plastic bags or making them buy reusable bags.
But Harper disagreed with Shaw and didn't want to see Huntington Beach follow suit in the footsteps of cities with "left-wing agendas," he said.
"This isn't the right to a free plastic bag," Harper said. "This is about freedom versus government intrusion. Whether or not a grocery store offers a paper bag, a plastic bag, a reusable bag or put either of those items on their shelf and charges for them should be the freedom of the business."
Sullivan said cities that have implemented this ban have seen increases in E. coli cases according to a study he read by the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University.
"Because people fail to wash these reusable bags, they fail to use separate bags for meats and vegetables and things they bring forth [from the bag] are contaminated," he said.
Shaw argued that the study Sullivan read was "funded by the American Chemistry Council, which is the manufacturer who represents most of the manufacturers of plastic bags."
California Grocers Assn. Southern California director Sarah Sheehy supports the city's decision to consider banning plastic bags and wants to see Huntington Beach join cities like Laguna Beach and Long Beach.
"We know these ordinances work in promoting reusable bag use," Sheehy said.
Local surfers even came out to push the city to consider the plastic bag ban, including representatives from the Surfrider Foundation chapter in Huntington Beach.
"I highly doubt that people are coming to Huntington Beach for our plastic bags," Surfrider spokesman Greg Goran said. "People come here for our beaches and our waves. I don't think that reducing the plastic bags is going to jeopardize any business revenue or offend too many people."
Twitter: @acocarpio


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[Continue reading "Chicken Caesar Salad Recipe" →]
Narrow down results by tags: buttermilk caesar salad carrot salad carrot salad recipe ginger green lentil green lentil salad mung bean mung bean salad ottolenghi carrot salad Parmesan pastırma potato salad potato salad recipe purslane purslane salad romaine lettuce worcestershire yogurt yotam ottolenghi
Chicken Caesar Salad Recipe
March 27th, 2009 | Category: Chicken, Salad
The Chicken Caesar Salad page of my recipe notebook must be the most stained and wrinkled page ever. A clean, cream-colored page of my Moleskin is the birth place of my recipes. Sometimes it stays clean forever, and in some instances – like the below Chicken Caesar Salad recipe – the notes I jot down turns it into a crime scene. But I must add… Those recipes turn ...

subset: commoncrawl


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Re: Function Fit to 3D data set
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg57764] Re: Function Fit to 3D data set
- From: dh <dh at metrohm.ch>
- Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 05:59:52 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <firstname.lastname@example.com>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi Adrienne, sincerely, Daniel Adrienne R wrote: > I have been trying to do several analyses with an [x,y,z] data set, where z is dependent on x and y. First, I tried a 3D plot. However, the only way I was able to get Mathematica to plot my data was to assume a grid form for x and y, and use ListPlot3D. First question: can Mathematica make a 3D plot from stated x,y,z points? ListPlot3D will do the job > > Secondly, I am trying to fit a function to the data. I have determined a function to which to fit parameters. However, Mathematica does not seem to want to accept y as a variable. Here is a simple suggestion of what I was trying. Note, my function is much more complicated. Please also ignore if the given does not work as stated, as I'm making it up. > > points = {{1, 1, 1}, {1, 2, 4}, {1, 4, 16}} > f1 = FindFit[points, a + b*x^0 * y^1 + c*x^0 *y^2 +k*x^2 *y^0 + l*x^2 * y^1, {a, b, c, k, l}, x, y] do not dispair, it is simply a syntax error. FindFit wants the variable names as a list like: FindFit[...,{x,y}] > > The error I receive is \!\(\* > RowBox[{\(FindFit::"nonopt > "\), \(\(:\)\(\ \)\), "\<\"Options expected ( > instead of \\!\\(y\\)) beyond > position \\!\\(4\\) in \\!\\(\[LeftSkeleton] 1 \[RightSkeleton]\\). An \ > option must be a rule or a list of rules. \\!\\(\\*ButtonBox[\\\"Moreâ?¦\\\", \ > ButtonStyle->\\\"RefGuideLinkText\\\", ButtonFrame->None, \ > ButtonData:>\\\"General::nonopt\\\"]\\)\"\>"}]\) > > Second question: Can Mathematica take a set of x,y,z data where z is dependent on x and y and fit a function to it? > > Secondary question for both: How? > > Thanks for the help! >


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Remedy's Max Payne games of the early Aughts were landmark releases for their time, dropping players into beautifully realized urban noir adventures that were bursting with gunplay that would make John Woo well up, and Matrixesque bullet-time acrobatics. The video game medium has seen some major evolution since those earlier efforts introduced the idea of the "cinematic shooter," and it's into this changed arena that Rockstar Games now drops its internally developed sequel, Max Payne 3, this week. The developer's RAGE engine should need no introduction after delivering such dazzling experiences in Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption, but fans of the series must still be wondering if the newly revised game engine's bells and whistles amounts to enough of an improvement on Payne's decade-old corridor shooter hook.
House of Payne
Max Payne 3 is a one-trick pony that performs its one trick exceedingly well, and in a stunning variety of ways. The basic tenet of "shoot dudes in the face while managing your bullet-time meter" beats steadily at the core of the experience, but lots of thought has been put into crafting scenarios and set-pieces that play well with this basic conceit. You run, dive, dodge, and shoot your way through dimly lit tenement hallways, cubicle hives, bustling police station command centers, crumbling urban ruins, airport monorails, overgrown Sao Paulo alleyways, and many more locales besides. The firefights that unfold on these deadly playgrounds are never the same, thanks in large part to the sharp and aggressive enemy AI.
Strategy is a surprisingly important factor to consider in your approach to the game, but it's set against the backdrop of this extremely dynamic action. It's not so much a matter of looking at the big picture as it is gauging things like how long you can hold out in one cover location or how to portion out your stored bullet-time juice against the five enemies that just started firing at you from downrange. There's cover, but this is not a cover-based shooter. You will be rooted out from your position of relative safety, and you will be made to pay for your camping ways. Max Payne 3 excels at keeping your thoughts firmly planted in the here and now; why worry about what's around the next corner when this one is very competently attempting to shoot your head off?
That's where Max Payne 3's bullet ballet excels. All of the things that the previous two games left to your imagination are as fully realized as can be here. From the individual bullet shell casings that fly out of your weapon to the slow-motion "final death" sequences in each room — a gruesome coda for each gunfight that exists as its own reward — it's all rendered down to the finest detail. If there's any serious flaw here, it's that the action is often moving far too fast for you to sit back and appreciate it. One can only wonder at the sort of amazing YouTube-ery that would have unfolded if Rockstar had been able to include a video editor for replays.
There's more than just skillful execution of time-tested gameplay holding up the experience, however. Max Payne 3 is a grim noir set, save for a few key flashbacks, in the sun-bleached Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paulo. The years since the events of the previous game have not been kind to Max. He's still haunted by the ghosts of his dead family and he's still escaping from that pain at the bottom of a bottle. It's never really made clear if he jumps at his bodyguard gig in Brazil with hopes of getting a fresh start or simply to plunge himself into a deadly world that might put a bullet into him before he does so himself.
There's no mistaking Max Payne 3's romanticized, if somewhat blunt-force, take on the tortured action hero. There's a well-told story here, and one that demonstrates a Rockstar's increasingly firm grip on artful cinematic storytelling. The filmic toolbox employed in Max Payne 3 isn't particularly, with Brazilian anti-fairy tale filled with blurred double vision and on-screen text feeling an awful lot like Man on Fire, but this is by far the most evolved Rockstar narrative yet, and the most capably executed one, precisely because of how firmly it embraces the neo-noir genre.
The stellar execution doesn't necessarily make for a particularly nuanced or bar-raising story, to be clear. The characters are all rather one-dimensional. They have very visible motivations, so much so that a finely tuned observer of such things ought to be able to figure out early on who's pulling the strings, who's being played, and who stands to lose the most. There are a few clever twists and turns, but those are tempered by the odd sudden revelation that feels unearned. There's no bending of convention here. Nor should there be. Max Payne 3 revels in its noir-ish influences and wears them proudly, and it becomes a better game for not overreaching.
A Payne-full Experience
For a linear third-person shooter, Max Payne 3 has a surprising amount of content to offer. There are four difficulty settings for the 8-10 hour campaign, and three targeting options (hard lock, soft lock, and free aim) that serve to further tweak the level of challenge. The story moves along at a good pace with only minor stumbles. A few sections of the game, particularly the second-to-last chapter, feel artificially drawn out. You'll also come upon the occasional combat scenarios — one in particular at the very end comes to mind — that feel downright scripted. This isn't a bad thing in itself, but it's jarring to suddenly be faced with a challenge that strips away much of the dynamic action that the game is otherwise so good at offering you.
Then there's Arcade Mode, which comes in two different flavors: Score Attack and New York Minute (plus a Hardcore New York Minute variant). Both play out in roughly the same way, sending players through chapter-specific chunks of the game while introducing an element of scoring that is based on your kills and building up combo multipliers by not taking any damage. The only thing that really separates Score Attack from New York Minute is the constantly ticking timer in the latter mode, which is in fact a throwback mode pulled from the previous two games.
These modes offer some good times and are worthwhile from a replay perspective, both because of the lure of leaderboards and because the XP you earn feeds into your multiplayer character progression. They're not perfect though. Both modes essentially present you with the same set of chapter challenges, with the primary difference being the timer in New York Minute. I personally came to prefer Score Attack; the time-based play in New York Minute is cool, but there are no checkpoint saves within the sometimes lengthy challenges and there are (sometimes unskippable) cutscenes to watch. It's no big deal if you're getting through a New York Minute chapter in one attempt, but repeated efforts highlight the fine line that exists here between a challenge and a slog.
Then there's the multiplayer mode. It's… elaborate. You've got multiple game types to choose from and a serious amount of customization to consider. You can unlock additional character skins by completing challenges in the Score Attack and New York Minute modes, but the bulk of your multiplayer unlocks come from leveling up in online play and using money you've earned to buy new gear. In short: Max Payne 3's multiplayer isn't in any way a half-assed afterthought. It's a complete chunk of game, and it's one that stands easily alongside the story as a compelling reason to shell out $60.
Bringing Payne the to the Masses
Multiplayer isn't exactly a new idea for the Max Payne series. It was a planned component for the first game and was actually included as part of Max Payne 2. It might as well be a brand new addition to the series, however, for all of the changes made to the mode for Max Payne 3.
I would argue that, for all the strengths of the game's single player story, the multiplayer is by far the number one reason to run out and buy Max Payne 3 rather than saving it for a rental. Rockstar took all of the lessons learned from the online elements in Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption to craft a progression-driven experience that dangles so many carrots in front of you that you'll never find yourself wanting for new content to unlock.
You can get a full rundown of how everything works in my Max Payne 3 multiplayer preview. The good news is that all of the promise that I felt seeping out of the game after that preview seems to have been realized. There is great fun to be had in using the unique mechanics of the Max Payne series in a team-based multiplayer setting. The maps aren't overly huge, but they're intricately designed and offer lots of options for lone wolves and team players alike.
Having a separate set of multiplayer rooms dedicated to "soft lock" (rather than free aim) is, frankly, a masterstroke on Rockstar's part. Multiplayer gaming can be hard to get into if you're a newcomer, and having that soft lock alternative evens the odds for those gamers who aren't accustomed to twitch-based online action. It works well, too. The soft lock latches onto opponents easily enough, but not so much so that the first person to lock on is necessarily going to take down his or her target.
It would be nice to see a few more modes — Payne Killer and Gang Wars are fun alongside Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, but the offering still feels light — but the only real complaint that I have is directed at the technical execution. I've frequently run into error messages and dropped matches in the time that I've been playing Payne 3's multiplayer both before and after its release. If anything, the issues seem to have gotten worse post-release. I'm certain that this is only a temporary situation and it doesn't impact the overall quality of the game in the slightest — really, this is an exceptionally well thought out multiplayer mode — but it's something to be aware of as you step into your first online matches.
Overall, Max Payne 3 is a full-on win for Rockstar. It's a tighter experience than anything the developer has attempted in recent years, and I think it's a better game for that narrowed focus. I don't want to see Rockstar's open-world games disappear, but it's nice to see the same high level of craft that Grand Theft Auto is known for applied to Max's more self-contained adventure. If you're a fan of video games and you're old enough to handle the mature content, consider Max Payne 3 a must-own.
Score 9.5 out of 10
(This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360 on a copy provided by Rockstar Games)


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Collin College
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On October 30, Collin College visited Farmersville High's varsity football game for a very special community relations pilot project. Trustee Dr. Robert Collins gave away two scholarships at halftime assisted by President Israel and team mascots.
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Our latest cat from the design tables of Robertson and Caine, the Sunsail 404 is built for sailing performance, bluewater capability and comfort. Inside, the innovative forward-facing galley with large windows, access door to the bow area, and sliding glass doors between the saloon and the aft cockpit provide an open atmosphere offering exceptional natural light and ventilation.
CABINS x 4
HEAD COMPARTMENTS x 2


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Atlassian Sourcetree is a free Git and Mercurial client for Windows.
Atlassian Sourcetree is a free Git and Mercurial client for Mac.
This file contains documentation on the TextGrounder project, including an overview as well as configuration and build instructions. See CHANGES for a description of the project status. See also the TextGrounder website: https://bitbucket.org/utcompling/textgrounder/ In particular, see the wiki, which may have more detailed and/or up-to-date information: https://bitbucket.org/utcompling/textgrounder/wiki/Home ============ Introduction ============ TextGrounder does document-level and toponym-level geolocation, aka geotagging (i.e. identification of the geographic location -- as a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates, somewhere on the Earth -- either of individual toponyms in a document or of the entire document). There are two subprojects. The Geolocate subproject primarily does document-level geolocation, but also includes some code to do toponym geolocation. The Toponym subproject includes various algorithms for toponym-level geolocation. The Geolocate subproject uses a statistical model derived from a large corpus of already geolocated documents, such as Wikipedia -- i.e. it is supervised (at least in some sense). The Toponym subproject primarily relies only on a Gazetteer -- i.e. a list of possible toponyms; hence it is more unsupervised. ======================================== Introduction to the Geolocate Subproject ======================================== The software implements the experiments described in the following paper: Benjamin Wing and Jason Baldridge (2011), "Simple Supervised Document Geolocation with Geodesic Grids." In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2011. (See http://www.jasonbaldridge.com/papers/wing-baldridge-acl2011.pdf.) If you use this system in academic research with published results, please cite this paper, or use this Bibtex: {{{ @InProceedings{wing-baldridge:2011:ACL, author = {Wing, Benjamin and Baldridge, Jason}, title = {Simple Supervised Document Geolocation with Geodesic Grids}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Com putational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies}, month = {June}, year = {2011}, address = {Portland, Oregon, USA}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics} } }}} There are three main apps, each of which does a different task: 1. Document geolocation. This identifies the location of a document. Training comes from "articles", which currently are described simply by (smoothed) unigram distributions, i.e. counts of the words seen in the article. In addition, each article optionally can be tagged with a location (specified as a pair of latitude/longitude values), used for training and evaluation; some other per-article data exists as well, much of it currently underused or not used at all. The articles themselves are often Wikipedia articles, but the source data can come from anywhere (e.g. Twitter feeds, i.e. concatenation of all tweets from a given user). Evaluation is either on other articles (with each article treated as a document) or on documents from some other source, e.g. chapters from books stored in PCL-Travel format. 2. Toponym geolocation. This disambiguates each toponym in a document, where a toponym is a word such as "London" or "Georgia" that refers to a geographic entity such as a city, state, province or country. A statistical model is created from article data, as above, but a gazetteer can also be used as an additional source of data listing valid toponyms. Evaluation is either on the geographic names in a TR-CONLL corpus or links extracted from a Wikipedia article. 3. KML generation. This generates per-word cell distributions of the sort used in the ACP strategy (--strategy=average-cell-probability), then outputs KML files for given words showing the distribution of the words across the Earth. A fourth, not-yet-written app is for simultaneous segmentation and geolocation. This assumes that a document is composed of segments of unknown size, each of which refers to a different location, and simultaneously finds the best segmentation and best location of each segment. ============ Requirements ============ * Version 1.6 of the Java 2 SDK (http://java.sun.com) * If you want to run using Hadoop, version 0.20.2 of Hadoop * Appropriate data files (see below) =========== Quick start =========== The following describes how to quickly get the Geolocate subproject up and running and to test that everything is in place and working. 1. Download TextGrounder. Probably the easiest way is through Mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com), an application for source-code management. If you don't have Mercurial, you can download it from the Mercurial web site, or (on Mac OS X) install it using MacPorts (http://www.macports.org); you might need to install the Mac OS X Developer Tools, aka Xcode (http://developer.apple.com/mac/), in order to install MacPorts. Mercurial should also be available as a package in all the standard Linux distributions. Once you have Mercurial, get TextGrounder like this: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/utcompling/textgrounder/ 2. Make sure you have Java installed. TextGrounder is developed and tested on Java 6, but it might work on Java 5 (definitely not earlier). 3. Set up environment variables and paths: -- Set TEXTGROUNDER_DIR to the top-level directory of where TextGrounder is located. -- Also make sure JAVA_HOME is set to the top level of the Java installation tree. (On Mac OS X it's probably /Library/Java/Home.) -- Make sure $TEXTGROUNDER_DIR/bin is in your PATH, so the scripts in the 'bin' directory get found automatically. -- See below if you're not sure how to set environment variables. 4. Obtain the data. -- If you are on a UTexas Comp Ling machine or the UTexas Longhorn cluster, the data is already there. Just set the environment variable TG_ON_COMP_LING_MACHINES to something non-blank if you're on a UTexas Comp Ling machine; likewise for TG_ON_LONGHORN if you're on Longhorn. -- Otherwise, you'll probably have to download the data. If you have access to either of the above machines, look in 'bin/config-geolocate' to see where the environment variables TG_WIKIPEDIA_DIR, TG_TWITTER_DIR and TG_AUX_DIR point to, and copy those directories, preserving the directory structure starting with '.../corpora' and '.../projects'. Then set TG_GROUPS_DIR to the directory holding 'corpora' and 'projects'. -- Otherwise, download the data and set up the appropriate environment variables, as described below. 5. Build the system. Run the following: textgrounder build-all This should download a whole bunch of stuff and then compile the whole system. 6. Test the system. Run the following: tg-geolocate twitter If all is well, this should do document-level geolocation on the GeoText Twitter corpus with a grid size of 1 degree. Because this is a small corpus, this should take only 30 seconds to a minute. The final answers should have a mean of about 632 miles and a median of about 402 miles. ====================================== Configuring your environment variables ====================================== The easiest thing to do is to set the environment variables JAVA_HOME and TEXTGROUNDER_DIR to the relevant locations on your system. Set JAVA_HOME to match the top level directory containing the Java installation you want to use. For example, on Windows: C:\> set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\jdk1.5.0_04 or on Unix: % setenv JAVA_HOME /usr/local/java (csh) > export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java (ksh, bash) On Windows, to get these settings to persist, it's actually easiest to set your environment variables through the System Properties from the Control Panel. For example, under WinXP, go to Control Panel, click on System Properties, choose the Advanced tab, click on Environment Variables, and add your settings in the User variables area. /*Next, likewise set TEXTGROUNDER_DIR to be the top level directory where you unzipped the download. In Unix, type 'pwd' in the directory where this file is and use the path given to you by the shell as TEXTGROUNDER_DIR. You can set this in the same manner as for JAVA_HOME above.*/ //THIS WILL BE REMOVED Next, add the directory TEXTGROUNDER_DIR/bin to your path. For example, you can set the path in your .bashrc file as follows: export PATH="$PATH:$TEXTGROUNDER_DIR/bin" On Windows, you should also add the python main directory to your path. Once you have taken care of these three things, you should be able to build and use the TextGrounder Library. Note: Spaces are allowed in JAVA_HOME but not in TEXTGROUNDER_DIR. To set an environment variable with spaces in it, you need to put quotes around the value when on Unix, but you must *NOT* do this when under Windows. =============================== Building the system from source =============================== TextGrounder uses SBT (Simple Build Tool) with a standard directory structure. To build TextGrounder, type (this works in any directory, provided you have set TEXTGROUNDER_DIR correctly): $ textgrounder build update compile This will compile the source files and put them in ./target/classes. If this is your first time running it, you will see messages about Scala being dowloaded -- this is fine and expected. Once that is over, the TextGrounder code will be compiled. To try out other build targets, do: $ textgrounder build This will drop you into the SBT interface. To see a list of possible actions, type 'tasks'. (You an also see all the actions that are possible by hitting the TAB key. In general, you can do auto-completion on any command prefix in SBT, hurrah!) A particularly useful action during development is '~ compile'. This does "continuous compilation", i.e. it automatically recompiles every time a change is made to a source file. (This may produce lots of errors in the middle of a development cycle, but this process is harmless, and eventually you shouldn't get any more errors.) Also try 'clean' followed by 'compile' if you get some really weird compile errors that you don't think should be there. Documentation for SBT is here: https://github.com/harrah/xsbt/wiki Note: if you have SBT 0.11.0 already installed on your system, you can also just call it directly with "sbt" in TEXTGROUNDER_DIR. ============================== Building and running on Hadoop ============================== The first thing is to do a test in non-distributed mode. This should require no additional steps from running with Hadoop, and doesn't even require that you have an installation of Hadoop, since we automatically download the Hadoop libraries during the build step (specifically, when the 'update' task of SBT is used). As an example, to run the Geolocate subproject on the GeoText Twitter corpus (which is very small and hence is a good test): $ tg-geolocate --hadoop-nondist twitter If you have appropriately set up all your data files and set the environment variable(s) needed to tell TextGrounder where they are located, this should run on the corpus. The current run reports a mean distance error of about 1017 kilometers, and a median distance error of about 648 kilometers. (NOTE: This may change! In particular the results may get better. But if your numbers are significantly larger, or enormously smaller, something is wrong.) To run properly using Hadoop (in distributed mode), you need an additional build step: $ textgrounder build assembly This builds a self-contained JAR file containing not only the TextGrounder code but all of the libraries needed to run the code. You will also need to copy some data to the Hadoop File System, which you can do using 'tg-copy-data-to-hadoop'. The simplest thing is just to copy all the data, including the Wikipedia and Twitter corpora and some extra data needed by TextGrounder: $ tg-copy-data-to-hadoop all This copies the data under a directory named by the TG_HADOOP_DIR environment variable. If not set, it is initialized by default to a subdirectory named 'textgrounder-data' under your home directory on the Hadoop File System. You can't see this using 'ls', but it should appear if you run the following: $ hadoop fs -ls Then, for example to run the Geolocate subproject on the GeoText Twitter corpus using Hadoop distributed mode, do this: $ tg-geolocate --hadoop-nondist twitter This will invoke 'hadoop' to run the code. If something goes wrong, or you just want to see more exactly what is being run, use the '--verbose' option, e.g.: $ tg-geolocate --verbose --hadoop-nondist twitter This will output the exact command lines being executed. ============================================ Further Details for the Geolocate Subproject ============================================ === Obtaining the Data === If you don't have the data already (you do if you have access to the Comp Ling machines), download and unzip the processed Wikipedia/Twitter data and aux files from http://wing.best.vwh.net/wikigrounder. There are three sets of data to download: * The processed Wikipedia data, in `wikipedia/`. The files are listed separately here and bzipped, in case you don't want them all. If you're not sure, get them all; or read down below to see which ones you need. * Auxiliary files, in `wikigrounder-aux-1.0.tar.bz2`. NOTE: Currently the only auxiliary file you need is the World Gazetteer, and that is needed only when doing toponym resolution. * The processed Twitter data, in `wikigrounder-twitter-1.0.tar.bz2`. Untar these files somewhere. Then set the following environment variables: * `TG_WIKIPEDIA_DIR` points to the directory containing the Wikipedia data. * `TG_TWITTER_DIR` points to the directory containing the Twitter data. * `TG_AUX_DIR` points to the directory containing the auxiliary data. (Alternatively, if you are running on a UTexas Comp Ling machine, or a machine with a copy of the relevant portions of /groups/corpora and /groups/projects in the same places, set `TG_ON_COMP_LING_MACHINES` to a non-empty value and it will initialize those three for you. If you are running on the UTexas Longhorn cluster, set `TG_ON_LONGHORN` to a non-empty value and the variables will be initialized appropriately for Longhorn.) The Wikipedia data was generated from [http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100904/enwiki-20100904-pages-articles.xml.bz2 the original English-language Wikipedia dump of September 4, 2010]. The Twitter data was generated from [http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/GeoText/ The Geo-tagged Microblog corpus] created by [http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D10/D10-1124.pdf Eisenstein et al (2010)]. === Replicating the experiments === The code in Geolocate.scala does the actual geolocating. Although these are written in Java and can conceivably be run directly using `java`, in practice it's much more convenient using either the `textgrounder` driver script or some other even higher-level front-end script. `textgrounder` sets up the paths correctly so that all libraries, etc. will be found, and takes an application to run, knowing how to map that application to the actual class that implements the application. Each application typically takes various command-line arguments, and `textgrounder` itself also takes various command-line options (given *before* the application name), which mostly control operation of the JVM. In this case, document geotagging can be invoked directly with `textgrounder` using `textgrounder geolocate-document`, but the normal route is to go through a front-end script. The following is a list of the front-end scripts available: * `tg-geolocate` is the script you probably want to use. It takes a CORPUS parameter to specify which corpus you want to act on (currently recognized: `wikipedia`, `twitter`, and `twitter-wiki`, which is a combination of both corpora). This sets up additional arguments to specify the data files for the corpus/corpora to be loaded/evaluated. The application to run is specified by the `--app` option; if omitted, it defaults to `geolocate-document` (other possibilities are `generate-kml` and `geolocate-toponym`). For the Twitter corpora, an additional option `--doc-thresh NUM` can be used to specify the threshold, i.e. minimum number of documents that a vocabulary item must be seen in; uncommon vocabulary before that is ignored (or rather, converted to an OOV token). Additional arguments to both the app and `textgrounder` itself can be given. Configuration values (e.g. indicating where to find Wikipedia and Twitter, given the above environment variables) are read from `config-geolocate` in the TextGrounder `bin` directory; additional site-specific configuration will be read from `local-config-geolocate`, if you create that file in the `bin` directory. There's a `sample.local-config-geolocate` file in the directory giving a sample local config file. * `tg-generate-kml` is exactly the same as `tg-geolocate --app generate-kml` but easier to type. * `geolocate-toponym` is almost exactly the same as `tg-geolocate --app geolocate-toponym`, but also specifies a gazetteer file as an extra argument. You still need to supply a value for `--eval-file` and `--eval-type`. * `geolocate-toponym-tr-conll` is almost exactly the same as `geolocate-toponym`, but also specifies arguments to evaluate on the PCL-CoNLL corpus. * `run-nohup` is a script for wrapping other scripts. The other script is run using `nohup`, so that a long-running experiment will not get terminated if your shell session ends. In addition, starting times and arguments, along with all output, are logged to a file with a unique, not-currently existing name, where the name incorporates the name of the underlying script run, the current time and date, an optional ID string (specified using the `-i` or `--id` argument), and possibly an additional number needed to ensure that the file is unique -- it will refuse to overwrite an existing file. This ID is useful for identifying different experiments using the same script. The experiment runner `run-geolocate-exper.py`, which allows iterating over different parameter settings, generates an ID based on the current parameter settings. * `python/run-geolocate-exper.py` is a framework for running a series of experiments on similar arguments. It was used extensively in running the experiments for the paper. You can invoke `tg-geolocate wikipedia` with no options, and it will do something reasonable: It will attempt to geolocate the entire dev set of the Wikipedia corpus, using KL divergence as a strategy, with a grid size of 1 degrees. Options you may find useful (which also apply to `textgrounder geolocate` and all front ends): `--degrees-per-cell NUM` `--dpc NUM` Set the size of a cell in degrees, which can be a fractional value. `--eval-set SET` Set the split to evaluate on, either "dev" or "test". `--strategy STRAT ...` Set the strategy to use for geolocating. Sample strategies are `partial-kl-divergence` ("KL Divergence" in the paper), `average-cell-probability` ("ACP" in the paper), `naive-bayes-with-baseline` ("Naive Bayes" in the paper), and `baseline` (any of the baselines). You can specify multiple `--strategy` options on the command line, and the specified strategies will be tried one after the other. `--baseline-strategy STRAT ...` Set the baseline strategy to use for geolocating. (It's a separate argument because some strategies use a baseline strategy as a fallback, and in those cases, both the strategy and baseline strategy need to be given.) Sample strategies are `link-most-common-toponym` ("??" in the paper), `num-articles` ("??" in the paper), and `random` ("Random" in the paper). You can specify multiple `--baseline-strategy` options, just like for `--strategy`. `--num-training-docs, --num-test-docs` One way of controlling how much work is done. These specify the maximum number of documents (training and testing, respectively) to load/evaluate. `--max-time-per-stage SECS` `--mts SECS` Another way of controlling how much work is done. Set the maximum amount of time to spend in each "stage" of processing. A value of 300 will load enough to give you fairly reasonable results but not take too much time running. `--skip-initial N, --every-nth N` A final way of controlling how much work is done. `--skip-initial` specifies a number of test documents to skip at the beginning before stating to evaluate. `--every-nth` processes only every Nth document rather than all, if N > 1. Used judiciously, they can be used to split up a long run. An additional argument specific to the Twitter front ends is `--doc-thresh`, which specifies the threshold (in number of documents) below which vocabulary is ignored. See the paper for more details. === Extracting results === A few scripts are provided to extract the results (i.e. mean and median errors) from a series of runs with different parameters, and output the results either directly or sorted by error distance: * `extract-raw-results.sh` extracts results from a number of runs of any of the above front end programs. It extracts the mean and median errors from each specified file, computes the avg mean/median error, and outputs a line giving the errors along with relevant parameters for that particular run. * `extract-results.sh` is similar but also sorts by distance (both median and mean, as well as avg mean/median), to see which parameter combinations gave the best results. === Specifying data === Data is specified in two main files, given with the options `--article-data-file` and `--counts-file`. The article data file lists all of the articles to be processed and includes various pieces of data for each article, e.g. title, latitude/longitude coordinates, split (training, dev, test), number of incoming links (i.e. how many times is there a link to this article), etc. The counts file gives word counts for each article, i.e. which word types occur in the article and how many times. (Note, the term "article" is used because of the focus on Wikipedia; but it should be seen as equivalent to "document".) Additional data files (which are automatically handled by the `tg-geolocate` script) are specified using `--stopwords-file` and `--gazetteer-file`. The stopwords file is a list of stopwords (one per line), i.e. words to be ignored when generating a distribution from the word counts in the counts file. You don't normally have to specify this at all; if not, a default stopwords file is retrieved from inside the TextGrounder distribution. The optional gazetteer file is used only when doing toponym resolution (--mode=geotag-toponyms), and doesn't apply at all when doing the normal document resolution, as was done in the paper. The article data file is formatted as a simple database. Each line is an entry (i.e. an article) and consists of a fixed number of fields, each separated by a tab character. The first line gives the names of the fields. Fields are accessed by name; hence, rearranging fields, and in most cases, omitting fields, is not a problem as long as the field names are correct. The following is a list of the defined fields: * `id`: The numeric ID of the article. Can be arbitrary and currently used only when printing out articles. For Wikipedia articles, this corresponds to the internally-assigned ID. * `title`: Title of the article. Must be unique, and must be given since it used to look up articles in the counts file. * `split`: One of the strings "training", "dev", "test". Must be given. * `redir`: If this article is a Wikipedia redirect article, this specifies the title of the article redirected to; otherwise, blank. This field is not much used by the document-geotagging code (it is more important during toponym geotagging). Its main use in document geotagging is in computing the incoming link count of an article (see below). * `namespace`: The Wikipedia namespace of the article. Articles not in the `Main` namespace have the namespace attached to the beginning of the article name, followed by a colon (but not all articles with a colon in them have a namespace prefix). The main significance of this field is that articles not in the `Main` namespace are ignored. However, this field can be omitted entirely, in which case all articles are assumed to be in `Main`. * `is_list_of`, `is_disambig`, `is_list`: These fields should either have the value of "yes" or "no". These are Wikipedia-specific fields (identifying, respectively, whether the article title is "List of ..."; whether the article is a Wikipedia "disambiguation" page; and whether the article is a list of any type, which includes the previous two categories as well as some others). None of these fields are currently used. * `coord`: Coordinates of an article, or blank. If specified, the format is two floats separated by a comma, giving latitude and longitude, respectively (positive for north and east, negative for south and west). * `incoming_links`: Number of incoming links, or blank if unknown. This specifies the number of links pointing to the article from anywhere within Wikipedia. This is primarily used as part of certain baselines (`internal-link` and `link-most-common-toponym`). Note that the actual incoming link count of an article includes the incoming link counts of any redirects to that article. The format of the counts file is like this: {{{ Article title: Ampasimboraka Article ID: 17242049 population = 16 area = 15 of = 10 mi = 10 sq = 10 leader = 9 density = 8 km2 = 8 image = 8 blank1 = 8 metro = 5 blank = 5 urban = 5 Madagascar = 5 }}} Multiple articles should follow one directly after the other, with no blank lines. The article ID is currently ignored entirely. There is no need for the words to be sorted by count (or in any other way); this is simply done here for ease in debugging. Note also that, although the code that generates word counts currently ensures that no word has a space in it, spaces in general are not a problem, as the code that parses the word counts specifically looks for an equal sign surrounded by spaces and followed by a number (hence a "word" containing such a sequence would be problematic). === Generating KML files === It is possible to generate KML files showing the distribution of particular words over the Earth's surface, using `tg-generate-kml` (e.g. `tg-generate-kml wikipedia --kml-words mountain,beach,war`). The resulting KML files can be viewed using [http://earth.google.com Google Earth]. The only necessary arg is `--kml-words`, a comma-separated list of the words to generate distributions for. Each word is saved in a file named by appending the word to whatever is specified using `--kml-prefix`. Another argument is `--kml-transform`, which is used to specify a function to apply to transform the probabilities in order to make the distinctions among them more visible. It can be one of `none`, `log` and `logsquared` (actually computes the negative of the squared log). The argument `--kml-max-height` can be used to specify the heights of the bars in the graph. It is also possible to specify the colors of the bars in the graph by modifying constants given in `Geolocate.scala`, near the beginning (`class KMLParameters`). For example: For the Twitter corpus, running on different levels of the document threshold for discarding words, and for the four words "cool", "coo", "kool" and "kewl", the following code plots the distribution of each of the words across a cell of degree size 1x1. `--mts=300` is more for debugging and stops loading further data for generating the distribution after 300 seconds (5 minutes) has passed. It's unnecessary here but may be useful if you have an enormous amount of data (e.g. all of Wikipedia). {{{ for x in 0 5 40; do geolocate-twitter --doc-thresh $x --mts=300 --degrees-per-cell=1 --mode=generate-kml --kml-words='cool,coo,kool,kewl' --kml-prefix=kml-dist.$x.none. --kml-transform=none; done }}} Another example, just for the words "cool" and "coo", but with different kinds of transformation of the probabilities. {{{ for x in none log logsquared; do geolocate-twitter --doc-thresh 5 --mts=300 --degrees-per-cell=1 --mode=generate-kml --kml-words='cool,coo' --kml-prefix=kml-dist.5.$x. --kml-transform=$x; done }}} === Generating data === Scripts were written to extract data from the raw Wikipedia dump files and from the Twitter corpus and output in the format required above for `textgrounder geolocate`. *NOTE*: Parsing raw Wikipedia dump files is not easy. Perhaps better would have been to download and run the MediaWiki software that generates the HTML that is actually output. As it is, there may be occasional errors in processing. For example, the code that locates the geotagged coordinate from an article uses various heuristics to locate the coordinate from various templates which might specify it, and other heuristics to fetch the correct coordinate if there is more than one. In some cases, this will fetch the correct coordinate even if the MediaWiki software fails to find it (due to slightly incorrect formatting in the article); but in other cases, it may find a spurious coordinate. (This happens particularly for articles that mention a coordinate but don't happen to be themselves tagged with a coordinate, or when two coordinates are mentioned in an article. FIXME: We make things worse here by picking the first coordinate and ignoring `display=title`. See comments in `get_coord()` about how to fix this.) The main script to extract data from a Wikipedia dump is `python/processwiki.py`. It takes the (unzipped) dump file as stdin and processes it according to command-line arguments. Normally the front end `python/run-processwiki` is run instead. To run `python/run-processwiki`, specify steps to do. Each step generates one file. As a shorthand, `all` does all the necessary steps to generate the Wikipedia data files (but does not generate every possible file that can be generated). If you have your own dump file, change the name in `config-geolocate`. Similarly, to generate Twitter data, use `python/run-process-twitter`, which is a front end for `python/twitter_geotext_process.py`. FIXME: Document more. =========== Bug Reports =========== Please report bugs by sending mail to jbaldrid at mail.utexas.edu. ============ Special Note ============ Small parts of this README and some of the directory structure and the build system for this project were borrowed from the JDOM project (kudos!). See www.jdom.org for more details.


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Penny Wong: 'Yes' vote important for all Australians
Today's "yes" vote is a momentous statement for LGBTIQ Australians – that we are accepted for who we are. That we, too, belong. That our love is equal.
Australians have recognised that our relationships have as much worth and commitment as everyone else's relationships.
Our desire to make a public and lasting commitment to the person we love is as important and meaningful as everyone else's.
For those of us fighting for equality, this has been a deeply personal debate.
The stubborn legislative discrimination excluding us from the institution of marriage was a clear statement about how our relationships were regarded.
This has been a very hard time for our community, the LGBTIQ community across Australia. The worth of our relationships has been questioned.
Our love and commitment to our children has been questioned. Our identity has been denigrated.
And when a part of our community is diminished in this way, whether it on the basis of ethnicity, language, religion, sexuality or other attribute, we are all diminished.
Today those attitudes have been resoundingly rejected.
Today the Australian people have declared we belong, our love is equal, and those who argued for division and intolerance have been rejected.
So this campaign wasn't just important for LGBTIQ Australians. It's important for all Australians.
Thank you to the millions of Australians who stood up for fairness. Thank you for standing up for equality.
Thank you for standing up for gay and lesbian Australians, the LGBTIQ community everywhere. Thank you for standing up for my family and for all our families.
Thank you for standing up for the sort of Australia we believe in, one that is decent, one that is fair, one that is accepting and one that turns its back on exclusion and division.
We have now seen an outpouring of love and support from our fellow Australians. I hope we can all take from this a message of solidarity, of support, of decency from our fellow Australians.
All of us have been lifted by the support from unions, from business leaders, from farmers, miners and professionals; from the ordinary working men and women of Australia; from the national sporting clubs and their leading stars to the local clubs in towns and cities across Australia.
The "yes" vote is not just a statement for the LGBTIQ community: it's a statement about the kind of nation we are.
A nation where the values of fairness and equality grow ever stronger.
A nation where acceptance and respect mean that all members of our community are made to feel safe and welcome.
Australians have voted for equality. They have done their part.
Now it is time for us to do ours.
The bill we will now debate is the 23rd marriage equality bill to be introduced into the Australian Parliament. And it is the first I have co-sponsored.
I have chosen to put my name in support of this bill because I believe it is the right bill to pass this Parliament.
The Australian people voted to remove discrimination – not to extend it.
It's time for us to get on with it.
It's time to remove discrimination from our Marriage Act.
It's time to legislate for marriage equality.
Senator Penny Wong is the leader of the Opposition in the Senate.


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Mon, 19 December 2011
The Occupy Des Moines crew are doing their thing at Democratic venues...let see how that goes. Then, a history of the movement.. JBS CEO Art Thompson. Then, Bill O'Reilly blasts Newt Gringrich's debate SCOTUS critique. Reverse engineering the case.
Direct download: mickelson-2011-12-19.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:24pm CST


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Well, it's still about the weather. But not as much.
The latest Beige Book collection of anecdotes about the economy contains 35 mentions of the word "weather." That's down from 103 in the last release. In this report, covering the period between April 7 and May 23, "lingering wintry weather" still impacted sales in the Northeast.
From the reopening of the Washington Monument to disturbances from Russian turmoil, here are some other interesting nuggets from the report.
• An aircraft-engine maker in the Boston region complained of rising prices of nickel and titanium, which may have been caused by turmoil in Russia.
• Imports and exports of autos remained strong at the Port of Baltimore, and container shipments bounced back after a weaker first quarter.
• An industry contact noted that the late thawing of parts of the Great Lakes hindered transportation of raw materials and that service center inventories remained somewhat low as a result.
• Both revenues and attendance at Broadway theaters picked up markedly in April and remained solid into early May, running roughly 20% ahead of comparable 2013 levels — partly driven by an increase in the number of shows.
• A contact in Washington, D.C. said that the number of tourists had increased in recent weeks, and the re-opening of the Washington Monument in mid May was well-attended.
• The number of visitors, especially international travelers from Latin America and Europe, to New Orleans, Atlanta, and most parts of Florida, increased.
• Airlines around Dallas (Southwest and American are based there) said airfares and fees continued to increase.
• A major appraisal firm reports that prices of Manhattan co-ops and condos have risen moderately this year and are now nearly back to their peak levels of 2008; this contact also notes that nearly half of all residential (apartment) sales have been all-cash deals, in part from foreign buyers.
• Some new apartment buildings in Boston appear to be having trouble achieving the rents and occupancy levels they had hoped for. Contacts attribute this difficulty to the fact that a large number of high-end units came on the market in a short period of time.
• One Pennsylvania builder indicated a general malaise, citing less customer traffic, more competition from existing homes sales, and a resurgence of concern among potential buyers that they would be unable to sell their existing homes. Read more on builder lot shortages
• New Jersey contacts reported that there is greater preparedness to welcome tourists this year than last year following Hurricane Sandy. In addition, some boat owners are bringing their boats back to the shore following recession belt-tightening.
• While there is growing confidence in western European markets, the outlook for the Chinese economy remains a question, say Cleveland-area manufacturers.
• Although export markets are strategically important to the coal industry, a strengthening U.S. dollar is hindering domestic production expansion.
• Bankers in New York report fairly widespread increases in loan demand across all categories—particularly residential and commercial mortgages.
• Many of the Cleveland Fed's banking contacts, especially community bankers, noted that competitive loan pricing, an inability to raise fee income, and reduced income from mortgage refinancing is impairing their ability to offset the cost of regulatory compliance and to invest in on-line and mobile banking technology.
• In Minnesota a disk-drive parts facility and a military firearms plant will both close later this year.
• Several contacts in the Kansas City region commented on the increased competition for workers due to the improving labor market.
• Contacts around San Francisco reported increased wage pressures in the construction industry as a consequence of shortages of qualified construction management personnel, particularly in fast-growing urban areas. Software developers and engineers continued to experience rapid compensation growth.
• The pace of initial public offerings remained high in the Internet and digital media sectors but slowed a bit in the broader technology sector. Reports indicated that the value and volume of private equity financing picked up.
• New England software and IT services firms saw year-on-year revenue growth of up to 20%, driven by strong demand, increased consumer spending and improving manufacturing in the U.S. and Western Europe.
• Labor supply remains tight for specialized roles in the welding, web development, intellectual property, and Internet technology spheres.
— Steve Goldstein
More must-reads from MarketWatch:
U.S. economy plods ahead without any sizzle: Beige Book


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Comment by Steven D Campagna 12 hours ago
Many Christians know of the atrocities done in the name of the loving, peaceful and compassionate Jesus - yet they speak not a single word about any of it. I'd be ashamed to speak also if I were them.
That leaves you and I to tell the world about 'what they've done' and 'what they're doing' currently to avoid responsibility for their actions. When a posting shows these things it is hoped that someone/anyone will take those deeds and post in other places - so more of the world will know more about these devils and how they act and what they are doing. The world needs to know these people and their fruits will show everyone exactly whom they really are. The gospel they follow is EVIL and I'm not afraid to speak about it.
Comment by leveni 6 hours agoDelete Comment
@ Steven,
If we use this logic of yours then you are also a murderer. In Afghanistan. Here is a link about what you did in Afghanistan. http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2011/11/24/afghanistan-6-children-1...
Why did you do this? Why did you kill these children? Does it make you big and tough to do such a thing?
If you tell me you are not an American then my accusations are baseless. But if you are an American then you are a murderer, according to your own logic.
Comment by Steven D Campagna 4 hours ago
Leveni - you should be more specific about 'what I've done'. You think I support the wars/ How do you know? How do you know I haven't spoken against them?
In Afghanistan it's well understood that Muslim radicals deliberately hide behind women and children using them as 'shields'....and it's a war - people get hurt and killed. I'm not hiding behind anyone nor did I start these wars. I'm a citizen and a pawn just like everybody else. We all say and do whatever we can - that doesn't make all of us 'responsible' for the atrocities of war.
Christians deliberately hide behind the atrocities of their leaders and authorities. They never speak of it and never begin any conversation about what they'd witnessed. In fact, it seems the 'new and improved' Chrisian is now beginning to side with the 'leaders' by saying nothing whatsoever about the atrocities (pedophelia) they've witnessed. Silence is golden to these people. I'm not silent.
Views: 482
Hi Steven,
The point I am making has to do with sectarianism. You want me to tell you what crime you have committed. Fair enough. I know you have not committed any crime in Afghanistan. You have never been there. So, this same reasoning should apply to everybody, even Christians. Now you tell me the crime committed by every single Christian in the world, along with their names. If you know of a Christian who knows of a crime then go to the police and tell the police about this crime. If you don't go to the police, then you are just as guilty as the Christians you are complaining about.
Just because somebody is a Christian doesn't mean they are paedophiles, nor does it mean they condone paedophilia. Having said that, every time I hear the word priest or religious minister, paedophile does comes to mind. The media sure is strong in forcing images into our brains or maybe my brain is easily swayed.
"Christians deliberately hide behind the atrocities of their leaders and authorities" What does this mean?
How do we know that there are paedophilic priests? Surely it was the Christians themselves who went to the police and told the police about this unimaginable crime committed against such innocent beings.
In Afghanistan I have heard of the Taliban hiding behind women and children. But if the US army goes to somebody's house, to kill a guy, who has fought for the Taliban, where should his wife and children go? Should they leave the house and after leaving the house tell the Americans, "You can go and kill my husband now, we have left our house" or "Our Dad is still inside, we left the house so you can go and kill him" and then "tell us when you have finished killing him, so we can go home and live happily ever after". These people have a way of life that isn't going to change. Their family unit is not like ours. Their nuclear family unit is looked upon as a one person, not various different sentient beings who are supposedly encouraged to do as they wish. We may not agree with the way they think, but that's the way they think. If America wants to stop this way of thinking, America is going to have to kill almost every Afghan in the country. So, why is America there?
Anyway, getting back to the real problem.
Do you personally know of any crime committed by a Christian leader or authority or anybody at all? This is a rhetorical question.
Priests, pastors, mastors, bishops, friars, ministers, prophets and pope's all spew lies with nearly every breath they take.
In those Sunday school Bible classes they give those 'lessons' to little 6-year-olds which say snakes once talked to a female who then ate a piece of fruit which then caused untold birthing pains and basically ruined the entire humans race.
Next, they tell these little children that Jesus died on a cross, all bloody and with untold pain and suffering just to save you little children from your sins. Jesus loved you so very much - and the very 'least' you can do is love him right back.
Those that do not accept Jesus as Lord and savior will be sent to Christian hell to be 'burnt'...with their mommy's looking down on them from Christian heaven each day - to view you're suffering and torture - forever.
Yes, now we have a new convert and saved soul through intimindation and threats. Religion is lovely and every single one of them believe the basics and spread this poison along. Children grow up not being to think clearly - that evolution is from the devil - and that atheists and homosexuals don't deserve equality nor should they even be allowed citizenship because we are 'One Nation Under God' and you damn well better get used to it.
So yes, I do throw all god-believers in a basic bucket of crap - because that's what they believe and spread around like dog-shit. If there is a Christian out there that doesn't believe any of the basic tenants of Christianity - such as the resurrection and that Christians go to heaven and I certainly do not - let them step forward and let's talk.
HI Steven,
So yes, I do throw all god-believers in a basic bucket of crap - because that's what they believe and spread around like dog-shit.
I liked this line the best. You could put that on Youtube, its funny stuff.
Ok, when it comes to the protection of children, I agree with what you are saying.
But is what the Christians are saying to child a legal form of child abuse? This time I decided to look it up. I had to look at your profile, in order to find legislation that was relevant to where you lived. Here is a link to the criminal laws of Arizona. But I don't have time to go through them right now, but will later on. Maybe you could tell me what crimes, if any, might apply, even slightly, to child abuse.
As for sectarianism, why make an enemy out of all of them(Christians). Surely there must be some Christians in Arizona that aren't anti-atheist. I go to church once a week to help out in the soup kitchen. Nobody minds me being an atheist there. Admittedly, I don't go around preaching atheism. One particular guy tries to reason with me, in a very Christian way, but I love it. All the things that people have said on these forums, about logical inconsistencies in Christianity, are true. It's great. Admittedly the priest guy has never talked with me, maybe he would be a little more consistent.
Leveni - Indoctrination of little children that messes up their brains for future critical thinking is child abuse. NO, it cannot and will never be listed as such because of overwhelming god-belief from those that make and enforce our laws.
Many studies have shows how American children are well behind the rest of the western world in math and other studies. In the acceptance of evolutionary biology America ranks 39th out of 40 western nations (Turkey is ranked 40th). That tells me a lot. Then today 12-15-2011 we have this..........
Developments in Washington D.C. - Nearly half of America's public schools didn't meet federal achievement standards this year, marking the largest failure rate since the much-criticized No Child left behind Law took effect a decade ago, according to a national report.
The Center on Education Policy shows more than 43,000 schools 48 percent - did not make 'adedquate yearly progress' this year.
The failure rates range from a low of 11 percent in Wisconsin to a high of 89 percent in Florida. (Arizona Republic 12-15-11)
We are close to changing our name to "The United States of Stupid".
Add a little more child brainwashing about talking snakes, Intelligent Design, the 2nd Coming of Jesus and a whole array of other incideous ideas and we'll be the laughing stock of the entire planet. When I go places now and if asked where I'm from - I tell them Canada. It's way to embarrassing to let them know I'm from a rabid Christian foaming-at-the-mouth nation. They already know this of course.
Hi Steven,
The Center on Education Policy shows more than 43,000 schools 48 percent - did not make 'adedquate yearly progress' this year.
Funny you should say this. I was reading about a Professor Somner-Miller(he was really famous here in Australia), he predicted this about America years ago. Interesting that you bring this up now.
Add a little more child brainwashing about talking snakes, Intelligent Design, the 2nd Coming of Jesus and a whole array of other incideous ideas and we'll be the laughing stock of the entire planet.
So many Americans say this. I just wonder if it is really true. It can't be that bad surely. Admittedly I don't live where you live so it's impossible for me to know.
When I go places now and if asked where I'm from - I tell them Canada.
Your not the only one, other Americans have admitted to me this very same thing.
We have had cases in Australia where children have been forcibly removed from Christian sects. I wonder if this has ever happened in America?
There have been many cases in the United States where interventions have removed people from Christian sects. In an off-shoot of the Mormon Church (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) there has over the past few years been many escapees that have come forward.
Unfortunately, some never escape such as what happened with the Jim Jones massacure of over 900-people that left the California area to live in South America - and they drank poison.
The title of this thread is Christian atrocities and their silence. I might have one (I'll look for it) that shows how this is happening more often and how ugly it has become.
The SILENCE of Christians as they commit atrocities. This is now becoming more noticable as the following shows:
The 15-year-old New Hampshire girl was pregnant, scared-to-death, and intimidated beyond belief when she was made to stand before her Trinity Baptist Church congregation and apologize for her immorality.
Pastor Ernest Willis in fact had raped this young girl and was behind this new public humilitation. Oh how the congregation reacted! Stone-faced, judgemental and pious. Oh yes, one or two were jaw-dropping flabbergasted at this real life freak-show. Why, this was far better than any movie in any theatre in the land!
Afterwards, morning coffee and gossip was never better and made this Sunday morning complete.
Pastor Willis, and who knows how many other church 'authorities', immediately helped ship this pregnant teenager to another Baptist family living in Colorado for hiding.
It took police 14-years to track this girl down. Her baby was gone; adopted out by this Colorado Baptist family - to get rid of the 'shame'.
Pastor Willis, 52, Gilford, N.H. said he was 'sorry and ashamed for this thoughtless act of sexual misconduct', but refused to admit to child rape.
The Baptist 'congregation' has largely been completely silent regarding the Sunday morning 'incident' and the subsequent cover-up. Pastor Willis received 15 to 20-years in prison for this assault and rape of a child. The girl, Tina Anderson, now 29, said she was 'thrilled' with the sentence.
"I was never believed no matter how many times I told everyone it was not consensual. Now it has been proven in a court-of-law that he's guilty, and he has been given a significant sentence", said Tina Anderson.
The case remained unresolved for so many years because Concord police could not locate the girl. Unknown to them, Pastor Willis, Trinity baptist Church, had conspired to ship her out-of-state, with the mother's consent. and the congregation kept silent for years.
(Arizona Republic 9/7/2011)
There was a raid on an FLDS compound a while back where children were removed.
unrepentant the canadian genocide
and in asia people who practice falun gong were rounded up and shot
in africa there are culling programs
in india there are the dalit
etc etc etc...
this is a human condition that is beyond religion
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