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Dedicated Prenuptial Agreement Assistance for West Chester, Hamilton and Mason Residents
A prenuptial agreement is a signed contract between you and your potential spouse that designates how you would like your property distributed upon divorce. Ideally, the agreement addresses and resolves issues like spousal support, expenses during the marriage, and the division of debts and property. If you divorce without a prenuptial agreement in Ohio, a judge will seek to equitably distribute your marital property. The court will divide your marital property in a way that's deemed fair, but not necessarily equal.
Requirements and Allowances Specific to Ohio
Ohio has several requirements to create a valid prenuptial agreement and allowances on several aspects of such an agreement.
These include that you and your potential spouse must disclose all your assets and debts to one another before signing the agreement. Ohio family law also includes a provision that removes property from the marital estate – which is subject to division in a divorce – if the property is addressed in the prenuptial agreement. Because Ohio decides custody on the basis of the child's best interests, state law disallows future spouses to address in advance custody of any children that the marriage might produce.
Ohio also allows for a severance clause agreed to by both spouses that can preserve the remainder of the agreement even if the court finds one part of the agreement invalid. Also, both you and your spouse must have adequate time to review the agreement—in other words, an Ohio judge will throw out a prenuptial presented to a future spouse the night before a wedding.
In addition, two witnesses must be present when you and your potential spouse sign the agreement.
State law doesn't require that you have legal counsel during the prenuptial process, but it's definitely in your interest to have an experienced attorney review your agreement to ensure that it's fair.


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BBC Magazines have kindly sent us details of issue two of their new Doctor Who Adventures magazine which some shops appear to have been selling over the Bank Holiday weekend to cash in on the airing of New Earth last Saturday.
According to the press release:
"In this thrilling second issue we take a sneaky look at two new episodes, there's a fascinating fact file about the Doctor's best friend Rose, an exciting comic strip. the second part of our win a Dalek comp, and a look at New Earth.
There are posters, puzzles and loads to win and you can find out about the Slitheen and make a Empty Child mask, too!
The issue comes with two fantastic free gifts – a Slitheen Gas Exhchange (an alien whoopee cushion!) and set of holographic stickers. And it's out now."

subset: commoncrawl


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Race for the White House 2012
Much of the national news this past week continued to settle on the uprising in Egypt, and the Brett Favre like back and forth over the eventual resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. While the events in the country will continue to be an important story in the months ahead, we should probably expect to see less daily coverage.
Stateside, the most prominent political event related to the 2012 Presidential election was this weekend's annual CPAC conference in Washington D.C. Numerous GOP hopefuls made appearances, including a surprise one by celebrity businessman Donald Trump. Absent from the confab were two of the more prominent potential candidates in Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, although the latter did seem to have a pretty impressive look alike wandering the halls and likely fooling some people, at least temporarily.
The Straw Poll results which were announced today included the expected first place finish of libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, who bought tickets for many young supporters and who captured 30 percent of the vote. Coming in second overall, (and first among actual conservatives) was my preferred pick, Mitt Romney, who won 23% of the vote. No other candidate was able to receive more than six percent of the vote, and it is worth noting that Romney received as much support as all his likely serious competitors for the nomination combined. The former Massachusetts Governor gave a well-praised speech to the meeting on Friday morning, after being introduced by his wife Ann. She has made it clear that while her husband is publicly undecided, she wants him to run and serve as President of the United States.
Bottom line: he is running and this past weekend at CPAC has only helped cement his statue as the GOP frontrunner at this still early stage, roughly one year away from Iowa and New Hampshire.


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Macon HS (MHS) Class of 1986 Alumni List
Help us Update the Macon HS 1986 Class List by adding any names missing from the list below:
Registered Alumni
1986 Class List
Know Macon HS Class of 1986 graduates that are NOT on this List? Help us Update the 1986 Class List by adding missing names.
The top movie in theaters during 1986 was Top Gun, grossing over $176,786,701 in its lifetime. The most popular television series for 1986 was The Cosby Show
Hit Songs From 1986
Hit Movies From 1986
Hit TV Shows From 1986
Reunions and Macon High School News
More 1986 alumni from Macon HS have posted profiles on Classmates.com®. Click here to register for free at Classmates.com® and view other 1986 alumni.
Alumni from the Macon High School class of 1986 that have been added to this alumni directory are shown on this page. All of the people on this page graduated in '86 from Macon HS. You can register for free to add your name to the MHS alumni directory.
Don't forget to upload your Macon High School pictures and check on the latest info about any Macon High School reunion.


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The first Thanksgiving in 1621 was celebrated with gratefulness for God's provisions and survival, including a "special instrument sent of God…" ♦ In the days before America was founded, an American Indian named Tisquantum (Squanto for short) would travel across the… Read More ›
Month: November 2014
The Future-Spouse-Prayer Treatment
It's sometimes hard to see beyond your children's here and now. But they do grow up and the visions you convey to young minds have powerful implications. All the more so if you're a person of prayer. ♦ In her broken… Read More ›
If God is Good, Why Do I Feel So Bad?
If God is so good, then why do we still feel so bad, even sad? What's really keeping a person from a life of real joy and happiness? ♦ Ok. So if one is loved by God and God is good,… Read More ›
A Simple Gospel: Romans 1-3
The Biblical letter to the Romans, written by the Apostle Paul, makes a powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel and a case for the world's need for God. And it merely takes faith, like that of a child. ♦ The Apostle… Read More ›


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"An amazing bunch of people providing fantastic experiences. Regardless of your fitness levels or abilities spending time with mor active is guaranteed to enrich your life and make you feel great about yourself. Me, my husband and 2 teenage boys can't wait to return." ~ Claire Philips
"A big thank you to Michael and his team for a brilliant week of activities for my family and our friends. We were a group of 12 (5 adults and 7 kids – age 6 – 18) and they organised activities that all of us could do and really enjoy our time together. A great family holiday." ~ Josephine Slattery
"The best holiday I have ever been on. Mick was a great instructor and he was very patient with everybody teaching them how to rock climb or abseiling. My personal favourite activity was body boarding and surfing on Inny strand. It was a bit cold but Mick gave us a nice surprise of a cup of hot chocolate to keep us warm. We will definitely be coming back." ~ Daniel Fitzgerald


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45.5 million people in the UK now hold a driving licence – and with so many people on the road, accidents are bound to happen. If you're unlucky enough to have been in one of them, you may be entitled to compensation.
Road traffic accidents can be caused by one of numerous reasons, including negligence, poor weather conditions, car failure or lack of maintenance, and unsafe roads.
If you are a driver, passenger, cyclist, motorcyclist or pedestrian, and you have been involved in a collision, and suffered a related injury (such as whiplash) you are well within your rights to explore making a claim.
Don't be afraid to take the first step and talk to someone about it. Many people are anxious about making a claim, on the basis that it might make life difficult for someone else – but claims are often made against the insurance company of the driver responsible rather than the driver.
Call us free on 0800 320 2121 for a friendly, informal and above all FREE conversation about how we might be able to help you claim compensation.


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- Our College
- Learning &Teaching
- Co-Curricula
- Student Wellbeing
- DO NOT CHANGE or DELETE
- Enrolments
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Year 7 Music
Students completing Year 7 Music are encouraged to rehearse and perform a musical item in a group situation. Students have the choice of learning to play the keyboard, guitar, bass, drums or singing. Students learn to play their own part within instrument groups. Towards the end of the semester the class gathers to perform their song as a whole class band to an audience.
VET Music Industry
Students studying VET Music Industry is a multi-disciplined subject for students who wish to gain Industry experience within the VCE or VCAL frameworks. While the Year 11 subject is the same across Music Performance and Sound Production, in Year 12 students can choose either to perform as part of a group or as a soloist, or they may choose Sound Production and learn to record and edit live and studio performances.
Music Performance Specialisation: provides students with the opportunity to apply a broad range of knowledge and skills in varied work contexts in the music industry. Depending on the electives chosen, Units 1 and 2 include making a music demo, composing simple songs or musical pieces and preparing for performances. Units 3 and 4 offer scored assessment and include units such as developing improvisation skills, applying knowledge of genre to music making and performing music as part of a group or as a soloist.
Sound Production Specialisation: provides students with the practical skills and knowledge to record, mix and edit sound sources. Units 1 and 2 of the program include core units such as implementing copyright arrangements, performing basic sound editing and developing music industry knowledge. Elective units provide students with the opportunity to specialise in areas such as composing, event staging support and recording. Units 3 and 4 offer scored assessment and include units such as recording and mixing a basic music demo, providing sound reinforcement and setting up and disassembling audio equipment.


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Kokoda Schoolies Village Stay
So walking the Kokoda Track may be too much to ask for Schoolies. Then how about 4 days in a village along the Kokoda Track, flying in and out in a helicopter from Port Moresby? In this specially crafted get away, we will fly you to Kagi Village which is situated in the middle of the Kokoda Track. There you will be welcomed by our team and the people of Kagi.
From Kagi you will do several shorter walks, exploring the wonderful villages of this region, an area that normally takes at least 4 days to walk to.
This tour is an excellent way to still be on the Kokoda Track and partake in some shorter walks while focusing more on the cultural immersion and getting involved in projects in Kagi. With these programs you will have a chance to play soccer/rugby with the local children, take part in the traditional greasy pole, learn how to do stick carvings and attend church with the locals. With this program we can arrange specific projects for you to be involved in that will have long term benefits for the people of Kagi.
- Celebrate your end of school in style
- Understand what Australian and Japanese soldiers endured during WWII
- Amazing terrain and river crossings (great swimming)
- Walk through the most pristine rain forests in the world
- Wonderful people with beautiful singing voices
- Undertake something that will push your body and spirit to new levels
By late November very few people are walking the Track. The weather can be favourable however because it is on the cusp of the rainy season, some rain should be expected.
Our food includes coconut milk curries, vegetarian pastas, fried rice, prawn crackers, damper even pizzas etc. We do not use rehydratable vegetables and we don't supply baked beans, just delicious and nutritious meals.
No Roads also supplies a portable shower tent so you can either wash in the rivers without soap or in our shower with soap which is kept away from water courses. We supply the soap. We can even provide a hot shower anywhere along the Kokoda Track.
Our Porters are well paid, well fed and motivated to provide you with a great experience. They set up tents, boil water, help you along the Track and ,at night, sing songs. On our trek you will have the choice each night of sleeping in village guest houses or in tents.
Day 1 - Arrive Port Moresby.
Day 2 - Charter flight from Port Moresby to Kagi.
Day 3 - Work with the people of the village in their gardens, build pig fences and live like the locals do.
Day 4 - Visit the local school and teach and learn from the students about life in a remote village.
Day 5 - Charter flight from Kagi to Port Moresby.
Day 6 - Port Moresby to Home.
Note: This Itinerary is indicative and may change due to local conditions.
For those that do not wish to share accommodation in Port Moresby, a Single Supplement of $380 will apply.
No Roads Expeditions also has a dedicated Kokoda website. With over 100 pages of information, this is an invaluable source of information for those trekking the Kokoda Track. Click on the kokodaexpeditions.com.au
INSURANCE: It is mandatory for you to have appropriate insurance for this expedition. Click here to obtain an online quote.
The Porters we use are the life blood of our business in PNG. Not only do they carry your food and equipment, but many have intimate knowledge of the areas we are traveling through. They are very interesting people who, at night, cook our meals and entertain us.
The Koiari people generally inhabit the area between the foothills of the Owen Stanley Ranges east of Port Moresby and Kokoda. They once built homes in tree-tops and when Europeans first encountered them in the 1880's, they were renowned for their fierceness.
Today, the Koiari are Seventh Day Adventists so they do not raise or eat pigs, chew betel nut or smoke tobacco. They grow taros, bananas, yams, vegetables and recently coffee. They are very friendly people, however young female Koiari are particularly shy and reserved and you should respect their wishes if they do not want to talk. Male bush walkers should give women the right of way on the trail - step off the trail, the further the better.
Also, be aware that men and women bathe in different places; usually the women down stream from the men. The same can apply to toilets, so ask first. Be sensitive, as this is of great importance to the people.
No Roads deals directly with the Koiari land owners. We have a great relationship with them and assured any Track closures will not apply to us.
Our food is one of the biggest differences between us and other operators. We do not get you to carry the food and we do not supply baked beans and 2 minute noodles for every meal. We cook up curries, vegetarian pastas, damper, prawn crackers, fried rice and the list goes on. Our Master Chefs are specifically trained in food handling to ensure you have not only a delicious meal full of nutrition, but one that is safe to eat. You may even have the opportunity to help the Chef prepare the meal, giving you a chance to engage our local team in conversation and build a bond otherwise not obtained.
Another feature of this expedition is that we try to maximise the economic benefits from your presence to the village people living in villages along the Track. This provides incentives for villagers to offer a good standard of service to trekking parties as well as a vital source of income to pay for medicine, education and transportation.
As an ecotourism company we are always looking for ways to maximise the benefits of tourism to the people living in the local area. Our tour uses experienced guides and porters recruited from all along the Track. And much of the food you will eat along the way is supplied by village people en route. This not only gives the villagers a market for their vegetable crops but gives you a wonderful opportunity to try out local foods. Food purchased locally includes pineapple, bananas, potatoes and pumpkins as well as eggs.
Camp breakfast is billy tea/milo/coffee with damper and porridge or Weetbix and Corn Flakes with powdered milk. Occasionally we also have banana fritters. Camp lunch is noodles,pasta, cuppa soups, biscuits and cheese.
We also provide you with 4 days of electrolyte replacement such as Endura, to replace fluids and essential electrolytes. This process helps prevent muscle seizures and cramps.
Finally, we provide you with 4 days of snacks that will help you from meal to meal. These consist of muesli bars, lollies, cuppa soups and trail mix.
* From Owers' Corner to Kokoda as the crow flies is about 60km
* The Kokoda track between these two points is 94-km
* One trekker recorded over 25,000 steps on his pedometer in one day
* If you total all the uphill climbing along the track, it comes to more than 5500m of elevation gain
* The best section is between Menari and Kagi, although the nicest forests are found at the higher elevations between Kagi Gap and Templeton's Crossing
* The highest point on the track is 2190m
Walking times are estimates and include breaks and lunches. Weather, Track conditions and Trekker fitness will impact on these times.
Day 1 - Arrive Port Moresby. We will meet you at the airport and transfer you to the Holiday for your nights stay. (B)
Day 2 - Charter flight from Port Moresby to Kagi. Early morning and we will head off to the airport for our helicopter transfer to Kagi Village. There you will receive a traditional welcome before you are shown your accommodation and then a guided walk around the village. (B,L,D)
Day 3 - Work with the people of the village in their gardens, build pig fences and live like the locals do. Today we will immerse ourselves in the local's way of life, helping them out in their gardens, buiding fences and preparing meals. (B,L,D)
Day 4 - Visit the local school and teach and learn from the students about life in a remote village. Time to give back with some fun at the local school. You will help in the class room, assisting the teacher with the children. You will also have a chance to play some sport with them and even have a go at the greasy pole. Tonight we will have a traditional dinner to celebrate your end of school.(B,L,D)
Day 5 - Charter flight from Kagi to Port Moresby. After breakfast we will fly back to Port Moresby. In the afternoon we will visit the Port Moresby Nature Park to see all the fascinating PNG Flora and Fauna and then back to the Holiday Inn for dinner. (B,L)
Day 6 - Port Moresby to Home. (B)
- Hand selected and trained Local Guide for the entire expedition
- Electrolyte supplement such as Hydralyte, essential for such a trip
- All domestic schedule flights
- River rescue team and procedures, essential for large rivers
- Government Taxes (except visa charge and civil aviation terminal facilities charge)
- Shower tent to wash with soap and protect the environment. Hot showers are available.
- 6 delicious breakfasts, 3 nutritious lunches, 3 fresh dinners. Meals on expedition include Curries and Pasta. All prepared by a trained Master
- Chef. (Dietary requirements can be incorporated)
- All transfers including those from the airport and from Owers Corner
- Visit Bomana War Cemetery
- Nutritious and delicious food for Porter team who deserve the best.
- All accommodation outside of Port Moresby in either insect proof tents or guest houses
- Kokoda Track Permit
- Hand selected Guide and porter team (who carry all group equipment, food, set up tents etc)
- 1 to 1 Porter-Client ratio
- A rubbish Porter that takes all our rubbish and other operators rubbish from the Track
- Tent hire and floor mats.
- 2 nights accommodation in Port Moresby twin share (4 star Holiday Inn : the best in Port Moresby)
- Dinner on the last night at hotel
- Snack Pack for each expedition day to get you between meals
- VHF Radio contact with Port Moresby, Kokoda and 10 other Track villages for emergency purposes.
- No Roads Expedition T-shirt
- Urine and health chart
- Access to your Australian Guide for advice prior to the expedition
- Access to FREE weekend walks before and after the expedition
- International airfare
- Insurance
- Meals not included in itinerary
- Beverages
Kokoda Helicopter Full
Imagine flying over the Kokoda Track, visiting all the major battle [...]
Kokoda Helicopter Short
Fly over Owers Corner and Imita Ridge on this amazing aerial observ [...]
Port Moresby Nature Park
Port Moresby\'s Nature Park is a must see for those interested in t [...]
Tufi Resort
Tufi Resort is a scuba divers dream located on the North Coast of P [...]


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Save time, empower your teams and effectively upgrade your processes with access to this practical Applications architecture Toolkit and guide. Address common challenges with best-practice templates, step-by-step work plans and maturity diagnostics for any Applications architecture related project.
Download the Toolkit and in Three Steps you will be guided from idea to implementation results.
The Toolkit contains the following practical and powerful enablers with new and updated Applications architecture specific requirements:
STEP 1: Get your bearings
Start with...
- The latest quick edition of the Applications architecture Self Assessment book in PDF containing 49 requirements to perform a quickscan, get an overview and share with stakeholders.
Organized in a data driven improvement cycle RDMAICS (Recognize, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control and Sustain), check the…
- Example pre-filled Self-Assessment Excel Dashboard to get familiar with results generation
Then find your goals...
STEP 2: Set concrete goals, tasks, dates and numbers you can track
Featuring 684 new and updated case-based questions, organized into seven core areas of process design, this Self-Assessment will help you identify areas in which Applications architecture improvements can be made.
Examples; 10 of the 684 standard requirements:
- What role does communication play in the success or failure of a Applications architecture project?
- Do the decisions we make today help people and the planet tomorrow?
- Is a Applications architecture Team Work effort in place?
- What is something you believe that nearly no one agrees with you on?
- What about Applications architecture Analysis of results?
- What does Applications architecture success mean to the stakeholders?
- When is/was the Applications architecture start date?
- Are you satisfied with your current role? If not, what is missing from it?
- Did any additional data need to be collected?
- How would our PR, marketing, and social media change if we did not use outside agencies?
Complete the self assessment, on your own or with a team in a workshop setting. Use the workbook together with the self assessment requirements spreadsheet:
- The workbook is the latest in-depth complete edition of the Applications architecture book in PDF containing 684 requirements, which criteria correspond to the criteria in...
Your Applications architecture self-assessment dashboard which gives you your dynamically prioritized projects-ready tool and shows your organization exactly what to do next:
- The Self-Assessment Excel Dashboard; with the Applications architecture Self-Assessment and Scorecard you will develop a clear picture of which Applications architecture areas need attention, which requirements you should focus on and who will be responsible for them:
- Shows your organization instant insight in areas for improvement: Auto generates reports, radar chart for maturity assessment, insights per process and participant and bespoke, ready to use, RACI Matrix
- Gives you a professional Dashboard to guide and perform a thorough Applications architecture Self-Assessment
- Is secure: Ensures offline data protection of your Self-Assessment results
- Dynamically prioritized projects-ready RACI Matrix shows your organization exactly what to do next:
STEP 3: Implement, Track, follow up and revise strategy
The outcomes of STEP 2, the self assessment, are the inputs for STEP 3; Start and manage Applications architecture projects with the 62 implementation resources:
- 62 step-by-step Applications architecture Project Management Form Templates covering over 6000 Applications architecture project requirements and success criteria:
Examples; 10 of the check box criteria:
- Risk Audit: What is happening in other jurisdictions? Could that happen here?
- Executing Process Group: What factors are contributing to progress or delay in the achievement of products and results?
- Monitoring and Controlling Process Group: A Applications architecture project management team of two has 8 key stakeholders to work with. How many potential communications channels exist on the Applications architecture project?
- Procurement Audit: Were the tender documents comprehensive, transparent and non-discriminating?
- Activity Duration Estimates: What is the difference between conceptual, application, and evaluative questions?
- Responsibility Assignment Matrix: Are overhead costs budgets established on a basis consistent with anticipated direct business base?
- Schedule Management Plan: Is there general agreement & acceptance of the current status and progress of the Applications architecture project?
- Activity Duration Estimates: Is risk identification completed regularly throughout the Applications architecture project?
- Procurement Audit: Is the purchasing department organizationally independent of the departments using that function?
- Human Resource Management Plan: Is the firm certified as a supplier, wholesaler, regular dealer, or manufacturer of such products/supplies?
Step-by-step and complete Applications architecture Project Management Forms and Templates including check box criteria and templates.
1.0 Initiating Process Group:
- 1.1 Applications architecture project Charter
- 1.2 Stakeholder Register
- 1.3 Stakeholder Analysis Matrix
2.0 Planning Process Group:
- 2.1 Applications architecture project Management Plan
- 2.2 Scope Management Plan
- 2.3 Requirements Management Plan
- 2.4 Requirements Documentation
- 2.5 Requirements Traceability Matrix
- 2.6 Applications architecture project Scope Statement
- 2.7 Assumption and Constraint Log
- 2.8 Work Breakdown Structure
- 2.9 WBS Dictionary
- 2.10 Schedule Management Plan
- 2.11 Activity List
- 2.12 Activity Attributes
- 2.13 Milestone List
- 2.14 Network Diagram
- 2.15 Activity Resource Requirements
- 2.16 Resource Breakdown Structure
- 2.17 Activity Duration Estimates
- 2.18 Duration Estimating Worksheet
- 2.19 Applications architecture project Schedule
- 2.20 Cost Management Plan
- 2.21 Activity Cost Estimates
- 2.22 Cost Estimating Worksheet
- 2.23 Cost Baseline
- 2.24 Quality Management Plan
- 2.25 Quality Metrics
- 2.26 Process Improvement Plan
- 2.27 Responsibility Assignment Matrix
- 2.28 Roles and Responsibilities
- 2.29 Human Resource Management Plan
- 2.30 Communications Management Plan
- 2.31 Risk Management Plan
- 2.32 Risk Register
- 2.33 Probability and Impact Assessment
- 2.34 Probability and Impact Matrix
- 2.35 Risk Data Sheet
- 2.36 Procurement Management Plan
- 2.37 Source Selection Criteria
- 2.38 Stakeholder Management Plan
- 2.39 Change Management Plan
3.0 Executing Process Group:
- 3.1 Team Member Status Report
- 3.2 Change Request
- 3.3 Change Log
- 3.4 Decision Log
- 3.5 Quality Audit
- 3.6 Team Directory
- 3.7 Team Operating Agreement
- 3.8 Team Performance Assessment
- 3.9 Team Member Performance Assessment
- 3.10 Issue Log
4.0 Monitoring and Controlling Process Group:
- 4.1 Applications architecture project Performance Report
- 4.2 Variance Analysis
- 4.3 Earned Value Status
- 4.4 Risk Audit
- 4.5 Contractor Status Report
- 4.6 Formal Acceptance
5.0 Closing Process Group:
- 5.1 Procurement Audit
- 5.2 Contract Close-Out
- 5.3 Applications architecture project or Phase Close-Out
- 5.4 Lessons Learned
With this Three Step process you will have all the tools you need for any Applications architecture project with this in-depth Applications architecture Toolkit.
In using the Toolkit you will be better able to:
- Diagnose Applications architecture projects, initiatives, organizations, businesses and processes using accepted diagnostic standards and practices
- Implement evidence-based best practice strategies aligned with overall goals
- Integrate recent advances in Applications architecture and put process design strategies into practice according to best practice guidelines
Defining, designing, creating, and implementing a process to solve a business challenge or meet a business objective is the most valuable role; In EVERY company, organization and department.
Unless you are talking a one-time, single-use project within a business, there should be a process. Whether that process is managed and implemented by humans, AI, or a combination of the two, it needs to be designed by someone with a complex enough perspective to ask the right questions. Someone capable of asking the right questions and step back and say, 'What are we really trying to accomplish here? And is there a different way to look at it?'
This Toolkit empowers people to do just that - whether their title is entrepreneur, manager, consultant, (Vice-)President, CxO etc... - they are the people who rule the future. They are the person who asks the right questions to make Applications architecture investments work better.
This Applications architecture All-Inclusive Toolkit enables You to be that person.
Includes lifetime updates
Every self assessment comes with Lifetime Updates and Lifetime Free Updated Books. Lifetime Updates is an industry-first feature which allows you to receive verified self assessment updates, ensuring you always have the most accurate information at your fingertips.


text: If you are trying to sign in to your account and cannot remember your password, then select "I forgot my password" and enter the mobile phone number you used when you signed up. Next you will receive an email (at the address you used when you signed up) with instructions about how to change it. For security reasons you will also receive an SMS notification. Please check junk e-mail as well as the "Promotions" field.


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- C.R.I.S. Access your membership & make schedule requests.
- Many Different Locations and Start Times to meet Your Needs!
- Gift Certificates Are Available on the public area of the website.
- The "Red Zone" has been updated over the New Year. Create an account & login to access your personal online Fitness & Measurements results, Meal Tracking, Journaling and Weekly Goals. Save, Store, & Print your Information!
- The Web Store for members' convenience! Get your BBF GEAR, Equipment, Forms and Protein (whey & Bars)! Set up an account & shop away!
- FREE T-shirt online form for Members! Fill it out and click send! Get A FREE SHIRT!!!
And the benefits keep growing! PLUS you will be achieving YOUR fitness goals, looking and feeling better every week! Joining now gets you started on fitness to carry you through the Fall and Winter! Start now while we're able to enjoy the GORGEOUS Summer Weather with OUTDOOR Boot Camps!
Visit http://www.bodybusterfitness.com/ for more info and to sign up! Or call us at (416)619-4456!


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Living room Space Planning
When you move into a new place, it's one of the first decisions you have to make. How does your furniture fit in the living room, and how should you orient the room? Experimenting with layout yields interesting, yet practical, rooms that work on multiple levels.
Think how strange it would look to have all the furniture on one side of the room, and a huge expansive blank space on the other side. Divide the room in sections and make sure the furniture is distributed equally across all areas.
Your living room might be as pretty as can be, but if you can't find a spot to put your water glass, or have to crane your neck to spot the television (and you're a die-hard watcher of Orange is the New Black), then your furniture isn't working for you. Ask yourself, is it doing everything you need it to? Do I have an unimpeded view of Uzo Aduba?
Mirroring furniture on either side of an imaginary axis (whether that's a fireplace or a sofa) is a nice ways to make your eyeballs happy. It feels nice, and always an easy approach to laying out your furniture, even when furniture doesn't perfectly match.
If you have to walk almost 360 degrees around the sofa in order to make it to the kitchen, your furniture placement isn't working. Create natural paths around the room that take you everywhere you want to go. At the same time, resist the urge to push everything up against the wall and in the corners. It just creates weird dead space in the middle of the room, and doesn't feel very cozy.
Related posts:


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A 25-year-old man from Logan was today sentenced in the Supreme Court of Queensland to 17 years and four months in prison for his role in planning a terrorist act on Australian soil and preparations for a foreign incursion into Syria and Iraq.
Agim Kruezi was arrested in September 2014 as part of an extensive operation by the Queensland Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT). The JCTT comprises members from the Australian Federal Police, Queensland Police Service and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
The Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton welcomed today's sentence.
"Terrorists rightly attract severe penalties under our legislation as reflected by the sentence handed down today," Mr Dutton said.
"I would like to congratulate the police and security agencies for their work which led to this outcome."
"The timely intervention which ultimately led to today's outcome prevented a potential terrorist attack and is a reminder of how effectively our agencies work together to turn intelligence into preventative action," Mr Dutton said.
Evidence collected in the investigation revealed the man was just days away from carrying out a terrorist attack somewhere in Queensland.
He was convicted for the Commonwealth offences of:
Since 12 September 2014, when the national terrorism threat level was raised, there have been 14 major counter-terrorism disruption operations in response to potential attack planning in Australia.


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Engelsk navneord: philosophy
|philosophy (om erkendelse) a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school
|Termer med samme betydning (synonymer)
|doctrine, ism, philosophical system, school of thought
|Mindre specifikke termer
|Mere specifikke termer
|abolitionism, absolutism, amoralism, animalism, animism, antiestablishmentarianism, antiestablishmentism, asceticism, Cabalism, church doctrine, commandment, contextualism, creationism, credo, creed, creed, democracy, descriptivism, descriptivism, divine right, divine right of kings, dogma, dualism, dynamism, egalitarianism, epicureanism, equalitarianism, establishmentarianism, establishmentism, ethicism, expansionism, feminism, formalism, freethinking, functionalism, Girondism, gospel, gospel, gymnosophy, humanism, humanism, humanitarianism, imitation, individualism, internationalism, irredentism, irridentism, Kabbalism, laissez faire, literalism, majority rule, millennium, monism, multiculturalism, nationalism, nationalism, nihilism, nuclear deterrence, pacificism, pacifism, passivism, phenomenology, philosophical doctrine, philosophical theory, pluralism, populism, precept, prescriptivism, prescriptivism, presentism, rationalism, reformism, reincarnationism, religious doctrine, secessionism, secular humanism, secularism, states' rights, teaching, theological doctrine, unilateralism, utilitarianism
|philosophy (om erkendelse) the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics
|Mindre specifikke termer
|arts, humanistic discipline, humanities, liberal arts
|Mere specifikke termer
|aesthetics, aetiology, axiology, dialectic, epistemology, esthetics, ethics, etiology, jurisprudence, law, legal philosophy, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, transcendental philosophy, transcendentalism
|Indenfor samme emneområde
|aesthetic, Aristotelianism, deconstruction, deconstructionism, determinism, dianoetic, discursive, empiricism, empiricist philosophy, esthetic, existential philosophy, existentialism, existentialist philosophy, final cause, formalism, idealism, immanent, intuitionism, logicism, materialism, mechanism, mentalism, naive realism, nativism, naturalism, nominalism, operationalism, peripateticism, philosopher, physicalism, Platonism, pragmatism, presentational, probabilism, rationalism, realism, realism, relativism, semiology, semiotics, sensationalism, sensationalism, sensualism, solipsism, Stoicism, subjective, subjectivism, teleology, transeunt, transient, vitalism
|philosophy (om erkendelse) any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation
|Eksempler med tilsvarende betydning
|Self-indulgence was his only philosophy.
My father's philosophy of child-rearing was to let mother do it.
|Mindre specifikke termer


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What about you? Below are two steps, and a third if you're a writer, that will diagnose who YOU are. Okay, take that loosely, and even if you're a skeptic like me–especially if you're a skeptic–humor yourself today and give it a shot. You may come away surprised.
TypeLogic Analysis Keirsey's Analysis


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|No.Of Rooms
|Approx Built Up (sqft)
|6,600 to 7,600
|Rental (Negotiable)
|$12,500 to $13,000
Woodgrove Estate is nestled in an exclusive area at Ashwood Grove, Cedarwood Grove and Woodgrove Avenue. It is next to the Singapore American School, within walking distance to Marsiling MRT Station and enjoy islandwide accessibility via Seletar Expressway (SLE) and Bukit Timah Expressway (BKE). For dining and shopping needs, The Woodgrove and Causeway Point are within minutes' drive. Lifestyle amenities such as the Singapore Zoo, River Safari, Night Safari and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve are within easy reach.
Comprising 34 detached bungalows, these country mansions offer generous space for housing of families. All of the mansions come with either in swimming pools or jacuzzis with space for 2 or more cars.
Public Transport
- 5 minutes' walk to nearest bus stop
- 10 minutes' walk to Marsiling MRT station
- Easy access to islandwide via BKE and PIE
International School
- 3 minutes' walk to Singapore American School
Shop & Dine
- 10 minutes' walk to The Woodgrove and local eateries
- 6 to 15 minutes' drive to restaurants and cafes at Junction 10, Causeway Point @ Woodlands, The Rail Mall & HillV2 @ Upper Bukit Timah
Parks & Recreation
- 7 minutes' drive to Woodlands Regional Centre, Woodlands Regional Library, Woodlands Stadium
- 9 minutes' drive to Singapore Zoo, Night Safari, River Safari
- 10 minutes' drive to Woodlands Waterfront Park
- 11 minutes' drive to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve
- 14 minutes' drive to Bottle Tree Park at Yishun
- 17 minutes' drive to Sembawang Park
- Parking space for 2 or more cars
- Well equipped American-style kitchen
- Dry and wet kitchen (selected houses only)
- Living and dining areas link to outdoor garden
- Swimming pool (selected houses only)


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As many of you who know me, know, I am a eagre booster of Comrade Iain Banks and his fine output of novels. To those who read science fiction to any extent, you will know him, and perhaps praise him, though I know there are many revilers out there, with reasons understandable, for disliking Iain M. Banks, author of bestselling novels, by science fictional standards, Consider Phleabas, Use of Weapons, Inversions, Matter, The Algebraist. To the more hoighty-toity types out there who must have their literature with a capital L, a group I can sometimes be included as well, Iain Banks is known for his 'classics' of a odd fiction like Dead Air, Complicity, The Crow Road and….The Wasp Factory, his debut novel and one of the nastiest and most unsettling pieces of fiction I have yet to read. Much nastier, and shocking than much written by that Chuck fellow…what was his name, whose outrage mongering seems a tad forced of late. Ahem. I like The Wasp Factory, but this essay isnt exactly a panegyric, or a summary; the post below reminds that reading the book first is a good idea. Besides, panegyrics are boring, though hardly dead if one bothers to read biographies or the newspaper, and the real meat ofThe Wasp Factory, besides all the murder and brutality and delightful black humour is its take on what is called in academic shorthand 'the construction of gender'.
That gender, our shared social understanding of what men and women, and those in our minds caught in between, is constructed is not much in debate nowadays, at least amongst many of the more 'intellectually' motivated. The list of feminist scholars and theorists, amongst many others who have questioned how ingrained in our bones, bodies and genes the social activities of sex is a very long one indeed, and I won't go into it here. Likewise, the grotesque and its relationship to the body, that grotesque equals disharmonious (to borrow from The Prisoner), both for good or ill, especially as described by Mikhail Bakhtin (an It-theorist if there ever was one in English studies) and others after him, is important here, but not crucial. I've tried to go light on the theory; not because theory is bad, per se, but they do tend to bore non-academic audiences who might actually give a hoot.
I also hate to spoil the endings of books, but in this case knowing the ending of The Wasp Factory is absolutely necessary to an understanding of the book's themes.
Spoilers abound ahead: you have been warned.
UPDATE: I just learned two days (August 21) that Iain Banks linked to this essay, which is a great honour. I've cleaned the essay up a bit, at it been published shortly before a long move, but it remains mostly the same, just more readable, hopefully.
In the surprise conclusion, the reader learns that the protagonist Frank Cauldhame, an aggressive, obsessed, disturbed and 'slightly' murderous (only three so far, he swears!) teenager who believes himself to be castrated, is actually a girl; her father had lied about an accident in Frank's (or Frances') very early childhood in order to raise her as a boy. Though often described as a new kind of gothic horror novel, The Wasp Factory is also a particularly effective, and particularly gruesome, satire on the social and scientific construction of gender; Frank is a woman, who believes herself to be man, who hates women, and acts out a male identity centred on the soldier-hero, over-the-top violence and aggressive adventurism, in a style that
reminds me strongly of a cross between Dennis the Menace and Vlad Tepes. The Wasp Factory also fits in nicely with Banks' other works, as his science fiction novels set in the Culture universe frequently reject the narrow and rigid classification of gender according to biological sex; it appears to be an abiding fascination, at the very least.
As a first caveat of this essay, I would like to avoid any sort of "pronounal confusion", as Marjorie Garber puts it in her essay "Spare Parts", about the mixed and uncertain nature of Frank's sex. Throughout The Wasp Factory, and in his personal history, Frank identifies himself solely as a man, an incomplete man maybe, but in his words, at least "an honorary man" who may lack a penis, but could "feel it in my bones, in my uncastrated genes" (154) that he is biologically and socially male. The accident that robs Frank of his penis, physical proof of masculinity, is caused by his father's do , Old Saul, or so Frank is told.
According to the fragmentary story Frank is able to piece together over his youth and teenaged years, when he is three years old , his "bow-legged and ancient white bulldog…kept…because it was so ugly and it didn't like women" (133) tears off his genitals, even as upstairs his youngest brother Paul is being born (Paul will soon meet his end at Frank's hands for sharing Old Saul's name, just a little reminder that Frank is nuts). His father tells him that when he cut open Old Saul, he "found tiny genitals" (140) which are then stored in his father's locked and inaccessible study until the end of the novel, when Frank sneaks in and finds a jar of "clear liquid…in the alcohol was a tiny, torn set of male genitalia" (228), the physical proof of Frank's
truncated masculinity. Deprived of this proof, however, the skull of Old Saul, dug up by Frank, becomes a horrific totem, his "old enemy in my power" and goes down, by his own admission, in his "history and personal mythology as the Castrator" (133), a terrifying power to be respected and nearly worshipped.
And yet this incident, like his entire gender identity, is a lie carried out at great lengths by his father, who tells Frank, drunkenly, at the very end, was part of "an experimen, sall" (231). His father, Angus, is a scientific man, fond of giving visiting relatives and his children "impromptu lectures on cancer of the colon or on tapeworms" and is described by Frank as a "doctor of chemistry, or perhaps biochemistry" with a great deal of information rattling around in his head on ordinary medicine and other sundry subjects; Frank says his father "because of his medical training, [is] never bothered by the suffering of lower beings" (141) including the animals Frank kills or tortures. Due to Old Saul's disfiguring attack, which does scar the three year old 'Frank', Angus takes the opportunity to conduct an experiment on the gender of his child, and so he constructs an elaborate lie, feeding his daughtertestosterone and other hormones, as well as bromide to prevent overt sexual arousal from too much androgen, in his food while at the same time encouraging his
masculine activities and telling him the savaged vagina is actually the gored remnants of his male genitalia. The testicles in the jar were sculpted from wax and kept as proof in case Frank "started to query about whether [he] was really castrated". The testosterone gives Frank a heavier frame and, as a teenager, a wispy beard, and yet he is horrified to learn that what he "thought was the stump of a penis is really an enlarged clitoris" and more horrifying still to Frank, that despite the testosterone and the mauling that left him with "scarred thighs, [his] outer labia a bit chewed up", he is still "a normal female, capable of intercourse and giving birth".
Though I wasn't immediately struck by the point, another re read of the novel recently has convinced me that Frank's rebirth as a male from the ashes of a deliberately suppressed female identity, as part of a scientific experiment no less, is a grim satire of the scientific attitude towards gender. It certainly fits in with Banks'
standard black sense of humour about these types of things, and with his established interest in the broad and not so rigid delineations of gender and sex, and of his tendency to subvert the still dominant idea that gender is essentials, linked hand in hand in physical sex. How else to you explain a novel like Inversions where the protagonists change sex and have each other's babies, or are pregnant for centuries?
But back to that satire on science and sex (no white lab coats and miniskirts here, a la Japanese eroge games). Angus Cauldhame is set up as a Frankstein-like figure, a trite point to make but the very fact that he is a biochemist supplies a solidarity with Shelley's famous experimenter and Promethean; most obviously, his new son is named Frank. As Garber points out, Shelley's Frankenstein is "a literary moment that marks the place of technological intervention" (207) into gender and sex, but rather then crafting a new lifeform from nothing but base chemicals, Angus uses his combination of paternal , technological and scientific power to craft a new son.
As a scientitic figure, Angus has a broad array of knowledge, though he is obsessed with strange ideas and theories: that the Earth is a Moebius Strip, that he can tell what someone ate and their very personality by their flatulence. He is also obsessed by order and regularity, not the least because he must maintain the hormones in Frank continuously, but also by a useless recitation of facts: he demands that Frank know the "height, length, breadth, volume of just about every part of the house" (Banks 7), and quizzes Frank constantly on this knowledge. Home-schooled, and rather bright, Frank is nonetheless frequently, and jokingly, lied to by his father, who made him think that, "for years…Pathos was one the Three Musketeers, Fellatio a character in Hamlet" and so on. (Incidentally, having friends who do this jokingky, especially about science and technology, sharpens your knowledge greatly). Frank now believes at sixteen that his father "has to tell me the truth" (11), but of course, ironically, Frank's entire life is a rather large lie carried out by Angus. Finally, his father's own desire to remove the feminine from his life, after his leg is broken by his second wife's, and Frank's mother's, escape from their house shortly after the birth of Paul; his hatred for this carries over to Frank, who says, "I hate her name, the idea of her" (82). His father's paternal authority is built on lies and a dislike of women; his scientific authority is rigid, demanding and when not eccentric beyond any sort of practicality, somewhat unimaginative and dogmatic.
These details of Angus's scientific and paternal outlook both reflect and make a mockery of modern medical practice when it comes to the indeterminancy of gender. Obviously, by creating Frank from his young daughter, Agnus is throwing the argument of biological essentialism out the window, that born a female you must remain forever so, and yet he still assumes, though not entirely with conviction, that the castration lie and the steady flow of testosterone, creating physical proof of masculinity, will be enough to make Frank his son and not his daughter. However, Agnus has created a transsexual, of sorts, for no matter how much both he and Frank wish him to be a male, Frank is some kind of pseudohemaprodite, hardly a success of scientific experimentation
Agnus' experiment is a to psy-turvy reversal of medical establishment thinking. According to researcher Alison Shaw, an uncertain gender at birth in a hospital is a kind of medical emergency, and met with horror, with the standard reaction by many doctors and parents "to assign the infant to the male or female sex, and the associated subsequent gender role" (Shaw 25). If the ambiguity is too extreme to easily hide, often "medical treatment and surgery is deemed necessary" with the assumption underlying that an ambiguous sex, the physical proof, can be somehow corrected or cured, as "intersex individuals are 'really' either male or female." By the well-intentioned use of "correct management" a person of ambiguous sex can "lead the sexual and reproductive life of 'normal' men and women", by corrective surgery, by the introduction of hormones and raising the child according to cultural norms of gender. Interestingly enough, Frank actually knows a Big Secret, as he puts it, about himself, but it is not the one revealed by the book; instead, Frank was "never registered" with "no birth certificate…to say I'm alive or dead" (Banks 10). Frank blames it on his father's hippy past, without realising of course that he is not registered because Agnus did not wish to tie his son to a specific gender, legally required, that would upset the experiment. This in a reversal of typical medical practice, as Shaw explains, wherein it is law in Western countries, Britain included, to "register a baby as a male or female within six weeks" (Shaw 20).
In Frank's case, the reverse of standard medical practice toward sexual ambiguity is true: a biologically normal young child, the expected and hoped for end of correcting a child born ambiguous, is instead transformed from 'normality' to something viewed by Frank as essentially male, but not at all by a long shot, but something in between, masculine in appearance but with a vagina. In Frank's case, however, he is not born into this particular sexual form, nor has he played any willing part in becoming transsexual, much as any child born 'ambiguous' might be, and like those children, he bears the scars, literally and figuratively, of having a sexual and gendered identity forced onto them by a medical profession who does not want
something aberrant; of course, that is the irony in Angus' Noble Lie, that out of normality he has created an 'aberrant'.
Indeed, even the assumption from the seventies, the time during which Frank was raised, detailed by Garber, that women who act or dress like men are "not psychotic…they merely wanted to be men, which in their society was a highly reasonable, indeed healthy, desire" (Garber 194) becomes suspect in The Wasp
Factory because, well, Frank is not the most reasonable, healthy or stable; his father muses that "you should be the one in the hospital, not Eric [his brother]" (9), meaning of course the Insane Asylum. Angus creates a son out of a daughter; he unintentionally satirises the medical discipline's desire for normality and order in the sex and gender of children, because his mangled monster making so specifically shows up the idea that gender is a construction; Frank, though he believes he is male through and through, has been built specifically, deliberately, through a scientific, social process, that, as we shall see, was almost too effective.
Ironically, Frank is himself a biological essentialist about sex and gender. Frank believes himself to be a male who"feels it in my bones, in my uncastrated genes" despite being "not a full man" (142), despite being castrated and therefore lacking the prime signifier of masculinity. Frank is not male, of course, genetically any more then he is genitalia-wise. Because Frank lacks the prime identifier of what he sees as objective male reality, a penis, and is not pleased with his body, "plump and chubby" and "not dark and mysterious" (19) as he feels he must be, he must replace it with a more rigorous scientific definition that places the onus on the very chemical bonds of his body. He is likewise angry that his injury would keep him in "an
adolescent state forever, would never let [him] grow up and be a full man" (183) and achieve the biological goal of copulation and reproduction, which despite Frank's abhorrence of all women, "because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men" (10) is still what he sees as paramount male duty.
Frank's obsession with what it is to be male, though it relies upon what he thinks is chromosomal fact, is undermined by the lack of male genitalia, part of the essentialist argument that a penis makes a man, and thus he obsessed with what he has been lost, what has been stolen from him.. Genes will never entirely do as visible prove of masculinity, and so he is also obsessed with, in Frank's own words, a
"negative and negation of the fecundity only others could lay claim to" and thus "unmanned – would out-man those around" himself (242). The fact that he is a she, however, undermines even that essentialist argument, and by trying to "out-man" other men, Frank demonstrates unwittingly, until the revelation at the end of the novel, that males and manhood are, shock of shockes, heavily constructed by society.
Some of the activities that Frank partakes in are fairly typically 'masculine', in that they are considered those activities that can make a boy a man, or at least that make an adolescent boy an adolescent boy, the activities met with an apathetic shrug and rueful shake of the head, usually. Frank goes to bars and gets stupendously drunk, he plays video games, he swears and grabs at his crotch, and wishes eagerly
and jealously that he could urinate standing up and play games by pissing on cigarette butts in the urinal; he resents bitterly having to "sit on the toilet like a bloody woman" (14) to urinate. This being a novel more notable for its extremely black humour and gruesome violence, however, Frank participates in a twisted kind of adolescent, a dark reflection on the normal kind of romping around on the island where his family
lives considered normal for young men, as it certainly was for me. When news of his brother's escape arrived, Frank was about to wage a War, and laments about not having had "a good War for months; the last one had been the Ordinary [plastic] Soldiers vs. the Aerosols" (23). He builds dams to hold back the sea and then relishes in their collapse and the sweeping away of tiny sand villages full of shells representing people, and he fights off bullies trying to "invade the island…with steelies and stones" (69). These details are reminiscent of any numerous of real or imagined bucolic childhoods, fighting the good fight, exploring, destroying, creating, so much so they have descended into a savage mockery of the cliche of Where the Red Fern Grow and any of a number of Hollywood paeans or rustic novel homages to childhood in the back country.
There is a manic kind of inte nsity to these activities that goes beyond just boyish fun. Frank haunts nearby rabbit warrens with a home-made sling shot, almost certainly mocking Dennis the Menace and his adventures, but ends up battling with a buck hare "a doberman of a beast…trying to tear me to shreds" (35), and ends up throttling and killing the rabbit in hand to hand combat; his revenge for the rabbit's
assault is genocidal: the use of homemade bombs and flamethrowers against the remaining rabbits, who "took flame and blazed, running and stumbling and falling" (39). Around the island he sets up poles topped with the tiny desiccated heads of animals, kept as a kind of "early warning system and deterrent rolled into one; infected, potent things which looked out from the island" (5), invested with a mythical, mystical energy, and specious reasoning; in order to fill his head quota, he kills all manner of animals with regularity and abandon, carrying around a bag of seagull and mouse heads as trophies. The head of Old Saul is kept in an
underground bunker as a totemic figure of great power to Frank, and is so obviously an attempt on Banks part to be psychological, a distressed way for Frank to deal, badly (how else does one deal with the loss of it?) with the ca stration myth of his life.
Most disturbingly of all, Frank describes in great detail his three successful murders, all before he is ten years of age: his cousins Blyth and Esmerelda and his sibling Paul, summarised and celebrated to a certain extent in one of the book's most famous passages:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my younger brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through. (49)
Murder is laid out as part of Frank's growing up experience, as a particularly difficult and challenging activity taken with the deadly seriousness of a young boy, and with a preternatural cleverness in all three cases. The murders are something, though, as necessary to his growth into adolescence and truncated manhood as the slingshot or the building games. Frank blames this on biological essentialism, again, as violence is "what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing especially well: women can give birth and men can kill. Men…are the harder sex. We strike out, push and take" (155).
Frank's extreme use of violence and murder is a particularly grotesque, and thus not a little darkly humourous, exaggeration of 'what boys tend to get up to naturally', and indeed, as critic Bertold Schoene-Harwood points out, though "Frank does undoubtably go to far, his actions are never deviant or subversive but follow from the normative guidelines of masculine propriety" 136). Although Frank locates his violent tendencies in the biological nature of males, as a female raised as a man, his ironically exaggerated violent tendencies are an overdoing and overacting of the 'normal' processes and activities that all boys go through as they grow up, overactedto overcompensate for the lack engendered by a false castration, or his 'real' sex, that prohibits Frank from being a true man. His murders are partly another way, to him, of fitting in, of accepting that pernicious mythology of male identity and socialisation, that somehow, intrinsically, maleness is aggressiveness.
Frank's ideal male is his elder brother, Eric, the only sibling or relative he truly loves and respects, who is tragically driven mad by a particularly ghastly sight while working as a nurse during his medical studies. Frank admires most of all Eric's adventurous spirit, that led him to London for university; as Frank relates, Eric's "wandering urge consumed him, as it does any real man" (182) and he voyaged out into the world, something any real man would want, but denied to Frank because he is not a real man. Frank takes a "vicarious feeling of manly satisfaction in the brilliant performance of Eric in the outside world", and as compensation for his 'disability' and his professed inability to leave the island for any length of time, turns inward, using his magical talismans of Old Saul's skull and his divining instrument, the Wasp Factory, to become "unchallenged lord of the island and the lands about it" (183).
And yet Eric goes mad, and the profoundly sad, disappointed and disgusted Frank blames it upon some inner biological weakness of his brother, a "fundamental flaw that a real man should not have had" caused by an inner sensitivity, a chink in the armour of maleness, which had led him into medicine and nursing. Frank believes that real man should be able to handle horror and terror with aplomb, but that women, "I know from watching hundreds – maybe thousands – of films and television programmes, cannot withstand really major things happening to them"; Eric's weakness is that he was "the victim of a self with just a little too much of the woman in it" (195). Frank is also digusted Angus let Eric wear dresses as a child, which as the ending reveals is a suppressed memory of Frank himself as a child.
Despite his ostensible belief in biological determinism and the innateness with sex of gender qualities, Frank still ends up partly blaming a socially constructed artifice of gender, clothing, for his brother's fatal 'weakness'. Of course, once the ending is known, Frank's critique is, like so much else in this book, heavily ironic, but what is most interesting is the respect Eric, with his madness, accrues from Frank. Eric burns
dogs, clearly related symbolically to Frank's own castration, doesn't sleep, gibbers and capers and eats maggots, and is able to escape several times from his incarceration through guile and cunning; because of this, Frank cannot help but admire the "total commitment about which only the profoundly mad are cautiously capable of, and the most ferocious soldiers and most aggressive sportsmen able to
emulate for a while" (168).
Thus, through madness is masculinity redeemed.


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MADISON COUNTY, Ala. – The dust has settled on the Special Session of the Alabama Legislature. Several things happened, and several things didn't happen and this week the newly appointed Alabama House Speaker, Rep. Mac McCutcheon stopped by WHNT News 19 to give his perspective on how the session went.
"I feel like at the end of the day we had a success." says McCutcheon. "We got a clear message about the lottery issue, whether you were for or against, the process worked, and the lottery bill died. I think that was a message to the people how the legislators feel about the issue. The success part of it is with the BP oil money that we were able to negotiate out, so that we could have real money in hand to try to take care of some of these needs, and the House worked very, very hard. As you know at the beginning of the Special Session the House took control of the BP Bill, and we worked very hard to work a compromise out and send it to the Senate. And the Senate was working on a lottery bill and so the House did a lot of good work and the members worked very well together, and so I feel like it was a success."
View our entire conversation with Rep. Mac McCutcheon, (R) Alabama House Speaker here in three parts:


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I have moved the website to: http://www.ljzigerell.com/. Sorry for any inconvenience!
Excerpts and comments on researcher degrees of freedom and the file drawer problem
I have been trying to reproduce several studies and have noticed that the reporting of results from these studies often presents a much stronger impression of results than I get from an investigation of the data itself. I plan to report some of these reproduction attempts, so I have been reading literature on researcher degrees of freedom and the file drawer problem. Below I'll post and comment on some interesting passages that I have happened upon.
To put it another way: without modern statistics, we find it unlikely that people would take seriously a claim about the general population of women, based on two survey questions asked to 100 volunteers on the internet and 24 college students. But with the p-value, a result can be declared significant and deemed worth publishing in a leading journal in psychology. (Gelman and Loken, 2013, 14-15, emphasis in the original)
I wonder how many people in the general population take seriously general claims based on only small mTurk and college student samples, provided that these people are informed that these general claims are based only on small unrepresentative samples; I suspect that some of the "taking seriously" that leads to publication in leading psychology journals reflects professional courtesy among peer researchers whose work is also largely based on small unrepresentative samples.
Maybe it's because I haven't done much work with small unrepresentative samples, but I feel cheated when investing time in an article framed in general language that has conclusions based on small unrepresentative samples. Here's an article that I recently happened upon: "White Americans' opposition to affirmative action: Group interest and the harm to beneficiaries objection." The abstract:
We focused on a powerful objection to affirmative action – that affirmative action harms its intended beneficiaries by undermining their self-esteem. We tested whether White Americans would raise the harm to beneficiaries objection particularly when it is in their group interest. When led to believe that affirmative action harmed Whites, participants endorsed the harm to beneficiaries objection more than when led to believe that affirmative action did not harm Whites. Endorsement of a merit-based objection to affirmative action did not differ as a function of the policy's impact on Whites. White Americans used a concern for the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action in a way that seems to further the interest of their own group.
So who were these white Americans?
Sixty White American students (37% female, mean age = 19.6) at the University of Kansas participated in exchange for partial course credit. One participant did not complete the dependent measure, leaving 59 participants in the final sample. (p. 898)
I won't argue that this sort of research should not be done, but I'd like to see this sort of exploratory research replicated with a more representative sample. One of the four co-authors listed her institutional affiliation at California State University San Bernardino, and two other co-authors listed their institutional affiliation at Tulane University, so I would have liked to have seen a second study among a different sample of students. At the very least, I'd like to see a description of the restricted nature of the sample in the abstract to let me and other readers make a more informed judgment about the value of investing time in the article.
The Gelman and Loken (2013) passage cited above reminded me of a recent controversy regarding a replication attempt of Schnall et al. (2008). I read about the controversy in a Nicole Janz post at Political Science Replication. The result of the replication (a perceived failure to replicate) was not shocking because Schnall et al. (2008) had reported only two experiments based on data from 40 and 43 University of Plymouth undergraduates.
Schnall in a post on the replication attempt:
My graduate students are worried about publishing their work out of fear that data detectives might come after them and try to find something wrong in their work. Doing research now involves anticipating a potential ethics or even criminal investigation.
I like the term "data detectives" a bit better than "replication police" (h/t Nicole Janz), so I think that I might adopt the label "data detective" for myself.
I can sympathize with the graduate students' fear that someone might target my work and try to find an error in that work, but that's a necessary occupational hazard for a scientist.
The best way to protect research from data detectives is to produce reproducible and perceived replicable research; one of the worst ways to protect research from data detectives is to publish low-powered studies in a high-profile journal, because the high profile draws attention and the low power increases suspicions that the finding was due to the non-reporting of failed experiments.
From McBee and Matthews (2014):
Researchers who try to serve the interests of science are going to find themselves out-competed by those who elect to "play the game," because the ethical researcher will conduct a number of studies that will prove unpublishable because they lack statistically significant findings, whereas the careerist will find ways to achieve significance far more frequently. (p. 77)
This reflects part of the benefit produced by data detectives and the replication police: a more even playing field for researchers reluctant to take advantage of researcher degrees of freedom.
This Francis (2012) article is an example of a data detective targeting an article to detect non-reporting of experiments. Balcetis and Dunning (2010) reported five experiments rejecting the null hypothesis; the experiments had Ns, effect sizes, and powers as listed below in a table drawn from Francis (2012) p. 176.
Francis summed the powers to get 3.11, which indicates the number of times that we should expect the null hypothesis to be rejected given the observed effect sizes and powers of the 5 experiments; Francis multiplied the powers to get 0.076, which indicates the probability that the null hypothesis will be rejected in all 5 experiments.
Here is Francis again detecting more improbable results. And again. Here's a back-and-forth between Simonsohn and Francis on Francis' publication bias studies.
Here's the Galak and Meyvis (2012) reply to another study in which Francis claimed to have detected non-reporting of experiments in Galak and Meyvis (2011). Galak and Meyvis admit to the non-reporting:
We reported eight successful demonstrations of this phenomenon in our paper, but we also conducted five additional studies whose results either did not reach conventional levels of significance or did reach significance but ended up being rhetorically redundant. (p. 595)
…but argue that it's not a problem because they weren't interested in effect sizes:
However, as is the case for many papers in experimental psychology, the goal was never to assess the exact size of the effect, but rather to test between competing theoretical predictions. (p. 595)
Even if it is true that the authors were unconcerned with effect size, I do not understand how that justifies not reporting results that fail to reach conventional levels of statistical significance.
So what about readers who *are* interested in effect sizes? Galak and Meyvis write:
If a researcher is interested in estimating the size of an effect reported in a published paper, we recommend asking the authors for their file drawer and conducting a meta-analysis. (p. 595-596)
That's an interesting solution: if you are reading an article and wonder about the effect size, put down the article, email the researchers, hope that the researchers respond, hope that the researchers send the data, and then — if you receive the data — conduct your own meta-analysis.
Stata treats missing values as positive infinity
I discussed here some weird things that SPSS does with regard to weighting. Here's another weird thing, this time in Stata:
The variable Q1 has a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 99,999. For this particular survey question, 99,999 is not a believable response; so, instead of letting 99,999 and other unbelievable responses influence the results, I truncated Q1 at 100, so that all responses above 100 equaled 100. There are other ways of handling unbelievable responses, but this can work as a first pass to assess whether the unbelievable responses influenced results.
The command replace Q1trunc = 100 if Q1 > 100 tells Stata to replace all responses over 100 with a response of 100; but notice that this replacement increased the number of observations from 2008 to 2065; that's because Stata treated the 57 missing values as positive infinity and replaced these 57 missing values with 100.
Here's a line from Stata's help missing documentation:
all nonmissing numbers < . < .a < .b < … < .z
Stata has a reason for treating missing values as positive infinity, as explained here. But — unless users are told of this — it is not obvious that Stata treats missing values as positive infinity, so this appears to be a source of potential error for code with a > sign and missing values.
Here's how to recode the command so that missing values remains missing: replace Q1trunc = 100 if Q1 > 100 & if Q1 < .
Excerpts from Schneider 2014 on null hypothesis significance tests
This post presents selected excerpts from Jesper W. Schneider's 2014 Scientometrics article, "Null hypothesis significance tests. A mix-up of two different theories: the basis for widespread confusion and numerous misinterpretations" [ungated version here]. For the following excerpts, most citations have been removed, and page numbers references to the article have not been included because my copy of the article lacked page numbers.
The first excerpt notes that the common procedure followed in most social science research is a mishmash of two separate procedures:
What is generally misunderstood is that what today is known, taught and practiced as NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] is actually an anonymous hybrid or mix-up of two divergent classical statistical theories, R. A. Fisher's 'significance test' and Neyman's and Pearson's 'hypothesis test'. Even though NHST is presented somewhat differently in statistical textbooks, most of them do present p values, null hypotheses (H0), alternative hypotheses (HA), Type I (α) and II (β) error rates as well as statistical power, as if these concepts belong to one coherent theory of statistical inference, but this is not the case. Only null hypotheses and p values are present in Fisher's model. In Neyman–Pearson's model, p values are absent, but contrary to Fisher, two hypotheses are present, as well as Type I and II error rates and statistical power.
The next two excerpts contrast the two procedures:
In Fisher's view, the p value is an epistemic measure of evidence from a single experiment and not a long-run error probability, and he also stressed that 'significance' depends strongly on the context of the experiment and whether prior knowledge about the phenomenon under study is available. To Fisher, a 'significant' result provides evidence against H0, whereas a non-significant result simply suspends judgment—nothing can be said about H0.
They [Neyman and Pearson] specifically rejected Fisher's quasi-Bayesian interpretation of the 'evidential' p value, stressing that if we want to use only objective probability, we cannot infer from a single experiment anything about the truth of a hypothesis.
The next excerpt reports evidence that p-values are overstated. I have retained the reference citations here:
Using both likelihood and Bayesian methods, more recent research have demonstrated that p values overstate the evidence against H0, especially in the interval between significance levels 0.01 and 0.05, and therefore can be highly misleading measures of evidence (e.g., Berger and Sellke 1987; Berger and Berry 1988; Goodman 1999a; Sellke et al. 2001; Hubbard and Lindsay 2008; Wetzels et al. 2011). What these studies show is that p values and true evidential measures only converge at very low p values. Goodman (1999a, p. 1008) suggests that only p values less than 0.001 represent strong to very strong evidence against H0.
This next excerpt emphasizes the difference between p and alpha:
Hubbard (2004) has referred to p < α as an 'alphabet soup', that blurs the distinctions between evidence (p) and error (α), but the distinction is crucial as it reveals the basic differences underlying Fisher's ideas on 'significance testing' and 'inductive inference', and Neyman–Pearson views on 'hypothesis testing' and 'inductive behavior'.
The next excerpt contains a caution against use of p-values in observational research:
In reality therefore, inferences from observational studies are very often based on single non-replicable results which at the same time no doubt also contain other biases besides potential sampling bias. In this respect, frequentist analyses of observational data seems to depend on unlikely assumptions that too often turn out to be so wrong as to deliver unreliable inferences, and hairsplitting interpretations of p values becomes even more problematic.
The next excerpt cautions against incorrect interpretation of p-values:
Many regard p values as a statement about the probability of a null hypothesis being true or conversely, 1 − p as the probability of the alternative hypothesis being true. But a p value cannot be a statement about the probability of the truth or falsity of any hypothesis because the calculation of p is based on the assumption that the null hypothesis is true in the population.
The final excerpt is a hopeful note that the importance attached to p-values will wane:
Once researchers recognize that most of their research questions are really ones of parameter estimation, the appeal of NHST will wane. It is argued that researchers will find it much more important to report estimates of effect sizes with CIs [confidence intervals] and to discuss in greater detail the sampling process and perhaps even other possible biases such as measurement errors.
The Schneider article is worthwhile for background and information on p-values. I'd also recommend this article on p-value misconceptions.
The ex ante value of replications
Jeremy Freese recently linked to a Jason Mitchell essay that discussed perceived problems with replications. Mitchell discussed many facets of replication, but I will restrict this post to Mitchell's claim that "[r]ecent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value."
Mitchell's claim appears to be based on a perceived asymmetry between positive and negative findings: "When an experiment succeeds, we can celebrate that the phenomenon survived these all-too-frequent shortcomings. But when an experiment fails, we can only wallow in uncertainty about whether a phenomenon simply does not exist or, rather, whether we were just a bit too human that time around."
Mitchell is correct that a null finding can be caused by experimental error, but Mitchell appears to overlook the fact that positive findings can also be caused by experimental error.
Mitchell also appears to confront only the possible "ex post" value of replications, but there is a possible "ex ante" value to replications.
Ward Farnsworth discussed ex post and ex ante thinking using the example of a person who accidentally builds a house that extends onto a neighbor's property: ex post thinking concerns how to best resolve the situation at hand, but ex ante thinking concerns how to make this problem less likely to occur in the future; tearing down the house is a wasteful decision through the perspective of ex post thinking, but it is a good decision from the ex ante perspective because it incentivizes more careful construction in the future.
In a similar way, the threat of replication incentivizes more careful social science. Rational replicators should gravitate toward research for which the evidence appears to be relatively fragile: all else equal, the value of a replication is higher for replicating a study based on 83 undergraduates at one particular college than for replicating a study based on a nationally-representative sample of 1,000 persons; all else equal, a replicator should pass on replicating a stereotype threat study in which the dependent variable is percent correct in favor of replicating a study in which the stereotype effect was detected only using the more unusual measure of percent accuracy, measured as the percent correct of the problems that the respondent attempted.
Mitchell is correct that there is a real possibility that a researcher's positive finding will not be replicated because of error on the part of the replicator, but, as a silver lining, this negative possibility incentivizes researchers concerned about failed replications to produce higher-quality research that reduces the chance that a replicator targets their research in the first place.
When are one-tailed hypotheses appropriate?
Comments to this scatterplot post contained a discussion about when one-tailed statistical significance tests are appropriate. I'd say that one-tailed tests are appropriate only for a certain type of applied research. Let me explain…
Statistical significance tests attempt to assess the probability that we mistake noise for signal. The conventional 0.05 level of statistical significance in social science represents a willingness to mistake noise for signal 5% of the time.
Two-tailed tests presume that these errors can occur because we mistake noise for signal in the positive direction or because we mistake noise for signal in the negative direction: therefore, for two-tailed tests we typically allocate half of the acceptable error to the left tail and half of the acceptable error to the right tail.
One-tailed tests presume either that: (1) we will never mistake noise for signal in one of the directions because it is impossible to have a signal in that direction, so that permits us to place all of the acceptable error in the other direction's tail; or (2) we are interested only in whether there is an effect in a particular direction, so that permits us to place all of the acceptable error in that direction's tail.
Notice that it is easier to mistake noise for signal in a one-tailed test than in a two-tailed test because one-tailed tests have more acceptable error in the tail that we are interested in.
So let's say that we want to test the hypothesis that X has a particular directional effect on Y. Use of a one-tailed test would mean either that: (1) it is impossible that the true direction is the opposite of the direction predicted by the hypothesis or (2) we don't care whether the true direction is the opposite of the direction predicted by the hypothesis.
I'm not sure that we can ever declare things impossible in social science research, so (1) is not justified. The problem with (2) is that — for social science conducted to understand the world — we should always want to differentiate between "no evidence of an effect at a statistically significant level" and "evidence of an effect at a statistically significant level, but in the direction opposite to what we expected."
To illustrate a problem with (2), let's say that we commit before the study to a one-tailed test for whether X has a positive effect on Y, but the results of the study indicate that the effect of X on Y is negative at a statistically significant level, at least if we had used a two-tailed test. Now we are in a bind: if we report only that there is no evidence that X has a positive effect on Y at a statistically significant level, then we have omitted important information about the results; but if we report that the effect of X on Y is negative at a statistically significant level with a two-tailed test, then we have abandoned our original commitment to a one-tailed test in the hypothesized direction.
Now, when is a one-tailed test justified? The best justification that I have encountered for a one-tailed test is the scenario in which the same decision will be made if X has no effect on Y and if X has a particular directional effect on Y, such as "we will switch to a new program if the new program is equal to or better than our current program"; but that's for applied science, and not for social science conducted to understand the world: social scientists interested in understanding the world should care whether the new program is equal to or better than the current program.
In cases of strong theory or a clear prediction from the literature supporting a directional hypothesis, it might be acceptable — before the study — to allocate 1% of the acceptable error to the opposite direction and 4% of the acceptable error to the predicted direction, or some other unequal allocation of acceptable error. That unequal allocation of acceptable error would provide a degree of protection against unexpected effects that is lacking in a one-tailed test.
List experiments are not useful for estimating U.S. vote fraud
Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013, p. 3) wrote:
List experiments are a commonly used social scientific tool for measuring the prevalence of illegal or undesirable attributes in a population. In the context of electoral fraud, list experiments have been successfully used in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Russia and Nicaragua. They present our best tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States.*
I'm not sure that list experiments are the best tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States. But, first, let's introduce the list experiment.
The list experiment goes back at least to Judith Droitcour Miller's 1984 dissertation, but she called the procedure the item count method (see page 188 of this 1991 book). Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) reported results from list experiments that split a sample into two groups: members of the first group received a list of 4 items and were instructed to indicate how many of the 4 items applied to themselves; members of the second group received a list of 5 items — the same 4 items that the first group received, plus an additional item — and were instructed to indicate how many of the 5 items applied to themselves. The difference in the mean number of items selected by the groups was then used to estimate the percent of the sample and — for weighted data — the percent of the population to which the fifth item applied.
Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) reported four list experiments from September 2013, with these statements as the fifth item:
- "I cast a ballot under a name that was not my own."
- "Political candidates or activists offered you money or a gift for your vote."
- "I read or wrote a text (SMS) message while driving."
- "I was abducted by extraterrestrials (aliens from another planet)."
Figure 4 of Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013) displayed results from three of these list experiments:
My presumption is that vote buying and voter impersonation are low frequency events in the United States: I'd probably guess somewhere between 0 and 1 percent, and closer to 0 percent than to 1 percent. If that's the case, then a list experiment with 3,000 respondents is not going to detect such low frequency events. 95 percent confidence intervals for weighted estimates in Figure 4 appear to span 20 percentage points or more: the weighted 95 percent confidence interval for vote buying appears to range from -7 percent to 17 percent. Moreover, notice how much estimates varied between the December 2012 and September 2013 waves of the list experiment: the point estimate for voter impersonation in December 2012 was 0 percent, and the point estimate for voter impersonation in September 2013 was -10 percent, a ten-point swing in point estimates.
So, back to the original point, list experiments are not the best tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States because vote fraud in the United States is a low frequency event that list experiments cannot detect without an improbably large sample size: the article indicates that at least 260,000 observations would be necessary to detect a 1% difference.
If that's the case, then what's the purpose of a list experiment to detect vote fraud with only 3,000 observations? Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman (2013, p. 31) wrote that:
From a policy perspective, our findings are broadly consistent with the claims made by opponents of stricter voter ID laws: voter impersonation was not a serious problem in the 2012 election.
The implication appears to be that vote fraud is a serious problem only if the fraud is common. But there's a lot of problems that are serious without being common.
So, if list experiments are not the best tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States, then what is a better way? I think that — if the goal is detecting the presence of vote fraud and not estimating its prevalence — then this is one of those instances in which journalism is better than social science.
* This post was based on the October 30, 2013, version of the Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman manuscript, which was located here. A more recent version is located here and has replaced the "best tool" claim about list experiments:
List experiments are a commonly used social scientific tool for measuring the prevalence of illegal or undesirable attributes in a population. In the context of electoral fraud, list experiments have been successfully used in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Russia, and Nicaragua. They present a powerful but unused tool for detecting fraudulent voting in the United States.
It seems that "unused" is applicable, but I'm not sure that a "powerful" tool for detecting vote fraud in the United States would produce 95 percent confidence intervals that span 20 percentage points.
P.S. The figure posted above has also been modified in the revised manuscript. I have a pdf of the October 30, 2013, version, in case you are interested in verifying the quotes and figure.