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http://www.pokrenibiznis.com - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that allows you to increase your visibility on the search engine result page [SERP]. SEO is not easy, because Google is always changing the algorithm. It is difficult to stay on top. SEO is the process that needs to be up-to-date, if you want to enhance your visibility on the SERP. It is not something you do once and never act on it again.
If you want to have a chance to increase the search rankings, these are the SEO trends you need to know:
Content Marketing: Content marketing is the technique of creating and sharing high quality, valuable content to attract the target audience. Content formats include Blogs, Press Release, Case Studies, E-Books, Infographics etc.
Google Authorship: Google Authorship allows you to link your personal Google+ profile to the content you create. Once you create that link for Google, the search engine result shows your profile photo and the information about your popularity within "Google+."
Social Media: Social Media is a technology that people use to share content, opinion, information, and experience. Social media is about community, conversation, connecting and building relationship with the audience. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, LinkedIn are some popular social media platforms.
Quality Inbound Links: Inbound links are the incoming links to a website. The inbound links are important for SEO because search engines see inbound links to a page as a sign that the content on that page is useful.
Search Engine Optimization does not give instant results. You have to wait to start seeing results. And make sure that your site is the best with fresh and unique content and good structure. You should read all the text on your site to make sure that it is error free and logical, so your visitors can easily understand it. When you have error in your content, the crawler will skip over you. You need a site map, if you want to have a successful result. Spiders can easily access your site through a site map. Extremely large sites may require more than one site map, you should not have too many links on any site map.
Make sure that your website is not being penalized by search engines for doing wrong things, so be committed to doing the right things to see the successful result.
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|Vienna, VA
|High School:
|Paul VI H.S.
#12 Blair Koniszewski - Career Stats
Career Game-by-Game Stats: 2012-13 | 2011-12 | 2010-11
2012-13: Came off the bench to appear in all 33 games in her junior campaign… Finished the season averaging 21.5 minutes, 9.5 points, 2.7 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.5 steals and 0.2 blocks per game… Second on the team shooting 33.2% from the three-point range… Set career-highs knocking down six field goals and five three-pointers on Nov. 24 against Seattle University in the Washington Dental Seattle University Thanksgiving Tournament… Pulled down a career-high 7 rebounds on Dec. 17 in the Pioneers' 55-38 win over Manhattan… On Feb. 2, she lit up the board with a career-best 26 points in SHU's 58-50 win at Mount St. Mary's… Earned her first Choice Hotels/NEC Player of the Week award on Feb. 5 after she averaged 20 points, 3 rebounds and 3 assists over the weekend as the Pioneers picked up wins on the road against Mount St. Mary's and Wagner… Was third in the NEC averaging 2.13 three-pointers per game, 12th with a 33.3 three-point field goal percentage and 27th in scoring (9.4 ppg)…
2011-12: Notched 12 points, going 4-11 with three treys in 26 minutes in her first collegiate start against Mount St. Mary's on January 28... Knocked down a trey that started the run to bring the Poineers back from an 18-point deficit. Recorded a career high 18 points and career high five three pointers in the 71-64 win...Set a career high with six assists at Saint Francis (PA) on January 16...Appeared in all 33 games and started four.
2010-11: Recorded four rebounds and hit a three-pointer in ten minutes of action against Boston College in the Bahamas...Posted a career high six points in a 72-33 win over Siena at home in the Pitt Center...Sank three treys en route to reestablishing her career high at 11 points in the Pioneers 70-52 victory over Wagner.
High School: Graduated from Paul VI High School in Fairfax, VA...A four year member of the varsity basketball team...Served as team captain in her junior season…Named team most valuable player in her senior year…MVP of Virginia Independent Schools State tournament as a sophomore...First team All-WCAC (Washington Catholic Athletic Conference) selection during her senior season as well as earning second team honors as a junior… Her 103 three-point field goals as a senior lead all players, male and female, in the Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia metropolitan areas… In 2009-10 she led her team to a school record 23 wins and the Virginia Independent Schools Girl's Basketball Association State Championship for the fourth-straight season.

subset: commoncrawl


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I've had this sitting on my shelf for the last three years (or something like that) and it would gradually get bigger and a little better but this is the final version of it. The only thing I wish I had done was give it some land scap. Well enough of that. Enjoy
Coments or sudgestions are welcome.
Purple Wolf


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Kilim Pillow Small Lumbar No. 17
Kilim Pillow Small Lumbar No. 17
Decorative pillow cover made of a vintage Kilim Turkish rug. The back fabric is high quality cotton with a hidden zipper.
Measures approx. 10" X 20"
Talk about adding a pop of color and individuality to a room with a small touch.
Our pillow covers are made from flat weave wool rugs that were woven by hand. Their imperfections reflect their handmade character and add to the natural beauty of these unique pieces. No two are exactly alike.
Fabrics should be dry cleaned only.
First photo is of exact cover you're purchasing. All other pictures are a demonstration of styling.
The listing is for pillow cover only without insert/filler. We recommend buying an insert a size up. For example a 16x16 cover should have a 20x20 insert. You can also use Polyfil.
Actual colors may vary from those shown due to the nature of photographing and monitor settings. Because of the unique and handmade nature of this pillow cover the measurements above may differ slightly.


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Larry Ellison Buys Rancho Mirage Estate at Discount
In late January, Ellison snagged an 249-acre estate that once belonged to Edra Blixseth called Porcupine Creek in Rancho Mirage, Calif. The reported sales price was $42.9 million, according to records filed in Riverside County. The last-known listing price for the amazing spread was $55 million, which was a 27 percent reduction over the original asking price of $75 million.
Paying $42.9 million, Ellison got the property for almost half-price.
Agent Lisa Bessone of Christie's International Real Estate on Tuesday confirmed the sale of Porcupine Creek, but declined to divulge the buyer or other details.
The Desert Sun did some crafty work tracing documents that show a grant deed recorded on Jan. 28 by Porcupine Properties, and the paper/site then linked the paperwork trail back to Ellison's investment holding company.
Ellison was last reported by Forbes to have a net worth of $28 billion. Besides real estate, hetennis. He bought the Indian Wells Tennis Garden and its world-class BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in 2009. Mark Hurd, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is a close friend and often plays tennis at Ellison's $70 million Woodside, Calif., estate, styled after feudal Japanese architecture, with a man-made 2.3-acre lake and an extensive seismic retrofit. Ellison has also purchased more than 12 properties in Malibu, Calif., worth more than $180 million. In early 2010, Ellison purchased the Astor's Beechwood Mansion in Newport, R.I., for $10.5 million. The property was the former summer home of the prominent Astor family.
Ellison also loves to sail, race his vinatge autos, and fly his private jet(s). Hopefully, he loves golf because Porcupine has a 240-acre private golf course as well as a most colorful ownership history.
Porcupine was last owned by Yellowstone Club founders Tim and Edra Blixseth, and was a central focus of their bitter divorce and subsequent bankruptcy action in Montana. Porcupine Creek is being sold to satisfy the Club's many creditors -- Edra alone has about $500 million to $1 billion in debts. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, her ex swapped the federal government 100,000 acres that he and two partners had bought in Montana for the primo real estate that is now the Yellowstone Club. Perhaps the world's sole, members-only ski resort, the Yellowstone Club is still uber exclusive, private, and boasts a Who's Who of members from Dan Quayle and the late Jack Kemp to Bill Gates, Starwood Hotels' founder Barry Sternlicht and News Corp. President Peter Chernin.
During the boom, the standard Yellowstone Club home was built with private elevators, wine cellars, movie theaters. One wild spec home, called the River Runs Through It, even featured an all-glass passageway to the guest quarters with a heated river flowing below it. When the financial world was rocking and rolling, the Yellowstone Club had $1,000-per-person New Year's Eve bashes in the clubhouse, complete with sommelier, concierge service and full access to the caviar bar.
In 2005, Tim Blixseth took out a $375-million loan from Credit Suisse and that's when things got naughty. He pledged the assets of the Yellowstone Club as collateral and used the Credit Suisse loan to buy up properties around the world, to fulfill his world real estate vision. Oh. Court documents also claim that the Blixseths also pocketed about $209 million in cash.
The Blixseths spent extravagantly. Edra Blixseth hosted a $90,000 party at Porcupine Creek for about 100 guests, who were invited to whack pinatas shaped like her ex, Tim. The piñatas were filled with gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins. This was, of course, after the couple split.
Perhaps some piñatas remain with the house: Mr. Ellsion has been married and divored four times.
The estate features an 18,430-square-foot Mediterranean-style main home with hand-painted ceiling murals, an amphitheater and a resort-style pool. There are eight two-bedroom guest houses, a gym, spa, an outdoor party grotto with a full-size stage, and commercial kitchens. The private home has been the scene for numerous charity events that often held 500 or more guests.
Oh, and last I heard, Edra remarried.
Real estate reporter & bloggerCandy Evans is an award-winning, Dallas-based real estate reporter, blogger, and consultant. She's the gal who brought House Porn to the Bible Belt! Read more at SecondShelters.com. Send story ideas and tips to firstname.lastname@example.com.
Click here to find available properties in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
For more on mortgages and related topics see these AOL Real Estateguides:
- Stop Foreclosure Scammers Before They Scam You
- How to Get a Low Mortgage Rate
- Mortgage Jargon in Simple Terms
- How Much Home Can I Afford?
- How to Buy Foreclosures
- Closing Costs: How Much to Budget
- Guide to Settlement and Escrow


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The descendent of 50 years of K-Swiss court style, the Court Frasco is a new addition to the Lozan lineage that combines high-style looks with a heritage court feel. A matte, premium leather upper features tonal stitching and debossed 5 Stripes detail, while a simple heel tab brings contrast in color and texture. The Court Frasco's high-walled outsole adds a luxe, fashion-forward element, elevating classic court style with modern sophistication in a supremely versatile sneaker.
•Leather Upper
•Synthetic Leather Collar Lining
•Rubber Outsole
•Ortholite Sock Liner
•Lace Closure
KSwiss.com will ship all orders Monday-Friday. All orders received by 11:00AM EST will ship the Same Business Day, Mon-Fri. Orders placed after 11:00AM EST will ship the following business day. Note that all orders placed after 11:00AM ET on Fridays, Saturday or Sunday will not ship until the Next Business Day.


text: Directory publishing services in Heber Springs offer a broad array of directory data content management services ranging from data maintenance on the client's in-house web-based directory system through a complete customized online directory system, providing directory content output in print, mobile or digital formats. They have years of expertise and resources to make directory process smooth and affordable. They are committed to presenting directory content at lower costs, insure exceptional accuracy, and maintain vast databases of information in an efficient manner. Likewise, guide publishing services in Heber Springs provide with important travel information that one would most likely need while one drives, while keeping one's personal budget in mind. They give information about places and people: where to go, what to see, what to buy, where to stay, and people make choices as per their preferences, economically and otherwise.


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maypop necesitaba un nuevo diseño de impreso o envases y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 94 diseños de 34 diseñadores freelance.
The Villager
The Villager sells affordable art and design. We specialize in hand made gifts by American Artists. We just relauched our website and need thank you note cards to send with purchases or to mail to customers shop in the gallery.
Our target audience is a 35-55 year old female. It is an existing target market. They appreciate our iunique gifts but are not contemporary in style or fashion.
The final card will be 5x7 and will fold to a 5 x 3.5 size.
I need artwork for front and inside. Full color
bleeds set up to extend if there is a border add 0.125" to allow for cutting.
flattern fonts used in vector format
Our logo colors are purple (pantone 267) and green (391) but feel free to add more color.
I am looking for an artistic, feminine, colorful, and elegant graphic design that represents the colorful feel of our gallery and gifts.


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Visit Chernobyl and Pripyat: Nuclear disaster tourism in Ukraine
On April 26, 1986, Reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine, exploded. Nearly nine tons of radioactive materials - 90 times as much as the Hiroshima bomb - were hurled into the sky. The explosion took place at around one in the morning while the neighboring town of Pripyat slept. Only forty hours later, the residents of Pripyat were ordered to evacuate, and most never returned. The exclusion zone of 30 km (19 mi) that was set up around the reactor is still in place today. Long term access to the zone is forbidden, but short term visits for tourists are allowed.
Pripyat palace of culture (Photo by Tim Suess)
The accident
The accident happened during unauthorized reactor tests. A sudden power output surge took place, and when an attempt was made at an emergency shutdown, a more extreme spike in power output occurred which led to the rupture of a reactor vessel as well as a series of explosions. This event exposed superheated internal reactor components to the air, causing them to ignite. The explosions and fire created a huge plume of radioactive fallout to float up into the atmosphere and out over an extensive area. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union, Europe and elevated radiation levels were recorded as far as the west coast of the United States and Canada.
Abandoned control room of reactor nr 4, were the operators made a fatal series of errors (Photo by Gerd Ludwig)
The first day after the event the Soviet Union told nothing about the incident to the rest of the world. Only after radiation levels set off alarms at a nuclear power plant in Sweden over one thousand miles from the Chernobyl Plant did the Soviet Union admit that an accident had occurred. Nevertheless, authorities attempted to conceal the scale of the disaster.
The zone of alienation
Only after a soviet investigation team from Kiev had reached the site and reported very high radioactive values the people of Pripyat were informed about the accident. The evacuation began at 2 p.m. on 27 April. To speed up the evacuation, the residents were told to bring only what was necessary since the authorities said it would only be temporary and would last approximately three days. As a result, most of the residents left most of their personal belongings which can still be found at Pripyat. An exclusion zone of 30 km (19 mi) remains in place today. The zone is controlled by special units of the Ukrainian ministry of internal affairs. It is partly excluded from the regular civil rule. Any residential, civil or business activities in the zone are legally prohibited and punishable. The only exceptions are the functioning of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and scientific installations related to the studies of nuclear safety. Everyone employed within the zone is monitored for internal bioaccumulation of radioactive elements. Access to the zone for brief visits is possible, through guided day-tours available to the public from Kiev or by applying directly to ChernobylInterInform, a department of the zone administration.
Entrance to the zone of alienation (Photo by Slawojar)
Visit Chernobyl
The guided tours offer a safe passage trough one of the most dangerous places on earth. Forbes magazine has Chernobyl named one of the most unique places to visit and more and more people then find their way into the hastily abandoned houses and weathered buildings. As a tourist you pay around 115 Euros for a visit to the site. Visitors are driven by bus to the ''forbidden zone'' to where only people with special permission are allowed. Most of the surface covered by the zone is relatively safe but there are also places like the red forest and the vehicle scrap yard were radiation levels are still very high. Be sure to follow the guide's advice at all time and do not leave the roads.
We show you some highlights of the tour:
Reactor nr 4:
The place where it all began. The reactor is now covered by a concrete sarcophagus to contain the radioactive materials from what's left of the reactor core. A new sarcophagus is being constructed and will be placed over the existing one, which was constructed very hasty and not meant to last forever. It will be the largest moveable construction ever made by man measuring 100m high, 150m long and 200m wide. When it's finished the construction will be rolled over the reactor and then sealed off. It should last for another 100 years. In this time span the government hopes to remove all of the radioactive materials that are still in the reactor. You can get as close as 200m from the sarcophagus.
The reactor nr 4 encased in a concrete sarcophagus (Photo by Sergei Tkachenko)
The Red Forest:
While the reactor was burning, the adjacent pine forest absorbed most of the released heavily radioactive dust. 10km² of woods were affected by the radiation and died, turning the forest to color red. The radiation levels here are several times higher then near the reactor core. Don't go for a walk there, as you will be inhaling the dust into your body.
Chernobyl's Red Forest
Chernobyl and Pripyat:
The emptiness prevails in the village of Chernobyl: Long, poorly maintained roads without traffic, lush vegetation and chaotic fields without cattle or machinery. Houses and streets are overgrown by nature. Be careful entering any of these areas, as vegetation always carries far higher levels of residual radioactivity than concreted areas. Guides will always tell you not to step on the moss, and the dust in dried-out puddles tends to concentrate radioactivity.
An abandoned house in Chernobyl (Photo by Gerd Ludwig)
With the city of Pripyat where once the personnel of the nuclear facility were housed, it is not much better: an empty backdrop of weathered buildings, interspersed with empty playgrounds, schools and a hospital. This abandoned city once housed 49.000 residents. The numerous signs of a hasty departure are still clearly visible: a toy, a bag, countless books, furniture, a gas mask are all left behind and lay scattered over the floors.
The Pripyat swimming pool hall (Photo by Timm Suess)
The Pripyat amusement park was scheduled to open only four days after the Chernobyl accident, but this never happened. The ferris wheel, swings, bumper cars and the merry-go-round were never used and are now rusting away.
The bumper cars in the Pripyat amusement park (Photo by Justin Stahlman)
Vehicle scrap yard:
The scrap yard is a collection of irradiated emergency vehicles which tended the disaster. There are a number of fire tenders, ambulances, trucks and helicopters in the vehicle graveyard. You will no longer be able to gain entry there, but as some of the vehicles are still carrying lethal doses of radiation, this isn't a bad thing. Tours nowadays take you to a collection of abandoned ships in the city harbor instead.
Chernobyl vehicle scrap yard
Another highlight to visit in the exclusion zone is the Duga-3, a Soviet over-the-horizon (OTH) radar used as missile detection system. The system was built just a few miles away from the power plant due to its high power consumption. The enormous steel construction measures over 100m (300 feet) in height and is 460m (1400 feet) long.
The Duga-3 system was extremely powerful, over 10 MW, and broadcasted in the shortwave radio bands. It appeared without warning, sounding like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise disrupting other radio communications worldwide, which led to it being nicknamed the Russian Woodpecker.
After the nuclear incident the antenna was deactivated, and transmission equipment was moved to other locations. The antenna still stands, however, and has been used by amateurs as a transmission tower.
Duga-3 radar antenna
Stay safe
The levels of radiation on guided tours are relatively small. A lethal dose of radiation is in the range of 300 to 500 roentgens when administered within an hour. Levels on the tour reportedly range from 15 to several hundred micro roentgens an hour. A micro roentgen is one-millionth of a roentgen. The main danger is not in the radiation itself, but in particles of radioactive materials that may remain on your clothes or items. Radiation levels measured at the power plant are 1.7 microsieverts per hour (170 micro roentgens per hour) and they vary between 0.4 and 9.5 microsieverts per hour (40-950 micro roentgens per hour) in the Pripyat amusement park. Thus, risks are pretty much non-existent as long as you don't get yourself contaminated.
Stay on roads; the radiation levels on areas covered by vegetation are significantly higher. Even more important, the risk for contamination when walking amongst vegetation is higher because it is more difficult to avoid touching or inhaling anything. Radiation ends when you leave the place, but you don't want radioactive elements inside your body. Follow common sense, if you see an area marked with a radiation sign, the meaning is clear: DON''T GO THERE.
Tour operator
Several tour operators are offering guided visits into the zone of alienation. Search a hotel in Kiev, choose your tour operator and prepare yourself to visit one of the most special places on earth. We went there with Chernobylwel on a 2-day trip.
This tour operator provides opportunities to see places, that usually stay unseen (cooling towers, meeting with local citizens, cemetery of technics, etc.) They also offer 2-day trips
Add new comment | LosApos.com
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I don't understand why people
I don't understand why people would want to go to one of the most radioactive places on earth to take a day-tour. Might as well take a day- tour thru hell;;;it would probably be much safer.
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Well hell doesn't exist so
Well hell doesn't exist so this is an interesting place to go......have you not watched any foreign made documentaries which have taken Geiger counters in and shown that it is no worse than any other places in the world?
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Don't you just have to love
Don't you just have to love the totally uneducated. Never ceases to amaze me the stupidity people are willing to show off publicly.
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Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you
Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you will understand...
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Most of the acute radiation
Most of the acute radiation is gone, when you are careful you are safe and will not bring radiation out with you, generally you get less radiation from being in Pripyat than you would doing a transatlantic flight, sounds crazy but it's true plus hundreds still work in Chernobyl part time (full time wpuld lead to to much exposure) so visiting for a day while being mindful not to touch certain things you will be fine =) beautiful and amazing place full of history and culture, as well as a few hundred residents who still live there!
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you what it so explosive und
you what it so explosive und stuff
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They don't go for
They don't go for radioactivity......
I could ask why wouldn't someone want to see a giant abandoned city?
You aren't very smart, are you?
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Extreme tourism mate
Extreme tourism mate
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Because most tours are smart
Because most tours are smart enough not to take you through highly radioactive places. A day there on most tours would expose you to less radiation than a chest x-ray
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Why did I visit Chernobyl?Why
Why did I visit Chernobyl?Why did man go to the moon?..because inside some of us lies the need to see things for ourselves..if man did not venture out of his house,he would live a very dull life!
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Man venturing out of there
Man venturing out of there home is technically the same road that led to reactors and meltdowns....but I agree more good comes from mans curiosity and his need to explore his world.
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i want to say thanks for who
i want to say thanks for who post all pic of that place & detais of Chernobyle disaster. Can tell any body how to reached of that place. Now i want know also it will be comfortable visit or not. Please suggest.
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i want to go to chernobyl so
i want to go to chernobyl so bad but most sites say no one under 18 is allowed and im only 15
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Chernobyl under 18
Hey man, im going to chernobyl this summer, and im under 18, too ! Im going there with my Motorbike, you could join me ! :D Write me an message: firstname.lastname@example.com
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Not aloud to enter by motor
Not aloud to enter by motor bike.. And you have to have a valid passport at all times while visiting there.. You have go sign and bunch of paper work before entering there's a check point where the will be investigating you and who else is entering. So its not as easy as taking a motor bike and getting in with out questions asked..
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search these vids on youtube:
search these vids on youtube: 8bn6V9x3_m4, zrIM2hwrLoc, cphkD-9NUe8
promise you will most likely learn something you did not know.
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Such a sad story for the
Such a sad story for the people affected, thank you for the information
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Private Film Festival: Chris Wiatt's DUPE/
I have been planning a mini-fest of my own: six features, six scripts, one weekend. As I write this I have eleven to go. I just added one short to the list. Howard Gertler tipped me to Chris Wiatt's short DUPE as an example of good low bud use of VFX where the storytelling doesn't suffer due to the use of the incredible tools now available. I am glad he did. Check it out.


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Lyrics:First verseA well fought battle ended, a vict'ry nobly earned, A wounded soldier lying where he fell, Thinking of the mother, to whom he'll ne'er return, And wond'ring who to her his fate would tell; He called his comrades to him, his face was cold and white, And well they knew death's angel hovered near; He said, ""I'll answer roll call, boys, far away tonight, But one more Southern song I'd like to hear.""Chorus""Sing me a song of the Sunny South, One with a sweet refrain, Sing me a song of Dixie Land, That I may be happy again: Sing me a sweet Southern melody, Something of bygone days. Sing one song of my Old Kentucky Home, Sing me a song of the SouthSecond verseAll nature seemed to mourn him, for ev'rything was still, Except the voices of his comrades nigh, The song they sang so sweetly, was echoed by the hills, That seemed to sadly murmur their reply: At last the song was ended, but ere its echoes ceased, They knew his spirit soul, had passed away; And as they gently lowered him into the grave of peace, Their thoughts were of his last request that day
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In Scotland, the name was derived from "the lands of Famell in Angus. Between 1214 and 1246 Duncan de Ferneuel witnessed charters by Malcolm, earl of Angus, and a charter of land in the territory of Kerimor to Arbroath Abbey. Meg Fernwale is recorded in Aberdeen, 1408." [3]CITATION[CLOSE]
Black, George F., The Surnames of Scotland Their Origin, Meaning and History. New York: New York Public Library, 1946. Print. (ISBN 0-87104-172-3)
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Shaun Chaudhuri looks to get Harvard's spring slate off on the right foot this weekend (Harvard Athletic Communications).
The Particulars
The No. 28 Harvard men's tennis team kicks off the 2013 portion of its schedule with the Harvard Winter Invite this weekend. The Crimson welcomes local foe Boston College and Marist to the Murr Center Tennis Courts for the event.
About The Crimson
Harvard put together a strong fall 2012 season and starts the New Year off as the top-ranked team in the Ivy League at No. 28 in the Jan. 3 ITA polls.
Sophomore Denis Nguyen returns with hopes of occupying the No. 1 singles position for the Crimson, after a strong year at No. 2 as a freshman. Nguyen earned a berth in the quarterfinals at the USTA/ITA Northeastern Regional Championships and also partnered with rookie Kelvin Lam to take the 'A' doubles crown at the Harvard Halloween Classic this fall. Senior captain Andy Nguyen capped his fall by earning all-tournament honors at the William and Mary Tribe Invite, and looks to be a mainstay in both the singles and doubles lineups.
Sophomore Shaun Chaudhuri shined at the Halloween event, winning the 'A' singles bracket and 'B' doubles flight with classmate Henry Steer, and hopes to be a force in singles play. Rookies Nicky Hu and Nicholas Mahlangu also look to break into the Harvard lineup this spring.
Last Time Out
Andy Nguyen and Nicky Hu led the way at the Tribe Invite in Williamsburg, Va., as the Crimson capped its fall season Nov. 9-11 on the campus of William and Mary. Nguyen posted a 2-1 singles record and teamed with Hu for a 3-1 doubles mark to earn all-tournament honors in both areas. As a team, Harvard went 5-2 in singles on day one, getting additional wins from Alex Steinroeder, Kelvin Lam, Nicholas Mahlangu and Henry Steer. Six more players earned singles wins on the final day of the tournament, and two of three doubles teams claimed wins to finish the fall slate in style.
Scouting The Eagles
Boston College got a good look at the Ivy League tennis talent, taking part in the Princeton Invitational, Brown Invitation and ITA Northeast Regionals during its fall schedule. The team ended its fall slate at the Seahawk Fall Invitational, hosted by UNC Wilmington the first weekend of November. The Eagles took on Davidson, East Tennessee State and the host Seahawks at the event, dropping decisions to each school over the weekend. The Eagles are led by captains senior Billy Grokenberger and junior Jonathan Raude.
Scouting The Red Foxes
The Red Foxes saw a similar smattering of Ivy teams, participating in the Brown Fall Classic, USTA Invitational, Columbia Fall Classic and ITA Northeast Regionals this fall. Marist also took part in a dual match with Connecticut Oct. 16, downing the Huskies, 4-2, on their home courts. While the Marist doubles teams got swept by the Connecticut duos, the Red Foxes came roaring back in singles, taking four of five completed matches for the victory. Will Reznek led the charge with a victory at No. 2, while Joris Van Eck, Dalen Klassen and Joseph Dube also collected singles wins. Marist ended its fall campaign with eight players competing in the ITA regionals, four of whom advanced to the round of 64 in singles.
Tough Road Ahead
Harvard's 2013 spring schedule will pit the Crimson against some of the best competition in the nation with Harvard potentially facing off against six teams ranked within the Intercollegiate Tennis Association's (ITA) preseason top 40. The Crimson opens its dual season against No. 30 Notre Dame could see No. 8 Oklahoma in the second round of the ITA kickoff event. Harvard hosts No. 22 Indiana in just its second home match of the season March 2 and faces No. 34 Louisville a day later.
Harvard Winter Invite Pits No. 28 Men's Tennis Against Boston College, Marist
Shaun Chaudhuri looks to get Harvard's spring slate off on the right foot this weekend (Harvard Athletic Communications).


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One of the many benefits of blu-ray movies is that studios, knowing these will be the most pristine versions of their films, make the effort to insure that they are of the highest quality when it comes to how they look. One studio that has done this in spades is Disney. Their blu-ray and Diamond Editions are well worth the cost. And now they're releasing one of the classics to the Diamond Edition fold, CINDERELLA.
Made in 1950, CINDERELLA became a Disney staple when it comes to fairy princesses. If you don't believe me check out their toy lines which have always included this character. It was also a return for Disney to the classic animated films he had been known for at the time. The artwork involved, the painstaking hand drawn detail and the beauty of the film are seen in every frame.
For those completely unaware the story revolves around a young girl named Cinderella whose widowed father marries to insure that his daughter will have a woman in the house to help raise her. In doing so she also finds two step sisters as well. Unfortunately her father passes away and the inheritance he left behind was squandered on the two step sisters. Cinderella has since become a handmaiden and work horse in the home she was raised in receiving nothing but grief from her hateful step-siblings and evil step-mother. Her only friends are the animals of the house: birds, mice and the loyal dog.
Word is sent out by the King that he intends to have a Ball to celebrate the Prince's return home. In truth, he's hoping the Prince will find a bride and marry. Everyone is invited and Cinderella even plans on going until her step-mother prevents her going. Fortunately her dreams carry the day and her Fairy Godmother steps in using magic to whip up a coach, coachmen, footman, carriage and a beautiful dress for her to wear. The only stipulation is that she returns home by midnight.
She meets the Prince, falls in love and at the stroke of midnight runs to return home. Smitten with her the only connection the Prince has is a glass slipper that fell from her foot as she ran away. With only that slipper it is now up to the Grand Duke to find the Prince's bride to be and for them all to live happily ever after. That is unless the evil step-mother prevents it from happening.
It's the classic fairy tale from days gone by given the Disney touch here. That means cute little animals that assist Cinderella in everything from cleaning to making her a gown to wear to the Ball. The birds even wake her in the morning before anyone can ruin her day yelling. All of them are as nice as can be and the mice are adorable with each one having their own particular characteristics.
What makes Disney films so spectacular and why they have lasted so long is that they stuck to a formula that worked and continued to do so while Walt Disney was alive. They took classic tales and just altered them enough to make them their own. They used amazing artistic abilities to bring to life on screen what was once just the written word. They combined sight and sound with the brightest and most colorful visuals and some of the best songwriting available at that time.
That was then and this is now though. What the studio has done with their use of blu-ray technology is offer the most fantastic looking version of the film that you will find. With each re-release of a Disney classic, they use the most current technology to bring forth the original vision offered when the film was released and in some cases make it even more colorful. There has never been a studio that has made animated films that can come close to rivaling Disney. It shows here.
For fans one of the best things about this release is that it's coming out just in time for Christmas. I know that I've routinely asked for their new releases each Christmas and this one would be no exception. The price is never outrageous and the costs will pay itself off with countless viewings between older fans and new ones discovering the magic for the first time.
The sentimentalist in each of us that grew up with these Disney films will be touched once again with a more current viewing. You'll marvel at the beauty of the film, you'll be touched by the story and you'll find yourself reliving memories of when you saw the film for the first time. This is a film you won't want to miss. One word of warning, like most Disney classics they only release them for a limited time period so don't hesitate, get it today.
Click here to order.


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Today I took delivery of a some lovely dried lavender buds, I could smell them as the postperson handed them to me, when I opened the box the aroma danced around my house and reminded me of standing in a field in Provence, which is exactly where these lavender buds were grown!
I have always loved the smell of lavender and the little bags that can be made to hang in your bedroom or craft room, so I decided to make this sweet little bag and fill it with these beautiful buds. Each time I passed the needle through the fabric I awoke the scent inside and it was gorgeous. These piilows feel so soft and nice with this filling inside instead of using fibrefill, I can highly recommend using these buds.
You can get this lavender from me as a special order, please email me from my about me page.
32 count murano linen fabric, mill hill beads and DMC threads
I used lightweight iron on interfacing on the reverse side of the linen to give the fabric
some support.
I will be announcing the winner of my brooch giveaway on Monday 1st August 2011 and then a few days later I will publish my third anniversary giveaway, I am hoping you like it as much as I do!
I will give you all a clue:
Ooooo la la and Paris!
Thankyou to everyone who has kindly left me a comment and become a follower, I really appreciate it!
Until next time, happy stitching!


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Check out our eBay listings!
The closure of a local British motorcycle shop and the purchase of the remains of the Nicholson Bros inventory was the start of MOTOPARTS INC. in November 1995. Working from a cramped but orgainized 2,000 square foot building the company has new parts inventory of about 9,500 part numbers and tons of used spares. Since 2004 MOTOPARTS has offered full service, welding and machining, wheelbuilding and most aspects of restoration from component rebuilding to ground up restorations.
Two people make it all happen. Nick Oland is handling sales and website management. John Oland handles parts sales and is the voice you will likely hear when you telephone us. We also have a very competent group of associates who richly complement our business and our ability to serve you.
Are you frustrated by the editorializing and opinions that pass for fact on the Internet? You are very welcome to call or email us with your British motorcycle questions. Our business is British motorcycles and we need to sell parts and service to continue. Our passion is British motorcycles and we are more than willing to share our knowledge and experience with you.


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LED fixtures improve safety and save energy: new lighting at Kimberly-Clark facility virtually eliminates lighting maintenance costs for the next decade.
Managers at a Kimberly-Clark facility in Malaysia sought to eliminate the costs associated with the maintenance, energy consumption and safety risks of its lighting fixtures. The company recently replaced 114 of its 400watt metal halide fixtures with 123-watt LED fixtures, allowing it to reduce energy consumption and improve visibility while making the workplace more safe and comfortable for employees.
Plant managers had noticed low brightness on the manufacturing floor and in the inspection area. Aside from the light depreciation that is normal for metal halide bulbs, the polycarbonate spark shields over each fixture had also begun to fade, discolor and collect insects. The shields were designed to prevent bulb failure from creating a spark that might ignite the paper products that are manufactured in the facility.
The metal halide bulbs also created heat in the facility, leading workers to turn off the lights in an effort to control temperatures. And, on further inspection, managers noticed the lights were illuminating unnecessary areas and were often left on when not needed. The management team chose LED lights (Dialight, dialight.com) after an on-site lighting simulation, where the team could see the results before the fixtures were even ordered.
"With the simulation, we could clearly see the optimum lighting layout for the space to be illuminated," said Adam Lua Boon Chin, project engineer for Kimberly-Clark Products. "We knew before installation that light would be directed exactly where we need it."
After the installation, the average watts per square meter have been reduced from 12.49 watts to 4 watts. The instant-on capability of the fixtures enables workers to turn lights on and off as needed. The new fixtures also offer variable lighting levels, for instance illuminating only alternating rows or only the perimeter.
The fixtures are expected to last up to a decade at consistent light levels before their first bulb change, virtually eliminating lighting maintenance costs. Safety also has improved since many of the former metal halide bulbs were directly above manufacturing equipment. The new bulbs are sealed, removing the need for the shield and the risk of bursting bulbs. The lights are also much cooler, running about 186 degrees cooler than the metal halide units.
By Josh Bond, Associate Editor
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|productivity solution
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|Sep 1, 2012
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Movie review: Catholicism
Directed by Matt Leonard (A Word on Fire/Picture Show Films Production, 2011)
Father Robert Barron, a Chicago priest who has appeared often in the pages of this magazine, finally brought his years-in-the-making Catholicism Project to public TV this fall. Up to 70 percent of PBS stations aired or will air four episodes; the series of 10 DVDs is for sale at Wordonfire.org with a companion book and a study guide.
Barron's is a confident Catholicism: At the Roman Colosseum—scene of torture and death for early Christians—he says he always thinks, "We won," because the church's great lesson is that love is always more powerful than hatred. Yet he also takes on the church's dark side: the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery. "Were a disturbing number of priests and bishops wrong and even sinful in their contribution to the sex abuse scandal?" he asks. "Yes."
Although Barron can speak Greek with the best of them, one strength of the program is that he mostly steers clear of heady and pious language. In explaining papal infallibility, he compares the pope to a baseball umpire, the "living voice of authority" who keeps the game from dissolving into bickering. Jesus, he says, is a "dangerous, strange figure" who compels a choice, not an inspirational nice guy. Barron counters the claims of resurrection doubters who say the apostles merely celebrated Jesus' memory: "C'mon! . . . Can you imagine Paul tearing into Corinth saying, 'I want to proclaim a dead man who's very inspiring?' No one would have taken him seriously!"
Catholicism is nothing if not ambitious, and the product is stunning—visually beautiful and stirring, it was filmed at sites in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Philippines, Turkey, India, and the Holy Land. Barron sets out to be far more than just a Ken Burns-type historian of the Catholic Church, though his series easily equals Burns' productions in quality. Instead he seeks to tell the Catholic story for listeners in the 21st century, speaking to the head, the heart, and the soul. The very beauty of the film speaks volumes on its own.


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NFC NORTH: Packers WR Greg Jennings out for Colts game
GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) -- The question is no longer whether Greg Jennings will play Sunday at Indianapolis.
Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy took care of that on Thursday, ruling the two-time Pro Bowl wide receiver out with the groin injury that has nagged him all season.
"I had a conversation with Greg before practice, and we just talked through the history of his injury. And we felt like we were going around in a circle," McCarthy said. "We just felt, 'Why take this decision all the way to Sunday?'"
Jennings suffered the injury in the closing minutes of Sept. 9 opener against San Francisco, then missed the Sept. 13 victory over Chicago. He returned to play at Seattle on Sept. 24, then aggravated the injury last Sunday against New Orleans and had to come out of the game in the second quarter after his 9-yard touchdown catch.
"(I've) got to be smart now," said Jennings, who is in the last year of his contract and has 12 catches for 78 yards and one touchdown. "Honestly, that's where my frustration starts. (You want to) be a tough guy (but it's) not so much (about) being a tough guy - you just want to go out there and play. There's a difference between being smart with it and being kind of ignorant. ... I can't keep having that up and down - I'm in one game, out the next, not sure one game, good the next. I can't keep doing that to myself or the team. "
The game at Indianapolis kicks off a three-game road trip for the Packers, as they'll travel to undefeated Houston for a Sunday night game on Oct. 14 followed by an Oct. 20 date at St. Louis.
Offensively, the Packers have found themselves adjusting to life without Jennings a lot. Late last season, Jennings suffered a knee injury on Dec. 11 against Oakland, then missed the final three games against Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit before returning for the Packers' season-ending playoff loss to the New York Giants.
Jennings also missed two weeks of training camp when he suffered a concussion in the annual Family Night scrimmage. It was the third concussion of his career, according to team doctors.
"When Greg Jennings is on the field, we definitely have a chance to be a very good offense," McCarthy said. "I still think we can play a different way and play without Greg and still be very good. I'd always want my best players out there. That's why it's important to get him healthy and get him back to 100 percent."
It's possible these Jennings-less Packers are a glimpse into what the offense will look like in 2013. Some believe the Packers will let Jennings walk as an unrestricted free agent after the season because he'll command a contract that will average more than $10 million per season. With quarterback Aaron Rodgers, outside linebacker Clay Matthews and defensive tackle B.J. Raji needing extensions, there might not be enough money to go around.
While frustrated by his injury, Jennings said the contract isn't on his mind.
"Honestly, I'm not even focused on that," he said. "I really need to get back on the football field and be 100 percent. The contract, that's going to take care of itself. It's going to be what it's going to be. I can't predict the future. I couldn't predict this. It is what it is."


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Miss Tulou 2009, has now officially launched and the contestants are now coming in. The press coverage is listed here:
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/prnewswire/ ... NM022.html
http://www.hereischina.com/MissTulou/Me ... aspx?id=27
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Fujian-Tu ... ?x=0&.v=83
And many more!
With just over 4 weeks remaining make sure you sign up to ensure you have the chance to be crowned Miss Fujian Tulou and win a free 10 day tour of China.
Good Luck
Miss Tulou, officially launches in Xia'men
Anything dealing with this website.
1 post • Page 1 of 1
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2009 9:42 am
1 post • Page 1 of 1


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Liberty News
Alumni Band Benefit 4 Babies
Six Chasing Seven is bringing its own brand of Christian rock-infused reggae funk to the Schilling Center on Friday, Aug. 29, at the first-ever Alumni Band Benefit 4 Babies. It's the official launch of Six Chasing Seven's new CD, "Direction," and proceeds will benefit the Liberty Godparent Home. Special guest My Favorite Highway will kick off the night at 7:30 p.m. Cover charge is $5. The first 200 people get a free CD. For details visit www.sixchasingseven.com.


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ok, for one thing, this keyboad sucks. i am in victoria statin at a really groovy 'net kiosk'. the strips you're doing are pretty funny luke, glad yu were able to get the site up and working. i'm haveing a great time here in London, sent you a postcard, and blah blah blha, times up!
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The Necronomicon--------------more hyphens? yes, please!----------------------ahh.


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The unspoilt islands of Kadavu are renowned for the world-famous diving spot, the Great Astrolabe Reef. Above water, there's also plenty to see and do, with rainforest treks, birdwatching and guided sea-kayaking tours. While getting around the islands is an adventure, that's all part of the fun when you're experiencing such a unique slice of untouched paradise.
Accommodation is varied across the islands. Options range from guest houses to budget backpackers and high-end eco resorts, with many places only accessible by boat.All accommodation in Kadavu
The Great Astrolabe Reef which surrounds Kadavu is one of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Whether you want to swim alongside huge manta rays, explore ship wrecks or soar through pristine coral gardens, the Great Astrolabe Reef offers a huge range of underwater experiences. All the resorts at Kadavu offer equipment and opportunities to snorkel or scuba dive on the reef.
Further inland you'll find good hiking routes from several of the resorts. Explore lush rainforest filled with stunning birdlife and spectacular waterfalls, or wind your way back to the long sandy beaches that line the coast
Getting to Kadavu
The road system in Kadavu is very limited, so you'll mostly need to travel by boat. A shuttle bus runs from Kadavu Airport to wherever your boat is leaving.
There are daily flights to Kadavu from Nadi and Nausori Airport just out of Suva. But if you want to travel like a local, catch the ferry that departs from Walu Bay, Suva, on Tuesday evenings and travels to Vunisea and Kavala Bay on Kadavu.
Dining in Kadavu
Being a remote tropical paradise, dining options on Kadavu are limited to the self-contained resorts, some of which grow their own organic produce on site. And, as you'd imagine, fresh seafood is plentiful. Outside of the resorts, you can buy basic supplies and snacks near the airstrip terminal.Dining in Kadavu


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PgCon 2012 Developer Meeting
From PostgreSQL wiki
A meeting of the most active PostgreSQL developers is being planned for Wednesday 16th May, 2012 near the University of Ottawa, prior to pgCon 2012. In order to keep the numbers manageable, this meeting is by invitation only. Unfortunately it is quite possible that we've overlooked important code developers during the planning of the event - if you feel you fall into this category and would like to attend, please contact Dave Page (email@example.com).
Please note that this year the attendee numbers have been cut to try to keep the meeting more productive. Invitations have been sent only to developers that have been highly active on the database server over the 9.2 release cycle. We have not invited any contributors based on their contributions to related projects, or seniority in regional user groups or sponsoring companies, unlike in previous years.
This is a PostgreSQL Community event. Room and refreshments/food sponsored by EnterpriseDB. Other companies sponsored attendance for their developers.
Time & Location
The meeting will be from 8:30AM to 5PM, and will be in the "Red Experience" room at:
Novotel Ottawa 33 Nicholas Street Ottawa Ontario K1N 9M7
Food and drink will be provided throughout the day, including breakfast from 8AM.
The following people have RSVPed to the meeting (in alphabetical order, by surname):
- Oleg Bartunov
- Josh Berkus (Secretary)
- Jeff Davis
- Andrew Dunstan
- Dimitri Fontaine
- Stephen Frost
- Peter Geoghegan
- Kevin Grittner
- Robert Haas
- Magnus Hagander
- Shigeru Hanada
- Hitoshi Harada
- KaiGai Kohei
- Tom Lane
- Noah Misch
- Bruce Momjian
- Dave Page (Chair)
- Simon Riggs
- Teodor Sigaev
- Greg Smith
Proposed Agenda Items
Please list proposed agenda items here:
- Agree CommitFest schedule for 9.3 (Strawman from Simon)
- CF1 June 15, 2012 - 1 month
- CF2 Sep 15, 2012 - 1 month
- CF3 Nov 15, 2012 - 1 month
- CF4 Jan 15, 2013 - 2 months
- Queuing [Dimitri, Kevin]
- Description: efficient and transactional queuing is a very common need for application using databases, and could help implementing some internal features
- Goals: get an agreement that core is the right place where to solve that problem, and what parts of it we want in core exactly
- Materialized views [Kevin]
- Description: Declarative materialized views are a frequently requested feature, but means many things to many people. It's not likely that an initial implementation will address everything. We need a base set of functionality on which to build.
- Goals: Reach consensus on what a minimum feature set for commit would be.
- Partitioning and Segment Exclusion [Dimitri]
- Description: to solve partitioning, we need to agree on a global approach
- Goals: agreeing on SE as a basis for better partitioning, having a "GO" on working on SE
- MERGE: Challenges and priorities [Peter G]
- Description: Implementing the MERGE statement for 9.3. It is envisaged specifically as an atomic "upsert" operation.
- Goals: To get buy-in on various aspects of the feature's development, and, ideally, to secure reviewer resources or other support. Because of the complexity of the feature, early interest from reviewers is preferable.
- Row-level Access Control and SELinux [KaiGai]
- Security label on user tables
- Dynamic expandable enum data types
- Enforcement of triggers by extension
- Enhancement of FDW at v9.3 [KaiGai]
- Writable foreign tables
- Stuffs to be pushed down (Join, Aggregate, Sort, ...)
- Inheritance of foreign/regular tables
- Constraint (PK/FK) & Trigger support.
- Type registry [Andrew]
- Provide for known OIDs for non-builtin types, and possibly for their IO functions too
- Would make it possible to write code in core or in extension X that handles a type defined in extension Y.
- Ending CommitFests in a timely fashion, especially the last one. Avoiding a crush of massive feature patches at the end of the cycle. Handling big patches that aren't quite ready yet. Getting more people to help with patch review. [Robert]
- What Developers Want [Josh]
- Description: a top-5 list of features and obstacles to developer adoption of PostgreSQL (with slides)
- Goal: to set priorities for some features aimed at application users
- In-Place Upgrades & Checksums [Greg Smith, Simon]
- Description: Revisit in-place upgrades of the page format, now that pg_upgrade is available and multiple checksum implementations needing it have been proposed.
- Goal: Nail down some incremental milestones for 9.3 development to aim at.
- Autonomous Transactions [Simon]
- Overview of idea, relationship to stored procedures
- Feedback, buy-in and/or alternatives
- Parallel Query [Bruce Momjian]
- Hope to get buy-in for what parallel operations we are hoping to add in upcoming releases
- Report from Clustering Meeting [Josh] (10 min)
- Description: to summarize the discussions of the cluster-hackers meeting from the previous day
- Goal: inter-team synchronization. Possibly, decisions requested on specific in-core features.
- Double Write Buffers [Simon]
- Is anyone committing to do that for 9.3?
- Goals, priorities, and resources for 9.3 [All]
- For roadmap and planning purposes, set expectations and coordinate work schedules for 9.3. Confirm who is doing what, identify interested reviewers at start, and check for gaps.
|08:30 - 08:45
|Welcome and introductions
|Dave Page
|08:45 - 09:15
|Autonomous transactions
|Simon Riggs
|09:15 - 09:40
|Dimitri Fontaine/Kevin Grittner
|09:40 - 09:50
|Report from the Clustering Meeting
|Josh Berkus
|09:50 - 10:10
|Type registry
|Andrew Dunstan
|10:10 - 10:30
|Access control and SELinux
|KaiGai Kohei
|10:30 - 10:45
|Coffee break
|10:45 - 11:15
|Enhancement of FDWs in 9.3
|KaiGai Kohei
|11:15 - 11:30
|What developers want
|Josh Berkus
|11:30 - 12:00
|Parallel Query
|Bruce Momjian
|12:00 - 12:30
|MERGE: Challenges and priorities
|Peter Geoghegan
|12:30 - 13:30
|13:30 - 14:00
|Materialised views
|Kevin Grittner
|14:00 - 14:20
|In place upgrades and checksums
|Simon Riggs/Greg Smith
|14:20 - 14:45
|Partitioning and segment exclusion
|Dimitri Fontaine
|14:45 - 15:00
|Commitfest Schedule
|15:00 - 15:15
|Tea break
|15:15 - 15:40
|Commitfest management
|Robert Haas
|15:40 - 16:45
|Goals, priorities, and resources for 9.3
|16:45 - 17:00
|Any other business/group photo
|Dave Page
2012 Developer Meeting Minutes
Started with introductions.
Autonomous Transactions
Simon brought this to get some feedback on the idea. Autonomous transactions (ATX) are a transaction inside a transaction ... a new top-level transaction. In Oracle, it's not just one new transaction, it's a whole new context which can submit multiple new transactions. There is no connection between parent and child transactions, which can result in new types of deadlocks.
Each new transaction context would allocate a new pg_exec from a pg_proc call. Implementation is straightforwards, just have to handle locking. Allows us to implement stored procedures in an interesting way. If we treat a stored procedure as an autonomous transaction, then this solves some problems. We can put COMMIT< ROLLBACK, other things in stored procedures.
Tom suggested that ATX don't need to conflict with parent transaction locks. Noah pointed out some issues with that. We'd need to have a switch for Stored Procedures in order to indicate they are autonomous, like using CREATE STORED PROCEDURE. We'd be using an additional client slot for each ATX, which could be a problem. Oracle's limit on ATX is 70 per connection, which seems like a lot. Maybe we should try to hold them all to a single session like it was a subtransaction. Not sure if we can do this, Simons will need to take a look at is.
ATX also need to eventually be able to run utility commands, like VACUUM and CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.
Ultimately the materialized views will need some kind of queueing. Once we have queueing in core, it could be generally useful. CLUSTER CONCURRENTLY would need it, or application queues will need queueing structure. We might want to have it exposed at the SQL level. You put things in the queue, and at commit, others can see it. LISTEN/NOTIFY is sort of a queue, but is only one item and vanishes if you're not listening.
Like a table, but access semantics are different. Would need logged/unlogged queues. Some discussion about how queues are different from tables. Haas wondered about whether what we need for interal queues are the same as what users need for user-visible queues.
Queue-tables also need different performance characteristics. We don't need queues so much as we need deferred action. We also need background processes which wake up and check the queue. Queues could be built on top of tables. Discussion about uses, designs for queues ensued.
We need a really clear design spec for how queues would work. There are specific performance improvements we want for queueing, but they're likely to be just improvements on table performance. The idea is to have a generalized API instead of reinventing a bunch of times.
Next steps is to collect use cases. Kevin & Dimitri will collect use cases on a wiki page, to design an API. Performance optimization needs to look at access pattern. Simon pointed out that this works similar to fact tables where you want to move stuff forward constantly. Users might not use queues as pure FIFO.
Unlinking segments works for deleting from the beginning of a table but indexes could be a problem. Block numbers could be a practical problem, we might need wraparound, or reset-to-zero.
Report on Clustering Meeting
See minutes.
Type Registry
WIP idea. Hstores aren't build in, so they get an arbitrary OID, which causes issues with writing generic code. Looking up they type name is expensive. It would be nice to have a registry for types where people writing extensions are allocated an OID. Andrew gave example of hacking Postgres to support upgrading from the optional JSON type in 9.1 to the built-in type in 9.2.
We need to expose the pg_upgrade stuff as well, set_binary_upgrade. Should we use something other than and OID? We need the OIDs for upgrade and for drivers. Driver identicalness isn't the same as pg_upgradability, so we might want two different switches for that. Maybe we should have a new OID if you change the storage of a type?
What's the criterion for allocating an OID? We'll need some kind of judgement. We'll also need to block off the OID reserved space into sections. People generally found this to be a good idea. Andrew will create a wiki page and follow-up. We could just do this for contrib, but that's not really a good idea.
We could have CREATE TYPE ... WITH OID = ###, for base types only. The folks who want it for ENUM etc. are just replication/clustering authors. There was discussion of other approaches to handling these problems. Users will create types with OIDs which conflict.
Access Control and SE-Linux
Several components: to add security around user tables. Second, to add additional conditions around user queries. Third, a condition around new tuples which are inserted. Fourth, we should have ENUMs to represent user-defined security labels. Did some performance testing on the last part, having labels as OIDs was much faster and closer to non-SE performance.
There's concurrency issues around seeing new labels -- we'd have a huge issue with inserting the labels into the system table. Creating a new label could be a downtime event; we can have a utility command, and we can require users to create a new label first manually. But what happens if the new label isn't there? Should error just like a constraint.
Is there a way to query SE-linux to get all of the security labels? That's hard, because it's four fields. The last field is an issue for prediction. There's a lot of value in having row-level security be completely type-agnosic; we just have a string and we don't care what's in it.
An SE Label consists of: user, row field, type field, and (something inaudible). That last part is a kind of bitmap. Do we actually need that part, though? What's multi-category security, will we support that? How many different labels would you have on a specific table?
The idea of row-level security is to force quals on people. Currently it's not transparent. The discussion on labels needs to continue elsewhere.
Also we need to address FK and PK implementation for security labels.
What Developers want
PostgreSQL is becoming the default for many web applications like Ruby and Django. But there are plenty of users complaints. They don't show up on the PostgreSQL mailing lists. The developer complaints are on stackoverflow, forums for virtual hosting companies, and application specific lists like ORM/framework layers.
Two categories of developer comments: blockers that cause to use another tool, and enhancers that would expand the market into new areas. Many of these are available features, but they seem to hard to use.
1. Installation onto developer laptops (Windows / OS X)
- Re-installs problematic in Windows
- Reinstall of Redis is the competitor here, it is a closer to a true one-click installer.
- People use Redis because it's "easy to install", while PostgreSQL ran into one of multiple problems (reported on lists like pgsql-general)
- postgres.app is aiming at simplifying things for Mac developers, is in beta
- Kevin: also seen issues with Rails + Rake, lots of questions on Stackoverflow.
2. Complexity of configuring PostgreSQL, i.e. postgresql.conf
- Shared memory issues on the Mac
- Could use POSIX shared memory instead Sys V
- Need a configuration generator and hints for settings that are set incorrectly
- Example: need to increase size of the transaction log with pg_xlog having X GB of space. Math to determine settings like checkpoint_segements given a GB target is complicated.
3. Better analysis and troubleshooting
- Expose everything via SQL, i.e. autovacuum ; no parsing logs.
- EXPLAIN needs to be easier to understand, suggest what needs to be done when planner mistakes are made.
- Freeze a stable query plan needed for some apps.
4. Easier to understand replication
- External projects that try to help are often less maintained/robust/documented than core
- Same thing is true for pooling projects
5. Better pg_upgrade
- More trustworthy
- Handle version upgrades across large clusters
- Deliver on <5 minutes promise. Can take a long time for statistics ANALYZE. Needs to save/restore that instead.
Enabling features to broaden userbase
1. Finish JSON support
- Most popular new feature on news sites LWN etc. since 9.0 replication
- Some people want simple document storage like NoSQL, but with PostgreSQl reliability
- Needs indexing performance improvements
- More extract from JSON features
- Schemaless PostgreSQL is possible with JSON or hstore, but it's not obvious that's true.
2. Better extensions
- Packaging for popular extensions on popular
- Extensions should follow replication; move .so to standby? Lots of resistance to that idea.
- Better visibility of extensions, and extension aggregators like PGXN.
3. Client language queries
- Straight from, say, Python to a parse tree
- SQL Server/.Net does move in this direction for C#
- Competition here is the non-relational databases
4. Built-in sharding
- PL/Proxy: must find it, minimal docs, questions around support situation
- Target user base here doesn't like SQL or functions much either
- Base on writable FDW?
- Borrow ideas from notable sharded PostgreSQL deployments?
Enhancements of FDW in 9.3
What do we need for FDW in 9.3? Want discussion of what to implement. Hanada is working on pgsql_fdw. Wants this in the core distribution, to replace dblink. Currently FDWs are read-only so users still need dblink. There is a list of features Hanada wants to implement.
One issue is naming. Currently we already have postgresql_fdw in core, which is used by dblink. Proposed pgsql_fdw, but that doesn't fit our naming conventions. We should maybe rename the dblink one to dblink_fdw. There is also an issue around options where it should consult libpq on what options are supported. Since the function name conflicts are internal, this would only mess with pgupgrade.
Features include:
- writeable FDWs
- aggregation pushdown
- table sorting pushdown
- table inheritance with FDW
- constraint support on foreign tables
Writeable FDW is the most interesting feature. One issue is transaction control, suggestion is that it's the responsibility of the FD module to control transactions, not PostgreSQL. Two ways to do it: one is that every write to a FT is an autocommit transaction. The other option is that the FT commits when you commit your local transaction. SQL Server automatically does two-phase commit. But it might be better for a first version not to have any transaction control.
We will implement with no remote transaction control for the version for 9.3. Plus distributed transactions have lots of interesting failure conditions.
KaiGai plans to get pgsql_fdw into the first CF so that we can play with it.
Parallel Query
Everyone run screaming from the room. First, understand that not everyone is I/O bound. There are cases where the system is primarily memory or CPU-constrained. If you have a handful of very complex queries which are primarily memory-bound, but we're not always I/O constrained, we need to look at ways to parallelize memory/CPU-constrained systems. We need to start looking incrementally with how we can do some things in parallel.
Already-completed parallel pg_dump is an example of this. We need more cases where we can surgically parallelize stuff. Josh brought up the issue of PostGIS queries which need CPU parallelism. Greg brought up 48-core server with 256GB of RAM for a 100GB server. If we can get 4 CPUs, we get better memory bandwidth. We're sometimes memory-bound because of non-sharable memory bandwidth. Bruce told story of Informix 6's parallelism disaster.
We need a task list of individual tasks we could parallelize instead of parallelizing everything. We do need a general "helper process" infrastructure so that we can hand work off to them. Simon is working on the parallel worker tasks now.
Bruce and Greg discussed Greenplum's history. The way we generate query plans makes this hard, since it's kind of a "pull" basis: "gimme a tuple". If our query plan was a task list it would be easier. MPP systems have plans where they look at which steps can be parallelized and what they cost.
The hard stuff is in the optimizer. Creating a cost model is really difficult. Peter brought up the Intel threading building blocks as a generalized parallelism case with a graph dependency. It has this thing called "task stealing". The classic parallelism case is video rendering, but our tasks are not like that. We need one-off cases for each task.
It's like the Windows port in terms of scope and complexity. This is different from the Windows port, in that we can do it piecemeal, but we need to decide to go down the road of additional complexity. Dimitri suggested exposing the executor as a virtual machine. A lot of stuff is different. Josh suggested starting with parallel index build as the easiest single task with solid benefit. Bruce points out the even simpler case is to build several indexes in parallel over the same scan.
Additional items that can be parallelized:
- Redo
- Vacuum
- Logical dump
- Sorting
- Scans, particularly partition table scans
Peter hasn't done as much with this as he expected so far, but plans to get something done for 9.3. What's the best way to solve this problem? Josh spoke about the need for atomic UPSERT, Peter agrees that that's a good version 1 goal.
There's a fair amount of speculation on how to implement this feature. A lot of people want to use predicate locking, but we need an accessible API and some more features for predicate locking to make it work. We could also have a new kind of lock associated with an index tuple. The UPSERT case requires solving the hard problem, general MERGE beyond that is detail work. One thing we need to do is finish deprecating user-definable RULEs.
Greg worked with a GSOC project for MERGE, but concurrency completely didn't work. We still have to solve the concurrency issues. Robert remembers that there were intrinsically complex issues without even a possible perfect solution. We need to look at the thread where we looked at the problems; the definition of sensible behavior is in question (thread: http://firstname.lastname@example.com). We need to define the spec first. We can look at what other databases do.
We can allow weird things to happen — corner cases — with MERGE or UPSERT. We can tell people to use SSI to avoid those weird issues. The SQL standard's MERGE doesn't really give us UPSERT, we should use different syntax. We want INSERT... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, not REPLACE INTO. We should ask MySQL folks about the history of this.
Job #1 is building the simple case, UPSERT. We can do SQL-standard MERGE later. Greg wants reviewers to commit for this. This is really a Heikki thing. The Executor part needs expert review (Tom?).
Materialized Views
What's the minimum committable patch, and what direction should we take it in? Kevin has time to work on it, but it's been hard to schedule that time.
- syntax for create/alter
- new relkind in pg_class
- pg_dump and restore support
- being able to index them
- statement to regenerate contents of matview (concurrently?)
Will have an option to create a matview without filling it with data. pg_dump would use this. Would deal with the various ways of updating matviews, like incremental, later. If you wanted incremental updates on a matview which is too complex it would error. Further down, doing incremental updates via queueing mechanism.
Also, there's the optimizer — substituting matviews for base tables automatically. That would be much later. Josh mentioned that someone had already written code for that. KaiGai asked about SE-Postgres and matviews, and discussed it with Kevin. Josh also asked about eventually doing on-request refresh.
Simon wants us to call it something different from Materialized Views, becuase we won't have the optimizer stuff which Oracle does. Kevin is calling it declarative materialized views. And it's not clear that we want to handle query rewrite the same way Oracle does. We can have synchronous update of matviews, but more useful is queueing updates of the views to that they are "eventually consistent". Kevin talked about cranky judges.
Phase I is just do do the object type and manual refresh. Incremental update will be later. There's a couple other things you can do if you can guarantee that the matview data would produce the same result. There was discussion around what to call the feature given that we'll be implementing matviews in several releases.
Dimitri suggested that we could use matviews as a working concept for correlation stats. Simon discussed issues of setting acceptable staleness at data request time, both for matviews and for replication.
In place upgrades & Checksums
Where had the page format discussion gone wrong in the past? There's 4 issues:
- adding more bytes in the header
- having multiple page views
- time required to upgrade
The whole discussion talked about 32-bit checksums. But with 16-bit checksums, we could borrow pg_tli, and add a checksummed bit. Greg said we bump the page format, Robert said no. Greg wants us to "get practice" in having new page formats. We need to flag whether or not the page is checksummed. Will we ever need 32-bit checksums? If we implement 16-bit, we'll find out.
Simon analyzed the error rate with 16-bit checksums, and felt that it was enough for an 8K page, but not a 32K page. Not clear on why it makes a difference on what the size of the page is. Plus we're not expecting an error on just one page.
What are we planning to include in the checksum? What are we going to checksum? Jeff has been looking at issues where whole disk blocks are getting swapped. Suggested including the relfilenode etc. in the checksum in order to make sure that the page is where it's supposed to be. Would it prevent us from moving data around? Changing tablespaces, etc. might be an issue. Is table OID better or worse than relfilenode? Discussion of what pg_upgrade does. OID seems better.
Need to have some way to track what's checksummed and what's not in a table. Each page will have a checksum bit. Add command VACUUM CHECKSUM ON. And we don't really have to implement an "old page reader".
Hint bits are the biggest implementation issue. Simon's approach was to full-page-write all pages with hint bits once per checkpoint cycle, but there's still some stuff to be worked out there. There's an issue with hint bits being set while the page is being written by another process. Discussed the performance impact of this.
For first version, we need to look at whether it's reliable. That is more important that the performance. Bulk loading has a major performance issue. Setting hint bits on the first select of a major table generates a whole bunch of WAL traffic.
Partitioning and Segment Exclusion
Current partitioning is "just good enough" to deter building something better. Dimitri has been thinking about what do to instead. Three problems:
- when do you create the new partitions
- constraint exclusion has all kinds of issues
- index and constraints — no primary keys etc.
We've had several proposals. Declarative partitioning syntax. But as long as we have separate tables, we only solve problem 2. We've had 5 years of partial patches for that problem.
So how about another idea: the problem is having a table with a huge data set, and addressing only part of that table. We already have table segments -- we could have segments which are determined by ordering. The idea is to have an index which, given the partitioning key, would tell us where the tuples are located — in which segment.
At what level in the system should a partition exist? Simon pushed for above-table level. Now we're looking at below table level. So the system defines partitions, not the user. We can look at a large table of 100 segements as having 100 partitions. If we store metadata about each partition, we can look at that to decide which segments to scan. Josh pointed out that this doesn't solve all or even most of the issues which partitioning is intended to solve. This solution is really a heavily compressed index or a performance optimization for scanning large, time-based tables. It's a sort of lossy index.
Don't get hung up on 1GB segments, we might change that in the future. Or we could change that for this. Jeff Davis pictured something different for constraint exclusion with something simpler. Discussion about index scans, which may not be as efficient as it could be. Index-Only scan needs some optimizations.
CommitFest Schedule
Simon proposed a schedule, which includes the last commitfest being 2 months. Robert would like it to be shorter, not longer. Robert pointed out that the final CFs have been getting longer, not shorter since 9.0. Two issues related to commitfests:
- works better when lots of people volunteer to review
- last commitfest doesn't end.
We would all benefit if we ended the CF earlier. Robert thought we should make CF4 shorter, non longer. Josh suggested that we could relese every 6 months. Big problem is people writing patchs still during CF4. We wait until everyone is exhausted and then decide what to bounce. We should make decisions at the beginning of the commitfest.
Suggested separating review and commitfest. We should triage at the beginning of the commitfest. Robert brought up Dimitri's patches as an example. Robert wants completion over priority, Simon says the opposite. The problem with a consensus process is that there's no consensus. We could have a release manager. It's the big patches which are the real problem, since people really want them and there's lots of stuff in them.
The problem with prioritization is that we're promoting a big feature over what's not quite there vs. several other patches which are ready. It's not fair to our contributors. But we could triage at the beginning because we're arbitrarily bumping stuff anyway. It's better to do it early than late. You can identify which patches are big or small, and which ones have a certain degree of readiness. Even if you're not correct, it'll help people allocate their time.
For voting on priorities, we could vote and rate which ones are going to be easy or hard and how important they are for us. Dimitri outlined a system of point allocation and voting. Or we could list the committer on a patch at the beginning of the commitfest. That makes sense for the big patches, but not the small ones. So we should identify them at the beginning of the commitfest.
Everyone is going to argue for their own stuff, though. People have different priorities. We also can't tell committers what to do, we can only ask. We'd like to get committer signoff early in the process. We might also want to sign off reviewers.
Triage also needs to flag patches where we don't agree on the spec.
We need to get better about giving feedback on the design for the patch. The problem with posting a design spec is that there's no formal review process for design spec. After CF3, a week of triage. If we haven't seen the big patch by the triage, it doesn't get into CF4 for big patches.
Simon pointed out that it's hard to make rules for big patches because each one is different.
So, changes to the process:
- Planning week after the 3rd commitfest
- "design spec" flagged submissions to the CF
- write docs about the CF process
- one patch, one review requirement
CommitFest Management
CF1: June 15 – July 15
CF2: Sept 15 – Oct 15
CF3: Nov 15 – Dec 15 Planning Week – Dec 8-15
CF4.1: Jan 15 – Feb 15 Final Triage: Feb 1–7
Goals, Priorities, and Resources for 9.3
Dave: Installers
Andrew: Aggregation for JSON, Projecting data from JSON, Pretty-printing SQL, PL/perl binary format, binary output for psql, windows builds for extensions.
Peter: UPSERT, trying to replace Flex, pg_stat_statements for query plans.
Simon: Bi-Directional Replication
Hanada: pgsql_fdw, other FDWs.
Hitoshi: plv8, JSON support, some windowing function improvements.
Kevin: Declarative materialized views, SSI performance.
Jeff: statistics for ranges, range keys, range FKs, and range joins.
Robert: performance, performance, performance. Reducing latency events. Write performance improvements. Can we optimize vacuum some more, reviewing patches.
Josh: documentation, advocacy, maybe autoconfiguration. Release notes.
Magnus: configuration directories. Monitoring. Simplifying replication.
Dimitri: now working on "event triggers". Next step for extensions. Segment exclusion. Queueing in core design spec.
Tom: backfilling weak spots in the planner.
Alvaro: finalize FK locks. Allowing ALTER TABLE to reorder columns.
Bruce: design spec for some parallel operations.
Oleg & Teodor: improve SP-GiST. Indexing similarity. Also want to work on spatial join. JSON indexing if they can get sponsorship.
Noah: global temp tables, local XID space for temp tables, more ALTER TABLE improvements.
Greg: reviving dead projects: config directory, eliminate recovery.conf, adding instrumentation for timing events inside the database.
KaiGai: SE row-level access control.
Stephen Frost: list optimization work. SSL under Windows, supporting engines.
Other Business
Josh will write as-we-go release notes for alphas or whatever.
We could have a mini-developer meeting in Prague. There was discussion about whether we should move the developer meeting around every year. This is the "main" developer meeting, but we could have another one somewhere else. We could have it at FOSDEM, in February.
Josh brought up the idea of having an unconference day for Postgres contributors. Robert suggested interest group meetings as a refinement of that.


text:
Somalis Say US And Ethiopia Raids Kill 100
"I was with a team sent to the bombardment areas near Dhobley to bury the dead, what I have seen was really terrible," Absuge Mohamed Weli, a Dhobley resident said. "I counted 29 dead people, some of them burnt so they could not be identified, and we have buried them," he said.
[Africa News Update]
Clan elders and residents in southern Somalia have said that about 100 civilians were killed this week in US and Ethiopian air strikes on suspected Al-Qaeda targets in the region.
There was no way to independently confirm the toll, and it was unclear if it referred to the same areas hit by at least one US air raid on Monday, and by other attacks believed to have been launched by Ethiopian helicopters. Sheikh Abdullahi Ali Malabon, an elder in the Afmadow area, said yesterday 100 bodies had been counted.
"We have sent a team to assess the casualties there and they have confirmed more than 100 people killed," he said by phone from the remote area. "Many others were wounded but we don't have an exact number."
Closer to the Kenyan border, between the villages of Afmadow and Dhobley, residents and elders also spoke of at least 100 civilian deaths but stressed they had only accounted for 29 bodies, some burnt beyond recognition.
"I was with a team sent to the bombardment areas near Dhobley to bury the dead, what I have seen was really terrible," Absuge Mohamed Weli, a Dhobley resident said. "I counted 29 dead people, some of them burnt so they could not be identified, and we have buried them," he said.
"I have seen more dead bodies in the forest, I recognized some of them and they were local civilians," Weli said. "They were killed while keeping their animals. I have also seen animals, most of them cows, dead in villages."
It was not immediately clear if the Dhobley and Afmadow estimates included the same reported deaths. "We estimate about 100 innocent civilians have been killed," said Dhobley elder Moalim Adan Osman. "Some are still missing and I think their bodies are somewhere in the forest."
"The airplanes have bombed large areas and the whole zone is jungle and no one can classify what is inside," he said. "They have bombed the nomads in the area indiscriminately."
Ethiopia, which has troops in Somalia backing the country's transitional government, said on Wednesday that Monday's US strike had not caused any civilian casualties but did not mention raids conducted by Ethiopian forces.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said the US bombardments instead killed only eight "terrorists" and wounded five, who were then captured by his troops, while another seven of the 20 extremists targeted may have escaped.
But Mohamed Ibrahim Guled, an Afmadow resident, said "a lot" of civilians had been killed by the US raid. "We haven't seen any Al-Qaeda members killed but what we can confirm is that a lot of innocent civilians have been killed by the American warplanes," he said.
"They hit civilian sites and forests where nomads keep animals." Dirir Moalim Hussein, a herder, said his wife and two other members of his family were killed as they tried to flee the attacks on their village of Bulo Haji between Dhobley and Afmadow.
"We are really scared," he said. "We heard bombing and heavy explosions over our village, it was dark and no one could see well. "I ran with two children, I don't know in what direction, but three of my family were killed, including my wife."
"I have nothing right now," Hussein said. "I have lost everything, they have bombed my cows and goats, we don't know what crime we committed and we have been punished for no reason," Hussein said.
The US has confirmed hitting at least one suspected Al-Qaeda position in southern Somalia on Monday but declined to comment on reports of airborne attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday reported by locals.
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text:
ESPN's new hire could transform sports television.
By Douglas Alden Warshaw
FORTUNE—We are steadily moving from a qualitative to a quantitative world, not just in the sciences but also in politics, sports, mass entertainment and many other creative endeavors.
The old guard—mostly over 45 (but not everybody over 45!)—is somewhere between despondent and pissed-off over this state of affairs. Many of these people feel that numbers lack nuance, that measurements lack emotions, that data lacks drama, and most of all that numerical insight lacks human understanding. And they've got good reason to feel this way, because it's in their DNA.
Human beings have evolved as storytellers, readers and listeners. Dating back to at least 2000 BC and the writing of the Gilgamesh—the epic poem from Mesopotamia, regarded as the first surviving piece of literature—we have explained our lives and the world around us in story. Narrative is not just how we discuss the world, it's how we interpret it, how we bundle our neurological impulses and responses to make sense of our immediate environment, which has far too many data points for us to ever live solely by the numbers.
But narrative has been digitally disrupted for most of us, since the mid-aughts. Now, instead of experiencing a packaged story we're able to simply choose the bits and pieces we want to read, listen to, or watch.
In sports, watching highlights has trumped the experience of the game, so much so that one NFL team is considering showing the RedZone channel on their stadium scoreboard during games. In music, songs have trumped albums. Images captured as pictures and video now trump the experience of life—go to any sporting event or rock concert and it's clear that most of us are far more interested in capturing the moment than truly experiencing it. It's no longer about being at the event, as much as it's about showing the world that you were at the event. Many of us now feel we can experience the world through an HD screen. Indeed, as of this summer we can merge ourselves with the screen by putting on a pair of internet enabled glasses that provide us with a steady stream of augmented reality and digitally annotates our life.
All of which means that if you are under 25 there's a good chance you are an active participant of the first generation since the Gilgamesh not compelled to put life into a narrative, if for no other reason than you're too distracted.
But the bits of life are not the guts of life.
In order to communicate causality, theory, insight, comedy or drama in depth—in order to truly move audiences, whether they be one person or millions—data still needs narrative, because people are hardwired to be moved by emotion.
For those of us who care about storytelling in the digital age, the question has become how do we get the best of both? How do we create new forms of storytelling that incorporate the quantitative into the qualitative?
Television, frankly, has been awful at this. And sports television in particular has been surprisingly awful at creatively integrating statistics into its coverage. For the most part it has simply littered the screen with scores and tickers—it's done a great job of bringing us multiple streams of real-time information, but it's done a lousy job of using data to bring any new dimension to what we're watching.
Nate Silver's arrival at ESPN just might change that.
ESPN, which doth bestride the sports world like a colossus, isn't just the biggest sports network in North America, it's also one of the continent's largest news and information companies. When it comes to news and data-gathering ESPN has scale—massive scale—and that ability to capture and parse big data is ESPN's next competitive advantage.
At ESPN Nate Silver is potentially an intellectual leader whose presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.
Just as Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics changed the way the lay person—or, at least, the people who write for the layperson—frames social issues by revealing how economic incentives affect human behavior on both micro and macro levels, Nate Silver through FiveThirtyEight.com parsed datasets and analyzed deltas to reveal human behavior in the aggregate and deliver fascinating takes on outcomes in the political world. Silver's ability to use numbers as a thread and weave data throughout a coherent narrative, when coupled with ESPN's resources, gives him the opportunity to transform how sports stories are told on the TV.
As we move from a qualitative to a quantitative world, as sabermetrics has migrated into all the major sports—and Moneyball has become Moneyballs—there are two big questions for sports journalists and sports fans:
- What do the available numbers tell us about patterns of performance? That is, how, when, where and why do sports executives, managers, coaches, players and agents make their decisions about personnel, contracts, pre-game and in-game strategy, and a host of other coaching and management decisions?
- How can the data be visually represented and animated to actually illustrate patterns of cause and effect with regard to the decisions and performances of the players and teams that we love and hate, to bring a new dimension to sports coverage?
Nate Silver isn't the Billy Beane of sports journalism—that honor goes to Bill James, the man who gave birth to sabermetrics—but Silver could be something special if ESPN supports him with production, vision and creativity. To get the most out of their substantial investment in Silver, ESPN needs to avoid thinking of him as just some new talking head who requires infographics instead of highlights. Instead, ESPN needs to start thinking up new production values, elements and animations to support Silver's style of storytelling.
The final piece of the Silver puzzle will involve his on-air personality. ESPN needs to think hard about the personal dynamics that are the emotional core of why viewers watch particular shows.
Case in point: ESPN's NBA studio show "NBA Countdown," a show that would stand out for its lack of creativity, vision and personality even if it wasn't inevitably compared to TNT's "Inside the NBA" starring Charles Barkley. This past season watching "NBA Countdown" featuring Magic Johnson, Michael Wilbon, Jalen Rose and Bill Simmons (ESPN's most innovative personality—in text) was like watching four guys who had just met at a convention and found themselves stuck together in an elevator. They were all there for the same reason, but they weren't going anywhere.
Enter Silver. (Please.)
TV shows at their core are about relationships—both friendship and friction—that's what bonds viewers to them, as the Today Show, Good Morning America, Charles Barkley & Co. and ESPN's own "Pardon The Interruption" make abundantly clear. ESPN now has a chance to recreate its NBA coverage with creative information, combined with "creative tension" between "The Quants" (Silver and Simmons) and "The Classics" (Wilbon and Magic). (Or as some might eventually call them, the Quants versus the Quaints.) But that will only work if ESPN puts serious production values—and resources—behind both Silver's and Simmons' insights.
The network has shown that it can be innovative when it comes to coaches X's and O's, but can they be innovative when it comes to zeros and ones?
That's really what will determine if ESPN can turn Silver into gold.
Douglas Alden Warshaw is a contributing writer for Fortune covering media and entertainment. He's been a producer at ABC News, ABC Sports, ESPN and NBC Sports & Olympics.
This piece can be found on Fortune Magazine's site at: http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/07/24/nate-silver-data-and-storytelling/