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Learn the latest: Read our 2014 update of "Real Teens Ask: Is Addiction Hereditary?"
On NIDA's Drug Facts Chat Day 2010, scientists answered a lot of your great questions. This one is from "I AM MIKE" from Jefferson Township High School in Trenton, New Jersey: "Are you more likely to do drugs if someone in your family does?"
Rolling the Dice
The short answer is "yes."
The risk of developing drug and alcohol problems is higher in children whose parents abuse alcohol or drugs—but it is NOT a guarantee. Research shows that children with parents who abuse alcohol or drugs are more likely to try alcohol or drugs and develop alcoholism or drug addiction. Why?
- Children whose parents abuse alcohol and drugs are more likely to have behavioral problems, which increases the risk of trying alcohol or drugs. They are also exposed to more opportunities to try these substances.
- Plus, children of parents who abuse drugs may inherit a genetic predisposition (or greater likelihood) for addiction—having an "addictive personality," so to speak.
Of course, most children of parents who abuse alcohol or drugs do not develop alcoholism or addiction themselves, so your genes do not write your destiny to become addicted to drugs. BUT to avoid that risk entirely, it's best not to start, and if you've already tried drugs or alcohol, stop now.
Help Is Out There
When someone has a drug problem, it's not always easy to know what to do. If someone you know is using drugs, encourage him or her to talk to a parent, school guidance counselor, or other trusted adult. Confidential resources are out there, like the Treatment Referral Helpline (1-800-662-HELP) offered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which refers callers to particular treatment facilities, support groups, and other local organizations. You can also locate substance abuse treatment centers in your state by going to samhsa.gov/treatment.
This is interesting but i dont have anybody that does drugs in my family that I know of
The risk of developing drug and alcohol problems is higher in children whose parents abuse alcohol or drugs—but it is NOT a guarantee. If you see drugs in your home, or at school, find an adult you can trust (like a school counselor or teacher) to learn how you can avoid getting involved with drugs. If you aren't sure what to do or just want to talk to someone, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/.
No I don't think so, I don't think addiction is hereditary but there is a great possibility that if the parents of a certain individual are drug dependents then their children also when they grow up will likely be a drug dependents. The best contraceptive or to take away from drugs is through sports. We must engage in sports to stay away from drugs, that our priority in [commercial link removed, per guidelines]. We bring you great sports and you can also earn a decent living through sports.
I absolutely objected that this drug addiction is hereditary. It's just that, teenager turns out into this for several reasons. Maybe their parents are more busy in offices, or maybe some other teenager lost hope in life so they've come up into this.
if your parents do drugs, it doesnt mean you are going to do drugs. Its possible. But, just as possible for kids that grow up without drugs. unless, you were born with drugs in your body. you can get help. & not be an addict.
yea i know how it is when u have both parents addicted to drugs i got through it and if anyone needs someone to talk to about it [email deleted, per guidelines]
Interesting.. perhaps I'm an exception when it comes to alcohol, my father used to consume alcohol a lot during his young years, I wouldn't say that it was an addiction but he would drink perhaps at least 1 liter of alcohol per week.. I on the other hand don't drink at all, but again I don't know if my dad was "addicted"....
On the other hand, I wonder if the same concepts of hereditary addictions apply to other types of addictions like those of pornography. Are there such things like addictive personalities, like some people get addicted more than others? I'm trying to better understand this.. i found some resources [commercial link removed, per guidelines] but if you know the answer or have other resources please share.
@Devin "Addictive personalities?" Not so much, but there are people with a genetic vulnerability to addiction, so yes, some people are more likely to become addicted than others, especially if they're around drug abuse growing up. A person's biology isn't the only variable—environment also counts, a lot. So, for instance, let's say you have a biological vulnerability to become addicted to drugs, but you don't ever experiment with drugs; therefore, you can't get addicted. Whether someone gets addicted or not really depends not just on their genes, but on risk factors in their environment, the quality of parenting they have, what communities they live in, and other things. And that applies to all addictions.
My father is addicted to perscription pill, just as his father was. My Dad is a cancer survivor and has been through many tramatic and painful experiences. I always worry about me or my sister becoming addicted, So I always try to avoid taking medications even over the counter pills until I can't stand it no more.
@Dallas Vann Thank you for sharing your experience and for bringing attention to the fact that some prescription medications can be addicting, just like illegal drugs. Still, if they are taken as prescribed, prescription medications can relieve suffering and help people get better. If not taken as prescribed by a doctor, or if you take someone else's pills, that is prescription drug abuse and can lead to trouble, including addiction. In light of your family history, it is good you are cautious. But most people can avoid the problems you worry about and also avoid needless suffering by following a doctor's orders, and never abusing prescribed medications.
yes. yes it is
it is hereditary, and addictive nature is something that's in you form birth, if not drugs, it will be something, be it food or sex, work stealing, but it will be something, the good thing is, there is hope, people have been known to stop, with the help of GOD, and a good program.
I agree ,addiction is hereditary. Its just dosnt have to be addicted to what your parents are addicted to . My mother has been addicted to opiates for 12 years now and I however am not addicted to opiates but I am addicted to Electronics.
@Tyrik, there is some evidence that addiction has a genetic component, meaning it might be in your genes. But, like we say in the article, there is no guaratee a child will become addicted to drugs or alcohol if his/her parent addicted. There is just a higher chance that it may happen.
@Ty, some science suggests that addiction is hereditary. This means that if someone in your family is addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, there is a higher chance that another family member will become addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. There are many factors that contribute to addiction. Genetics (addiction being hereditary) is just one.
@Unknown, you should speak to a trusted adult, like an aunt or uncle, grandparent, or your guidance counselor at school. They should be able to help you figure out what to do.


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Vintage Omaha
Season 22 Episode 19 | 52m 30s
Uncover how appraisals from 14 years ago have held up in the ever-changing antiques marketplace, including an Edgar Allan Poe daguerreotype, a Teco collection from around 1905, and a 1907 Frank Lloyd Wright archive. Can you guess which find's appraised value jumps to $80,000-$120,000?
Aired: 07/23/18
Expires: 07/23/22Video has closed captioning.
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Funding for ANTIQUES ROADSHOW is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance, Ancestry, and Consumer Cellular. Additional funding is provided by public television viewers.

subset: commoncrawl


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honey in the sun
Photos by Helena
Outfit Details:
cape – vintage
dress – thrifted (originally from Forever 21)
belt – thrifted
socks – can't remember
Harmony wedges – c/o Seychelles
bag – Rebecca Minkoff sample sale
La Marquise glasses – c/o BonLook
lipstick – Estee Lauder Melon
I spent two days in Warwick, with my dear friends Helena and Christine, for a welcome getaway at a charming bed and breakfast, the Inn at Stony Creek. Though it's less than two hours from the city, it feels like another world with all its nature and wildlife abound. I made friends with some geese and ducks, saw a chipmunk, and lots of deer frolicking about. We made the most of our two days with apple picking, hot cider, and lounging at the beautiful inn. Now that the leaves are starting to change, I can't wait to go back. If you're ever looking to get away for a few days, I highly recommend checking out the Inn at Stony Creek – they made our short stay truly wonderful.


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Receive Online Training on Plasma-Arc Cutting
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Saturday, November 1, 2008
Hypertherm Inc., Hanover, NH, has launched the Hypertherm Cutting Institute, an online classroom where visitors can learn more about plasma-arc-cutting (PAC) technology and Hypertherm's PAC products. When fully stocked with training programs, the institute will offer introductory courses on plasma technology and cutting applications aimed at high-school students, technical and university school students and fabricating-plant employees. Learn more at www.hyperthermcutting-institute.com.
See also: Hypertherm, Inc.
Related Enterprise Zones: Fabrication


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Must-sees in Florence and Surroundings
Cultural Sights
Uffizi Gallery
- Loggia degli Uffizi (12 minutes walking distance, 1 km)
- Open Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15 to 18:50
The Uffizi Gallery, a symbol of Florentine culture from the 16th century to the present, takes its name from the Uffizi palace designed by Giorgio Vasari and commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici in 1559. Intended to be the headquarters or major offices of the State Courts, around the mid-1500s Francesco I de' Medici had the idea of bringing together the immense art collections the Medici had amassed to the Uffizi. In the halls, visitors today can see masterpieces by the early Renaissance artists Giotto, Cimabue, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and many more. The beautiful figurative works are testimony of the new civilization that was born in Florence in the early 1400s and which earned Florence the name of the "cradle of the Renaissance".
Today, some of the most popular works here include the "Birth of Venus" and the "Primavera", both painted by Sandro Botticelli. The first is undoubtedly the most classic work of the master, the Goddess of Beauty, pure and with rapid flickered contours, appearing from the sea driven by the winds. In the "Privamera" or Spring, considered the masterpiece of the artist, Botticelli expresses his aesthetic vision of the Neoplatonic ideal, the perfect expression of beauty shared by the intellectual world of his time in Florence. Venus appears and everything around her is beautiful and in bloom, while Hermes driving away the clouds, the three dancing Graces, symbols of beauty and love, and Zephyr, whose breath spread flowers to Flora all encircle Spring.
Following these rooms are the rooms by Leonardo da Vinci with the scene of the "Annunciation", Raphael's "Madonna with the Goldfinch", Caravaggio and more, ending with the Hall of the eighteenth century that hosts a diverse group of works, mainly Italian and French, which then continue in the Vasari Corridor.
Palazzo Pitti
- Piazza Pitti (12 minutes walking distance, 1 km)
- Open Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15 to 18:50
The construction of the palace was commissioned by Luca Pitti, a prestigious Florentine banker, who in 1498 gave the project to Brunelleschi and work was started on the hill of Boboli in the Oltrarno.
Today, the building houses the Palatine Gallery, striking in its the luxurious appearance, quite different from that of the Uffizi, and the sumptuous surroundings in luxurious fabrics and rich display of frames.
The museum continues with the Monumental Apartments, inhabited at first by the Medici and Lorraine families and later by the King of Italy, and then by the Gallery of Modern Art, which houses the most famous nineteenth-century paintings by the Macchiaioli, the Italian equivalent of the French impressionists that advocated a suitable anti-academic painting to reproduce the "impression of reality", painting mostly natural scences with "spots" of color and light contrasts. To be admired in this section are works by Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini and Giovanni Fattori with the famous Rotonda Palmieri.
Palazzo Pitti also houses other important museums such as the Museo degli Argenti, the Costume Gallery dating back to the Napoleonic era to the early decades of the twentieth century, the Carriage Museum and the Museum of Porcelains which includes Italian, French and Viennese pieces as well as work by Meissen.
From behind Palazzo Pitti, one can head into the Boboli Gardens, one of the most beautiful Italian gardens existing today with its boulevards, fountains, squares and statues. The garden was requested by Eleanor of Toledo in 1550 and designed by Tribolo Buontalenti.
Accademia Gallery
- Via Ricasoli, 60 (18 minute walking distance, 1.4 km)
- Open daily except Mondays, from 8:15 to 18:50
- biglietto con prenotazione consigliata, disponibile in reception
The origin of this collection dates back to 1784 when the Grand Duke Peter Leopold of the Lorraines wished to endow a collection of ancient works of art to the Academy of Fine Arts to serve as examples for students. Emblem of the Gallery is the most famous piece of sculpture in the history of Italian art, Michelangelo's David, sculpted between 1501 and 1504. The David portrays the biblical hero ready to face the giant Goliath and was originally located in Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of the Florentine republic itself: vigilant and victorious against all enemies.
Medici Chapels
- Piazza Madonna degli Aldobrandini, 6 (12 minute walking distance, 1 km)
- Open Monday to Sunday, 8:15 to 13:50
Part of the monumental complex of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the Medici Chapels are the burial grounds of the majority of the Medici and Lorraine families, whose tombstones are recognizable in the floor. Rare expression of Florentine Baroque, the chapels were worked on for over three centuries by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence with the use of materials of great value as well as cost.
Brancacci Chapel
- Piazza del Carmine (8 minute walk, 700 m)
- Open Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00, on Sunday 13-17.
- Closed on Tuesday
Located inside the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, the Brancacci chapel is one of the highest examples of Renaissance painting, a collaboration of the two greatest artists of the early fifteenth century: Masaccio and Masolino from Panicale. The theme of the frescoes is the story of man's salvation, from the Original Sin to the intervention by Peter as the direct heir of Christ and founder of the Roman Church. Noteworthy of special attention are the scenes: "The Temptation of Adam and Eve" by Masolino and "the Expulsion from Paradise", considered as Masaccio's greatest masterpiece.
Cathedral - Duomo
- (18 minute walk, 1.4 km)
- Cathedral: free admission Monday to Friday 10:00 to 17:00; Saturday 10:00 to 16:45; Sunday 13:30 to 16:45
- Dome (463 steps): entry ticket, open from Monday to Friday 8:30 to 19:00 and Saturday 8:30 to 17:40
The construction began on the ancient foundations of the church of Santa Reparata in 1296 by Arnolfo di Cambio, then was continued by Giotto from 1334 until his death in 1337. In 1412, the new cathedral, a perfect expression of the Gothic style, was dedicated to Santa Maria del Fiore and finally consecrated by Pope Eugene IV on March 25, 1436 when Brunelleschi's dome was completed.
The inside of the Cupola was painted in the mid-sixteenth century by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari with a fresco depicting the "Last Judgement".
Old Bridge - Ponte Vecchio
- (12 minutes walking distance, 1 km)
Built in Roman times on wooden piles of stone, up until 1218 this was the only bridge across the Arno in Florence. Butchers and vegetable vendors set up their shops here and at the end of the sixteenth century were replaced by the shops of goldsmiths and jewelers to give greater prestige to the bridge that had become, according to the Grand Duke Ferdinando I, "a place much frequented by gentlemen and visitors".
Pharmaceutical-Profume Workshop of Santa Maria Novella
- Via della Scala, 16 (6 minute walk, 500 m)
- Open everyday from 10.30 to 19.00
The origins of the Officina of Santa Maria Novella go back to 1221 as a result of the work by the Dominican friars who grew herbs in their gardens to prepare medications, balms and ointments for the small infirmary of the monastery. Today, the pharmacy continues to use raw materials of the highest quality following the same traditional methods used by the Dominican monks. Lily extract, essence of gardenia, amber cologne, calendula cream, shampoo with pomegranate, evening tea, lavender salts, melissa water, lemon balm, Medici liqueur, elixir of roses: these are just some of the great variety of products for sale in the entrance hall.
The workshop museum is housed within the same rooms that were used as the laboratories with the aim to share and bring back to life the machines once used for manufacturing all of the products, from glass to ancient ceramics from the pharmacy to bronze objects and copper kettles.
Shopping: Markets and Outlets
Markets in Florence
Antiques at The Fortezza (18 minutes walking distance, 1.4 km)
- Viale Filippo Strozzi
- Tel. (+39) 055 3283550
- Third weekend of every month from 8.00 to 19.00
In the gardens of the Fortezza da Basso, the antiques trade fair offers furniture, gifts, fine collectibles, books, prints and many other interesting, small antique items.
"Mercato delle Pulci" Flea Market (24 minutes on foot, 2 km
- Piazza dei Ciompi
- Open daily from 9.00 to 19.30
- The last Sunday of the month the market extends to all the streets around the square
Around the loggia designed by Vasari, you'll find lamps, tea sets, cutlery, furniture, prints, books and jewelry, all items of a more or less distant past. Strolling between the stalls, collectors will find it easy to find an antique and tourists might find a unique, original object to take back as a memory from their time in Florence.
San Lorenzo Market (12 minutes on foot, 1 km)
- Closed Sundays and Mondays
All around the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the market consists of stalls of clothes, leather goods, and typical souvenirs for tourists who want to buy a memento of their visit to Florence.
Mercato del Porcellino (12 minutes on foot, 1 km)
- Piazza del Mercato Nuovo
- Closed Sunday and Monday morning
Here visitors will find articles in Florentine straw, hand embroidery, flowers, gifts in leather or wood – all perfect souvenirs to take back home.
Outlet Prada
- Località Levane, Montevarchi
- Tel. (+39) 055 91931
- Open Monday to Saturday, 9:30 to 19:00, Sunday 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Take the highway "A1 Florence-Rome" and exit at "Valdarno". Head toward Montevarchi and as you leave the town behind, turn left and maintain the left.
THE MALL - Outlets for Gucci, Valentino, Armani, Ferragamo, Loro Piana, Tod'S, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and more
- Via Europa 8, Leccio, Reggello
- Open Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 19:00, Sunday 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Take the highway A1 Florence-Rome and exit at "Incisa", turn right following signs to "Florence-Pontassieve". Continue for about 5 Km until you reach the turnaround with signs to the parking lot for The Mall.
The Principe Hotel can arrange shuttle service on request (round trip) with departures at 8.00 or 11.30 and return trip at 15.00 or 18:15.
Booking Online
PROMO CODE request for AGENCIES/TO
Honeymoon in Florence
A fairy tale setting or from the past for a romantic honeymoon
Your special occasion
An ideal location for private elegant receptions and parties


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As a unique, fun, and bright brand, Lilly Pulitzer has a diverse collection of girls clothing for vacationing, formal occasions, or casual events. Her main desire was to create a brand that captured the true spirit of the wearer, girls who were carefree, fun, and ready for adventure. With her exclusive line of clothing girls are able to feel their best and show off their personal style all at the same time. Parents also love the brand as she not only focuses on girls clothing but also clothing for women and teens. Whenever someone talks about the clothes that she has available, the first thing that they think about are the Lilly Pulitzer dresses, designed with brilliant prints that are designed to impress.
How Lilly Pulitzer Started
While growing up in Palm Beach, Lilly was in a position to where she had a lot of spare time on her hands as her friends lived closer into the cities and rarely visited. During her downtime, she began designing dresses that accommodated her every day activities and her first piece was a little shift dress with high slits on both sides. Little did she know that this simplistic style would soon become the basis for her entire brand – beautiful resort style dresses. As a young fashion designer she didn't care about what other people thought of her style and continued making more pieces that accentuated her personality and her surroundings. By using bright and tropical colors and patterns in her designs, the Lilly Pulitzer dresses quickly became the talk of the town.
Where is Lilly Pulitzer Now?
Everything that is available for sale through the brand is designed to emulate the personality that Lilly has. Each dress, top, bottom, accessory, or pair of shoes has the most inclusive patterns with immaculate details that you wouldn't be able to find on other articles of resort wear. The main purpose of the brand is to create girls clothing for women and young girls who are proud to be different. Instead of relying on traditional basics that you can buy from relatively any retailer such as Gymboree, Lilly Pulitzer offers items that are "essentially Lilly". If you're the type of shopper with eclectic fashion that is always looking for the latest pieces to make a statement, Lilly Pulitzer dresses are the perfect addition to your wardrobe. For the fun, artistic, and loud women, this brand has everything that you're asking for.
Shop Lilly Pulitzer a-line dresses, casual dresses, casual pants, casual skirts, dresses, pants, skirts, tops.


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It is now available with exciting features to enrich your shopping experience with Mall of the Emirates
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V-6 Exhaust Manifold Welding Jig
Do you have an exhaust manifold that is cracked?
Do you want to weld up the outside of the flanges so you can port the inside to make more HP?
To help keep your exhaust manifolds from warping when welded it is suggested you bolt them to the cylinder heads when welding. This is difficult for most because most do not have their cylinders heads off.
Made from one inch thick 1018 cold rolled steel. I talked to a friend who has a fabrication/welding shop and has many years experience. I wanted to make them out of 3/4" thick. He suggested to be safe I should make them out of one inch but they would weigh 16 pounds! So I did. The cost difference between 3/4" and 1" is not that much.
Tip; On my 88 I had one flange to the crossover break free from the header. You should add some weld to the other side of the flanges. You should also add some weld to the hex nuts. Tap these nuts before installing the crossover.
They just fit in a postal flat rate box. I cut a pice of thin pylywwod for the bottom of the box and I bought HD fiber corner protectors for each end. Taped with filament tape. Shipping is $18 anywhere in the USA. Yes it is more but the extra cost covers the plywood piece and the corner protectors.
I do not offer free shipping.
Because I use postal flat rate boxes for heavy orders there is no program that can add the proper amount of shipping to every order. So all shipping is added manually by myself after you place your order. That is explained here: Shipping added later explanation
When you place an order the shipping amount will show $0.00. Soon after you place an order you will receive an email confirmation that shows the amount of shipping that was added to your order.
Shipping: Shipping is $16.00 in a medium flat rate postal box. (USA)


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Showing 1-24 of 97 items found in Shopping
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At the pinnacle of Chicago's famed Magnificent Mile, Water Tower Place is Chicago's premier shopping destination. Its stunning eight-level atrium features more than 100 of your favorite stores and restaurants plus a mix of distinctive specialty shops and boutiques. It offers a unique, high-energy urban shopping experience you simply won't find anywhere else in the city. In short, Water Tower Place is the place to shop.
Chicago Premium Outlets, Aurora
Find impressive savings at 140 designer and name-brand outlet stores, such as Ann Taylor, Armani, Banana Republic, Calvin Klein, Coach, Cole Haan, Gap Outlet, J.Crew, Lacoste, Nike, Polo Ralph Lauren, Salvatore Ferragamo, Michael Kors, SAKS Fifth Avenue Off 5th, Theory, Vera Bradley and more. A recent expansion will bring additional stores in the spring of 2016 making this even more of a Midwest Shopping destination! In Aurora, 37 miles west of Chicago.
With more than 200 manufacturer and retail outlet stores offering up to 70% off, serious shoppers flock to Gurnee Mills. The diverse variety of stores includes Bass Pro Shops, Saks Fifth Avenue Off 5th, Nike Factory Store, Gap, Last Call by Neiman Marcus and Levi's. Dining options include Rainforest Cafe or a quick bite at one of the two food courts. Non-shoppers can check out Rink Side Sports and Entertainment Center for ice skating, arcade games and laser tag, or catch a movie at Gurnee Marcus Cinema.
The ritzy North Michigan Avenue shopping district boasts a dizzying array of stores, including Nordstrom, H&M, Tiffany, Chanel and the flagship Crate & Barrel store. Upscale shopping centers include Water Tower Place and The 900 Shops. In just eight blocks, you can shop at over 420 exclusive stores and boutiques, enjoy fine dining at over 200 restaurants and discover unsurpassed hospitality at over 50 hotels.
The avenue's most fashionable address features an unprecedented shopping experience at Bloomingdale's flagship store, along with 70 fine shops and restaurants. Enjoy six levels of spectacular shopping at retailers like Coach, Gucci, Maxmara, and Mark Shale.
One of Illinois' top tourist destination, anchored by Nordstrom, Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Sears, and JC Penney. Woodfield has nearly 300 stores, restaurants, and specialty shops all under one roof.
This landmark development on State St. features first-to-Chicago retailers, signature dining and entertainment venues within a five-story atrium. The center has direct access to the CTA Red and Blue Lines as well as Chicago's extensive pedway system.
Enclosed, two-level shopping center featuring Apple, Coach, A/X Armani, Lego, Gilly Hicks and over 150 fine shops & restaurants.
VILLE:Orland Park
More than 55 dealers: antiques, collectibles, jewelry, furniture, old toys. Two miles east of Galena.
Conveniently located at the corner of Knoxville Ave. and Prospect Road in the heart of Peoria. We invite you to explore the boutiques and eateries along our historic boardwalk. Enjoy a gourmet lunch, shop for a new outfit, find traditional and modern home decor, or surprise a loved one with a bouquet of fresh flowers. The quality and sophistication of the Junction City experience rivals anything found in Illinois.
Over 150 specialty stores with outdoor ambiance! Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Macy's, Lord & Taylor and Sears, The Cheesecake Factory, Maggiano's, The Clubhouse and Mon Ami Gabi restaurants. Voted the #1 shopping center.
VILLE:Oak Brook
The Shoppes at Grand Prairie ~ a vibrant, open-air lifestyle center in Peoria ~ is the premier dining and shopping destination for the region. The Shoppes features an exciting blend of retailers and restaurants, along with our anchor stores: Bergner's, DSW, Jillian's and Dick's Sporting Goods. The center is highlighted by an inviting, lushly landscaped outdoor environment that features animal sculptures throughout the center, the nationally acclaimed Holocaust Memorial Button exhibit filled with 11 million buttons, the Caterpillar children's play area, and weekend entertainment.
Chicago's newest shopping destination features 50 world-class specialty shops. 15 sumptuous restaurants, five elegant hotels, one magnificent Nordstrom and over 2,500 parking spaces.
Opened in 1958, this is one of the first strip-mall shopping centers in America -- 27 stores are locally owned and operated. Bakery, hardware, liquor, florist, restaurant, and the Neighborhood Co-op featuring local grown produce.
A lifestyle and entertainment center offering streetside shopping and dining in a suburban setting. A vibrant shopping alternative including Carson Pirie Scott, AMC-Loews Theater, GameWorks, Laugh Out Loud Improve Theater, and some of Chicago's top restaurants. Store, restaurant, and theater hours vary.
Enjoy indoor shopping throughout the year at SouthPark Mall. This mall features some 200 stores that include larger department stores like Dillards, VonMaur, and Yonkers. Specialty and gift shops, well-known clothing stores, and large food court make this a great place to shop.
Shop Von Maur, Carson Pirie Scott, JCPenney, Target, and nearly 150 specialty shops. Kids love the Yorktown Express train and the free Treehouse Adventure Play Area. Experience exciting tastes, styles and entertainment at The Shops On Butterfield.
Mainstreet shopping & dining destination anchored by Ikea, Macy's and Bass Pro Shops. Ted's Montana Grill, Gordon Biersch and Johnny Rockets are a sampling of the restaurants. Barnes & Noble, H & M, Coldwater Creek and Coach represent the many retailers.
DuPage County, Chicago's Western Suburbs - Choose from a large variety of restaurants from fine dining to casual fare. Catch a movie or browse our wonderful shops.
Anchored by JCPenney and Macy's, Alton Square Mall is the area's regional mall destination. A full-service food court, U.S. Post Office, satellite city library and Christian Science Reading Room are also featured at the mall. Hours: Sunday, noon - 6 p.m. Monday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Marketplace Shopping Center offers all of the big names from larger cities, but without the long wait lines! Shop everything from the Gap, Limited, and Banana Republic, to Sephora, Finish Line and Eddie Baur. Complete with four anchor department stores, this shopping center also offers a varied food court, multiple restaurants, and even a carousel for the little ones.
Town and Country Shopping Center
From discount apparel at Burlington Coat Factory to a unique art gallery shop. Several shops and restaurants to choose from.
Features more than 115 specialty stores and a food court. Super regional center serving the entire Central Illinois community. 1933 antique double deck carousel.
Featuring food, shopping and entertainment, Eastland Mall is the family friendly center that is sure to please everyone with a wide variety of stores and activities. We know you will find great shopping at stores like Kohls, American Eagle, Macy's, Hollister, Justice, Limited, Rogers & Hollands, Talbot's, Victoria's Secret and more.


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The Chevrolet Sonic makes its presence known by its good looks and efficiency. This incredible vehicle is absolutely spacious and comfortable as compared to other cars in its class. Test-drive a Chevrolet Sonic and explore more about its amazing features. Cappellino Chevrolet in Boston, NY is proud to feature the Chevrolet Sonic. Check out our inventory of new Chevrolet vehicles. You can also make the most of the financing options that we are offering at our dealership
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text: To celebrate National Trails Day and to enjoy the outdoors, I joined up with a bunch of women from my church in Eugene for a day of hiking along the Umpqua River in southern Oregon. Following a portion of the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway, we stopped for three short hikes to beautiful cascading waterfalls on the north Umpqua. Each building in size and awe-power, the waterfalls filled the day with relaxing river sounds and a chance to get away and enjoy the fellowship of other women in the wild! Continue reading


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Amid the instruments and musicians practicing, another group of people were at an Oak Harbor music store doing something a bit different.
About six people were in a large room at Click Music honing their juggling skills and having a lot of fun doing it.
The informal group of jugglers, known as the Whidbey Island Jugglers, spend their Wednesday evenings at the popular music store tossing clubs and balls to each other and off the walls to improve their dexterity.
"There's nobody in charge," said Joy Thompson, an Oak Harbor resident. "We just come and practice together." She added that members come together to teach others, improve their juggling abilities, laugh and have fun.
The group has been meeting every Wednesday night for about a month. Currently about a dozen or so jugglers stop by to practice. Thompson spent part of the session tossing plastic clubs to her husband, Dave, while others were busy tossing small, four-ounce balls around.
Thompson said she started juggling before ukulele lessons.
Fellow juggler Glena Kelso, who started the hobby several months ago, also uses it as a break from her piano lessons.
"It uses a different part of my brain," Kelso, who also spent time tandem juggling with her husband, Duncan, said. "It relaxes me."
Oak Harbor resident Julie Wilson, who is also a quilter, produced several balls that the group uses. The fabric balls were filled with plastic beads or aquarium gravel.
"You can't stay worried while you're doing this. You're laughing too hard," Wilson said while showing off several of the balls she produced.
The group has been meeting at Click Music, which is located on NE Seventh Avenue in Oak Harbor. Thompson said the high ceilings in the room the jugglers use are a help. While a half dozen or so group members were busy juggling, bands and musicians were busy rehearsing in performance rooms contained in the building.
Thompson cited Bellingham residents Amiel Martin — of the Flying Karamazovs and the Juggling Jollies — along with his wife, Hallie, as mentors to the group.
It will cost an eager juggler $3 to participate in the session. Equipment is provided. The money raised pays for the room and development of a website.
The Whidbey Island Jugglers meet Wednesdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. For more information, simply show up or email firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Series of deadly car bombs target Iraqi Shiites
Issued on: Modified:
At least 31 people were killed on Friday after a wave of car bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslims tore through two Iraqi markets, the latest attacks to highlight growing tensions between the country's Sunni, Shiite and ethnic Kurdish factions.
Four car bombs struck two outdoor markets in predominantly Shiite areas of Iraq on Friday, killing at least 31 people and wounding dozens at a time of mounting discontent among minority Sunnis.
The bombings in Baghdad and a town south of the capital were the latest attacks by suspected Sunni insurgents trying to re-ignite sectarian violence and undermine the Shiite-led government.
A recent spike of particularly lethal insurgent attacks comes at a time of anti-government protests by Iraq's disaffected Sunnis, including tens of thousands who rallied Friday in Sunni areas in western and northern Iraq.
Demonstrators blocked Iraq's main highway to Jordan near the city of Ramadi, performing Muslim prayers, the highlight of the religious week. Ramadi is the capital of the Anbar province and a former al-Qaida stronghold that saw some of the fiercest fighting against U.S. forces during the Iraq war.
Protesters have rejected calls by an al-Qaida-linked group that they take up arms against the government, but there is concern militants are trying to exploit mounting Sunni discontent.
Friday's bombings targeted an outdoor pet market in Baghdad's northern Kazimyah neighborhood and in a vegetable market in the Shiite town of Shomali in Hillah province, south of the Iraqi capital.
Every Friday, Iraqis converge on markets to shop and spend family time during the Muslim weekend. Markets are a frequent target for militants who seek to inflict large numbers of casualties.
In Baghdad, the first car bomb exploded around mid-morning at the entrance to the Kazimyah market, two police officers said. When panicked shoppers tried to flee the area, a second parked car exploded a few meters (yards) away, according to the officers.
At least 17 people were killed and 45 were wounded in the two blasts, police said. All the victims were civilians.
About an hour later, two car bombs exploded simultaneously at the Shomali market, killing at least 14 people and wounding 26, two police officers said.
Health officials confirmed the casualty figures in each attack. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
Violence has decreased since the worst sectarian fighting in 2006-2007, but insurgents carry out near-daily attacks on security forces and civilians in an attempt to undermine the Shiite-led government.
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StrategyBy Gary Bolles
Technology: Logistics
Any efficient logistics sequence begins with a clear link to the company's strategy for delivering customer value.
Just about the time the first cave people figured out how to acquire sharp rocks from one group and long sticks from another, and then to deliver spears to a third, the first supply chain was created. Soon after that, it's likely that the first chief logistics officers were born, who immediately began determining how to acquire rocks and sticks faster and cheaper.
Until recently, the basics of supply chain logistics hadn't changed much since those early days. But the world has grown increasingly complex. Companies are sourcing product globally far more often than before, and supplying customers whose expectations for timely delivery and rock-bottom pricing have increased exponentially. Competitive pressures are mounting to squeeze out costs for "product at rest and product in movement," and now the race is on: Every player in the supply chain wants just-in-time everything. And even companies that traffic in intangible offerings, such as services, can learn from the efficiency mentality with which consumer packaged goods and other product-focused companies approach their supply chain logistics.
The most fundamental measure of efficient logistics is your efficiency ratio: Are your revenues growing faster than your inventory? If revenue growth equals inventory growth, your efficiency ratio is 1. If inventory is rising faster than revenuesyour ratio is less than 1you have a problem. Anything over 1 is therefore pretty gooduntil you consider that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has a torrid efficiency ratio of 2.4, and its closest competitor can muster only a 1.7. That's a competitive advantage you can take to the stock marketexactly what Wal-Mart has done.
Experts say it's possible to get savings of up to 10 percent on logistics costs if a company has yet to focus on an end-to-end improvement drive. But increased efficiencies in the supply chain must first be linked to a corporate strategy that's maniacally focused on providing value to the customer, such as delivering products by a certain time once a firm order is placed. Only then can you determine the ways in which you can compress time and cost to create the most flexible and responsive supply chain possible.
"If you look at the leaders in any industry," says Art Mesher, a former Gartner Inc. analyst who's now chief logistics officer for software vendor Descartes Systems Group, "the top leaders are becoming great at logistics, because they're finding they can get a competitive advantage."
Tell Your CEO: We can use our goods-related capital more efficientlybut only if we can link our logistics plans to a clearly defined corporate strategy.
Ask Your Chief Logistics Officer: Where are the "pain points" in our supply chain, so we can determine exactly how much of an improvement we think we can deliver?
Tell Your CFO: We need to set dollar targets for savings to be generated so we have some goals to shoot for.
Any effort to improve logistics through technology begins with the business processesand the peopleit's designed to transform.
The real goal of efficient logistics is demand-based replenishment, which depends on projections for demand being initiated where the goods are neededthe end customerand rippling back through the supply chain. With that in place, the thinking goes, every supplier throughout the chain could perform the most effective action at the best possible time.
Yet that "100-percent optimized" supply chain is a myth. A supply chain is simply a series of decisions and actions, each of which can change based on new business requirements. The goal of logistics should be to increase the amount of information flowing throughout the chain, and to create the most flexible structure possible to adapt to changing conditions, rather than to drive for some fixed and unattainable level of optimization that inevitably will falter under the pressure of changing circumstances.
Unfortunately, human factors can grind even the best-designed logistics system to a halt. Suppose your grocery clerk decides to take the four different cans of soup you're buying, and scan the bar code of a single can four times. There goes your supply chain visibilityand with it your ability to effectively move the right amount of product to that store in the future. "You can have the most wonderful information system in the world," says Ed Feitzinger, senior vice president of logistics outsourcer Menlo Worldwide Technologies, "but you're still dependent on a clerk typing something in somewhere."
Ask Your Counterparts in Partner It Groups: How are you dealing with process improvements in your organization?
Ask Your Staff: What are we doing to make sure we've incorporated an understanding of human factors into the technology we're delivering?
Ask Your Chief Logistics Officer: What do I need to learn about logistics?
There's software to focus on every part of the logistics management process. The trick is to make sure it's all synced up.
In the past, key parts of the logistics process have been managed using a hodgepodge of techniques, from paper forms to custom-designed spreadsheets to enterprise-class applications. But now, software can automate just about every component of the sequence, including order entry and processing, requisitioning and procurement, strategic sourcing, warehouse management and partner relationship management.
Consider cross-docking, the practice of coordinating supplier shipments so they can be mixed, matched and immediately shipped out again without requiring goods to be warehoused. It's theoretically possible to do this without software managing such complex handoffs, but few chief logistics officers would want to attempt such a feat without systems to support their efforts.
However, this proliferation of applications has for many companies created a mishmash of software that keeps logistics managers from getting the timely information they need. According to AMR Research Inc., the average U.S. manufacturer and retailer has 12 order management systems. That means many companies have substantial holes in their ability to get their supply chain logistics in order. Because many companies' ERP systems never really dealt with the myriad of logistics implementation issues like shipping optimization and transportation purchasing, there's currently a wave of upgrades and consolidation taking place that's similar to the series of integration steps many businesses went through with their earlier ERP efforts.
Yet even when such software is consolidated, lack of external integration is a problem. "You can put in a beautiful system that provides you with real-time information," says Menlo's Feitzinger, whose company controls about $7 billion in annual freight purchases. "But if your transportation carriers can't give you reliable information, then you have a great systembut you don't have great information."
Ask Your IT Staff: How many systems do we have that touch logistics, and what are the major stumbling blocks to integrating information from them?
Ask Your CFO: How much are we spending on services such as shipping, and how timely is the information we receive about what we're spending?
Ask Your Chief Logistics Officer: What tools do you think you'll require to get the information you need for better logistics?
Ultimately, your ability to create flexible logistics processes with suppliers and customers will come down to standardsand there's the rub.
If the linchpin of supply chain logistics is the flow of information, then the standards used to exchange information between players in the supply chain are key. In the early 1990s, large companies known as "channel masters" were able to force their suppliers to adopt Electronic Data Interchange standards, or simply stop being suppliers. But many suppliers who adopted EDI are less than eager to shift over to newer standards such as XMLin part because there are so many standards to choose from. "There are hundreds and hundreds of different standards that exist," says Descartes' Mesher, "and everybody has a business issue of not subordinating to someone else."
How will the inevitable disagreements over standards be resolved? Mesher points to several strategies for companies attempting to put together next-generation supply chains. The first is the channel master, the 800-pound gorillas such as Dell and Wal-Mart who can simply mandate standards that its suppliers must follow. The second Mesher calls "the chameleon," characterized by companies such as FedEx Corp. Using varying levels of business process customization, these companies present whatever face is most appropriate for the customer, adapting heavily for larger customers and guiding smaller customers toward more homogenized services.
The third approach is "the grange member," smaller members who band together to aggregate their buying and selling power in hopes of mandating standards. But historically, such initiatives fail miserably because their members often can't remain consolidated forever. The last approach is the "Zen master," which is a company that assumes it will continually be buffeted by the decisions of its larger customers. Ultimately, most companies will need to have at least some characteristics of the Zen master, designing their logistics processes to support continuous improvementand to be able to interact with new and existing channel partners as flexibly as possible.
Ask Your Chief Logistics Officer: Which industry standards do our customers and suppliers want to supportand which ones do we want them to support?
Ask Your Business Strategists: Which standards approach is most clearly linked to our company's strategic goals?
Ask Your Chief Technology Officer: Which standards should we support to keep from being buffeted by the winds of change?


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For one of my school projects, I and another student had to make a Mediterranean cooking video.
For one of my school projects, I and another student had to make a Mediterranean cooking video. We decided to do a Mediterranean pizza. Sorry no picture for this one, my family ate it before we could take a picture of it. But anyway here is the recipe!
Mediterranean Pizza
Focaccia Bread Crust
- 3 cups of bread flour
- 2 1/2 tsp salt and to taste
- 1/2 tsp yeast
- 1 cup of warm water
- 6 tablespoons of olive oil
Mix together yeast into a bowl of warm water and let dissolve.
In a mixing bowl place all dry ingredients, then add dissolved yeast into the dry mix.
Add in a third of the oil oil and continue to mix.
When dough begins to ball up in the mixer it is ready, the dough should be pliable but not sticky. Wrap and let rest for 1 hr.
On a sheet try place the rest of the oil and spread out the dough, then flip the dough over and continue to spread out in a free-form shape. Make sure the dough is covered in the oil, this will make it more moist and give the bread flavor. Then sprinkle salt on top.
Bake the bread until it begins to brown.
- 8 oz tomato sauce
- 6 oz goat cheese
- 2 T paprika
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- 1 T corriander
- 3 cloves of garlic
- salt to taste
- black pepper to taste
- 1 handful of basil
- 3 cups of pre-cooked shredded chicken
- 3 T of olive oil
Take out the bread from the oven and let cool.
Marinate the chicken in the olive oil, paprika, and nutmeg, with a dash of salt and pepper. Then fridge for 1 hr.
Roast the garlic.
While chicken is marinating, with a fork mix the cheese with the roasted garlic and corriander in a bowl.
When the bread is cool to the touch, spread the tomato sauce, sprinkle the chicken, and then crumbled the cheese on top. Set in the oven to bake.
When the cheese begins to melt, place the basil leaves around in a simple fashion and continue to bake.
Serve and enjoy!


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Information Security
- FeatureAchieving Access Control with Symark PowerBroker 5.0
- FeatureSonicWALL TZ 180W firewall product review
- FeatureGuardium SQL Guard 6.0 product review
- FeatureProofpoint On Demand Product Review
- FeatureKnoppix-NSM removes complexity of Snort-based network security monitoring
- FeatureSecurity 7 Award winners successfully integrate security and business
- FeatureDevice Management: Pointsec Protector software review
- FeatureLog management reins in security and network device data
- FeatureBeyondTrust Privilege Manager 3.0 product review
- FeatureAutomated configuration management tools clean out redundant rules
- FeatureLearn to balancing security and usability
- FeatureInterview: CISO explains enterprise's access control policies
- FeatureVendor compliance management: Are health care software vendors HIPAA compliant?
- FeatureViewpoint: Hard drive encryption growing
- FeatureRedefining free security software
iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
Security 7 Award winners successfully integrate security and business
The 2007 Information Security magazine Security 7 Award winners demonstrate how their strategies for integrating their security programs into the overall business.
Security 7
Seven Winners, One Mission
In recognizing seven individuals working in different markets, you might think their experiences and abilities would be quite diverse. And while it's true that all of this year's Security 7 Award winners possess their own traits and talent, all are unified by a single mission: align information security with the business. Across the board, the seven winners have succeeded in guiding large security operations toward this unification while keeping some of the world's largest and most sensitive networks safe from harm. The following profiles shed light on their accomplishments and provide insight into what drives some of the brightest practitioners in the industry.
in critical infrastructure systems by establishing a program to develop language owners can insert in procurement contracts with vendors.
required by one of the largest research universities in North America; a staunch advocate of defending against cyberfraud and harassment.
that protect the systems and intellectual property of one of the country's largest defense contractors; manages a staff of 41 and a $16M annual budget.
security operations center with a small staff and instituted successful two-factor authentication in 30 locations.
within his company and in the security community, delivering security as a managed service within the corporate walls, and identity exchange programs industry-wide.
access to patient records through data mined from hundreds of applications; safeguards privacy of thousands and maintains the open nature mandated in a teaching hospital.
of real-time market pricing information, news and trading services to 330,000 financial services professionals, via a program that promotes service management within the security organization.
Greater Good
By Michael S. Mimoso
| Opportunity knocks; sometimes uncertainty answers. Michael Assante spent the greater part of his early career securing the assets, people and facilities of a major Midwest utility. But all the while, he kept a watchful eye on the disturbing news and trends surrounding critical infrastructure and the SCADA control systems that support it.
"There were marked improvements in frontline IT systems and their protection profiles, but back-end systems were struggling," Assante says. "Systems grew that weren't intended to be connected, but became connected. I started worrying about these systems."
Enter opportunity in the form of an opening with Idaho National Laboratory, a facility in Idaho Falls dedicated to nuclear energy research and focused on partnerships with the U.S. Department of Energy and Homeland Security.
Enter uncertainty in the form of relocation. The prospect of moving to Idaho and working and living near Yellowstone National Park and in the shadow of the Grand Teton mountains was a daunting contrast to the life Assante and his family knew in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio.
"It's quite beautiful here," Assante says. "I was immediately impressed with the lab and the amount of industry experience here, the guidance they provide to industry. I realized they weren't in business just to do work for the U.S. government, but to bring value to the end user."
Opportunity won out, and Assante, INL's infrastructure protection strategist, joined the lab two years ago. He was immediately struck by the lack of emphasis put on security by control systems vendors, who countered pleas for improvements with the claim that customers just weren't asking for security. Instead, customers were bearing the expense of tacking it on. "They weren't really resourced or prepared to ask for [security from vendors]," Assante says.
Assante set out to provide control system managers with language to insert into procurement contracts to ensure vendors address security concerns. He sought help from Alan Paller at the SANS Institute and Will Pelgrin, director of the New York State Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination, to establish a SCADA Security Summit. The event in March 2006 brought together more than 400 SCADA experts and vendors, and kick-started the SCADA Procurement Project. Recently, version 1.6 of the Cyber Security Procurement Language for Control Systems was posted on the Multi-State ISAC site, msisac.org.
"Vendors were forced to make changes they knew they had to make," Assante says.
Jerry Freese, director of IT security engineering at Assante's former employer, American Electric Power, praises Assante as a man of vision and one who is driven to execute that vision.
"He's a strategic thinker, very focused on the global security threat and astute at distilling that focus into relevant business and critical infrastructure protection planning," Freese says.
SCADA systems were plagued by some common vulnerabilities, regardless of the provider, Assante says. For example, extraneous services were turned on by default, risky configurations needed to be addressed, as did some patch management, authentication, and weak policy management issues. The group edited the procurement language for months, and both sides made necessary compromises.
"It's an incredible resource for asset owners," Assante says, "who can cut-and-paste the language into procurements with vendors to get more secure systems."
Idaho National Lab takes part in several outreach programs with the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security to develop a risk management program for control systems. The lab has brought together ally nations like the U.K. and Australia for information sharing workshops, and has established training environments for critical infrastructure asset owners to demonstrate attacks against these systems, and optimize security technology to combat them.
"We have done a lot of work in vulnerability testing and discovery, looking especially at interdependencies between infrastructures," says Michael Assante. "We're looking at where these crossovers are, the vulnerabilities associated, and what could cause high consequences."
--Michael S. Mimoso
Trend Spotter
By Bill Brenner
| Long before online fraud and harassment were a mainstream concern, Kirk Bailey was passionate about them. In 1999, for example, he challenged computer security researchers to take a couple months to scour cyberspace for as much of his personal information as they could find. To the surprise of Bailey and others, the researchers amassed a pile of data in short order, proving that the Internet was a trove of information for good and bad.
Eight years later, Bailey, chief information security officer at the University of Washington and former City of Seattle CISO, is being praised by peers as an industry leader and someone who can spot security trends before others. He spreads the word as the driving force behind Agora, an expansive group of IT security professionals who come together to chew on the latest security challenges. And he is an expert on cyberstalking and risk analysis.
"Kirk has been on the leading edge of such issues as data privacy, critical infrastructure protection and active defense," says Port of Seattle CISO Ernie Hayden, a longtime friend and collaborator.
"He is often raising information security issues and concerns before the general community even recognizes the problem," Hayden says.
As one example, Hayden notes how four years ago Bailey was building the concept of active defense--ways to fight back against a cyberaggressor--at a time when few were paying much attention.
"Kirk's probing questions and concerns were hard to swallow by the mainstream information security community, but he was right in his perception of the issues, and today active defense is part of the general infosecurity dialogue and there are even conferences on the subject."
During his tenure with the City of Seattle, Bailey ran an innovative risk analysis exercise against the city's IT infrastructure called ALKI. The exercise produced innovative defense strategies, and Hayden says that without Bailey's leadership, such an exercise would never have happened.
Bailey says his passion for the job is driven by the fact that the public's appetite for new technology far outpaces the ability to secure it. "Not enough attention is paid to the potential consequences of all this technology," he says. "Places like MySpace create an enormous opportunity for problems.
"The big unintended outcome of all this technology has been the loss of privacy," Bailey says. "More than 160 million letters have gone out to people telling them their privacy has been invaded, and that's just not right."
Bailey's mission is to take what he learns and share it with colleagues, peers and anyone else who will listen. He has learned to rethink the concept of security as data breaches escalate.
"Instead of worrying about perimeter security and perfect scores for zero compromises, we now have to operate under the premise that all systems can be compromised at any time, and act accordingly," Bailey says
To that end, he says the building blocks of a good defense are strong forensics and incident response plans, public education, partnerships and continued public debate about the legal issues surrounding information security.
"I worry the public doesn't understand the true risks, so my mission is to educate them," he says.
|Making a Difference
One of University of Washington CISO Kirk Bailey's missions in life is to raise awareness of cyberstalking and help pass laws to protect people and privacy.
Bailey was instrumental in getting a cyberstalking law on the books after he and his peers helped bring to justice a stalker harassing a fellow City of Seattle employee online. The Working to Halt Online Abuse site says the Washington law declares a person guilty of cyberstalking if they use electronic communication to intimidate, torment or embarrass another. Cyberstalking is considered a felony in multiple offenses against the same person.
--Bill Brenner
Best Defense
By Barbara Darrow
| Information security is a big deal for enterprises, but for a major defense contractor, the task takes on a whole other layer of urgency. Michael K. Daly, director of enterprise security services for Raytheon Company in Massachusetts, knows that in his bones. When your company designs and manufactures missiles, and intelligence and defense systems, the potential downside to a breach can be disastrous.
Daly, whose team of 41 security professionals works under a $16 million annual budget and supports 73,000 employees, 15,000 contractors and 5,000 partners, sees two major trends.
The first is "data exfiltration," which he says is a fancy way of saying the loss of intellectual property, including private information and corporate data. Previously, security pros spent the bulk of their time fighting off external hackers, he says. "We continue to fight that fight, but now there's also the issue of Trojan horses and viruses and worms that grab data off machines."
The second trend is the whole wide world of mobility. It's one thing to protect data that primarily stays under lock and key in a climate-controlled glass room. It's quite another to do the same with a mobile workforce, and where virtually every enterprise's supply chain includes outside partners--each with its own LAN.
"The architecture of our environments has changed," Daly says. "Companies used to build their own LANs, but now services are outsourced, you have different suppliers out on the Internet. Users are not necessarily sitting at workstations on your floor; they're on laptops connecting over T-Mobile, so we have to move the security control from the LAN out into the world."
A couple of Daly's projects reflect that reality. He and other industry leaders in the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program launched CertiPath, the world's first commercial PKI bridge. That infrastructure enables qualified member companies to cross-certify and authenticate, and is itself cross-certified with the U.S. Federal Bridge, which connects the major U.S. defense agencies.
Jeff Nigriny, president and COO of CertiPath, has known Daly for years and says his efforts are invaluable to CertiPath and Raytheon. "We worked with Raytheon for more than a year [to get the company certified] and Michael rode his team pretty hard. The process is fairly onerous and it's fairly easy to get distracted, but he got it done," Nigriny says.
Inside Raytheon, Daly's group deployed new Internet and teaming gateways to Europe this year. Those gateways help ease Web access, remote access, Web hosting, email with spam and virus filtering, single sign-on to the various Raytheon groups in Europe and the Middle East and consolidate several smaller centers that were used in the past.
Daly, the son of not one but two Raytheon engineers, is a busy guy. Jeff Brown, chief information security officer for Raytheon, cites Daly's technical breadth, which he combines with an eagerness to keep learning.
"If you ask him a question on Friday and he doesn't know the answer, by Monday he'll be an expert," Brown says. Raytheon CIO Rebecca Rhoads agrees. "He attacks everything. He's a voracious reader with great technology abilities and capacity, and he can do a lot of things at once."
Barbara Darrow is a Boston-area freelance writer.
Travel Guide
By Neil Roiter
| With a typically small staff and tight budget, Sasan Hamidi knows he has to sell security to enlist the help of his IT and business colleagues.
"Security is always looked at like we're cops. We walk through the hallways and people try to hide," says Hamidi, CISO at vacation exchange company Interval International. "My job is to bring people together, convince them security is important and could affect the bottom line."
By all accounts, Hamidi does that quite well.
"He's always aware of different skill sets of certain people in each division, and leverages those skill sets," says Robby Fussell, senior information security engineer at AT&T Government Solutions and Hamidi's former colleague at IBM and AT&T. "He's proactive; most managers I've dealt with are reactive, plugging holes when there's a crisis."
The proof is in the results. With only two direct-report security staffers Hamidi, in his six years as CISO, has built a state-of-the-art security operations center, instituted two-factor authentication, secured mobile devices, assured compliance with regulations, and accomplished many other projects.
"He really does try to work with business, IT and other departments. He's dogged at making sure they are aware of a risk and assume responsibility," says Interval CIO Marie Lee, to whom Hamidi reports. "He always talks with the business managers and puts the need in a business context. And, he's willing to explain and to compromise."
"My mother says I should be a politician," says Hamidi.
He's much more than that. His knowledge of security policy, processes and technology is broad, deep and current. Hamidi built that knowledge base working at General Electric Power Systems, IBM Global Network Security and AT&T Global Network Security.
"What makes him extremely effective is not only wide knowledge of security across domains, but a vast array of products," says Fussell.
"He's the only person I know who has such wide knowledge," Fussell says.
Hamidi believes strongly in adding the personal touch as well. Years ago he was impressed when a security executive said he spent 10 minutes at his company's quarterly IT meeting telling people about his personal life--his career background, his military service, his wife and kids.
"I tried it and got a slew of email and calls," Hamidi recalls. "It makes you more human."
Hamidi's zeal extends into the community, where he's developing an initiative to introduce the basic concepts of information security to Orange County, Fla., middle and high school students.
"I'd just developed a comprehensive information security training and awareness program for my own organization," says Hamidi.
"Being the father of an 11-year-old daughter who spends a considerable amount of time in front of a computer connected to the Internet, I thought it would be appropriate to put something similar in place for our kids," Hamidi says.
And, though he's making his mark in corporate America, there may come a day when a simpler life beckons. That's why he found time to earn a Ph.D. despite a demanding career.
"I figured that some day, when the hustle and bustle of the corporate world gets to me, I can always teach and do research, my first loves."
Risk Reward
By Robert Westervelt
| Timothy S. McKnight is on the front line against cybercriminals tied to organizations with anti-American interests. He's not that far removed from his previous life at the FBI, where, as a special agent he investigated bank robberies and corporate corruption. Now, as vice president and chief information security officer at government contractor Northrop Grumman, McKnight's perpetrators are less tangible, but just as crooked.
"That's what's exciting about security--it's constantly changing," McKnight says. "It's not like we're doing the same job every day--those days are gone. Today we need to get way ahead of threats, anticipate the business needs and reduce the risks to the company."
To reduce those risks, McKnight developed an extensive security metrics program that measures the effectiveness of the enterprise's security initiatives.
Each organization within Northrop Grumman reports on policy compliance, progress on security projects, critical patch response and implementation times, and mitigation of issues found during vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. As many as 50 metrics are rolled into a dashboard viewable by management.
The program helped the company become more efficient, improving patch-management and antivirus capabilities for all servers and desktops, says Keith Glennan, Northrop Grumman's chief technology officer. Not long ago, it took 45 days to deploy patches to 150,000 company devices. Today it takes about 48 hours, Glennan says.
"The threat tempo has obviously picked up, but the foundation Tim helped us put into place is directly attributable to our successes today," says Glennan. "Tim has helped to really frame security as a risk need as opposed to just a cost of doing business."
McKnight oversaw the deployment of disk encryption for Northrop Grumman-owned laptops to mitigate consequences of lost or stolen laptops.
To minimize the probability of virus and worm infections, he removed computers that were not Northrop Grumman-owned or supported from its internal network, and he reduced the risk of sending company-sensitive information to non-employees by removing those email addresses from the company's global address list.
McKnight also helped form the Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence group within Northrop Grumman. Comprising former intelligence community experts, military personnel and analysts, the group helps assess threats and is focused on competitive intelligence.
Its work has led to an intellectual property protection and counterintelligence program at Northrop Grumman.
Outside Northrop Grumman, McKnight helped create and served four years as a board member of the TransAtlantic Secure Collaboration Program, which developed the CertiPath PKI Bridge, a third-party identity broker that links commercial contractors in the aerospace and defense industries with government agencies.
McKnight says today's CISO helps shape a company's overall strategic planning.
"The CISO [was] embedded in network organizations a decade ago and now we're getting seats at the table," McKnight says. "The role is becoming less technical and more about leadership and talking the business language in terms of risk."
Audit Doctor
By Marcia Savage
| With more than 11,000 employees using 250 clinical applications, auditing access to medical records of hundreds of thousands of patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center seemed a daunting if not impossible task.
But Mark Olson, manager of IS security and disaster recovery, tackled the problem head on. Working with other IT groups and the business conduct office at Beth Israel, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, he and his security team devised a program that ensures compliance with privacy regulations by quickly catching employees who peek at patient records they have no business looking at. And there is a lot of temptation: Beth Israel is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox.
The innovative program ties data mined from a cross section of clinical applications, security devices and databases with the geographic location of an IP address to quickly catch inappropriate access. It looks for atypical patterns like a physician accessing an extraordinarily large number of records in one day, or a clinician looking up data from an unusual location, and issues an alert.
Olson says the program is modeled on the credit card industry's system of monitoring spending patterns to detect abnormal behavior. He's getting the word out about Beth Israel's program through presentations at national and local conferences to help IT professionals understand that some basic data mining and ingenuity can go a long way in building an effective auditing program.
"People shy away from it because they look at the problem as too large of one to solve," he says.
John Powers, Beth Israel's chief administrative information officer, says Olson's creativity and thoroughness have been invaluable.
"The bottom line is that we think that the safety of our patient database is markedly improved compared to other hospitals as a result of this security umbrella we put over it using Mark's concept," he says.
The program is a novel turn on the usual reactive, complaint-driven approach to compliance with privacy standards, and allows the hospital to be proactive, says Tim Hogan, Beth Israel's director of corporate counsel.
Olson's team has also added auditing to a Web-based training system that meets HIPAA required training for handling patient records.
"He's just done tremendous work in bringing about a transformation of the technical security, but also in providing leadership across the various technology groups to get everybody aware of the need for security when making changes or introducing technologies," Powers says.
"We've buttoned down our environment mightily since Mark has been at the helm of our security," Powers says.
Today, Olson extols the benefits of auditing. In the health care industry, records are shifting from paper to electronic, which promises significant benefits but also presents challenges in guaranteeing that information is kept private and secure.
Being proactive is essential, Olson says, and doing more in the area of auditing would help the security industry become less reactive.
"Security isn't looked at as an auditing job and in my view it is," he says. "We need to do more auditing to discover trend analysis and find out [when] something is about to happen."
Real-Time Security
By Michael S. Mimoso
| Reuters' business is providing the financial industry with real-time pricing information, market news and trading services. More than 300,000 professionals in the equities, commodities, foreign exchange and other markets count on the availability and reliability of the information Reuters delivers. It's a prime example where security services mustn't get in the way of business.
Simon Riggs, the global head of IT security, has an internal audit and consulting background guiding his insistence on bringing security in line with Reuters' established service management philosophy. At the core, Riggs wants his security teams to be proactive about finding weak spots in IT systems and business processes, using cutting-edge modeling to determine the risks imposed by not only security events, but changes to the network.
"I'm a great believer that we shouldn't be doing security for the sake of doing security. We should be doing security because we're running a business," Riggs says.
Service management is a Reuters-wide mandate, one spawned three years ago as a regimen of strict best practices based on the popular U.K. ITIL standard. Riggs is also working to integrate IT security as a global discipline into ITIL best practices.
"As a company we've been banging the drum about customer service, and we're pushing hard to ensure things are done in a systematic, disciplined way to make the customer experience even better," Riggs says.
Reuters' customers measure performance in hundredths or thousandths of seconds; latency is not tolerated. Thus it is dogged work tracking a complex environment of real-time data feeds, historical databases and an infrastructure of 30,000 switches, routers and more than 1,300 firewalls.
A standardized service management approach is the only logical means of keeping such complexity reined in, Riggs says. In addition, the company has unified operations and security around incident, problem, configuration, change and release management processes. For example, Reuters' security analysts examine every security incident--whether it caused a disruption or not--to understand a root cause of the management behavior that failed and why a service was not resilient. Finding the root cause allows Riggs' team to apply that information elsewhere and mitigate future events. Modeling exercises, meanwhile, allow them to anticipate problems in the event of future incidents or scheduled network changes, which can number hundreds per week.
"You always expect your infrastructure to come under attack. But if it fails, you have to understand the real underlying root cause. Was it a network design problem, a third-party quality failure, capacity overrun or did it fail because of a configuration problem?" Riggs says. "We want to pinpoint this as well as any aggravating factors and triggers...and then see where we may be exposed elsewhere and fix it before it causes customer pain."
Riggs has tried to instill that uniformity up and down Reuters' supply chain as well.
"I treat them as a virtual extension of my team, and expect them to behave in a certain way." Riggs says. "That's what I expect of the products they deliver."
Stephen Bonner, head of information risk management at Barclays, says Riggs' focus on service management has won over his share of supporters. "He brings a refreshing approach to security based around meeting business needs rather than slavish application of historic approaches," Bonner says. "He focuses on execution and delivery."
|CATCHING UP WITH Christofer Hoff
ON HIS NEW JOB WITH UNISYS I spent two years with Crossbeam and it was a fantastic experience. I gained exposure to the Fortune 500, carriers, mobile service providers and other spaces. [Crossbeam] is in a growth pattern and they're focused on applying strategy, not crafting it. I looked at the position with Unisys (chief security architect, security innovation) as an opportunity to expand my horizons. They're in the middle of a business transformation, and it's a very interesting intersection.
After winning the 2005 Security 7 Award in financial services, Chris Hoff has become a prolific blogger, willing to share his opinions on the security market and new technologies, in particular the need for security in virtual environments.
I work for the office of business innovation, and one of the pillars of Unisys' business strategy focuses on security. That means more than information security; it means protecting borders of countries, working with the Department of Defense, container security, port security; it expands my horizons on the convergence of the physical and IT elements of security. It's been quite interesting.
ON SECURING VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS This technology is 30-40 years old; think about IBM and ALPARS (affinity logical partitions). People are looking for less footprint and more computing power. On the business side, CIOs are looking at cost savings, then think about security. One side of the market is centralizing with thin, dumb clients, and using hosted software as a service and Ajax applications, dispersing processing power to the edge. The two intersections are never secured.
Virtualization is fantastic: it does great things for cost, horrible things for security. But I think we're making progress on this portion of the uphill slant. Look at the classes of problems we have; we haven't eliminated any, we're creating more.
Ajax is an example, and we're at odds of how business and technology are approaching these problem sets. We've put all this power in users' hands and we yank it back because we never engineered proper security in the first place. it's not right.
ON ACQUISITIONS If there are 800 security companies in the dating pool, some of them were born to be commoditized, others were born to be snapped up. Data leak prevention, for example, is a feature without a market. And it's normal, and I welcome it.
You get these nascent products and the features either take hold or run out their lifecycles and get integrated into end-to-end suites. If you look back over time, this is natural and normal. Every time we carry over to another intersection of technology, economics and business problems, we end up having new niche companies. It will be a sad day if we don't have innovation.
ON BLOGGING I owe my blog (http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/) to one of the biggest agitators around, Alan Shimel [chief strategy officer, StillSecure]. He came out for a visit and told me, to blog and make a difference, it's something you have to do every day so that it becomes part of your life. It becomes addictive, like checking email. You gotta do it. And when people interact with you, it's quite amazing. I never expected it would open avenues of discussion, networking and more.
--Michael S. Mimoso
Remembering a Model CISO
I met Robert Garigue a year ago at a luncheon in Chicago for the Security 7 Award winners. Robert was at my table, as were fellow honorees Stephen Bonner and Andre Gold. It didn't take long to ascertain who would carry the conversation at our table, and not because he craved the attention. No, it just gravitated to Robert because his opinions were so informed, his dialogue so pointed. It was readily apparent this man should be heard because his words weren't like what was being spoken at the time by other security professionals. That, and he was genuinely a nice man, one who asked if we'd be so kind as to send him a glossy print of his cover image so that he could present it to his mother for her home.
His death in January was a shock because he made such an immediate impression on all of us in the brief time we knew him. But to his colleagues, the grief was profound. Notes and email from many of them proved that he touched many lives, and a year later, it's appropriate to remember him in these pages with a sample of his work.
Doing some digging on our Web site, I came across a presentation he did for our 2004 Information Security Decisions conference on the evolving role of the CISO. It truly could stand as a thesis on the role of the corporate security officer. But one slide stands out best.
In it, Robert suggests the Emperor Charlemagne stand as a model CISOs should emulate. Charlemagne, Robert wrote, reunited Europe after the Dark Ages, established schools that were open to nobles and peasants. He brought scholars from all corners to encourage development of a standard script. He established money standards, urged new farming methods and spread education to all classes. He relied on others to build an infrastructure on which others could thrive.
There are lessons here, and it's fair to say, Robert followed them in his work and his studies. Perhaps Robert Garigue is a model more CISOs should emulate.
--Michael S. Mimoso
|CATCHING UP WITH Andre Gold
ON HIS NEW JOB At Continental, I had responsibilities over policy, strategy and execution. Here, it's just strategies and execution; policies come from the group level. At Continental, the organization was 50 years old and never really focused on information risk management; here in financial services, it's all about risk management. The first day I walked in, there were posters on the wall about Compliance Week and security awareness training. At the fundamental level, information risk management is germane across industries. It's just that a number of external statutes caused companies to lose track of the fundamental blocking and tackling of information risk management. At ING, that's what we focus on.
Last year's retail award winner has moved on to a new position in a new vertical market as head of technology risk management with ING.
ON SWITCHING INDUSTRIES It was absolute culture shock. I have one of those posters in my office now, and I'm thinking of having some fun and making a PDF copy for some of my friends. 'See: this is what we were striving for!' It's a lot easier to get the business engaged; everyone has a notion of risk. The executive team is cognizant of the role information risk management plays in the delivery of products and services.
ON THE SECURITY MARKET Buying habits were a lot different 18 months ago than they are today. Big companies today are a lot more focused on providing synergies between product portfolios. Now, you're not looking just at best-of-breed, now it's about vendors telling their portfolio story, how they leverage XYZ products. What companies are doing is looking at who is going to be a technology security partner for them, making a bet on that company and leveraging their technology exclusively with one or two that they'll primarily buy from. On the other hand, there are still markets where you can a la cart some technology if you're trying to meet a particular need. It's about making the right choices.
ON THE PURSUIT OF HIS MBA I took the summer off with the new job, but grad school just started up again and I'm back riding the bull. I would have graduated this spring otherwise.
--Michael S. Mimoso
Dig Deeper on Security industry market trends, predictions and forecasts
Senate asks President Obama for a cyber act-of-war definition
Game of Phones: Desk handsets still rule office phones
Is the future of cyberdefense a new branch of the military?
Long-duration advanced persistent threat attacks now the norm, say experts


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Art Trip: Columbus, Indiana
Season 3 Episode 47 | 12m 50s
Visit the architectural mecca of Columbus, Indiana, to bask in the mid-century glory of Eliel and Eero Saarinen's masterpieces and a series of new and innovative installations by renowned designers. We explore the first exhibition of Exhibit Columbus, an annual exploration of architecture, art, design, and community, and ask questions about the value of good design.
Aired: 12/05/17Video has closed captioning.


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Suppose $V$ is a finite-dimensional vector space (over $\mathbb{C}$) and $\lambda$ is a partition of $n$ (not necessarily the dimension). Let $S^\lambda(V)=(V^{\otimes n})_\lambda$ be the $\lambda$'th Schur functor applied to $V$ (a.k.a. the $\lambda$-component of the $S_n$ representation $V^{\otimes n}$). Pick a basis for $V$. Is there a good basis for $S^\lambda(V)$? Even better, is there a good subset of the canonical basis of $V^{\otimes n}$ which projects to a basis of $S^\lambda(V)$? (This is the case for our favorite Schur functors coming from the trivial and alternating reps).
Further, is there a good combinatorial description for the functoriality property, i.e. $S^\lambda(M)$ where $M:V\to W$ is a matrix?


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These can be driven with any of the EL inverters and sequencers that we carry and come in a variety of bright colors (check below for other colors). This particular panel is 10cm square and illuminates blue. It is attached to a 20cm cable which is terminated with a JST PH connector.
Note: These panels can be cut to any shape! Regular scissors work fine to cut this EL panel but after you've cut the panel you should seal the exposed edges with some tape or epoxy to avoid shorting the panel or shocking yourself.
Dimensions: 10 x 10 cm
If you are interested in Internet of Things (IoT) or M2M projects check our open source sensor platform Waspmote which counts with more than 100 sensors available to use 'off the shelf', a complete API with hundreds of ready to use codes and a low consumption mode of just 0.7µA to ensure years of battery life.
Know more at:
Get the Starter Kits at:


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|Hungry Like The Wolf [2001 Remastered Version]
|Rio [2001 Remastered Version]
|The Reflex
|Ordinary World
|Come Undone
Mar 2019 • 19 songs
Feb 2019 • 1 song
Mar 2017 • 4 songs
Duran Duran personified new wave for much of the mainstream audience. And for good reason. Duran Duran's reputation was built through music videos, which accentuated their fashion-model looks and glamorous sense of style. Without music videos, it's likely that their pop-funk -- described by the group as the Sex Pistols-meet-Chic -- would never have made them international pop stars. While Duran Duran did have sharper pop sensibilities than their new romantic contemporaries like Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, none of their peers exploited MTV and music videos like the Birmingham-... Read more


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Don't look now, but the Obama Steam Shovel just took another chunk of money from California for the president's re-election campaign.
The president has been here so much lately that he almost qualifies for residency. This week's visit marked his 16th trip since being elected, and third within the past month, but surely not the last.
To date, according to Open Secrets, 20 percent of all money raised by Obama has been here in California, where he has brought in about $41 million. He was expected to take in another couple of million this trip.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has garnered $10 million in the Golden State (at least when it comes to presidential fund raising) through May, or slightly more than 10 percent of his fundraising take.
There's no question that Obama will carry California in November. The bigger question is whether the purse strings of California Democrats will be able to carry Obama to re-election. He'll need all the help he can get.
Thus far, spending for Obama has totaled about $550 million, including money raised by the Democratic Party and money spent by the Super PACs. Spending for Romney has amounted to about $450 million, counting the same sources.
But with the lid blown off spending limits by the Citizens United case, most observers expect Romney to attract several hundred million dollars in Super PAC expenditures.
The Democrats will count on organized labor more than ever, but whether Big Labor can match the checks of Republican donors remains to be seen.
For Obama, two of his best sources will be in California, where more than ever he will lean on the gay community and Hollywood. Both were disproportionately in the Obama camp in 2008, but will be sought after even more in 2012, especially since Obama is not likely to be as popular with the Wall Street crowd as he was in 2008.
But don't worry if you missed Obama this week. He'll be back soon with his campaign steam shovel close at hand.
Larry Gerston teaches political science at San Jose State University and is the political analyst for NBC Bay Area.
Send us your thoughts via Twitter @PropZero or add your comment to our Facebook page.


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Meet Former Clash of the Titles Competitor Ann Gaylia O'Barr,
guest post by Amanda FlowerAnn Gaylia O'Barr is a former Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. State Department. She had several assignments overseas, including one in Saudi Arabia, which certainly influenced her novel, Singing in Babylon.
Clash of the Titles featured Ann during our Best Description of an Antagonist Week, and she was the Clash champion! Her villain kept our readers jumping!
In Singing in Babylon, recent grad Kate McCormack, saddled with college debt, has limited options…until she accepts an offer to teach English in Saudi Arabia. Plunged into a foreign world, she's homesick and lonely, stuck in a gilded prison where women aren't even allowed to walk around the block by themselves. The future stretches before her like a leaden sky.
Journalist Philip Tangvald, on the trail of a story about illegal immigration routes through the Middle East and North Africa, is intrigued by the feisty Kate, but wonders if he deserves to find love again. Too much loss and betrayal has burdened his life. First, his father, when he was eleven. And, a year ago, his wife. Now he's free of everything—except the guilt from his past—and wants to stay that way.
Two worlds, two hearts in exile, are about to collide. And when they do, might they find a new song to sing … in Babylon?
We posed a few more questions to Ann, which she was kind enough to answer.
Who is your favorite character you've created and why?
I think Philip intrigues me the most. Kate is pretty clear cut in what she wants. Philip has so much to learn about forgiveness and being able to grow beyond childhood hurts and yield to the love he so wants to express but has difficulty doing. He's a complex character.
Have you learned anything new about God's character through this book?
As I developed the male protagonist, Philip, the passage in the Bible about God removing our sins as far away as the east is from the west came alive in a new way. Philip's deep need is to see God as one who yearns to love him despite his failings.
If you could interview one character in your book, which one would it be? What shocking or interesting thing might that character say? Why?
Actually, I have Philip, the journalist in the story, carry on a conversation with a citizen of Saudi Arabia who lived in the U.S. for some time. In that conversation, or interview, the Saudi surprises Philip, an American Christian, with the question of why Saudi Arabia would want the American way of life, given the hedonistic life style that he witnessed while in the U.S.
When's your favorite time to write?
When I get up in the morning (I tend to rise early). I have a short devotional period and then settle in to write. How much time I can spend with it (all morning, a couple of hours) depends on family needs, meetings to attend, household chores that can't be put off any longer, and so on.
Share something about the book that you think readers would like to know.
Some of the perspective for Singing in Babylon came from the insights I gained while living in Muslim-majority lands. I saw America as Muslim Arabs might see it. I began to differentiate between America the country and American Christians. The years in those countries also strengthened my core Christian beliefs. I began to see Jesus as our living revelation from God, as contrasted with the Quran, which Muslims believe is God's revelation.
Thank you so much for stopping by Ann. We enjoyed having you on Clash of the Titles and look forward to reading more of your work in the future.
Singing in Babylon was published by OakTara Publishers in 2010, and Ann has two more novels under contract: Quiet Deception and Searching for Home.
You can visit Ann at her website http://www.anngayliaobarr.com/.
Amanda Flower, an Agatha-nominated mystery author, started her writing career in elementary school when she read a story she wrote to her sixth grade class and had the class in stitches with her description of being stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel. She knew at that moment she'd found her calling of making people laugh with her words. Her debut mystery, Maid of Murder, is an Agatha Award Nominee for Best First Novel and the first in a series featuring amateur sleuth India Hayes. Like her main character, Amanda is an academic librarian for a small college near Cleveland. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime and on the Clash of the Titles staff. Her next mystery, Murder in a Basket, will be released in January 2012. Visit her online at http://www.amandaflower.com/.