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The Monterey County Office of Education website can be translated into many different languages using the Google™ Translate Service, hereinafter referred to as the "Service". The Service is offered to you ("User" or "You") as a public service at no cost to assist web visitors with understanding information presented on this website in a variety of foreign languages.
The maintenance and publishing of content for this site is done in English. Because the Service provides automated computer translations there may be differences in meaning between the English and translated language. MCOE cannot guarantee the accuracy of translations through the Service, so translations are not be considered exact and only used as a rough guide. Anyone relying on information obtained from the Service does so at his or her own risk; and, should refer to the English content whenever discrepancies exist. MCOE disclaims, and will not accept, any liability for damages or losses of any kind caused by the use of the Service.
Monterey County Office of Education
Leadership, Support and Service to Prepare All Students for Success
Dr. Deneen Guss, County Superintendent of Schools
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For instructions regarding entering an Escape HelpDesk ticket, please see Escape Help Desk How To
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Business Systems Support Technician
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Copyright © 2014 Monterey County Office of Education | WebMaster | Contact MCOE: 831.755.0300 | 901 Blanco Circle, Salinas, CA 93901
Welcome to the Monterey County Office of Education's Website
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P19 cells, which exhibit epithelial morphology and adherent growth in culture, have been of significant interest to developmental biologists. Since the pluripotent murine embryonal carcinoma cells can differentiate in culture into many tissue types similar to those normally found in early embryos, they have they potential to help reveal important information about certain developmental proceedings. In some studies, for example, P19 cells have been used to analyze protein activities involved in neuronal differentiation. Other studies have concentrated more specifically on utilizing the P19 line as part of a larger endeavor to find ways that pluripotent cells may be applied in the medical field to develop treatments and cures for a variety of diseases and medical conditions, such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and leukemia.
The mouse embryo teratocarcinoma (P19) cell culture presented in the digital image above was labeled for mitochondria and the cytoskeletal filamentous actin network with MitoTracker Red CMXRos and Alexa Fluor 488 conjugated to phalloidin, respectively. In addition, the cells were counterstained for DNA with the ultraviolet-absorbing probe DAPI. Images were recorded in grayscale with a QImaging Retiga Fast-EXi camera system coupled to an Olympus BX-51 microscope equipped with bandpass emission fluorescence filter optical blocks provided by Omega Optical. During the processing stage, individual image channels were pseudocolored with RGB values corresponding to each of the fluorophore emission spectral profiles.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Big Papi doesn't have many fans in New York City, and just made one more enemy off the field.
Yankee fan Jay-Z has filed a $5 million suit against David Ortiz, accusing the Boston Red Sox slugger of getting more than an empire state of mind after visiting the rap mogul's swanky Manhattan nightclub, 40/40.
Court papers filed Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court accuse Ortiz of visiting the Jay-Z-owned nightspot on two occasions then opening up a copycat club in his native Dominican Republic, the New York Daily News reported.
"David Ortiz was at the club at least twice, and certainly knew of it," Jay-Z's lawyer, Peter Raymond told the News.
As proof, the filings reportedly include photos of the designated hitter partying at Jay-Z's club on W. 25th Street.
Ortiz's representatives did not return calls for comment by the News or The Associated Press.
Besides the New York club, Jay-Z boasts other 40/40-branded hotspots in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Chicago, Tokyo and Macau.
The name is a reference to when a baseball player hits 40 home runs and steals 40 bases in a single season.


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Be a part of a unique online community that connects post production professionals and film academics worldwide.
You'll have access to personalize your news feed, access to Live Post Talks and much more. Contribute to the community by posting interesting post production content.
July 16, 2019, 6:12 am
RebusFarm render service offers cloud rendering for a huge range of 3D software and renderers. befores & afters readers can also benefit from an exclusive special: 50 free trial RenderPoints!
October 21, 2019, 7:40 pm
Mark Franken from Sounds In Sync has been in touch to tell us about the release of EdiCue version 3.1.0, which includes support for macOS Catalina.
October 21, 2019, 4:20 pm
Blackmagic Design just released the final version of DaVinci Resolve 16.1. You now have access to enhanced tools on the cut page like a smart indicator, the new Boring Detector, Sync-Bins and other improvements – without having to worry using a beta version.
October 21, 2019, 12:45 pm
Sony released Ang Lee's new sci-fi action movie Gemini Man in theaters a few weeks ago. Aside from the HFR cinematography, the film is boasting "groundbreaking" technology with its de-aging VFX. Gemini Man is about the world's best assassin, played by Will Smith at his current age (51), attempting to retire until he's pursued by a younger version of himself.
October 21, 2019, 12:45 pm
Ever since James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I've been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had to basically invent new ways to realise the CG 'liquid metal' T-1000 shots in that film, of which there are surprisingly few. Tools like 'Make Sticky' and 'Body Sock' are ones that I'd heard referenced several times, but I've always wanted to know more about how those pieces of software were made.
October 20, 2019, 1:48 pm
Sound Devices just released firmware v3.00 for their latest Scorpio and 833 recorder/mixers. Firmware version 3.00 includes the revered Sound Devices' MixAssist algorithm, integration with the popular Sound Devices CL-12 linear fader controller, AAC recording for immediate handoff to transcription and more.
October 20, 2019, 1:48 pm
Film biography Harriet had its eagerly awaited world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, now Wyatt Smith talks about it.
October 19, 2019, 7:28 pm
Though critics didn't seem to care for Gemini Man much, one of the consistent compliments among many have been with regards to the visual effects used to create a young Will Smith that faces off with an older version of Will Smith. The team behind this amazing technological achievement in visual effects has consistently touted the fact that they didn't simply de-age Will Smith's face, but instead, they created a completely digital model of young Will Smith that was informed by a motion-capture performance. Now a Gemini Man visual effects breakdown reveals how it was accomplished.
October 19, 2019, 7:28 pm
Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C are frequently mentioned in the same breath, which can make understanding the difference between the two quite challenging for the average person.
October 18, 2019, 8:07 pm
You will probably not want to go for a walk in the fields after watching this VFX Breakdown by Spin VFX about their work on IN THE TALL GRASS...
October 18, 2019, 8:06 pm
Come discover how Image Engine have duplicated Marlon Wayans for SEXTUPLETS...
Lawrence Jordan joins Gordon to discuss editing, 2-pop, and his new venture Master the workflow.
Tom Ohanian is legendary; he helped create Avid and make it the industry standard in post-production and now, he has released ...
Gordon sits down with Michelle Miller to discuss the makeup of PEN15
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A sports car at first glance. Extremely low and wide when viewed from the front, a flat silhouette, powerfully-formed surfaces and precise lines. A second look reveals the well-planned revolution. With design dedicated to function. Sustainability and efficiency meet their equals in dynamics and sportiness. The street is the stage on which the BMW i8 displays how these ideals interact: hugging the ground in typical BMW style as it glides along.
Long wheelbase, short overhangs, solid status as it crouches on the street: the BMW i8 has all the characteristics of a full-blooded sports car. The front appears extremely low and wide. Everything is arranged to be optimally aerodynamic. At the same time, the flat, but prominent double kidney grill makes this vehicle's origins clear. A V-shaped 'black belt' starts on the bonnet and dynamically wraps around the bodyshell to the rear.
Viewed from the side, the exaggerated wedge shape, the long drawn-out lines and the flat silhouette underscore the dynamics and fulfil the expectations one has of a sports car. From the front to the rear, the car has a very dynamic, three-dimensional appearance. Surfaces and lines overlap and interlock, a method known as 'layering'. This joins all the surfaces harmoniously and allows compact and unbelievably agile look. Its monolithic appearance lends the BMW i8 its extraordinarily powerful stature.
Off to a swinging start: the special sports car aspect of the BMW i8 is unmistakeable after just a glance at the spectacular scissor doors. The prominent scissor doors - which swing upwards when opened - are an optical highlight and blend perfectly in the smooth lines of the aerodynamic bodyshell.
From the inside, the doors emphasise the entire sporty character of the interior and guide the driver's gaze forward. The decorative door handle is ergonomically located in the inside of the door panel.
LED headlights are standard in the BMW i8 and go perfectly with the exceptional sports car concept. All lighting elements are completely in LED and low-beam and high-beam are widely spaced. The optional high-beam headlights with laser light technology* includes a typical BMW i U-shaped frame, from which the running lights and the built-in indicators are operated. A second, wide light frame surrounds the innovative laser light unit and emphasises its three-dimensionality. a passively lit blue band signalises the lighting unit's innovative technology. In the equipment with laser light, the headlights have a brilliant metallic side cover rather than a dark one. The overall impression of the light concept is unmistakeably BMW i8.
*Available in a special edition from the end of 2014 onwards.
The consistently sporty look of the exterior is continued seamlessly in the interior of the BMW i8. All elements are light and dynamically positioned. In the interior, the layering principle creates a novel relationship between functionality and clear form. Lightweight construction is implemented visually, for example the visible carbon elements in the door sill highlight its low weight.
A classic sports car character and the typical BMW driver orientation are both equally prominent in the design of the BMW i8. The centre console is aligned towards the driver. All the instruments and signs in the digital instrument panel, with its two large displays, are simple to use. Passengers all sit particularly close to the ground and the narrow lightweight seats provide reliable support and a high level of comfort even when cornering rapidly. The iDrive Controller is conveniently located on the centre console that optically bisects the vehicle.
Colour and material design underscores the guiding idea of a smart, sustainable sports car concept. Three equipment lines - 'Halo', 'Carpo' and 'Neso' - differ in terms of materials used. 'Halo' and 'Carpo' are full leather equipment; 'Halo' is the top of the range and 'Carpo' comes in two colours, 'Ivory White' and 'Amido'. The equipment concept 'Neso' is the most direct implementation of future-orientated mobility: a pure and clever blend of resource-saving materials that contrast with each other and evoke modern sportiness in every detail. The tanned plant leather - made of olive leaf extract - in the interior and the use of lightweight and recycled materials in all the material concepts proves that sustainability doesn't herald the end of premium products, but instead, shows where their future lies.
Sustainable production. Local emission-free driving.


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Tennessee - Centerville
Reverse Sales Tax Calculator of Centerville
Calculation of the general sales taxes of the city Centerville, Tennessee for 2017 Q3
How 2017 Q3 Sales taxes are calculated in Centerville
The Centerville, Tennessee, general sales tax rate is 0%. The sales tax rate is always 0%
Every 2017 Q3 combined rates mentioned above are the results of Tennessee state rate (0%). There is no county sale tax for Centerville, Tennessee. There is no city sale tax for Centerville. There is no special rate for Centerville.
The Centerville's tax rate may change depending of the type of purchase.
Please refer to the Tennessee website for more sales taxes information.
Centerville city rate(s)
The average combined rate of every zip code in Centerville, Tennessee is 0%


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Pearl Reference Tom Drum
Scarlet Fade 16 X 13
(Scarlet Fade16 X 13)
Sku #446696000655668
Mounted Toms
- Write a Review
45 day price guarantee, 45 day return policy, 100% secure shopping
What if each drum in your drum set was engineered as an instrument unto itself? Each tom is designed to respond perfectly within the confines of its respective frequency without compromise over any other area of your kit. This is the mission behind these tom drums and all other drums in Pearl's Reference Series. A complete set of individually engineered, incredible sounding drums.
In 1999, Pearl began its most ambitious undertaking, The Masterworks Series, the world's first truly custom drums. Designed for the player by the player. Every aspect of the manufacturing process was custom made, from the number of wood plies, the wood selection, to the final finish. Over the last five years, through arduous listening tests, Masterworks has taught Pearl drum makers a great deal about drums and what makes the perfect shell. So forget what you think you know about drums and take a close look at Reference Series, the most acoustically advanced drums in the world. To fully understand the Reference Series you must understand that the desired tonal characteristics of a 10" tom are completely different than that of a 22" bass drum. Thus to use the same material in both drums would result in a compromise.
Reference Series drums use a combination of task-specific bearing edges and three time-proven woods: birch, maple, and African mahogany. Using maple as a sole material has long been the traditional choice for shells and for good reason. Maple provides smooth, well-balanced tone that is perfect for a 12" tom. Subsequently, all Reference Series 12" toms are composed of six plies of maple; this is the only single wood shell in the series. Pearl's 10" and 8" toms receive four plies of maple with two inner plies of birch for cut and attack. And for maximum response, all 13" diameter and smaller toms have a rounded 45 bearing edge, a more focused area for head-to-shell contact to boost mid- to higher-range frequencies.
Beginning with Pearl's 13" tom and larger, mahogany is added to the inner plies to increase the lower frequencies and accentuate the warmth of the maple. The 14" diameter toms and larger begin using Pearl's fully-rounded bearing edge for even more shell contact for a boost in mid to low range frequencies.
With Reference Series, it's not about compromise, it's about every drum in your kit performing at its optimal capacity.
- 2 inner plies birch
- 4 outer plies maple
- Rounded 45 bearing edge
- 6 plies maple
- Rounded 45 bearing edge
- 2 inner plies mahogany
- 4 outer plies maple
- Rounded 45 bearing edge
- 2 inner plies mahogany
- 4 outer plies maple
- Rounded 45 bearing edge
- 4 inner plies mahogany
- 2 outer plies maple
- Rounded 45 bearing edge


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It's prep time for deer hunters
It's never too early to get into the deer-hunting mode in Texas. The bow-hunting season opens Sept. 29, and the regular gun season in 239 counties opens Nov. 3. And don't forget about the kids. The Special Youth Season is open Oct. 27-28. One thing is certain – now is the time to start getting your deer hunting gear in order.Deer hunting is Texas is big business. There are roughly 650,000 deer hunters in the Lone Star State. And you can bet the barn on this fact – those hunters are going to be geared up to the max before going after some of the estimated 4 million white-tailed deer roaming the Texas countryside.
Here in Southeast Texas, you don't need a calendar to know when the opener on deer is nearing. Deer corn will be for sale at just about every store in town. And places like Leger Shooting Range will be packed with hunters buying gear and guns and taking them out back for a little target practice. Sporting goods stores will not only be packed with people but everything under the sun that relates to deer and deer hunting. Without a doubt deer hunting is serious dollar business.
The No. 1 thing to do prior to the season opener is to find a place to hunt. Once that is done, you'll need a rifle, case, scope, some ammo, binoculars, camouflage clothing, boots, a blind, a stand, feeders, tons of corn, game cams and … well, you get the picture.
There are many brands of rifles in an array of calibers that will put a deer on the ground. Some of the more popular calibers include a .270, .30-06 and .243. A bolt-action rifle is by far the most popular among Texas hunters. Another option is the old lever action .30-30 with iron sites. That's a good one if you'll be hunting in the Pineywoods thickets.
A rifle without a scope is practically unheard of. When properly scoped and sighted, in a good rifle can lay a deer down anywhere from 100 to 300 yards out. A 200 to 300 yard shot is stretching it, but with a little practice on the range, it can be done.
Quality binoculars are worth their weight in gold. Never, ever go hunting without your binoculars.
It used to be that most of the deer hunting in the Pineywoods was done from homemade box blinds or tree stands made of 2x4s and plywood. Nowadays a high tech tree stand or factory made box blind is the norm. If you'll be hunting from last season's blind, make sure to clean it up before opening day. Wild animals and insects love to set up house in unused blinds.
Corn feeders are about as common as guns and blinds. Millions of pounds of corn are run through feeders each deer season. Like rifles and binoculars, you get what you pay for when selecting a feeder. Some are simple; others are high tech. Some are cheap while others are expensive. The high quality feeders will last for years. The el cheapo feeders tend to fall apart. One of the big markets for deer gear manufacturers is in replacement parts for feeders.
You can't have a feeder without some sort of video or camera that keeps track of what's eating all that expensive corn. Game cams are super popular. You can even buy video cams that will stream live footage right to your computer.
Camouflage clothing and gear ranks right up there with bullets for your rifle. Something that has always puzzled me is the demand for full camo clothing for hunters that do nothing but sit in a blind. I know deer are pretty smart critters, but last time I checked, they can't see through walls. Regardless, the camouflage clothing market is huge and getting bigger every season. The list includes shirts, jackets, pants, hats, gloves and boots. One of the latest niche markets centers on soap that will wash human scent out of your clothing. If that's not enough, you can carry along a bottle of scent control spray.
That's just some of the gear you'll need to stay one step ahead of the other half million or so deer hunters heading afield this season.
There is one other item you might want to check out – a four wheeler. Back when I was a kid there was no such thing as riding to your blind. We parked a half mile away and walked in. That is definitely not the situation now, and it's just one more reason why deer hunting is a billion dollar business.


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Dan dan noodles is one of those quintessential Sichuan dishes that you must try at least once if you're a fan of anything spicy. The chili-laced vinegar and sesame sauce is quite possibly one of the finest sauces that ground pork or beef can ever be cooked with.
Now, if you were to have dan dan noodles in Sichuan province, the noodles would come swimming in a chili-laced broth that is almost impossible for mortals (non-Sichuan-natives) to slurp. I like to do a less saucy version that tones the heat down slightly while still maintaining flavor. The noodles in this recipe are spicy enough for someone who doesn't mind a little heat in their food. But please feel free to adjust the amount of chili oil to your preferences. And slurping is, of course, encouraged.
The first time I ever had dan dan mian was years ago in New York's East Village. It was one of those insanely hot and muggy July days, and my friend Shar and I were walking on St. Mark's Place, sweaty even in tank tops and skirts.
"Where do you want to have lunch?," I asked.
"Anywhere with AC," was the reply.
We ducked into the St. Mark's branch of Grand Sichuan and sure enough, there was a generous amount of AC, along with a particularly surly waitress. We ordered quickly just to get her to go away.
We ate about 4 or 5 dishes, but I don't remember any except the dan dan noodles and cold cucumber salad. I remember the dan dan noodles because it was one of the spiciest dishes had ever tasted, at that point. I remember the cucumbers because, despite also being spicy, they tamed the heat in my mouth from the dan dan noodles.
I gulped about 4 or 5 glasses of water during the meal. The food was actually pretty good, but I, being a newbie to Sichuan food, couldn't fully appreciate the complexity of the Sichuan peppercorn. Years later, having had many 4-alarm Sichuan meals, I actually miss and crave the mala sensation (numbing spiciness) if I don't eat Sichuan for a week or more.
You can find dan dan mian at almost all Sichuan restaurants. Some people have it as an appetizer, others have it during the meal instead of rice. (I, for one, always get rice if I'm also ordering dishes bathed in a spicy sauce, like mapo tofu or mouth-watering chicken. Some friends of mine don't mind piling heat on top of heat, those brave fools.)
Dan dan noodles are also easy to make at home. Even the American home, now that the Sichuan peppercorn ban is lifted. Of course, this dish can always be toned down by adding less Sichuan pepper, but trust me...mala heat is addictive. Just make sure to have some water by your side.
Dan Dan Noodles
Serves 4 as part of a multi-course meal, or 2 to 3 as a single dish
- 8 ounces ground pork or beef
- 1 tablespoon peanut oil
- 2 teaspoons minced garlic (about 2 cloves)
- 1 teaspoon minced ginger
- 2 scallions, white and green parts chopped
- 2 tablespoons chopped Sichuan preserved vegetable (optional)
- 1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
- 1/2 teaspoon salt, or salt to taste
- 8 ounces dried Chinese egg noodles
- 1 handful dry-roasted peanuts, finely chopped
- 1/2 cup chicken stock or water
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon Chinese sesame paste or tahini
- 2 tablespoon Chinese black rice vinegar, or substitute good quality balsamic vinegar
- 3 tablespoons chili oil (adjust according to your tolerance of spiciness)
- 1 tablespoon sesame oil
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ground Sichuan pepper
- Bring a large pot of water to boil and cook the noodles according to package instructions. Drain the noodles, rinse under cold water, and drain again. Transfer the noodles to a serving dish.
- Prepare the sauce: In a medium bowl, whisk together the chicken stock, soy sauce, sesame paste, vinegar, chili oil, sesame oil, sugar, and Sichuan pepper. Pour the sauce over the noodles and toss so the sauce is evenly distributed. Set aside.
- Heat a large wok or skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil and swirl to coat the base and sides. Add the garlic, ginger, white parts of the scallions, and optional Sichuan preserved vegetable and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the meat and stir-fry until the meat is a little crispy on the outside and no longer pink. Add rice wine to deglaze the pan. Season with salt to taste.
- Spoon the cooked meat mixture over the noodles, sprinkle the chopped scallions greens and chopped peanuts on top, and serve.


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This course is the 1st semester of a year-long course.
This Readings seminar explores research on happiness and decision making, and the implications for legal systems, legal rules and life choices. Pursuing and maximizing happiness have long been prominent legal ideas, from Bentham and Jefferson to today. New research is generating direct measures of happiness (or subjective well-being) and comparisons across countries, demographic groups, activities, rules, choices, and different versions of happiness. A growing body of research in psychology, neuroscience, economics and law is investigating how people make decisions, and whether our decisions improve our happiness. In this Readings seminar, we will explore this research and its implications. Why are some societies and some individuals happier than others? What role for legal systems, lawyers, and our own choices? How well can people envision and pursue their own future happiness? What social cues and mental heuristics prompt us to make the choices we make? If we have difficulty making good choices, can the law help?
This Readings seminar is open to up to 12 students. It meets for 7 sessions of 2 hours each, once per month, spread over the full academic year. For each session, we will read a book or a set of articles. Specific meeting dates and times will be arranged in consultation with the students; like other Readings seminars, it will typically meet in the evening, often at the professor's home. 1 credit (graded on a credit/no credit basis). It is a book group and discussion (no exam or paper). Note: This course does NOT fulfill the Ethics requirement.
Topic: Happiness, Decisions, Future
Fall 2016
|Course Number
|Course Credits
|Evaluation Method
|Meeting Day/Times
|Jonathan B. Wiener
|Sakai site: https://sakai.duke.edu/portal/site/LAW.613A.01.F16
|Email list: email@example.com


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fall fall fall fall fall by ArMaS
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fall fall fall by ArMaS
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falls at fall by Chelsea Yarger
The Falls At Fall by Emily Trudeau
The falls at Fall by Christa Buono
FALL IN FALL by foster zeh
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Fall Falls by Andrew Benedict
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|System: X360, PS3
|Review Rating Legend
|Dev: Cavia
|1.0 - 1.9 = Avoid
|4.0 - 4.4 = Great
|Pub: Square Enix
|2.0 - 2.4 = Poor
|4.5 - 4.9 = Must Buy
|Release: Apr. 27, 2010
|2.5 - 2.9 = Average
|5.0 = The Best
|Players: 1
|3.0 - 3.4 = Fair
|ESRB Rating: Mature
|3.5 - 3.9 = Good
by Jonathan Marx
There's a lot to like in Nier, however, there is also a good deal more to dislike; the game has a handful of quality needles hidden under a haystack of tired gameplay mechanics. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this title is the well-crafted, heartfelt story that will keep any RPG connoisseur engaged. Players will also be treated to a few interesting dungeon puzzles and bosses, as well as an ability/weapon enhancement system with serious potential. That's why it's such a shame that the overwhelming number of asinine side quests, blight of mundane minions, superfluous diversions (fishing, collecting, harvesting), and boxed-in, featureless environments reduce this game to little more than a common slog.
Players take on the role of an anxious father consumed with protecting and curing his afflicted daughter, Yonah. The game setting takes place in a future Earth where today's humans are considered to be ancients. All the technological knowledge that humanity harnessed has been lost to an apocalyptic event and the passage of time. The survivors now find themselves in a world fraught with danger, magic, and nightmarish Shades.
The player character and Yonah live in a sleepy village, surrounded by wilderness. Your character fills his days taking on odd jobs and errands, while his sickly daughter mostly stays home resting and cooking. Yonah also has a penchant for getting herself into trouble. On one such unsupervised outing, she ends up being held captive at an ancient shrine. The player-controlled hero saves her from the clutches of Shades, but Yonah contracts a lethal disease called the Black Scrawl.
Fortunately, the PC's rescue efforts also net him a powerful companion: Grimoire Weiss. This magical tome is the counter to Grimoire Noir; the black magic compendium that is spreading the devastating Black Scrawl. But, Grimoire Weiss is no standard magical text. This book is a supreme being that's both loquacious and arrogant, but also extremely powerful. Throughout the journey, the protagonist will harness the power of Grimoire Weiss in order to battle the Shades and secure the cure for his daughter's affliction.
While the story may not seem to be particularly unique when painted with broad strokes, it eventually evolves into an charming narrative about the love of a father for his daughter and the great lengths he'll go to, to ensure her well-being. The story, more than any other facet of Nier, is what kept me going through the game's myriad shortcomings.
But before I hit you with the bad, let's talk a bit more about what Nier gets right. For starters, the musical score is full of nice background tracks, some of which are actually quite excellent. Also, the voiceover work, for the most part, is capably done - Grimoire Weiss is voiced especially well.
Players will undoubtedly find the weapon and ability enhancement system to be quite nice too. As you hack and slash your way through the game, Shades will drop prefixes and suffixes that can be combined by Grimoire Weiss to form more potent weapons, higher player stats, and augmented magical abilities. There are even bonus effects that grant, for example, paralyze or poison modifiers. While these word portions can be combined in many different ways to obtain distinct results, the game also offers impatient players the ability to simply utilize the best combinations at the touch of a button via the Word Edit tab.
In addition, weapons can also be enhanced in a more conventional manner. By finding key components strewn about the world and dropped from enemies, you can, for a fee, have your current weapon leveled up by smithies. This typically adds bonuses to damage or even magical force.
There are also a number of bosses in this game that, while straightforward to beat, will have you using all of Nier's abilities. The result is several instances of very satisfying gameplay - almost Metroidvania-like battles that will test your mettle. Similarly, there are several dungeon puzzles that nicely break up combat and keep you thinking.


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Seasonal campfire restrictions commence in national parks and reserves
Fly Neighbourly Advice for the Tasman National Park
Hybrid diesel-electric shuttle buses at Cradle Mountain - a first for National p
The Bay of Fires on Tasmania's East Coast extends from Binalong Bay in the south to Eddystone Point in the north.
This unusual name was given to the area by Captain Tobias Furneaux, in 1773, when he noticed numerous fires along the coast. This led him to believe that the country was densely populated. Abundant evidence of this occupation by Aboriginal people can be seen along the coast today.
A scenic view of the bay can be glimpsed by driving along the coast to The Gardens. This picturesque area was named by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Governor John Franklin, who spent some time in the region.
The northern section of the Bay, from north of the outlet of Ansons Bay to Eddystone Point lies within the Mt William National Park.
The middle section of the Bay of Fires lies in the vicinity of Ansons Bay. It can be accessed via Policemans Point or the northern shore of Ansons Bay, however be aware that it is not possible to cross the outlet of Ansons Bay.
The southern section of The Bay of Fires is in the Conservation Area, situated along a 13 km stretch of coast between Binalong Bay and The Gardens.
A wide range of activities are able to be pursued in the Bay of Fires area, including camping, beach activities, boating, bird watching, fishing, swimming, surfing and walking.
Please be aware that Aboriginal middens (shell and bone deposits) are found in the sand dunes. Please do not disturb these protected sites.
Detailed maps for this area are the 1:100,000 series, Georges Bay and 1:25,000 series, Ansons Bay, The Gardens and Binalong.
This page produced by the Parks & Wildlife Service,
a unit of the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment This page was last modified on Tuesday, 1 July 2008


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Holiday shopping is here and so are the hard sells for extended warranties and service plans. Consumer Reports says there's a real dollars-and-cents reason for that. Stores make a lot more profit on those than on the actual product you're buying! In fact, Consumer Reports says service plans are almost never worth it.
Consumer Reports' reader survey shows that products rarely break during the service contract period. And even if they do, it doesn't cost that much more to repair them than it does for the contract itself.
Extended service plans are expensive. They can boost your costs by 30 percent or more and can run into hundreds of dollars. And Consumer Reports' surveys find that If you pay for a repair yourself, there's a better chance that it's going to be done correctly and quicker than if you had it repaired under contract.
Consumer Reports says better than buying a service plan is paying with a credit card. Many cards automatically extend the manufacturer's warranty up to a year, so check your terms.
Calling the manufacturer can pay off, too. Just because the manufacturer's warranty has expired doesn't necessarily mean that you're out of luck. If you contact the manufacturer and make a good argument, there's a good chance the company will pay for part or all of the repair.
Consumer Reports says the one possible exception to the "No Extended Warranty Rule" is when buying a laptop. If you're going to travel with it a lot, Consumer Reports says you may want to consider an extended warranty that covers accidental damage.
Complete Ratings and recommendations on all kinds of products, including appliances, cars & trucks, and electronic gear, are available on Consumer Reports' website.


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By Mike Lehman, TTU Sports Information Coordinator
HATTIESBURG, Miss. - After just two short rounds, it seems as if the Tennessee Tech men's golf team has picked up right where it left off from the 2012-13 season. The Golden Eagles sit in seventh out of 15 teams at the Sam Hall Intercollegiate.
Following last season's impressive third-place showing at the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament, the Golden Eagles have played quite impressively in its first action of the 2013-14 season.
Leading the way for the Tech squad is junior Lee Whitehead, whose score of 135 after the first two rounds has the Knoxville native tied for fourth overall in a tournament featuring SEC powers Mississippi State and Ole Miss, a Louisiana-Lafayette team that broke the tournament's 36-hole record with a 553, and a new course record from Sam Houston State's Zach Cabra (who shot a 62 in the second round).
Whitehead carded a first round 69 before completing a career-best round of 66 in his second 18.
Also performing well for the Golden Eagle squad was Mitch Thomas, who put together a score of 144 with rounds of 73 and 71. Not far behind was sophomore Adam Cunningham, as the Cookeville native used both a 71 and 74 to total 145 on the first day of action.
Following suit were redshirt junior Mason Griffin and sophomore Bryce Kendrick, who finished with scores of 146 and 147, respectively. Griffin, who saw his first action in nearly a year after sitting out the 2012-13 season due to injury, provided great consistency with back-to-back 73s.
Just two shots back of sixth place, the Golden Eagles will look to finish strong on Tuesday morning as round three of the tournament will begin at approximately 8 a.m. CDT.


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Caspar and the Jesus paper
There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in a single posting. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written and piecing it together from the individual CA postings has been a long, hard but fascinating struggle. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.
At some time or another, most people will have seen the hockey stick - the iconic graph which purports to show that after centuries of stable temperatures, the second half of the twentieth century saw a sudden and unprecedented warming of the globe. This was caused, we were told, by mankind burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For a while, the hockey stick was everywhere - unimpeachable evidence that mankind was damaging the planet - an impact that would require drastic measures to reverse. The stick's most famous outing however was just a couple of years ago when it made a headlining appearance in Al Gore's drama-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The revelation of the long, thin graph with its dramatic temperature rise in the last few decades, and the audience gasps that accompanied it, is something of a key moment for many environmentalists.
Shortly after its publication, the hockey stick and its main author, Michael Mann, came under attack from Steve McIntyre, a retired statistician from Canada. In a series of scientific papers and later on his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre took issue with the novel statistical procedures used by the hockey stick's authors. He was able to demonstrate that the way they had extracted the temperature signal from the tree ring records was biased so as to choose hockey-stick shaped graphs in preference to other shapes, and criticised Mann for not publishing the cross validation R2, a statistical measure of how well the temperature reconstruction correlated with actual temperature records. He also showed that the appearance of the graph was due solely to the use of an estimate of historic temperatures based on tree rings from bristlecone pines, a species that was known to be problematic for this kind of reconstruction.
The controversy raged for several years, involving blue riband panels, innumerable blog postings, endless name-calling and dark insinuations about motivations and conflicts of interest. In May 2005, at the height of the controversy, and on the very day that McIntyre was making a rare public appearance in Washington to discuss his findings, two Mann associates, Caspar Amman and Eugene Wahl, issued a press release in which they claimed that they had submitted two manuscripts for publication, which together showed that they had replicated the hockey stick exactly, confirmed its statistical underpinnings and demonstrated that McIntyre's criticisms were baseless. This was trumpeted as independent confirmation of the hockey stick. A few eyebrows were raised at the dubious practice of using a press release to announce scientific findings. Some also noted that on the rare occasions that this kind of announcement is made, it tends to be about papers that have been published, or at least accepted for publication. To make such a dramatic announcement about the submission of a paper was unusual in the extreme.
The first of these papers ("the GRL paper") was submitted to Geophysical Research Letters, the journal of the American Geophysical Union. It took the form of a rebuttal of a McIntyre paper that had attacked the hockey stick and had been published in the same journal. From the first, the McIntyre paper had been controversial. Apart from Amman and Wahl's paper, there were three other papers taking issue with it. However, it turned out that some of these attempted rebuttals were less well formed than others. In fairly short order, Amman and Wahl's paper was rejected, many of its criticisms either relating to other McIntyre papers than the one at hand, or relying on the second paper for their arguments. Since the second paper was unpublished, it was effectively impossible for McIntyre to defend himself against these criticisms. Shortly after Amman and Wahl's paper was rejected, another of the rebuttals, that of a physicist called David Ritson, was also shot down by the journal's editors.
Meanwhile the second, longer paper ("the CC paper") had started its long road to publication at the journal Climatic Change. This article purported to be a replication of the hockey stick and confirmation of its scientific correctness. However, in a surprising turn of events, the journal's editor, prominent global warming catastrophist Steven Schneider, mischievously asked none other than Steve McIntyre to be one of the paper's anonymous peer reviewers.
We have seen above that one of the chief criticisms of the hockey stick was the fact that its author, Michael Mann, had withheld the validation statistics so that it was impossible for anyone to gauge the reliability of the reconstruction. These validation statistics were to be key to the subsequent story. At the time of their press release Wahl and Amman had made public the computer code that they'd used in their papers. By the time their paper was submitted to Climatic Change, McIntyre had reconciled their work with his own so that he understood every difference. And he therefore now knew that Wahl and Amman's work suffered from exactly the same problem as the hockey stick itself: the R2 number was so low as to suggest that the hockey stick had no meaning at all, although another statistic, the reduction of error statistic (or RE) was relatively high. It was only this latter figure that had been mentioned in the paper. In other words, far from confirming the scientific integrity of the hockey stick, Wahl and Amman's work confirmed McIntyre's criticisms of it! McIntyre's first action as a peer reviewer was therefore to request from Wahl and Amman the verification statistics for their replication of the stick. Confirmation that the R2 was close to zero would strike a serious blow at Wahl and Amman's work.
Wahl and Amman's response was to refuse any access to the verification numbers, a clear flouting of the journal's rules. As a justification of this extraordinary action, they claimed that they had shown that McIntyre's criticisms had been rebutted in their forthcoming GRL paper, despite the fact that the paper had been rejected by the journal some days earlier. At the start of July, with his review of the CC paper complete, McIntyre took the opportunity to probe this point, by asking the journal to find out the anticipated publication date of the GRL paper. Wahl and Amman were forced to admit the rejection, but they declared that it was unjustified and that they would seek publication elsewhere.
With the replication of the hockey stick in tatters, reasonable people might have expected some sort of pause in the political momentum. Seasoned observers of the climate scene, however, will be unsurprised to hear that global warming eminences grises like Sir John Houghton and Michael Mann continued to cite the Wahl and Amman papers despite the CC paper being in publishing limbo and the GRL paper being apparently dead and buried. The Wahl and Amman press release was not withdrawn either.
Events soon took another surprising turn., It was announced that the editor in chief of Geophysical Research Letters, Jay Famiglietti, had taken over the file for the McIntyre paper and its responses. This was justified he claimed, because of the high number of responses - four - that the McIntyre paper had received. That two of those responses had been rejected and were no longer in play was not mentioned. The reason for the change quickly became apparent though when, at the end of September, the rejected response from David Ritson turned out not only to have been re-submitted but had also been accepted for publication. This was another clear breach of the journal's rules, which required that an article's author should be able to comment on responses before they were accepted. Famiglietti however refused to make any on-the-record comments about why he behaved as he did.
If McIntyre had any suspicions about the implications of Famiglietti's malfeasance, he must have been quite certain when, shortly afterwards, hockey stick author Michael Mann commented on his RealClimate blog that both the CC and the GRL papers were going to be accepted shortly. Sure enough, in the last week of September, the GRL paper was resubmitted and revisions were made to the CC paper. Both papers were back in play again.
As 2005 neared its end, two important events loomed large. The first was the year end deadline for submission of papers for the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report on the state of the climate, and realisation soon dawned on McIntyre and the observers of the goings-on at GRL:
the IPCC needed to have the Wahl and Amman papers in the report so that they could continue to use the hockey stick, with its frightening and unprecedented uptick in temperatures. Mountains were going to be moved to keep the papers in play.
The other important happening was the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which would be attended by many of the big names in paleoclimate and at which both McIntyre and Amman would be making presentations. McIntyre's plan was to use the question and answer session after Amman's presentation to once again press for the R2 number for the hockey stick, a figure that had never been released, despite it being constantly requested over the previous years by McIntyre, journals, politicians and journalists. Sure enough, when confronted, Amman once again prevaricated.
After the session, McIntyre attempted to clear the air by inviting Amman to lunch. In the circumstances, this seems to have been a relatively amicable affair, but McIntyre's suggestion that he and Amman write a joint paper outlining where they agreed and where they differed was not taken up. When McIntyre later formalised this offer in an email, Amman failed even to acknowledge it.
While the AGU was meeting in San Francisco, Climate Change had provisionally accepted Wahl and Amman's CC paper, any objections which might have been raised by McIntyre swept aside by simple means of not inviting him to review the second draft. The resubmitted version of the paper turned out to be almost identical to the old one, except that a new section on the statistical treaments had been added, presumably as a condition of acceptance. And here there was an upside because, buried deep within the paper, Amman and Wahl had quietly revealed their verification R2 figures, which were, just as McIntyre had predicted, close to zero for most of the reconstruction, strongly suggesting that the hockey stick had little predictive power. Their decision to reveal these key data is necessarily obscure, but may well have been prompted by McIntyre's decision to file a complaint of academic misconduct about Amman with his employers, UCAR. Although the complaint was rejected, it may well have put sufficient pressure on Amman and the journal to show the numbers that everyone wanted to see.
The CC paper's provision acceptance date was December 12th, just a few days before the AR4 deadline. Strangely the version that was accepted seems to have been dated 24th Feb 2006, so according to its rules the IPCC shouldn't have been able to considered it. And what is more, it appears that the new sections discussing the statistical verifications were only added in this post year-end version. As McIntyre put it:
So under its own rules, is IPCC allowed to refer to Ammann and Wahl [2006]? Of course not. Will they? We all know the answer to that. When they refer to Ammann and Wahl [2006], will they also refer to its confirmation of our claims about MBH verification r2 statistics. Of course not. That information was not available to them in December. But wait a minute, if Ammann and Wahl was in press in December, wouldn't that information have been available to them? Silly me.
In other words, the version of the paper which had gone forward to the IPCC didn't include the adverse verification statistics, but the version accepted by the journal did. The IPCC got their rebuttal of McIntyre and the journal got a fig leaf of respectability to cover up its duplicity.
By March, the CC paper had been fully accepted, but there was to be another hiccup that would threaten its existence. After all the shenanigans at GRL with the replacement of the editor and the resubmission of letters, the journal decided once again to reject Wahl and Amman's attempt to rebut McIntyre's work. Ostensibly this was because the arguments were "already out there", but the truth was surely that there were so many holes in the statistical arguments as to make their publishing an embarrassment to the journal.
This new rejection was a problem for the CC paper, as I will explain below. When using an R2 verification, researchers can refer to tables of benchmarks to gauge the significance of their results. Now that the fact that the hockey stick and Amman and Wahl's replication of it were public, Amman was arguing that the correct measure of significance was in fact the alternative RE statistic. His problem was that for RE statistics, there are no tables of benchmarks for the researcher to refer to - he has to establish a benchmark of his own by other means. And Amman had done this in the GRL paper which had just been rejected. Without the GRL paper, he couldn't even argue that his results in CC were statistically significant.
There is a rule of thumb for RE statistics: this says that positive RE numbers have some significance while negative ones do not. Unfortunately for Amman, this rule applies only to linear regressions; as the hockey stick was clearly not linear, it couldn't apply. The original hockey stick authors had claimed that they had created a benchmark through other means, and that the figure was still zero. Now, while they had been silent on the issue in their original GRL submission, Amman and Wahl announced in their resubmission that they had performed benchmarking calculations and that had confirmed that the significance level for the RE should remain at zero.
However, now that the resubmission had been rejected by GRL, the "establishment" of this benchmark was cancelled out, and the statistical arguments in the CC paper which relied on it could no longer be maintained.
And then silence. A year later, the CC paper was nowhere to be seen, despite having been accepted for publication. It was stuck in a kind of publishing limbo once again. This left the IPCC and Climatic Change with a problem. McIntyre observed:
I'm intrigued as to what the final Wahl and Ammann version will look like. They have an intriguing choice: the inclusion of a reference to this article in AR4 was premised on their article being "in press" which would prohibit them from re-working their article to deal with the GRL rejection. But the article needs to be re-worked since it will look pretty silly to describe their GRL article as "under review" over 18 months after it has been rejected.
In the background, howevrer, much had been happening. Suddenly in September 2007, and with the IPCC report published, the CC paper suddenly appeared, preceded in the same journal by another paper by the same authors. What had happened was that Wahl and Amman were quietly allowed to rewrite their rejected GRL paper and submit it to Climatic Change instead. All reference to the rejected GRL paper in the CC paper could be replaced by reference to the new paper, (which I will call the Jesus paper, in light of its extraordinary resurrection and for lack of any less confusing name). With identical authorship, and a maze of cross-references between them, the two CC papers were carefully designed to make understanding how their arguments relied on each other as difficult as possible.
The beauty of this approach was that it allowed for retention of the original acceptance date for the CC paper, and hence its inclusion in the IPCC process. It did leave them with the embarrassing problem that a paper that was allegedly accepted in March 2006 relied upon another paper that even the journal itself said was only received until August (and in reality, is was even later than that) Readers should note that this matters because unless the paper was accepted by the journal by the deadline, it should not have been accepted by IPCC for inclusion in the Fourth Assessment Report. But the IPCC needed the CC paper and despite the inconsistency being pointed out to them, the IPCC they waved the objections aside as irrelevant.
The CC paper argument leads from the text, to the appendix and then onto the Jesus paper. At places in the Jesus paper the argument referred back to the CC paper creating a neat, if logically flawed, circular argument. One notable feature of the CC paper and the Jesus paper was that they relegated some of their key argumentation to their Supplementary Information (SI) sections, online appendices to the published papers. In particular, the Jesus paper stated that the statistical discussions and more precisely, the establishment of RE benchmarks could be seen there. To have key arguments in the SI was most unusual and it quickly became apparent why it had been done: the SI was nowhere to be seen. Even the peer reviewers appear not to have had access, and once again, Amman refused McIntyre's request for the data and code. His reply to this request was startling (and remember that Amman is a public servant):
Under such circumstances, why would I even bother answering your questions, isn't that just lost time?
Again, everything fell silent. For the next year nothing more was heard of the two papers. McIntyre pressed from his blog for release of the SI and the politicians were able to quietly take advantage of the political space created by the IPCC report. Then, just a few weeks ago, and entirely unannounced, Wahl and Amman's Supplementary Information suddenly appeared on Caspar Amman's website, some three years after that first press release announcing the refutation of McIntyre's work. With it, and a godsend to McIntyre, was the code used to establish the benchmark for the RE statistic. With no more than a few days work, McIntyre was able to establish exactly what had been done.
You will remember that Amman and Wahl had claimed that they had established a benchmark of zero for a 99% significant RE score - that is to say, there is only a 1% chance that you might have got that score by chance. McIntyre had, much earlier, shown that if you ran red noise through the process, you could get RE scores of more than 0.5. (Red noise is best described as a "random walk" - a line which wiggles at random, but is not entirely random like white noise.) To reduce your chance of random error to 1% you actually needed to score 0.54 for RE. How Amman had come up with zero as his benchmark was a mystery.
Now, with the code in front of him, McIntyre could see exactly what Wahl and Amman had done. And what they had done was to calculate almost exactly the same figure as he had! The number they had arrived at was 0.52, just a whisker away from McIntyre's own 0.54, but they had reported to the world that it was sufficient only to score a positive number! Of course, this wasn't picked up by the peer reviewers because, as we've seen, they didn't have access to the Supplementary Information, but the IPCC's purposes had been served - the hockey stick found its way intact into the Fourth Assessment Report, unscathed by skirmishes with inconvenient statistical truths.
However, the figure of 0.52 was insufficient for W&A's purposes. Their problem was that the key component of the hockey stick had a verification RE of 0.48, leaving it tantalisingly just below the calculated benchmark. They needed it to be in the top rank and getting it there was going to be tricky. For each simulation, a thousand runs through the statistical sausage machine were perfomed and the RE number, the correlation with the temperature record, was recorded. Then all the runs were sorted in order of RE value, the best runs having the highest RE and the worst the lowest. W&A needed to show that the hockey stick RE was right up there with the best simulations - in the top one percent. While its RE was high, it wasn't good enough. And it was no good simply removing runs which had a higher score than the hockey stick, since this would not increase its position enough - they would have been reducing the total number of runs as well as the number of runs which were scoring better than the hockey stick. To get the answer they needed, the higher scoring runs had to be made to be lower than the hockey stick, but left in the calculation.
To do this, Wahl and Amman came up with a value which they called a calibration/verification RE ratio. As the name suggests, this was the ratio of the two RE numbers for calibration and verification. This ratio is however, entirely unknown to statistics, or to any other branch of science. But it was not plucked out of the air. The ratio and the threshold value which was set for it by Wahl and Amman was carefully calculated. They argued that any run with a ratio less than 0.75 should be assigned a score of -9999. Since the hockey stick had a score of 0.813, 0.75 was pretty much the highest level you could go to without rejecting the hockey stick itself. However if you set your ratio threshold too low, not enough runs would be rejected and the hockey stick would no longer be "99% significant". Some of the results of this ratio were entirely perverse - it was possible for a run that had scored a reasonably good RE in the calibration (there was a good correlation between it and the actual temperatures) to be thrown out of the final assessment on the grounds that it had done very well in the verification - the correlation with actual temperatures was considered too good!
With this new, and pretty much entirely arbitrary hurdle in place, Wahl and Amman were able to reject several of the runs which stood between the hockey stick and what they saw as its rightful place as the gold standard for climate reconstructions. That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance. For political and public consumption, the hockey stick still lived, ready to guide political decision-making for years to come.
12 Aug: Minor updates for typos etc. Also, I think I'm right in saying that the correct usage in UK English is "blue riband", not "blue ribbon", or that they are at least valid alternatives. Apologies to my North American readers. :-)Dissenting opinions welcome in the comments.
4 Sept. It was pointed out that I've used the term "CC paper" before defining it. I've changed the relevant paragraph to read "second paper".


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I was recently introduced to the concept of Code Year, which challenges people to learn how to program by taking one mini-class a week throughout 2012. The first course goes out today. I'm a bit skeptical, but I've signed up (it's free) to see what kinds of things they're offering. It might prove useful for users who don't know the next step in the learning process or are looking for challenges to test their programming ability.
Code Year is a part of a larger site called Codeacademy, which apparently offers free programming tutorials and allows you to compare your progress through the exercises to your friends' progress, all through a slick-looking interface.
I haven't looked into it in that much depth just yet, but it seems like a neat idea. I'm thinking it might be a good "check this out" type response for people who are looking to flex their emerging programming muscles (like Project Euler). So far everything seems to be in javascript, but hopefully they'll branch out to other languages as the site grows in popularity.
Anyway, I'd be curious to hear if anybody has used this site or is doing Code Year!


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Blankley distorted Democratic criticisms of initial U.S. tsunami aid efforts
In his weekly syndicated column, Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley claimed that Democrats had criticized Republicans for "the mere billion dollars and the 7th Fleet rescue mission" dispatched following the tsunami in South Asia. But Blankley has a short memory: the Bush administration faced criticism following Bush's initial pledges, the first one of which was $15 million. Further, those who criticized these early offers included United Nations officials, former diplomats, foreign policy experts and several editorial pages across the nation, not simply "Democrats."
On December 27, the Bush administration announced its pledge of $15 million to the relief effort, then raised this amount to $35 million on December 28. Finally, the administration announced on December 31 that U.S. tsunami aid would be increased to $350 million.
Bush faced criticism for his initial commitment:
- Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey under President George H.W. Bush: "My initial reaction is that it does not seem to be very aggressive" [The Washington Post, 12/28/04].
- Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations: "When that many human beings die -- at the hands of terrorists or nature -- you've got to show that this matters to you, that you care" [The Washington Post, 12/28/04].
- A New York Times editorial referred to the $15 million aid offering as "measly" and the subsequent $35 million pledge as "a miserly drop in the bucket" [12/30/04].
- A Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial described the initial $15 million offering as "paltry" [12/30/04].
- A Baltimore Sun editorial referred to the $15 million pledge as the President's "initial tightwad commitment" [12/30/04].
- A Greensboro News & Record editorial: "Stung by criticism for being stingy, the Bush administration now says it will contribute $35 million for relief. That's still a drop in the bucket. Is that the America we want the world to see? Shame on the Bush administration" [12/31/04].
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) stated his disappointment with the "initial pledge" and recognized the subsequent increase in aid on January 4:
Frankly, I was disappointed by the President's initial pledge of $15 million for the victims of this disaster -- less than half of what he is spending on his inaugural ceremonies this month. Equally disappointing was the fact the President waited several days before publicly addressing this terrible disaster. [...] Since then, we have increased our commitment, and the United States has provided aircraft, ships and helicopters to help deliver food, water and clothing to those who need it. The response of the American people, and of our government, is important for many reasons.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to the White House's later pledge by saying on January 3: "[T]hank heavens the administration finally saw the light."
From Blankley's May 11 column:
Winter got off to a bad start when the tidal waves killed hundreds of thousands of Asians and, more to the political point, swept away the aura of good feelings following the Republicans' triumphant November election results. That gave Democrats a chance to feel good about themselves again by beating up on "American stinginess," while Republicans had to apologize for the mere billion dollars and the 7th Fleet rescue mission we dispatched.


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Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Buy nothing new - more resolve than ever?
22 comments:
I think this is so awesome and inspiring. When you become a mum, you become a 'super consumer': always on the look out for more clothes, sales, food for your family. The first few years of being a mum I felt like I spent most of my 'public' life at the shops, ear to the ground listening for news of the next sale. I seriously want to change this, and I'm following this with eagerness.
I'm a pale greenie, but I'm working on getting a bit more colour.
- 5 July 2011 at 06:39
- Cate said...
I'm only a pale green colour at the moment - with my biggest failure being having to be a palm oil consumer at the moment (so many gluten free products have it - but I'm such a newbie at the whole GF thing I'm sticking with it until I get the hang of it better so I don't make my daughter sick).
I'm pretty good on the clothes thing - especially for bub#3 she's a hand-me-down gal :-)
Oh and I know I'm getting a new phone soon and you can forget me turning *that* down!!
Yup pale pale, almost translucent green...
- 5 July 2011 at 07:28
- alliecat said...
Compared to you Ms Bright Green, I am quite pale, but you are my inspiration behind the handmade doll we gave as a gift on the weekend. In my past life I'd have bought a book or something to go with it, feeling like something I'd made alone wouldn't be enough. It is, in fact it is worth much more than anything I could have bought to go with it. So thanks!
- 5 July 2011 at 08:29
- Suzi said...
I really admire you for this! I will take up the challenge eventually too, maybe next year. I think I would struggle with things like shoes for the boys, they grow like weeds!
- 5 July 2011 at 08:38
- Salamander said...
I'm not bright green, nor pale green - somewhere in between, I think, with aspirations to increase the depth of my hue!! We unwittingly became "non-buyers" last year when both my husband and I lost our jobs on the same day. Six weeks before Christmas. I can honestly say the only gifts we gave last year were home-made. I didn't do any Christmas shopping whatsoever - it was the best Christmas I have had since I was a child. We simply can't afford to buy new things...so most of the time, we don't. Shoes are probably the only thing we don't put off. And you're right - after a while, you don't miss the new and shiny. I'm hatching an idea for a 'clothes swap' at our primary school...I'll let you know if it comes to fruition! xxx
- 5 July 2011 at 08:55
- Photographer Mum said...
you are truly inspiring! I am only pale green, but slowly getting a bit greener. I think I need to jump on the bandwagon and up the ante a bit, although, I now shop with green bags @ Aldi and the number of plastic bags in our house has dwindled a fair bit and I find myself saying no to plastic bags if I only have a few items picked up from the servo or something.
I have also learned (finally!) how to crochet and have made my first gift of a baby blanket which was a bit exciting. Thanks for the inspiration :)
- 5 July 2011 at 09:08
- Mrs BC said...
I am a bit deeper than celadon but not anywhere near emerald just yet. I have always been a bit 'do it yourself' but lately I have been yearning to become the anti consumer - I really do not want anything shiny & new. The idea of getting a big SUV like all the other mums repulses me, we are growing more & more veges & I have embraced op shop living (& even curb shopping) if I really need something new..I find your journey so inspiring.
Would love to see that page!
- 5 July 2011 at 09:44
- Maxabella said...
Transparent, really. But I do try a little bit with products and stuff. I look to you for inspiration!! x
- 5 July 2011 at 10:02
- Mrs Woog said...
Cool post. I agree that shopping from your wardrobe is great! We are a non clutter family here. I guess I am apple green x
- 5 July 2011 at 10:18
- Naturally Carol said...
I think the thing that made my heart sing about this post was not the colour green but how you were reconnecting with the same values that you had come to believe in when younger, still finding them worthwhile, kind of like finding some integrity there. I hope you can understand what I'm trying to say??
- 5 July 2011 at 12:37
- Diminishing Lucy said...
You rock. I am a kind of mid green (kelly green?).
I'm the worst kind - I am green when I am familair with how to be and if its convenient.
But to go all out and try new greenie challenges like you...I am a bit chicken...
- 5 July 2011 at 13:38
- Aspiring Millionaire said...
I am not as green as I would like to be or used to be, but we are making a lot more changes here.
I have noticed a lot of it depends on who I am spending too much time with. I have green friends and I have shopaholic friends. I need to spend less time with the shopaholics! lol.
You are doing an amazing job. I take my hat off to you!
- 5 July 2011 at 14:08
- 1000 Homes of Happiness said...
gorgeous post! Agree, we are always trying to reduce, re use and recyle. Such an important message to pass onto our little ones.
I hope you are on the mend, and the labyrinth (always makes me think of the fab movie beyond the labyrinth)thingy is on the mend. Sounds terribly painful.
Hugs xox
- 5 July 2011 at 20:22
- Hear Mum Roar said...
This is so fantastic to read! I'm not at a stage where I'd feel able to do this, but truly admire those who are doing it.
- 6 July 2011 at 01:42
- sascedar said...
this post and challenge you are undertaking speaks very loudly to me! I have just begun a challenge to give meaningful gifts for twelve months, being handmade, recycled etc. I am now going to read back on your blog for inspiration- thanks!
- 6 July 2011 at 05:28
- Mama of 2 boys said...
Good on you! I do enjoy reading about your savings plans and how they're going. Sounds like you've mastered the art beautifully. I try to do it in little ways, but I'd be on the paler side of green unfortunately. I try to reinvent and recycle most things, but there is so much more I could be doing :o/
You are inspirational though, so your posts will eventually sink in for me xo
- 6 July 2011 at 19:30
- Tricia said...
Loved reading about the effect of this challenge on you. I love challenges also. They can make life harder in the beginning – but I always find the lessons learnt make it all more than worthwhile. And breaking the challenge is part of the learning process. I imagine each time you broke your challenge it was far from mindless consumption. Looking forward to following the next 6 months.
- 6 July 2011 at 21:49
I could have written exactly this myself. I took on the exact same challenge about a year ago after watching The Story of Stuff. Now it is just too easy really, though I'm a sucker for clothes so keeping me out of the op-shops is nigh on impossible! I had one slip up last christmas, I though I had been doing so well that I deserved a new pair of jeans. I gave them to my partner to give to me. I thought this was justifiable as I completely wear jeans to death, however every single time I wash them they come out worse for wear, once with what looked like bleach marks (I don't even own the stuff!), once slightly pink tinged, once with zinc cream all over them! Very frustrating considering I will pile all my op-shop purchases marked "dry clean only" in with everything else and they come out fine. I think the universe is telling me I was on the right track to begin with and shouldn't even bother buying new stuff. That's fine with me, while it was challenging to begin with, its a habit now and I've found when something becomes a habit it becomes so much easier to keep up.
- 7 July 2011 at 10:15
- Charis said...
Great post! I try to be green where possible but had a big slide in the last year & went a bit consumer crazy! Now however I'm about to be a student & will be working not quite full time hours so money will be tighter.. I think buying new will have to be restricted to art materials!
- 9 July 2011 at 03:46
- dixiebelle said...
Great post! Came over from Tricia's 'Inspiring reads'...
Green, hmmm, if we are talking 'eco', 'fair', 'aware', 'purposeful', 'simple living' and all those things, we are more like a rainbow! So many things we do as habit and don't even think of them as being 'green' anymore. A few that we are currently working on, like incorporating more SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, Ethical). Some that I *know* are not so green but we still do them, which is worse, but also sanity-saving! I used to try to be a 'purist' but all that got me was a guilt-induced headache... now I am happy with what we do, and that we are blessed with the opportunity to do it!
- 9 July 2011 at 08:47
- tinytearoom said...
this is a fabulous idea. before we got a mortgage I used by new clothing items every week. then we moved into our first home. We nearly choked when we saw all of the stuff that we threw out and all the stuff we had to pack. we are now more mindful about what we buy and how we use it.
- 11 July 2011 at 22:55
Hi! this is so exciting and inspiring!
y husband and i also have been 'not buying new' for the last few years and have been blogging our experiences, trials and tribulations and successes www.itiseasytobegreen.wordpress.com emilyx
- 28 February 2012 at 23:10


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The Cardinals' Courtney Zambello limits the Warriors to five hits in a 2-0 shutout victory in the Division 2 South Sectional first-round game.
A week layoff didn't leave much rust on Cardinal Spellman's aluminum bats or dust on Courtney Zambello's left arm.
The second-seeded Cardinals and Zambello were both firing on all cylinders in their MIAA Division 2 South Sectional softball tourney debut on Saturday night to come away with a 2-0 first-round shutout at home of 18th-seeded Coyle-Cassidy.
Zambello struck out 13 and scattered five hits as she allowed the Warriors to get into scoring position in only one inning to send Cardinal Spellman (21-2) on to a second-round matchup Tuesday against the winner of Monday's Abington-Bishop Stang contest.
"Courtney was outstanding," Cardinal Spellman coach Mike Gerrish said of his senior ace. "She pitched real well. She's tough when she bears down."
Coyle-Cassidy (13-9) had blanked Hanover, 4-0, in its preliminary-round win on Thursday, but found itself on the other end against Zambello and her overpowering fastball.
"We ran into an excellent pitcher," Warriors coach Russell Hunt said. "She moved the ball well and definitely kept our hitters off stride.
"They were getting some good swings, but they maybe got a little bit overpowered by their pitcher. She did a great job."
The Cardinals didn't fare that much better at the plate against Coyle-Cassidy junior Tori Gomes, who gave up only three of Cardinal Spellman's four hits over her five innings in the pitching circle, but she was done in by a pair of costly errors in the first and fourth innings that led to two unearned runs.
The Cardinals, meanwhile, played errorless defense behind Zambello to lay to rest any worries Gerrish might have had about heading into the tourney after not playing a game since last Saturday.
"It's tough to sit there that long and wait, but we had some good practices and this group of kids stays focused," Gerrish said. "I don't think we lost our edge, other than the fact that we didn't play games."
The Cardinals took advantage of a first-inning infield error to put leadoff hitter Lily Demers aboard. An Emily Tuite bunt single and fielder's choice off the bat of Bridget Walsh moved Demers to third where she scored on a Courtney Ward groundout to put the Cardinals on top to stay.
The Warriors mounted their lone scoring threat in the fourth inning where singles by Kristen Caporelli and Brooke Gubala gave Coyle-Cassidy runners at second and third with two out. Zambello, who struck out six of the first nine batters she faced, rose to the challenge, registering a strikeout to end the uprising.
"Courtney was outstanding all day," Gerrish said. "She pitched with a lot of poise."
Cardinal Spellman pushed across another unearned run in the fourth on a leadoff walk to Walsh who then came all the way around on a Ward sacrifice bunt that wound up being thrown away by the Coyle-Cassidy shortstop when Walsh rounded second and went for third, allowing Walsh to scamper home.
Zambello closed it out by striking out the side in the seventh.


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Tag: Arrows »
Star Wars Pit Droids Review
Popular Flash Game Gibbets 2 Coming To iOS
Having never played either the iOS game Gibbets or the flash game Gibbets 2, I thought I'd best see what all the fuss is about before I announce that Gibbets 2 is set to hit the app store during Q2 next year.
I quickly learnt why the franchise has been played over 250 million times. It sucks up time in a manner that's a sign of something truly special.
It's a simple enough game. Each level comprises of a few people hanging from nooses and it's the player's job to cut them down by shooting arrows in their direction. Underneath that surface is a compelling game thanks to the keen physics engine within that means it's vital to line up the shot and speed just right. Players are also provided with a limited number of arrows per level and are punished accordingly for taking too long or hitting the poor victims.
It's great fun on the PC and I suspect it'll be an ideal game for iOS with easy touch based controls and 30 levels promised.
Gibbets 2 is set for release sometime in Q2 2012. We'll be sure to keep up to date on any developments.


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The automobile is an incredibly important part of American culture. It represents freedom, independence and the iconic open road. It is a physical artifact of the political, cultural and social structures of the nation. Then what happens when a car enters the American market with an ideology that contrasts with its foundations? A car that can further investigate this discussion is the Cube, a vehicle manufactured and designed by the Japanese company Nissan. There is much deeper story that can be found once you dig deeper at the blocky car. I have decided to observe several key areas. First is the historical context of the car, and its hybridic with Japanese history and culture. Next, we can see how the car was adjusted in the export models to assimilate better. Then, an observation can be made on how the company modified its marketing tactics to make the car theoretically easier to digest in the US. Along the way, we can see the missteps in selling a car that is so fundamentally Japanese to an unsuspecting market.
After the Second World War, the nation of Japan was in a horrible economic situation. This meant that most people ended up buying bicycles and motorcycles as their main mode of transportation. An automobile was reserved as a luxury. The government of Japan decided that the country should make a recovery effort by advancing the manufacturing and technology sectors. Realizing that transportation would be key to achieving this, the government decided to create regulations to create a new category of vehicles. This new class was named as keijidōsha or "kei car". This category was designed to promote automakers to produce efficient and cheap vehicles that can act as an alternative to motorcycles. This created a huge increase in car owners and helped get a broken nation back in motion. The regulation was first created on 1949 and included a maximum, length, width, height and engine displacement dimensions. At the time, the length of the cars were restricted to 2.8m and the engine at 150cc. These dimensions have slowly increased and today, kei cars are restricted to 3.9m with a 660cc engine. Kei cars come with other perks too - the limitations are designed precisely to exploit tax and insurance costs. Also, unlike other cars sold in Japan, kei cars do not require evidence for adequate parking; a big difference because it means that they are reliant on your real-estate value. According to the Japan Mini Vehicles Association, the Suzuki Wagon R has been the best selling of the kei class in Japan since 2003. It is the car that exemplifies the success of its category and defines the domestic Japanese auto market. A visual analysis makes it evident that Nissan took inspiration from this successful product. A class of vehicle that has resisted traditional classification has now become the de facto aesthetic and structural standard and has now influenced the design of cars of a "normal" class.
When Nissan went to design the third generation Cube, it was done with the intention to sell the car in the US. This time, the exterior design was lead by an American and graduate of Art Center College of Design, John Sahs. Though I have no proof, I believe this was done as an action to design a more global car. He was however given the task of doing an update for an existing vehicle, not starting from scratch. This resulted in a third generation design that still has the original Japanese ideologies interwoven into the car. Nissan seems to have realized that the second generation's extremely rectilinear design would be too polarizing so they made the third generation a softer design that's more traditionally "automotive". Nissan likes to call it "softened like a pebble in a stream." This is where the Cube fundamentally fails in satisfying the needs of the American market. The car may have new sheet metal but the underlying principles and structure is the same. Even with the softened lines, the car is still a boxy homage to Japan's city planning and the asymmetrical window is still a functional addition originated from tight Tokyo streets. The interior of the new Cube actually ended up being an even more Japanese expression than before. Designed by Tadamasa Hayakawa, the seating is reminiscent of a love-seat with a high seating position and cushy padding. These seats are then laid out almost like an Onsen (Japanese hot springs) with a social and including layout. The surrounding lines of the interior then encompass the passengers and promotes a unique social experience. These are all alien concepts to the American market where the focus is in creating a driver focused cabin experience. A car is considered an extension of the driver in the western world, not a communal pool.
The Japanese marketing for the Cube emphasizes three things. The first is the room-like interior cabin. Nissan uses the tagline, "Cube. My room." This is supported by TV commercials showing groups of people relaxing in the car as if it is a living room. The second reoccurring element is the emphasis on the sofa-like seats of the Cube. In a TV commercial for the 2011 Cube, the exterior of the car is only shown briefly and most of the time is spent on showing how plush and soft the seats are. The ad rarely shows the exterior of the car and doesn't even show the driver's seat of the car. The viewer is just shown the rear seat that is so reminiscent of a sofa. Lastly, some of the Japanese advertisements have emphasis on the soft and gentle nature of the car. The ads in 2009 were backed by the tagline, "I'm Peaceful." and a reoccurring bulldog - which the car bears much resemblance to. This is another issue with the Cube in the west. The car has absolutely no intention in showing aggression. If you look at the American automotive market, most cars have a certain desire to show power and competence - a visualization of how the car is very much an expression of oneself in the culture. The Cube does not follow this system, it is all about comfort and having a gentle expression. This is once again a very Japanese trait. The car was birthed from a hyper urban environment where the space is limited and therefore, the experience of driving stressful and a chore. Driving in tight streets is not widely taken as a form of escape and freedom like in the States. The Cube is designed to be a sanctuary from the tense and claustrophobic driving experience. This seems to connect very well with Japanese consumers. The soft sofa-like seats and unusually generous headroom of the interior all make this marketing a valid proposition. The fundamental idea behind creating a living room on wheels is sort of a genius one, but requires a level of social acceptance to be absorbed. Nissan seems to have understood that a differentiation in marketing needed to take place between the Japanese and American launch tactics. In the US, they used the tagline, "Cube Mobile Device". The ads show the Nissan cube as having traits of a digital "device". For instance, when the driver enters the car, a popup says, "Login" and when his friends enter the car, a "Add friends" button shows up. The Cube's wheels throughout the ad don't spin even when the car is driving, emphasizing the digital aesthetic over the mechanical. This campaign was largely unsuccessful and the Cube consistently saw leisurely sales figures. It's not hard to see why though - the ads are completely fabricated without any basis in the actual car's design. In reality, the car is rather spartan in terms of technology. Options like navigation are now available, but during launch they couldn't even be optioned in. In hindsight, it seems like Nissan was hoping to appeal to drivers that now relate better with devices than automobiles. People of a culture are able to very easily identify impostors, and most people seemed to have seen the Cube for what it was. Reviews done by journalists also frequently commented on this disconnect. The car is not what it is promising to be and is just an awkward car that belongs in the tight streets of Tokyo, not the ten-lane freeways of America.
Nissan has also made some physical changes to the American version of the Cube other than moving the steering wheel to the left. What's little known is that the Nissan Cube is sold as a hybrid in Japan with the rear wheels being driven by an electric drivetrain. In that market, these boxy cars are so common place that the hybrid powertrain acts as a point of differentiation. Though the reasons haven't been officially stated, the removal of the hybrid drive system is probably a decision made to make the car more mainstream. The car is already an off-putting composite of many elements, and making it an electric hybrid would only add to the complexity. There are more changes made to the Cube to muffle its unusual character. The American model comes in grey, black and navy seat colors, all pretty standard issue. The Japanese model comes in unique flavors like green, brown velour and camel suede. The Japanese also receive plush carpeting not unlike a rug one would have in a living room. This idea of the living room on wheels continues to the accessories, where Nissan offers things like wooden garnish and a diverse selection of carpets and seat covers. Nissan has made even further tweaks like splitting the seat to a more traditional design instead of the bench sofa seat of the Japanese domestic market version. Because the American model now has space in between the passenger and driver, the column mounted gear shift has now been moved in between the two seats. By diluting the design of the Cube, the messaging of the car has become a mixed one. The car now has broken signifiers of the original vision for the car. The exported interior is both visually and functionally broken, all done to gain acceptance in a market the car was never intended for.
The Nissan Cube is a car that could have only come out of Japan. The cultural and regulatory influences can be seen visually throughout the car. And this infestation of ideologies is exactly what has made the car so off-putting to American consumers. It is a car that resists classification in the US. I am a driver of a 2011 Nissan Cube and every time I look at my insurance information, I notice that my car has been categorized as a "5 seat wagon". The car is shorter than a car like the Volkswagen Golf yet has too much interior room to be classified as a compact hatchback. The car clearly exceeds existing boundaries. In this way, the Cube is very much a "monster". Though speculative, it may even fulfill in having elements of anxiety that propagate through American culture. The Japanese auto makers were initially rejected by some as the market was scared of the Japanese taking over the American auto industry. To fight this, the cars that Nissan, Honda and Toyota sell in the US are very American in design and now, 70% of the vehicles sold are manufactured right in America. The Nissan Cube may be bringing back this old fear in at a subconscious level. The car is like an evangelist of Japanese culture that has come to the US. And because the car is so central to American culture, it really is a hard sell - and it shows - the Cube is one of the worst selling cars in Nissan's US lineup. It's also worth noting that the Nissan cube is the same car as the Nissan Versa mechanically, which is currently the best selling compact car in the United States. It's impressive how much of an impact design can have. The Nissan Cube is a rarity in the automotive industry. In the midst of an industry that is afraid of change, Nissan has taken the ideas of a regulation based kei class car and implemented them on a compact car. The Cube is the mainstreaming of the kei car, an unclassifiable outcast when it was first introduced. The Cube was a big hit in Japan and became a design icon, but completely flopped due to immense cultural walls that stood between Japanese and American philosophies. The car is a lesson in design and its relationship to cultural and social ideologies. Regardless of market success in America, the car will be remembered by history. I think The New York Times said it best:


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|New Brighton, Minn.
|High School:
|House Affiliation:
Sophomore • 2011-12
Recorded a goal and an assist in season-opening 7-1 victory at St. Lawrence Oct. 28 … Assisted on the game-winning goal in a 2-0 win at Colgate Nov. 11 … Repeated her performance against St. Lawrence, picking up a goal and an assist in a 6-1 win Nov. 19 … Scored a goal and blocked a pair of shots against No. 2 Minnesota Nov. 27 … Netted a pair of goals in 8-1 victory at Connecticut Jen. 3 in first game back from the holiday break … Collected first career hat trick in 5-3 comeback win over Rensselaer Jan. 14 … Picked up a goal and an assist in 10-1 beating of Princeton Feb. 4.
Freshman • 2010-11…
Posted six points during rookie season on two goals and four assists ... Dished out an assist on eventual game-winning goal against Brown Oct. 30 ... Scored her first goal of the season Jan. 22 against Union ... Had a pair of assists, including on the game-winning goal, in 3-2 overtime win at St. Lawrence Feb. 12 ... Picked up an assist against No. 2 Cornell in regular-season finale ... Tallied a goal in 8-3 win over St. Lawrence in Game 2 of ECAC quarterfinal Feb. 26.
Before Harvard
Lettered in soccer, lacrosse and ice hockey while at Irondale, serving as captain of the lacrosse team as a senior and captain of the ice hockey team as a junior and senior … Athena Award recipient in 2010 … Named all-state hockey player by three different outlets as a senior as well as all-metro first team and All-North Suburban Conference … Named team MVP in 2007 and '08 … Played for the U.S. national select team in 2008 … Received Best Forward and Top Scorer Awards at Hockey Night in Boston in 2007 … Knights Awards recipient for hockey and lacrosse … Two-time all-conference lacrosse player … Helped hockey team to two Section 5 championships and two North Suburban championships … Conference and state scoring leader as a senior … Super Senior Athlete Award recipient … Herb Brooks Scholarship recipient … Received Distinguished Academic Achievement Awards in soccer, hockey and lacrosse … Member of the student council and National Honor Society … Involved in numerous volunteer efforts, including Empty Bowls, Adopt a Family and Inner City Skate … Sister, Anna McDonald '10, played three seasons for the Crimson women's hockey team … Uncles, Bob and Steve Arndt, and cousin, Jaime Arndt, played hockey for Dartmouth … Cousin, Sam Cornelius, played hockey for Notre Dame … Enjoys biking, waterskiing and pottery.