text:
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Israel's prime minister pledged Sunday to move ahead with construction of a new Jewish settlement in a strategic part of the West Bank, speaking just hours after Israeli forces dragged dozens of Palestinian activists from the area.
The activists pitched more than two dozen tents at the site on Friday, laying claim to the land and drawing attention to Israel's internationally condemned settlement policy.
Before dawn Sunday, hundreds of Israeli police and paramilitary border troops evicted the protesters. Despite the eviction, Mustafa Barghouti, one of the protest leaders, claimed success, saying the overall strategy is to "make (Israel's) occupation costly."
The planned settlement, known as E-1, would deepen east Jerusalem's separation from the West Bank, war-won areas the Palestinians want for their state. The project had been on hold for years, in part because of U.S. objections.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revived the E-1 plans late last year in response to the Palestinians' successful bid for U.N. recognition of a state of Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.
Jewish settlements are at the heart of the current four-year impasse in Mideast peace efforts. The Palestinians have refused to negotiate while Israel continues to build settlements on the lands they seek for their state. Netanyahu says peace talks should start without any preconditions. He also rejects any division of Jerusalem.
Israel expanded the boundaries of east Jerusalem after the 1967 war and then annexed the area — a move not recognized by the international community. Since then, it has built a ring of Jewish settlements in the enlarged eastern sector to cement its control over the city.
E-1 would be built in the West Bank just east of Jerusalem, and would close one of the last options for Palestinians to create territorial continuity between Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, their hoped-for capital, and the West Bank. According to building plans, E-1 would have more than 3,000 apartments.
The Palestinians say they turned to the U.N. last November out of frustration with the deadlock in peace talks. They believe the international endorsement of the 1967 lines will bolster their position in negotiations. Israel has accused the Palestinians of trying to bypass the negotiating process and impose a solution.
Netanyahu told Israel Army Radio on Sunday that it would take time to build E-1, citing planning procedures. Still, he said, "we will complete the planning, and there will be construction."
Asked why the protesters were removed, Netanyahu said, "They have no reason to be there. I asked immediately to close the area so people would not gather there needlessly and generate friction and disrupt public order."
Palestinian protest leaders hoped the tent camp would be the first of a new type of well planned, nonviolent protests against Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories.
In recent years, Palestinians have staged weekly rallies in some areas of the West Bank, demanding to get back land they lost to Israel's separation barrier. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has held up such tactics as worthy of emulation. The protests have remained relatively small, and media coverage has dropped off over the years.
The tent camp was set up after a month of planning by grass-roots groups using Facebook, Google Earth and other tools to find the right spot and stay in touch, said organizer Abdullah Abu Rahma.
The Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government in parts of the West Bank, provided legal assistance.
The activists said they pitched the tents on private Palestinian land and immediately obtained an Israeli court injunction preventing the removal of the tents for several days.
At the next court hearing, Israel will have to explain why it wants to take down the tents, said Mohammed Nazzal, a Palestinian Authority official whose department is involved in the legal proceedings. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said he believes one of the issues in the hearing will be the status of the land where the tents were pitched.
Barghouti, meanwhile, said troops beat some of the protesters, a claim Rosenfeld denied. Rosenfeld said the protesters were carried away without injuries, put onto buses and dropped off at a West Bank checkpoint.
About half a million Israelis live in the dozens of settlements that dot the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Over the past 15 years, Jewish settlers have also set up dozens of rogue settlement outposts without formal approval, and critics say the government has done little to remove them.
Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Ramallah and Amy Teibel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.


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Life (US - DVD R1 | BD RA)
We have art for a release of the series with David Attenborough commentary
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Released: 1st June 2010
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The BBC has announced 4-disc DVD ($59.98) and 4-disc Blu-ray ($69.99) releases of Life for the 1st June. You can also choose between a version with David Attenborough commentary or Oprah Winfrey commentary. Extras will include a collection of ten production video diaries showing the exhaustive efforts by the filmmaking team to bring this remarkable series to the screen, deleted scenes, and a "Music Only" viewing option. We've attached our first look at the official package artwork for each below:
Quote: From the BBC and the Discovery Channel, producers of Planet Earth and The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, comes the newest landmark natural history series, Life. In Planet Earth, we brought you the world as you've never seen it before. Now, get closer with Life. Four years in the making, filmed over 3000 days, across every continent and in every habitat, with breathtaking new high definition filming techniques not available for Planet Earth, Life presents 130 incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world, 54 of which have never been filmed before. Packed with excitement, revelation and entertainment, this remarkable 11-part blockbuster, narrated by Oprah Winfrey, captures unprecedented, astonishingly beautiful sequences and demonstrates the spectacular and extraordinary tactics animals and plants have developed to stay alive.
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Extended interviews with educators on the meaning of "21st century literacies," recommendations for using new technologies, and ideas for updating lesson plans to support 21st century learning.
"One of the problems when talking about 21st century skills or 21st century literacy skills is that this is a nice buzzword, but nobody really defines it very well," says Karl Fisch.
As for what's different: "When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, our conception of what literacy was very, very different. For the most part, it was being able to read at a certain level, and certainly there was some writing in there, but so much of the focus at that point was on reading to acquire information."
"One of the big differences today is that we live in a world that's info-abundant. Finding information isn't the big problem—the big problem is we have too much information and we don't know what to do with it. It's a very different problem that's going to involve some different skill sets."
One definition of being a literate consumer might be that in addition to "being able to download information to your brain," says Fisch, you also are able to "remix it and repurpose it and share it back out to the world."
For Dawn Hogue, 21st century literacies are "all about a community and sharing and collaboration; it's absolutely about collaboration. It's really also about classrooms with no walls and no constraints of time. In an ideal school, you could be having class with people in a different country, engaging with partners who go to a different school."
Will Richardson has a similar view. He says the big difference in the 21st century is that educators and students aren't "as dependent on physical space or time" as in the 20th century. "If you have access and you're connected, it really is anytime, anywhere learning . . . "
"We have a lot more opportunities now to get the information that we need when we need it, and learn the things we need to learn at the moment we need to learn them," says Richardson. "We don't need to be so pigeon-holed into a curriculum that treats everyone the same way, that really doesn't provide a lot of personalization or license to pursue those things that are of interest to you.
"It's a very difficult thing for teachers to get their brains around."
Ernest Morrell points to three major differences between 20th and 21st century literacies: vastly greater communications technologies in the 21st century, such as the Internet, laptops, and iPods; rapidly changing demographics, with an increase in Latino and other minority populations; and a change in how students are expected to process information—critically, rather than simply regurgitating what they have consumed.
"Literacy is defined by communications technologies and by your culture and your community," says Morrell, who also works with high school teachers in the Los Angeles area. "A literacy is a way that people communicate with one another, so if we have been assuming erroneously that the prototypical American student is white, middle-class, and lives in the Midwest, and we have a school system where that's not the case, then we have to think of literacy differently."
Indeed, says Morrell, "literacy is always changing. It's not novel to our time." Literacy was mostly tied to reading up until about 200 years ago, says Morrell; then it referred to basic writing.
"We always have to ask: how do people communicate in our time? However that question is answered is how literacy is defined."
Today, says Morrell, "we're in an information age, where information is the primary form of capital. Reading and writing play a huge role in our contemporary society, more so than in past societies, because we deal in the production of information. Economics are tied to one's ability to read and write in ways that they haven't necessarily been in the past, so what we have is increased literacy demands in the 21st century, just for ordinary citizenship. Where my grandparents would not necessarily have had to be great readers and writers to have an ordinary quality of life, that's changed, and just in the past century."
Teachers need to take into consideration all three dimensions of 21st century literacy, says Morrell: multimodality, changing culture, and using information critically.
"There's no definitive research that I know of" to show a link between increased technology usage in schools and higher performance, says Bass. "As far as I know, definitive research on a direct link between technology and test scores still doesn't exist."
Though Dawn Hogue's school has no hard data to show that CyberEnglish is better than 'regular' English—partly because it has no control group that isn't taking CyberEnglish—Hogue says she sees evidence of its value every day.
"Students feel better about ninth grade than they used to," she says. "They have a more positive emotional experience in class . . . if you enjoy a class, you're going to be engaged and get a lot more out of it."
While some decry technological innovation as being "too overwhelming" and recommend shutting computers off, Bud Hunt advocates the opposite position.
"This is a really powerful opportunity, and it's a really neat time to be a teacher and to be a kid and to be alive and to be in the world," he says. "And I hope that our schools can grow to embrace where we are technologically."
One aspect that has perhaps been overlooked is how these methods can help students with differing learning styles or learning disabilities.
For instance, Hogue notes that working on a computer can help disabled students who have trouble with handwriting and spelling.
"The computer takes away some of that sting," says Hogue.
Bill Bass notes that teachers can "really differentiate and meet a variety of learning styles by using technology."
Podcasting, for example, can reach auditory learners or visual learners (depending on the type of podcast). "A lot of online resources come in multimodal form, so you can help a kid grasp a concept by using those different resources that are available."
What Web 2.0 allows people to do—"the real big change here"—is to self-publish, says Richardson. Users can create and then post what's been created to a much larger audience, and then create networks around the things that are published.
Students enjoy making their own web pages because it allows them to express their personalities through color and images, and because "it's a way of social networking: they know their friends are going to look at it," says Hogue.
While Hogue's students write frequently in class, they often don't see it as writing, because it's not the typical paper printed out and handed in to the teacher. Yet, they are more personally invested in the writing they do for her, because of the wider audience.
Don't simply ask for factual answers to questions, but focus on evaluative skills instead. "You can find the answer to any question quickly [on the Internet]," says Bass, "but evaluating and analyzing the answer and determining whether it's a good one and why—that's where evaluative skills come into play."
Lee sees the Internet as providing tools that can help make topics more exciting and relevant for students.
For instance, via the Internet, "you can go to Salem and walk through a multi-media site that shows what the witch trails were like."
"Kids need to have it approached in a way that makes it relevant and exciting for them," says Lee. "I think it's important for students to make them producers rather than consumers of the new information technology."
Bud Hunt notes that, as English teachers, "we're not just teaching them the traditional essay anymore, we're teaching them to compose in many different media now, in video, audio, and text, and we can put these together in powerful ways."
Hunt suggests teachers use cellphones in class.
"Kids think about words a lot more when only have 140 characters . . . than if they have five pages to fill," he says. "If I have to convince you you have to vote for my candidate and I only have 140 characters in which to do it, that's a really important literacy opportunity there..I wish we'd think about that instead of saying, 'Let's turn the cellphones off and put them away.'"
He also recommends teaching proper cellphone etiquette.
Richardson thinks technology will change the way curriculum is decided and implemented.
"Teachers are dependent upon administrators and systems to tell them what to teach, when to teach, where to teach. What's happening now from a learning standpoint is that we're not under those same strictures; we're not necessarily bound by that particular process anymore. I think there's a real disruption that's beginning to be felt because of this. I don't think we're close to feeling it in any real systemic way yet, but we're getting closer."
Richardson finds social learning environments and networks to be transformative in helping students connect with and learn from other people.
"While there are thousands more teachers and hundreds of thousands of kids using these social tools in schools—which is still a small percentage of what's out there—the problem is that most of it is doing what we've done before, but publishing it in a different way," says Richardson. "That's because teaching isn't changing, because teachers themselves aren't owning the changes."
"When I work with teachers," says Bass, "I stress that we're creating a website, but the website should not just be a repository for the worksheets you used to use: it needs to be a portal, to help them think critically, and to develop deeper understandings and go beyond their regular, traditional assignments, because a lot of times those are on a very surface level."
Dawn Hogue's CyberEnglish class—in which every student creates a website, plus Hogue herself also has a classroom website— is not entirely paperless, though paper is much reduced. Assignments are either published on the students' webpages or emailed to her as attachments. When she is reading students' webpage assignments, she doesn't print them out, but instead reads them online—which means she can't make notes on them.
"It changes the whole dynamic of grading and marking," says Hogue. "You can't really mark up a website. . . My red pen is dusty." She does use rubrics to assess different things, and also works with the class as a whole if she detects common problems.
For example, Hogue uses interactive web-based grammar sites to help students learn about such basics as comma splices and agreement problems; she then posts a quiz on Moodle to test students' understanding.
Tim Lauer uses blogging software (specifically, WordPress) to create his school's website.
"What's nice about blog software is it's easy to organize information and share it in a timely manner," says Lauer. "Teachers are comfortable with it. They can link to resources rather than running around making sure resources are properly [loaded on each computer] . . . .They can put up additional information for families and students, which lets them go deeper than in a hand-out."
Gretchen Lee first saw the power of Web 2.0 to transform her classroom about 10 years ago.
"I had just started dabbling in the Internet in class," says Lee, a 7th grade language arts teacher at Oakwood in Morgan Hill, Calif. "I decided to do a cyber-book preport using AOL Press, a free program that AOL used to offer that was a very basic HTML editor."
Students prepared a report on The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander, including character summaries and artwork. Lee posted news of the assignment, and excerpts, to an NCTE listserv—and was amazed to receive "comments from every continent, from teachers who had seen it . . . My kids never recovered; they were so excited and happy. It was recognition beyond just doing things for the teacher.
"That's when I first saw the power of what this kind of inter-connectivity could do for my students."
Karl Fisch's school produced a "wikified research paper" built around a book called "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink. Students live-blogged in class about the book, and also discussed it with about 32 adults Fisch knew from the education community—some local, and some from countries such as Qatar and Australia (contacts he had made over the years through his own blog). The discussion was webcast, and author Daniel Pink also joined in for a live video teleconference with the students.
As a final project, students created a research paper in wiki form, with links to research, video, audio, and images. Unlike a traditional paper, this form allowed students to include live links rather than footnotes.
"The students definitely were engaged," says Fisch, "but in some respects, they weren't as impressed as the adults, because it was normal for them. They didn't see it as being unusual. Why wouldn't you have a discussion with people thousands of miles away?" Meanwhile, the adults in the building were saying, "how is this even possible?"
Lee's middle school students work throughout the year on "vocabulary statues," which involves students using materials such as papier mache and construction paper to create representations of words they study. Lee then takes photos of the students' works and uploads them to the classroom site, where the class then must go to match vocabulary words to pictures.
Lauer says having a document camera and projector opens up opportunities for teachers to very easily enlarge images from books or magazines or photographs (keeping copyright issues in mind) and share them with the class.
The school is using Skype for videoconferencing, so that children can see and talk to experts, authors, and others from outside the community.
Gretchen Lee dislikes heavy-handed site-blocking filters. "A major issue for teachers in public schools is the prevalence of filters blocking sites that they want to use," she says. "It's such a hassle in some schools to get them unblocked that they give up in frustration."
"I had a teacher come up after a presentation I did last year and get very agitated about it; he wanted to use all the cool, free sites online for his students, but the district was so afraid of liability that he couldn't get to what he wanted. The approval system was too cumbersome to be useful. I've heard of teachers having to wait MONTHS to get a single site unblocked."
Another factor holding back teachers is unreliable equipment—computers that crash, printers that won't print, projectors that won't project. "It drives teachers crazy," says Lee. "When it's more reliable, more and more people are happy to try it."
Lee cautions teachers to expect glitches, but to ride them out, because the end results are worth it; she also notes that equipment seems to be becoming more reliable.
Melissa Pomerantz's film project was not prohibitively expensive, she notes: she applied for a grant through her district's technology fund, which allowed for the purchase of five handheld cameras, five microphones and five headphones. These were split among the five student teams Pomerantz created to examine five global warming issues. Adobe Premiere Elements was purchased for each of five computers the school used for the project. (The education site license was about $27 per computer, Pomerantz says.)<
Other free and easy-to-use tools include those provided by Google, says Pomerantz.
"The things that anyone can use that work out really nicely are the Google tools; anybody who has Internet access can use these—Google Earth, Google docs, Google calendar, Google reader (for RSS feeds)," says Pomerantz. (RSS feeds allow students to receive automatic updates of topical content from selected websites and online publications.)
Teachers can use blogs for themselves, too, as part of teacher development. Lee, for instance, says she follows 15 to 20 education blogs (as well as about 10 listservs) and learns tips from other teachers about technological tools and ways to use them.
Hogue finds belonging to discussion listserv helps with her professional development. Also, she says, "just having a web presence, like a blog or website or both" can result in networking, because readers email you and this results in connections. "It's the same for teachers as for kids—when you use the Internet for collaboration, school is no longer this place that has walls. It's everywhere; it's the world."
Hogue recently joined Facebook. "I thought, 'I've got to see what this is about,'" she says. "I can't talk about it [with my students] if I don't even know what I'm saying."
As a result of having her own Facebook account, Hogue has learned "that I need to tell students to be more careful with what they publish . . . I think teaching students how to be responsible web content generators is one of our roles."
Hunt recommends teachers dive into technology themselves, in order to better learn about it.
"One of the greatest ways to get immersed in anything is to start doing it," he says. "I would never do anything to a kid that I wouldn't do myself, and technology's no different."
Richardson agrees: "I think we have a responsibility as educators to help our kids really understand what's changing and what their roles are in a much more participatory media society, and the best way we can do that is to become participants ourselves . . . . I know it's very difficult for a lot of teachers to see a way of getting to that point, but to me, it's imperative."
Richardson says teachers can search for people who are blogging about things they are passionate about and start engaging in conversation with them by leaving comments on their blogs. Or they could share other information, such as add pictures to a site devoted to a particular topic (such as Flickr's photo pools).
"At the end of the day, you have to be a publisher yourself," says Richardson. "You have to begin sharing yourself," whether by Twittering, blogging, creating a wiki page, starting a Facebook or MySpace page, or another means.
Teachers do need to try to keep ahead of newer technologies, which is a difference from the past, notes Morrell. In the past, a teacher wouldn't need to continually learn how to read in order to teach reading. But now, he says, "we're all kind of flying the plane as it's being built. . . Teachers have a pretty steep learning curve around these technologies, not just so they can teach them, but to be aware of how literacy is changing."
Bill Bass, a former English teacher, is a technology integration specialist at Parkway School District, Chesterfield, Missouri.
Karl Fisch is director of technology at Arapahoe High School, Centennial, Colorado.
Dawn Hogue is a teacher at Sheboygan Falls High School, Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.
Bud Hunt is an instructional technologist and former language arts teacher in Longmont, Colorado.
Tim Lauer is the principal at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Portland, Oregon.
Gretchen Lee is a teacher at Oakwood School, Morgan Hill, California.
Ernest Morrell is associate professor of urban education and cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Melissa Pomerantz is a teacher at Parkway North High School, St. Louis, Missouri.
Will Richardson is an author, speaker, and blogger. (http://weblogg-ed.com/)
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Your article was educational and really raised my awareness level on what it means to be a teacher in the 21st century. I mostly appreciated the comment on "the greatest way to get immersed in anything is to start doing it". So, that is what I will need to do. I am always a step behind and need to be on the same page as my students in order to help them be come 21st century individuals who can collaborate and compete in a global market.
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[ Source: clisp ]
Package: clisp-doc (1:2.49-10build1) [universe]
Links for clisp-doc
Ubuntu Resources:
Download Source Package clisp:
Please consider filing a bug or asking a question via Launchpad before contacting the maintainer directly.
Original Maintainers (usually from Debian):
- Debian Common Lisp Team (Mail Archive)
- Peter Van Eynde
- Christoph Egger
It should generally not be necessary for users to contact the original maintainer.
External Resources:
- Homepage [www.clisp.org]
Similar packages:
GNU CLISP, a Common Lisp implementation (documentation)
Download clisp-doc
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This morning I have a giveaway for you to enter. I have an ARC of We Were Liars by E Lockhart up for grabs. This is a compelling read that draws you in and refuses to let go. I am still trying to decide whether or not I actually liked it, but I know that I could not put it down.
About the book:
A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
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We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.
Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.
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The international teaser trailer for director Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is online and can be watched using the player below. Opening in theaters on November 18, the film stars Gary Oldman, Ciaran Hinds, Jared Harris, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Svetlana Khodchenko.
Based on John Le Carre's seminal cold war best-seller, the movie is set in the aftermath of the cold war and tells the tale of a spy-hunt within the highest echelons of the British Secret Intelligence Service


text: Job Discussion Forums :: View topic - Where in Central/Eastern Europe can a newbie find job? Get TEFL Certified & Start Your Adventure Today! Job Discussion Forums"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Students and Teachers from Around the World!" FAQ Search Memberlist Usergroups Register Profile Log in to check your private messages Log in Where in Central/Eastern Europe can a newbie find job? Job Discussion Forums Forum Index -> General Europe Forum View previous topic :: View next topic Author Message mikaelJoined: 27 Aug 2012Posts: 3 Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 10:24 am Post subject: Where in Central/Eastern Europe can a newbie find job? I'm a non-native English speaker with no teaching experience. I do, however, have an MBA from an American university and I lived in the USA for six years. Furthermore, I have an EU-passport and I have taken an online TESL certifcate (ITTT). Where in Central/Eastern Europe would I have the greatest chance of finding employment? Back to top spiral78Joined: 05 Apr 2004Posts: 11498Location: On a Short Leash Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 10:57 am Post subject: You're legally eligible to work anywhere in the region and as most contracts for the region run September-June, you're just missing the major hiring period right now. There is usually a second, smaller bump in January. For Central Europe, you are unlikely to find anything from abroad; there are plenty of teachers here on the ground and reputable schools don't need to take chances with anyone sight-unseen. This is not the case farther East; you might want to post on the Russia/CIS forum for more/quicker info on this. For Central Europe, an online certification puts you at a disadvantage. Most newbies here have on-site certification which includes (key) actual supervised teaching practice with real students. You can try to find something with what you've got, but you may find that you need to upgrade your certification to get better jobs, or any job at all in competitive areas like Prague. Your MBA is a plus, but here it won't likely make up for your online cert. Basically, you have useful language knowledge, but no-one knows if you can convey it to students well. For this region, there are obviously start-up costs. You'll need to get yourself here and plan to support yourself until first paycheck; typically monthly at the end of the month worked. If you find you need to consider a cert upgrade to get into the job market(s) you are interested in, there are lots of courses available in the region. CELTA is the name brand, but there are generics that fit the requirements: 120 hours on-site and including the supervised teaching practice with real students, and feedback from experienced teacher trainers on how you've done. Back to top mikaelJoined: 27 Aug 2012Posts: 3 Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 11:17 am Post subject: I am considering getting a CELTA-certification in a European city close to an area where I would be likely to find employment. What such cities would you recommend? Back to top spiral78Joined: 05 Apr 2004Posts: 11498Location: On a Short Leash Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 11:41 am Post subject: That would be a good plan - local training centres can give you very useful info about reputable local employers and your cert will definitely be recognized in the region. I am only personally familiar with Prague, so far as entry-level training goes. There are several CELTA and equivalent centres located here. I believe they are all OK. My own original cert, from 1998, was a generic with the 120 hours and teaching practice. It's been recognized everywhere I've gone in Europe (West, East, and Central) and also by the Canadian national TESL organization, so the name brand CELTA isnt' absolutely necessary. Just if you do something else, be sure to highlight the on-site hours and teaching practice on your CV so employers know you have an equivalent. Back to top jonniboyJoined: 18 Jun 2006Posts: 751Location: Panama City, Panama Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 1:56 pm Post subject: I'd respectfully disagree with Spiral that you've missed the main hiring period. Certainly in the Baltics and, friends tell me, Poland people are still enjoying their last few weeks of summer with schools just beginning to look for teachers as the bulk of courses will start late September/early October. Also here (I'm currently in Latvia) , compared to Western Europe, which is more geared towards a traditional academic year running from September through June, there is a bit more flexibility as courses start and finish at different times of the year with 5 month courses common. I think you should still apply but, no matter how good your English and qualifications, not being a native speaker will definitely hurt you when negotiating pay and conditions. Back to top SashadroogieJoined: 17 Apr 2007Posts: 11061Location: Moskva, The Workers' Paradise Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 2:21 pm Post subject: Come to Russia! Or at least consider it. An MBA would be well respected, depending on the school - ones that offer business training, that sort of thing. No fixed hiring season. Though September is the peak, many schools recruit all year, depending on their needs. Worth a shot. Good luck! Back to top spiral78Joined: 05 Apr 2004Posts: 11498Location: On a Short Leash Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 3:41 pm Post subject: Quote: I'd respectfully disagree with Spiral that you've missed the main hiring period. Certainly in the Baltics and, friends tell me, Poland people are still enjoying their last few weeks of summer with schools just beginning to look for teachers as the bulk of courses will start late September/early October Jonniboy, you're absolutely correct - I said he's in the process of missing it just now (or at least that's what I mean). A few weeks left to go, for sure! Back to top mikaelJoined: 27 Aug 2012Posts: 3 Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 7:08 am Post subject: My plan is to start teaching 2013 so I have plenty of time. Can someone recommend any specific cities (offering CELTA and easy to get a job nearby)? Back to top SashadroogieJoined: 17 Apr 2007Posts: 11061Location: Moskva, The Workers' Paradise Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 11:27 am Post subject: Come to Moscow! CELTA with BKC-IH. Back to top White iceJoined: 28 Aug 2012Posts: 37 Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 10:39 pm Post subject: Sashadroogie wrote: Come to Moscow! CELTA with BKC-IH. Can anyone comment on this place for doing a Celta course. Would it be easy to get a visa to do the Celta in russia? I'm from the UK. Back to top miss smartyJoined: 03 Mar 2013Posts: 8 Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 6:29 pm Post subject: Istanbul? Hi, Have you tried looking into Istanbul? Istanbul has tons of English schools and there seems to be a demand for English speakers. Just a thought Good Luck! 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WALNUT CREEK, Calif. (AP) — A commuter train that is part of a San Francisco Bay Area system whose employees are on strike hit and killed two maintenance workers Saturday afternoon, officials said.
The accident in the East Bay city of Walnut Creek occurred shortly before 2 p.m. as the train was on a routine maintenance operated by non-union staff members, Bay Area Rapid Transit officials said in a statement.
BART officials said an "experienced operator" was at the controls, but did not specify who it was. The train was being run in automatic mode under computer control at the time of the accident, the statement said.
Union representatives have warned of the danger that could come with allowing managers to operate trains.
The two dead were one BART employee and one contractor who were performing track inspections in response to a reported dip in the track, BART said.
"Both people had extensive experience working around moving trains in both the freight train and the rapid transit industry," BART said.
The procedures for such maintenance require one employee to inspect the track and the other to serve as a lookout for oncoming traffic, BART officials said, but they did not immediately say whether that procedure was being followed.
The accident occurred about a mile from the Walnut Creek station and some 25 miles northeast of San Francisco.
Two tarps that appeared to be covering the two dead were laid across the tracks, the Contra Costa Times reported.
The victim's names and ages were not immediately released.
BART management and officials from two unions representing workers have been at an impasse over contract negotiations since Thursday as the system that links San Francisco and Oakland to Bay Area suburbs goes through its second work stoppage in less than three months.


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The International Student Club would like to invite you to the MOVIE NIGHT on the 8th of November at 6 pm, a. 301.
The International Student Club would like to invite you to the MOVIE NIGHT on the 8th of November at 6 pm a. 301.
Important Dates:
• Registration and Abstract Submission: June 1, 2018
• Notification of Abstract Acceptance and Full Paper Requirements: July 1, 2018
• Full Paper Submission: August 1, 2018
• Notification of Full Paper Acceptance: August 10, 2018
• Opening of a Conference: October 18, 2018
The Training was held under the Erasmus+ Project "Library Network Support Services (LNSS): modernising libraries in Armenia, Moldova and Belarus through library staff development and reforming library services".
The summer school, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) will start with visits to European Institutions in Strasburg, followed by llectures and presentations in Essen and last from 22.08. - 31.08.2016.
Application deadline: 05.02.2016.
Working language is English.
Travel costs and costs foe stay are covered by DAAD
See more information in the FLYER.
We are pleased to invite all those who are not indifferent to English and who want to upgrade their English skills to join "English Speaking Club" at our university.
The meeting between head of department of informatics and applied mathematics Siarhei Parfamuk and the university's undergraduates was held on October 30, 2015 on the theme "Participation of the Brest State Technical University in the CERES project".
I am Alexandra from Spain and I am going to tell you about my experience in Belarus.


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Can someone tell me what that ν is called that is used by Pharr in 'Homeric Greek for beginners' in paragraph 685?
It's in the sentence 'ν of course regularly becomes -ᾱ'. Or am I misreading it?
and a little line (n̩) for syllabic consonants
perispomenon wrote:Still, I need to know how to type it too. Or else copy it from a site. Can anyone point me in some direction?


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You can view the Proceedings from this event here.
This conference will explore how new IT trends are empowering improvements in business. We'll learn how industry organizations are seeking large-scale transformation and some of the paths they're taking to realize that. We'll also explore how cross-organizational collaboration and trends such as big data and cloud computing are helping to make enterprises more responsive and efficient.
Objectives include:
- Show the need for Boundaryless Information Flow™, which would result in more interoperable, real-time business processes that span throughout all business ecosystems.
- Provide high-level view of the healthcare ecosystem that identifies entities and stakeholders which must collaborate to enable the vision of Boundaryless Information Flow.
- Describe how to develop better interoperability and communication across organizational boundaries and pursue global standards for Enterprise Architecture that are highly relevant to all industries.
- Highlight business use-cases to provide a basis for the identification of architecture patterns, detailed ecosystems, and requirements for Open Platform 3.0™.
- Explain how Open Platform 3.0 can magnify the business benefits by enabling enterprises to use products and services that work together and enable them to deploy the technologies freely and in combination.
Desired Outcomes
Learn how industries in different business sectors have faced transformation and relied on Enterprise Architecture and TOGAF® to manage that process and make it something that's standardized, understood and repeatable.
Understand how standardized messaging and/or collaboration models allow us to facilitate the ability of technology to provide improved value to users
- Explore the business impact of emerging technologies, in particular, cloud, social, mobile, big data, and the Internet of Things.
- Identify the current state of IT standards and future opportunities standards which cover the healthcare ecosystem.
Thought leaders at this conference will share how they have been looking at IT trends, capabilities and global interoperability, which will lead to improvement for more responsiveness and efficiency
Monday, July 21
Open Platform 3.0™
Open Platform 3.0™ focuses on new and emerging technology trends converging with each other and leading to new business models and system designs. These trends currently include:
The general benefits of Open Platform 3.0 are in the combination of existing and new emerging technology and business processes to support enhanced business and technology value. This includes:
This is the foundation for developing new standards that will support architectures and implementation strategies for enterprises producing or consuming products and services based on the emerging technologies.
The Open Platform 3.0™ Forum will advance The Open Group vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ by helping organizations take advantage of the convergence of emerging technologies
Tuesday, July 22
Enabling Access to Quality Care
There are a myriad of IT standards in the healthcare industry, but the current IT standards in healthcare are not always working. Today, there are still too many IT systems that are not interoperable which results in significant barriers to the secured Boundaryless Information Flow™ in healthcare. Inside the healthcare ecosystem, information either doesn't flow well or it only flows at a great cost in terms of custom integration project.
The intent is to make existing and future IT standards in healthcare productive, pervasive, practical, and persistent.
Improving healthcare's information flow is a key enabler to improving healthcare outcomes and implementing efficiencies within today's delivery models. The goal is to look into healthcare challenges, desired outcomes, the extended healthcare enterprise, and the healthcare IT enterprise and gather those pain points that are out there…like interoperability.
In order to lead to better solutions that support better patient outcomes, we encourage the participation of global healthcare organizations as well as healthcare industry stakeholders and those in our Healthcare Forum.
View the full Healthcare agenda


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How do you control changes to your database schema? Can you manage differences between your production, development, test, and staging databases? In early June, Microsoft announced a new addition to Visual Studio Team System called Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (VSDB Pro), in which Visual Studio integrates database professionals and their databases into the application lifecycle and provides a foundation for managing database change in an offline, source- and version-controlled environment.
Managing and controlling changes throughout the application lifecycle has long been a problem in the software world, so much so that an entire industry has grown up around solving it. The development community has tools that manage code changes during development, but managing change to database schema still requires human intervention. And it's difficult to roll back a change if that change is incorrect or causes problems in other areas.
Adding to the complexity of change management is the continuous change that happens after a database is in production. DBAs spend hours and days updating indexes and optimization plans to improve production systems' performance. Even with self-managing databases, the DBA's role is a full-time job, especially in large organizations. One source of the difficulty in database-change management is the idea that the schema of the production database is the "master" version or the "one version of truth." With the DBAs' constant changes, and without procedures to control those changes, the production database can easily become out of sync with the development, test, and staging databases.
A Logical Separation
I propose that we take a slightly different view of the problem and separate the two distinct elements of a database: the constantly changing data and the schema that defines that data. I agree that the data's production version is the master copy, but does that necessarily mean that the same should be said of the schema's production version? If we think of the schema and the data as separate parts, we can treat the schema differently than we treat the data. Data operations rarely affect the schema, and because there's a logical separation between data and schema, wouldn't we benefit from controlling database schema changes outside of the production database?
I admit that the concept of controlling database schema changes outside of production systems took a long time to sink in. The light bulbs came on only when I related the concept to recent changes in Web management. In the Internet's early days, a Web site's production version was the master version. Web administrators would make changes to the live version of the Web site because the site needed to be live 24x7, just like a typical database system. As Web sites' complexity grew, one developer's changes overrode a different developer's changes, and synchronizing development efforts with the production system became increasingly difficult. So the industry adopted source- and version-control systems in which the Web site's master version is the one maintained in the source-control system and against which all development is conducted. Emergency changes to the live system are always tracked and slipstreamed back into the source-controlled version.
As more processing and application logic move to the database tier and database systems become more complex, the database industry needs to move in the same direction that the Web has. The more complicated the database systems become, the harder they are for an individual to manage and the more important advanced automated systems become to help everyone in the lifecycle work together.
Integrate with the Team
VSDB Pro provides a set of tools to help integrate a database into the software lifecycle. The Project System lets database professionals take a SQL Server 2005 or 2000 database schema offline and put it under source control, and it eases change deployment to all system versions. Other tools include a refactoring (or cascading change) engine with which you can rename any object (e.g., table, column, stored procedure) in the database and reflect that change across all objects in the database; a full unit-testing infrastructure that creates repeatable tests for database objects; a Data Generator that lets you create meaningful test data for other tests to execute against; and SchemaCompare and DataCompare, which can compare two different versions of a database (with SchemaCompare you can compare the source-controlled project against a live database), and build scripts to update one version to match the other. Over the next months I'll look at all of these features in more detail and continue to discuss this shift in the industry and how it affects the way we all work.
For more details about VSDB Pro, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/DBPro and read Karen Forster's exclusive interview "Life Cycle Tools for the Data Dude," InstantDoc ID 50271, and think how the tool might change the way the industry works with databases.


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President Obama just finished his press conference (I watched the CNN feed) and while most of the media reaction has been to his comment that "the private sector is doing fine", I want to focus here on his push back against the charge leveled by some Republican Party leaders, including senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, that members of his White House staff are deliberately leaking classified national security information to bolster Obama's reelection chances. Those charges were a response to recent news stories casting a generally favorable light on Obama's anti-terrorism efforts, including this NY Times piece by David Sanger on Obama's use of cyber warfare against Iran and this one documenting his role in targeting terrorists for drone strikes. Republicans found Sanger's story particularly troubling because it was based on research for his forthcoming book Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power . In his note on sources for the book, Sanger writes: "Following the practice of the Times in reporting on national security, I discussed with senior government officials the potential risks of publication of sensitive information that touches on ongoing intelligence operations. At the government's request, and in consultation with editors, I withheld a limited number of details that senior government officials said could jeopardize current or planned operations."
For Republicans, this suggests the White House cooperated with Sanger in order to burnish Obama's national security credentials heading into the fall election. Not surprisingly, when asked about this in today's press conference, Obama said he found the idea that he would authorize leaking classified security information for political gain "offensive." Moreover, as Press Secretary Jay Carney noted in yesterday's press gaggle, Scott Shane – one of the authors of the NY Times drone kill list story, has stated "The notion that the White House prompted the story or controlled our reporting and writing is absurd."
I don't doubt that Obama does not condone national security leaks. Nor do I believe the New York Times published two generally favorable pieces at the White House's bidding. But that does not mean the Times reporters didn't rely on leaked information to write their story. The reality is that it is all too common for a president's political aides to wade into politically controversial waters, including leaking potentially classified information, if they believe by doing so they will help the president achieve a policy objective, or gain politically – and they often do so without telling the President in order to give him "plausible deniability". Recall, for example, the decision by Ronald Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter, working with the redoubtable Oliver North, to use "residuals" from the sales of arms to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan contras in the period 1985-86. That decision was made, based on all available evidence, without Ronald Reagan's knowledge, but when it was disclosed, Reagan bore the full brunt of the political repercussions. Poindexter famously proclaimed that the "buck stops here" in trying to take full responsibility for the diversion, but of course this was politically naive; whenever a White House aide or senior official acts, the repercussions always fall back on the President – whether he authorized the act or not.
In 2003, of course, State Department Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, for reasons that are still disputed, revealed to columnist Bob Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA officer. Novak was trying to find out why Plame's husband Joe Wilson, a former Clinton administration official, had been sent to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in the form of "yellowcake" as a precursor to making a nuclear weapon. Bush had made that charge in his 2003 State of the Union address, but Wilson subsequently wrote an op-ed piece saying that is not what he learned on his trip there, and that Bush had misrepresented the intelligence findings. Armitage's motives in revealing Plame's work status remains a matter of debate; while Armitage contends that he revealed the information to Novak inadvertently, Novak stated that he thought the leak was deliberate.
The key point, however, is that although President Bush denies instructing Armitage to leak Plame's name, and in fact promised to fire anyone in his administration who broke the law by unmasking a CIA officer, his critics argued then, (and continue to argue today) that he in fact authorized the leak as retribution for Wilson's op-ed piece.
And this, of course, is exactly the issue Obama will confront, particularly if Congress begins an official inquiry into the matter of national security leaks. If one of Obama's political aides did, in fact, leak classified information regarding cyber intelligence, it will hardly matter whether Obama authorized it, or knew of it, or not. The political and legal repercussion will fall squarely on his shoulders.
Let me be clear – the motive for these acts is usually not political venality, or criminal stupidity so much as misguided zeal to carry out the president's mission; White House aides are particularly susceptible to being more "holy than the Pope", as presidency scholar Richard Neustadt once put it. When one is deeply committed to the cause, it becomes all too easy to step over a line, particularly when that line is somewhat fuzzy and indistinct. Note that Armitage was never prosecuted for his leak, in part because of the difficulty in determining whether he had committed a crime. However, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was found guilty and sentenced to 30 months in prison for covering up his discussions with reporters about the Plame affair.
With these examples in mind, I find it perfectly plausible that a high-ranking Obama official, convinced the President's action in keeping this nation safe has been underappreciated, and wanting to do everything possible to insure his reelection, may have released some classified information to a reporter in the process of providing background material to a story. Do I know this happened? Not at all. But if it did, we should not be surprised. It wouldn't be the first time – and it likely won't be the last.
Meanwhile, our own Danny Zhang was at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus yesterday (Danny's working on a campaign out there) and caught the President up close and personal, working the rope line. There's no truth to the rumor that Danny took the opportunity to advise Obama to read the Presidential Power blog, but Danny did remind me that "It's great to study American Politics in America!"


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WASHINGTON - Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a liberal Democrat and a champion for Americans with disabilities, announced Saturday that he will not run for re-election.
WASHINGTON - Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a liberal Democrat and a champion for Americans with disabilities, announced Saturday that he will not run for re-election next year, saying that 40 years in Congress is enough.
Harkin's retirement gives Republicans a chance to pick up a Senate seat during next year's midterm election. They need to gain six seats to take control of the Senate.
But Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Harkin's early announcement gave the party ample time to recruit a strong candidate to run next year.
"In my short time in the Senate, I have seen firsthand Tom Harkin's strong commitment to the people of Iowa. He is a great legislator and his accomplishments in healthcare, education and on behalf of people with disabilities will be remembered long after he leaves," Bennet said.
Last week, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said he would not run for a third term, and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., said he would not run for a sixth term.
Harkin, 73, made the announcement in his hometown of Cumming, Iowa. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, and in 1984 won election to the Senate, where he has served since. He ran for president in 1992.
"After 40 years, I just feel it's somebody else's turn," Harkin said. "I am going to make way for someone new in this Senate seat. I think that is right not just for me, but for Iowa as well."


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Members Participating:
Hon. Dale Sandstrom, Supreme Court Justice, Chair
Hon. William Herauf, Judge - Southwest Judicial District
Hon. Joel Medd, Judge - Northeast Judicial District
Hon. Frank Racek, Judge - East Central Judicial District
Sally Holewa, State Court Administrator
Lee Ann Barnhardt, Director of Education & Communication
Rita Fischer, Deputy Clerk of Court - McKenzie County
Donna Wunderlich, District Court Administrator - Unit 3
Members Absent:
Hon. Daniel Narum, Judge - Southeast Judicial District
Hon. Doug Mattson, Judge - Northwest Judicial District
Penny Miller, Clerk of Supreme Court
Becky Absey, Clerk of District Court - Grand Forks County
Hon. Allen Schmalenberger, District Judge
Jim Gienger, Project Manager for UCIS Replacement Project
Rod Olson, District Court Administrator - Unit 2
Chris Iverson, Trial Court Manager - Unit 2
Kathryn Ouren, Clerk of District Court - Cass County
Barb Hill, Clerk of District Court - Stutsman County
Dennis Herbeck, District Court Administrator - Unit 1
Deb Simenson, Clerk of District Court - Burleigh County
Susan Hoffer, Clerk of District Court - Ward County
Brandi Fagerland, ITD Project Oversight Manager
Wanda Knutson, Clerk of District Court - Mercer County
Don Wolf, Director of Finance
Kristen Wheeler, Tyler Technology
Larry Zubke, Director of Technology
Cammie Schock, Technology Coordinator
The meeting was called to order by Chair Sandstrom.
Approval of Minutes from December 3, 2010 Meeting
Minutes will be amended to correct the e-signature capability timeline. Although, Odyssey is being upgraded to version 11 in the January-February timeframe, additional document capability will not be available until the third quarter of 2011.
Donna Wunderlich moved to amend and approve the December 3, 2010 meeting minutes. Sally Holewa seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Odyssey Implementation
Status of Phase 4
Jim reported the status is as of the end of December as submitted to the ITD Large Project Oversight. Jim indicated that since December, quite a bit of work has been accomplished. SME's have been trained; numerous conference calls on configuration and data reviews have been held. Approximately 22 issues have been documented in the data reviews, most of which were anticipated and nothing significant. The preliminary one-day basics training is nearly complete for clerks and deputy clerks.
Jim continued by saying Larry has ordered most of the hardware and much has been deployed including replacement pc's, citrix boxes, printers and scanners. The March-April training has been finalized, as well as, month-end training the first week of May. Jim will be sending updated schedules today. Also nearly complete are the go-live plans. Contingency ideas have been discussed but not yet documented. Worst case scenario would be to bring in additional Tyler support in case court staff cannot be on-site due to flooding in the eastern half of the state.
Jim Gienger stated in addition to phase 4, there are ongoing activities in Units 1 and 2. They have been testing the new 2011 Odyssey release which will be available Monday morning.
Variance Report
Jim Gienger reported as of the end of December the project falls right at 0.0% on schedule and 13.2% under budget. The budget percentage is slightly skewed due to several payments that were anticipated in December but did not occur until January. Jim predicts once those payments occur we will be at 6% under budget.
Jim Gienger stated e-filing continues to expand to state agencies and private attorneys. Case types and documents have been expanded as well. Tyler recently moved the servers to Dallas, Texas and has proven to provide better performance and redundancy. The server move will now allow us to move to Tyler's mainstream product line. We will be testing the new 2.4 release within the next couple of weeks. Tyler is also working on the 3.0 release and that will be available to us this summer. In response to a question, Jim Gienger stated that we are not charged for taking new releases however, what may cost us money is if we need professional services from Tyler to implement or customize features of the release. Tyler has delivered a roadmap that contains significant changes to the product.
Justice Sandstrom inquired on the timeframe for initial filings into criminal cases. Jim stated that is one of the functionalities we will be testing with the release of 2.4 coming later this month. However, we may not have the capability until release 3.0. Judge Racek brought to the committee's attention the sensitivity of warrants getting to the state's attorney and sheriff's office when we have the ability to submit initial filings into criminal cases.
Jim Gienger reported that we continue to identify more forms for Units 1 and 2 and are currently capturing all of the signatures for Units 3 and 4. Tyler continues to work on plans to expand E-signatures. Jim stated high on Tyler's priority list is to add e-signature capabilities to File and Serve and they hope to have this functionality available somewhere between July and September.
Municipal Courts
Jim went on to report that we have currently brought 7 municipal courts onto Odyssey and have 8 to go. At the beginning of the project, the original plan was to convert 10 municipals; however, more have shown interest. Included in the 8 municipals remaining is Fargo, which is currently moving on a different time line for several reasons, one being the conversion of data from a different system. The goal is to have Fargo live on Odyssey by the end of June.
Web Payments/Phone Payments
Jim moved on to explain that web and phone payments are currently a part of Tyler's e-payments solution. Jim stated that web payments give the public the ability to pay for traffic tickets on the internet and is currently live in Cass, Barnes and Stutsman counties. Phone payments, or IVR (Interactive Voice Response), gives the ability to call into an automated phone line and through a series of menus the defendant can make a payment. Phone payments are currently live in Cass County only. The current vendor for this is Sonant. We will be moving to Tyler's phone payment solution in the June timeframe for Cass County and from there it will be rolled out to the rest of the state.
Attorney Web Access
Jim Gienger reported private attorneys cannot gain secure public access unless they sign up for e-filing and receive training. Larry Zubke reported that 84 law offices have been trained thus far, 193 attorneys have signed up as of yesterday and 292 state employees use secure public access such as State's Attorneys and Dept. of Corrections.
Enhanced Maintenance Proposal
Jim Gienger mentioned that the amount of free Tyler support will diminish substantially when we transition from implementation mode to maintenance mode in July. Tyler's initial proposal did not address this issue. Tyler responded by delivering an Enhanced Maintenance proposal which includes 24/7 support, application and technical support, and a Support Account Manager (SAM) to coordinate and escalate issues. Their role would also include strategic and onsite planning, coordinate release upgrades, assist in backup recovery planning and be the gate keeper of resources at Tyler, as well as, be the primary contact.
Jim Gienger stated that currently, we have budgeted for 700 hours of professional services for the next biennium. Within the maintenance agreement, Tyler would be giving back $30,000 worth of professional services per year. The total cost of the Enterprise Support would be roughly an additional $30,000 per year. Jim's recommendation is to sign up for the support.
Larry Zubke stated the current maintenance contract has limitations. He also stated having a SAM would be a huge help in getting us through the next 2 years which will be a pivotal time for everyone on the new system. Larry also recommended accepting the proposal. Sally Holewa agreed and stated the planning piece with the Account Manager is critical as we would not have the mechanism to work with Tyler on adding to their road map without being charged. Brandi Fagerland also agreed that the next two years will be critical and challenging and based on what she has heard the new maintenance plan would be well worth it.
Sally Holewa moved to recommend the Enhanced Maintenance Proposal. Judge Racek seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Dismissed criminal cases and the manner in which they are displayed on the website
Justice Sandstrom stated the Joint Procedure Committee expressed concern in regard to the public website and the complexity of finding out whether charges have been dismissed. Justice Sandstrom explained the website shows the offense but does not immediately show the disposition. The Joint Procedure Committee would like the Court Technology Committee to examine possible ways to improve the display of records. Jim Gienger further explained the search results of the case initially shows the citation number, defendants name, date of birth, filed date, location, judicial officer, case type and status, charge, and what the case was initiated as such as felony, misdemeanor and so forth. He stated the case number shown is a hyperlink that will take you further into the case to view the disposition information.
The group discussed several possibilities such as highlighting the disposition, adding a case status of dismissed rather than open or closed, as well as, adding a general disclaimer. The group decided this issue should be taken to the Operation Oversight Committee for further discussion.
Destruction of documents
Justice Sandstrom stated there were concerns of the quality of scanned documents and not having an original to fall back onto. Jim Gienger stated when the clerks scan they currently go through a quality assurance process. The problem may come into play when there is different shades of color or possibly a bad copy was received to begin with. Jim stated there are options available when scanning such as black and white, grey scale and color when necessary. Justice Sandstrom stated it seems to be more of a training and implementation issue. Rod agreed and stated when the clerks were trained they are to make sure everything is correctly lined up and legible. Rod says it is not an Odyssey problem it is a quality control issue. He stated initially they struggled but it has since gotten better. Dennis Herbeck stated there are certain documents that may not scan well. He also stated some documents are not legible when received and is the responsibility of the person submitting them. Judge Racek stated that ultimately these documents will be received through e-filing in the future and if they are not legible they will be rejected and we should be following the same practice now. Larry Zubke stated for those documents that are the originals and if there is no way to get a better image of those items they should be kept as an exhibit and noted on the case. Rod Olson agreed and explained that is what they are currently doing in Unit 2.
Judge Herauf expressed concern that 5 days is not a long enough time frame for a judge to review all documents that have come in. Judge Racek stated that there is a great deal of awareness throughout their office and there is flexibility, for example, a large document or a picture that is not well scanned will be addressed with the judge prior to destroying the documents.
Justice Sandstrom stated he attended an E-filing session at a national conference in December. He asked a panel what they do with documents of independent legal significance. He explained there were two responses. One state returns all documents to the attorney and the other state said they had identified documents of independent legal significance and are keeping them on file. Justice Sandstrom asked the committee its opinion of Administrative Order 19 and retaining documents. Sally Holewa stated that originally we settled on 5 days for destruction when we first started working with electronic documents. Judge Racek stated if it's kept much longer then they will need to establish a paper filing system once again. Rod Olson stated once e-filing is better established this will not be an issue due to not having the document to begin with. Justice Sandstrom stated that the general consensus of the committee is retaining documents for 7 days is sufficient. Justice Sandstrom stated he would work with Mike Hagburg on tweaking the order for those items of independent legal significance.
Sally Holewa stated that when the Operations group first visited this issue, they started making a list of documents that might be of independent legal significance and then shifted to having the party submitting the document be responsible for identifying those documents rather than having the burden placed on the clerk.
January 18th power outage and impact on the Courts and Odyssey system
Larry Zubke stated that he has not received official documentation on the cause of the power outage and what they will do to prevent this in the future. He stated there were some digital audio frustrations and changes have since been made. He also stated that SessionWorks should still function provided the cases are downloaded prior to the outage.
Sally Holewa explained that the proposed disaster recovery study is in doubt with the legislation. They feel it is better to have ITD do a statewide study.
Recap of IT projects for the 2009-2011 biennium and current budget status
Larry Zubke stated most projects listed in the IT plan are complete. The UCIS to Odyssey replacement project is still in process. There is still a fair amount of money left for pc's, scanners, citrix boxes and licenses. For the most part the project should be done by June 30th. The virtual server expansion was on the plan. There were about 40 when we started the biennium and we are now at about 70. The middle tier server for Unit 3 has been upgraded. Last spring the digital central server was installed. This would be the third level of digital audio support. Larry stated ITV was installed in Pierce and McKenzie counties and we replaced a failed system in Stutsman. Wireless networks were installed in Burleigh and Cass County. Due to the Odyssey project, almost every state employed clerk position was given a new pc. To date we have replaced about 215 pc's and 112 printers. After the Odyssey project is complete we will have installed 165 scanners. Larry explained we are currently finalizing the quotes for the last project on the list which is to put video in the Supreme Court courtroom.
Don Wolf explained how he put together the projection for the remainder of the biennium. He estimates there will be roughly $2.2 million of turnback. He stated that the turnback estimate includes $1.1 million of prepayment from last biennium for the Odyssey project. In addition, $575,000 of the $600,000 appropriated for the management reserve will be turned back to the general fund. The Information Technology Department project oversight fee of $25,000 was charged to the management reserve. The estimated turnback does not include approximately $150,000 for scanners and printers for Units 3 and 4. Also to be considered is the possibility of having to pay the extra costs for Odyssey's enhanced maintenance contract proposal which wasn't included in the budget.
Judge Racek stated that previously we had deferred buying servers for video monitors for public scheduling and asked if this could be revisited. Larry stated the cost was $30,000-$40,000 for a statewide server and the monitors for one county. Larry estimated the total costs would be $80,000 - $100,000 for the system to be installed in the 4 largest counties. Larry stated the intent is to have a monitor by the front door and one on each floor.
Judge Racek moved to recommend proceeding this biennium with the video monitor project. Donna Wunderlich seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Justice Sandstrom presented a proposal from Judge Nelson to request new audio visual equipment in the new Williams County courtroom. The cost would be roughly $50,000. Larry Zubke stated an additional $8000 would be needed for the digital audio system.
Judge Racek moved to recommend the request for new audio visual equipment. Rita Fischer seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Justice Sandstrom informed the committee that Judge Medd suggested adding a trial judge to the Operations Oversight Group. He also stated that Judge Medd suggested a default printer option in Odyssey as well as a FAQ section. He also would like to see a "Back" feature in Odyssey. Jim Gienger stated that these items are being looked into and he would work with Judge Medd on these issues.
Judge Herauf moved to recommend adding a judge to the Operations Oversight Group. Rita Fischer seconded the motion and the motion carried.
For the Good of the Order
The meeting was adjourned by Justice Sandstrom. The next meeting is scheduled for April 29, 2011.


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Goat Husbandry Books
Saanen Roots by Allan L. Rogers
Regular Price: $7.95
Special Price: $5.00If you are a Saanen fancier, this small book is a complete, detailed history of the Saanen breed in the United States. Learn More
Artificial Insemination Handbook$7.55This 28-page booklet is a very good introduction to dairy goat A.I. Clearly written, well-organized, easy to follow. Learn More
More Life in the Goat Lane by Linda Fink$10.95If you liked Fink's book Life in the Goat Lane, you'll love this one. Here Fink takes on guard dogs, goat escapes, goat people and barn fashions, goats and horses, manure, fencing, hay hauling, milk test day blues, cleaning chores, and the myriad of other frustrations we all go through. Learn More
Life in the Goat Lane by Linda Fink$10.95A humorous look at goat owning and goat owners, adapted from the best of Fink's columns, "The Kidding Pen," which appear monthly in United Caprine News. Learn More
Diet For Wethers by Carolyn Eddy$18.95A comprehensive guide to wether nutrition. The nutritional charts and feed composition charts are most helpful for all goats. Learn More
Field First Aid for Goats by Alice Beberness & Carolyn Eddy$24.95Subtitled "A Portable Guide to Health Care for Your Goat," this spiral-bound, 4-1/2" x 5-1/2" booklet covers most first aid topics, plus emergency information, systemic diseases, packgoat management, diseases of pregnancy and kidding. Learn More
Livestock Guardians, by Janet Vorwald Dohner$24.95A complete guide to working with guardian animals. Learn about methods of predator control, chapters on livestock guard dogs, llamas, and donkeys, their selection, training, and care. Learn More
"Training Goats to Pull a Cart" by Caprine Supply$3.95This Caprine Supply booklet details what you need to know to begin training a goat to pull a cart. Learn More
USDA Goat Extension Handbook edited by George Haenlein$35.95USDA-sponsored handbook of information about goats, edited by George Haenlein, University of Delaware, and Donald L. Ace, Pennsylvania State University. More than 60 separate articles on management, housing, nutrition, genetics, reproduction. Learn More
Your Goats by Gail Damerow$14.95A book for young people who want information about raising and showing all kinds of goats. Learn More


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Asked what drove him to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory simply replied, "Because it's there.''
If asked what moved them to photograph mountains, Vittorio Sella and Brad Washburn might have just pointed to the memorable images they left behind of some of the harshest, remotest and most sublime places on Earth.
To see their spectacular photos of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, the Presidential Range and the Doldenhorn, climb two flights of stairs to the Panopticon Gallery in the Hotel Commonwealth in Kenmore Square.
Take a look at "A View From The Top'' and be prepared to catch your breath.
Organized by gallery owner Jason Landry, this gorgeous exhibit showcases two pioneering photographers whose distinctive approaches captured different aspects of mountaineering that set a standard rarely matched over the ensuing decades.
However different their backgrounds and styles, Sella and Washburn photographed mountains with a kind of awed reverence for their pitiless indifference to the humans who climbed their surfaces like little bugs.
In their own ways, each conveyed the seeming spiritual serenity of these vast, implacable peaks.
Though shooting nearly 50 years apart, often in different parts of the world, Sella and Washburn took photos that reveal the difficulties climbers faced and the sheer immensity of the mountains they challenged.
"A View From The Top'' offers 28 images by Sella, including several of shepherds and folk who lived near the mountains he photographed. Washburn is represented by 11 large, mostly panoramic photos in which humans are barely present.
Each is a master photographer who imbues their scenes with a solemnity often reserved for grand cathedrals or other sacred spaces.
Born in August 1859 in the foothills of the Alps, the Italian Sella took the first photos of several major peaks, carrying a bulky 40-pound camera that used 14-by-11-inch plates at the dawn of modern mountaineering.
Born in 1910 and raised in Cambridge by a Brahmin family of outdoor adventurers, Washburn was climbing in Europe as a teenager. An experienced pilot who studied geology and geography at Harvard and later became the founding director of the Museum of Science, he pioneered the art of aerial photography, creating spectacular images of entire glaciers and mountain ranges, mostly in Alaska.
In his 1909 photo, "Western Spur of Gasherbrum, 17,917 feet,'' Sella captures a barely visible, solitary figure gazing toward a massive panorama of craggy, snow-draped peaks rising into the sky.
Humans appear in Washburn's signature "After The Storm, Climbers on the Doldenhorn'' as six tiny specks, casting absurdly long shadows as they pick their way across the mountain's jagged crest, sandwiched between the clouds above and sheer slopes below.
In Sella's photos, his climbers encounter natural obstacles like a series of dangerous crevasses in his 1888 shot of Glacier Blanc. Other times they lug a sled laden with supplies as in his 1897 photo "Traversing the Hitchcock Glacier on the Return from Mount St. Elias."
Since Sella seemed to shoot from the snowy surface, his photos more than Washburn's suggest the grueling physical exertion required to climb these mountains.
In an 1888 photo, two climbers approach the highest peak of Les Rouies in the French Alps, pausing as if to summon the energy before following a trail of footsteps ascending at an impossibly steep angle to the distant summit.
Since most of Washburn's photos in this show were shot from an airplane, his mountains are immense, brutally beautiful and godlike.
Whatever his spiritual inclinations, Washburn was an internationally recognized cartographer who must also have seen the mountains he photographed so magically as geological objects, carved across the eons by forces of nature that dwarfed human endeavor.
The nearly vertical rock walls in his 1958 "Moonrise Over the Grandes Jorasse'' seem utterly impervious to human effort, an affront to will and ego that's somehow purifying.
Yet in a 1937 photo, Washburn grins boyishly as he handles a large 8-by-10 inch Fairchild camera mounted in the window of a monoplane near Valdez, Alaska.
While some might say it's impossible to take a bad photo of Mount Everest or K2, Sella and Washburn did more than photograph piles of rocks: they conveyed the human effort and otherworldly beauty of an activity that takes place amid the clouds.
In 1924 Mallory died near the summit of Everest at the age of 37. When his body was recovered 75 years later, the camera he was known to carry couldn't be found.
Perhaps Sella and Washburn took those photos for him.
"A View From the Top''
WHEN: Through Feb. 23
WHERE: Panopticon Gallery, Hotel Commonwealth,
502c Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
INFO: 617-267-8929; www.panopticongallery.com
Photography: Moonrise kingdom at Boston's Panopticon Gallery
Asked what drove him to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory simply replied, "Because it's there.''


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The Benefits And Drawbacks Of The Legalization Of WeedAt first, when there was talk about weed dispensaries opening up near me, a lot of people were confused about just how legit the transition of illegal weed to legal weed was going to be. Many people believed that weed was never going to be legal, and so it came as a surprise to them to learn that Colorado was going to be setting up legal weed shops around the state. For many citizens, this seemed like a huge mistake, as they believed that pot-smokers would become too prominent in the society, which would result in low employment rates amongst many other issues. What these people didn't expect, however, was just how much their society was going to benefit from the legalization of weed. The following are the top 4 positive ways the legalization of marijuana affect a society.
It Lowers the Crime Rate
For starters, the legalization of weed helped lower the crime rates in Colorado, which had begun to reach an all time high. While some people might believe that weed makes a person feel violent, it actually does the opposite, it encourages them to view both sides and come to a friendly solution. In fact, weed is a lot less dangerous than alcohol consumption, as it still permits people to see clearly sites and actually de-motivates them to get into fights or whatnot. For these reasons, many states that have legalized marijuana have noticed a significant decrease in their crime rate, ranging from home break ins, arrests, and overall violent crimes.
It Affects the Economy
Governments had no idea just how beneficial it would be for them to legalize marijuana, and this is because they never could have anticipated making over 40 million dollars since weed was legalized in Colorado — from taxes alone. Being able to collect this many taxes has helped governments supply their municipalities with better health care, schools, programs, renovations, etc.
It Creates New Jobs
Another very pleasing additive to the legalization of marijuana is that unlike anticipated, it has lowered the unemployment rate. While it is true that smoking a lot of weed can make someone more prone to living a lazy lifestyle, not many people are going to quit their day job in order to smoke weed in their mother's basement for the rest of their lives, and so weed has not affected the unemployment rate negatively. Instead, the legalization of weed has helped see here supply the public with over 16 000 new jobs, which is the main reason behind the unemployment rate dropping.
Less Gang Violence
Since most people are now buying their weed from a dispensary near me, there are less drug dealers fighting over turf, and so gang violence has also significantly decreased.


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Main Site - :: Why Won't God Heal Amputees? ::
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Religions need books because they don't have gods.
Discovered your website after reading Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Thought it was fantastic and looked for a facebook page. I was on board until seeing the pornographic post on the facebook page of amputees engaging in graphic sex. Porn? Really? Totally childish and unnecessary...quite a disservice to the serious message I think you are trying to get across...what a shame....you lost me.[name removed]
I didn't create the website, just the facebook fan page. I encourage discussion of the topic, but any suggestions or feedback about www.whywontgodhealamputees.com should be directed to email@example.com://www.facebook.com/pages/Why-Wont-God-Heal-Amputees/110479855631610?id=110479855631610&sk=info
If there is a facebook site for wwgha, it is neither part of the forum nor, as far as I know, run by the owner of this forum and the associated site. It is likely a scam trying to capitalize on the popularity of wwgha. I will bring it to the attention of the owner of wwgha.


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Framework for participation in integrated catchment management
Expanded Title:
The Farmer Support Group – through its Mlazi River Catchment Programme - was commissioned to develop a framework for community participation in catchment management in South Africa. Over the past seven years, a multi-disciplinary team helped to start twenty four water efficient organic community gardens, thirty three school environmental action clubs, seven craftwork groups and a number of subcatchment committees, local environmental committees and conservancies. Of these, about half are functioning well, while about a quarter are likely to be able to sustain themselves without further external assistance. Thousands of young people and hundreds of decision makers are more aware of the fact that they live in the Mlazi River catchment, and that their activities impact upon this ecosystem. Programme goal for phase 3 was to finalise a framework document for community participation in integrated catchment management. During this phase, the programme aimed to help members of subcatchment committees (and of other interest groups, including commercial farmers, community gardeners and craft groups) to learn more effective participation in the activities of the catchment management agencies. Earlier phases of the programme identified four major areas needing intervention: 1. The development and promotion of ecologically sound farming and land use practices 2. Working with local communities to enable them to pursue their own development 3. Promoting and enabling networking and collaboration among local leadership and multiple stakeholders, and 4. Awareness raising among youth and adults about social, ecological and economic issues impacting on the catchment. Given the provisions of the National Water Act, these four major areas make up the most important aspects of achieving the aim of phase 3. Ecologically sound land use practices included rainwater harvesting using swales, mulches, compost and wetlands. This was found to reduce water use dramatically during the earlier phases of the programme. Local communities were best helped with their own development through participatory techniques, which helped them to analyse their problems, and to find solutions to these problems. Collaboration was promoted by bringing diverse communities together into small local "platforms" where they could discuss common problems, and begin to understand the other person's perspective. Awareness among youth and adults was raised through the activities of school environmental action clubs, through discussions and presentations to a large number of local groups, and most importantly, through introducing a large number of people to the riverine environment and teaching them about stream life practically. These practical biomonitoring activities were reported in a regular catchment newsletter, which helped many catchment residents to develop a catchment identity. Many people were helped to generate money through craft activities based on wetland conservation, and these constitute a contribution towards sustainable livelihoods based on sound natural resource management. Others were able to improve household food security through direct production of food, and some are selling surplus production locally. Organic certification could help these people to sell their produce at a higher price, and the Ethekwini Municipality has recommended that small-scale farmers should be assisted with organic production and certification for export. As a pilot programme, the Mlazi River Catchment Programme has enjoyed a relatively high level of resources. It has shown that even after seven years of facilitation, neither catchment management nor sound land use have been well enough established to continue without further outside support. However, the programme has also demonstrated that it is possible to bring communities together in a way which allows them to relate better to one another and to their local environment. Quantifying this improvement and evaluating its worth is very difficult, but the use of many local people in the programme team means that human capacity has been improved in the area, and also that team members are still available to contribute to on-going development activities. However, community participation has been poor in the process of establishing a local catchment management agency for the Water management Area. People feel that they will not be helped by an agency that is too remote to achieve anything practically on the ground. Collective action at local level is considered a more likely route to bring about improvement. It is expected that some of the local groups will continue to work towards improved management of their environment, while others will collapse without dedicated support and facilitation. Attempts have been made to set up more permanent local institutions, and these may continue to support local initiatives. The main conclusion of the programme is that intervention at local level is far more likely to achieve real progress, even if this is quite modest. Effective intervention at large-scale catchment level takes a very long time. Thus, integrated catchment management should focus on enabling people to work together and take collective decisions at local level.
Date Published:
Document Type:
Research Report
Document Subjects:
Water Resource Management/IWRM - Catchment Management, Water Resource Management/IWRM - Hydrogeology
Document Keywords:
Water Quality
Document Format:
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ISBN Set No:
Auerbach R; Salmon M
Project No:
Mlazi River Catchment Management Programme Farmer Support Group
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Tomorrow (June 9) there are two FREE opportunities to get advice on writing and publishing.
- At 11 a.m. ET, I'll be chatting with Deb Scott on her show "The Best People We Know." You can listen online for free, and ask questions live. Click here for more info.
- Then, at 2 p.m. ET, you can listen to Dan Blank discuss the basics of author platform. He's one of the best experts and teachers I know on the topic, so this is an excellent opportunity to get golden information absolutely free. Click here for details.
Last week, I offered an online 90-minute class covering 6 key components of an online platform. The recording is now available for sale at WritersDigestShop.com.


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Friday, July 10, 2009
Drunk cherries
8 comments:
I will definitely be making these this week! I wonder how they would be with Kirsch - would that add an extra cherry zing or would it just be gilding the lily, I wonder?ReplyDelete
Did you mention why you can't eat raw fruit? Is it allergies?
- Anonymous6:30 AM
This looks fabulous.In simply it looks wonderful.ReplyDelete
Free Satellite TV
- lily6:32 PM
I remember as a child my Dad would make these when they were ready to pick or at the market. They kept for years in the closet. My brothers and I would sneak them for a treat. I don't remember if he used sugar, but sure do remember the grain 190 proof he used. Will be making some this year for gifts to my children this Christmas.ReplyDelete
When I make black forest cake, I make something similar (but use a mixture of rum, kirsch, and chocolate liqueur) for the cherries in the cake. I always make extra for snacking -- they're great with ice cream! And I keep the liquor the cherries have been soaking in, in the fridge, to use again -- or put in martinis. ;)ReplyDelete