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In making Acer a global computer brand currently growing at 70 percent a year, the Clone King of PC Island, Stan Shih, has become a national hero in Taiwan and the most successful information technology entrepreneur in Asia.
It was while eating a Chinese meal in Mexico that Stan Shih, Taiwan's Number One digital entrepreneur, realized personal computers could be marketed like fast food.
Stan - as everyone always calls Acer's chair and CEO - has to travel a lot: his company, Acer, makes the leading brand of PC in Mexico and has facilities in 24 other countries. Wherever he goes, Stan likes to eat Chinese food, but the quality of the cooking varies greatly from place to place. Now, Stan is a pragmatic man. While pondering how the operating principles established by the likes of McDonald's might be applied to his beloved national cuisine, he made the connection between burgers 'n' fries and boards 'n' drives.
Few industries move faster than the personal computer industry: the product cycle for desktop machines these days is narrowing, down to just a few months. That means makers can easily get burned by excess inventory - who wants yesterday's disk drives? Instead of putting together fully loaded PCs in Taiwan and then shipping them worldwide, Stan figured it would make more sense to configure machines downstream to suit local tastes. Final assembly could be delegated to Acer's standardized production lines - 16 different sites worldwide - and components could be sourced according to shelf life. Under this scheme, computer housings and floppies could be shipped to franchises by sea, motherboards flown in fresh from Taiwan, and the most perishable parts - CPUs, hard disks, and memory chips - sourced locally. The result cuts inventory shelf life in half, from 90 to 45 days, and customers can have it their way - at McAcer's.
Stan's plan seems to be working. In 1993, Acer grew 60 percent, scoring sales worth US$1.9 billion. In the first quarter of 1994, sales were up 70 percent, to US$630 million, boosting Acer into 10th place among PC vendors in the US. For the full year, Acer predicts sales of US$2.7 billion. Prospects for the next three to five years also look good, as companies continue to downsize, replacing their mainframe and minicomputers with networks of PCs. Acer's dream is to break into the top five PC vendors by 1996 and to reach sales of US$8 billion by the year 2000. A tall order perhaps, but people have scoffed at Acer's lofty ambitions before - and each time Stan has proved them wrong.
There was his controversial 1987 decision to establish a global brand name, for example. Stan spent heavily to transform his company from an anonymous manufacturer of original equipment for big US and European firms into Acer, a brand registered in more than 100 countries around the world with a fancy logo to match. This was a step that no other Taiwanese computer manufacturer had been bold enough to take; back home, locals accused Stan of hubris. (The Latin acer means - among other things - active, energetic, and incisive, but the gambler's interpretation of "ace" also resonates well in the risky PC business).
Heads shook again two years later, in 1989, when Stan decided to invest US$185 million in a joint venture with Texas Instruments Inc. to make memory chips. Taiwan didn't do DRAMs, ran the conventional wisdom. Huge Japanese and Korean conglomerates would kill them in the market if they tried. But Stan had read his tea leaves right, foreseeing the huge increase in demand for memory that Windows 3.0 would create. Since coming online in July of 1991, TI-Acer Inc., located at Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park in Taiwan, has begun spitting out DRAMs round the clock, breaking records for productivity and generating healthy profits in the process. Acer provides capital to TI-Acer, and in return gets half the factory's output of memory chips as well as access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
Whatever Acer does is big news in Taiwan - it is by far the biggest PC maker there, with Mitac running a distant second. (In 1993, according to the island's Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan earned 47 percent of total Asian PC industry revenues of US$7.6 billion. Japan earned 38 percent, and South Korea earned 14.5 percent. In addition to personal computers, Taiwanese firms also have shares of between 30 and 80 percent of the world markets for computer power supplies, monitors, keyboards, scanners, and mice.)
Stan himself is a national hero, king of "PC Clone Island." Fortune has called him "one of the 25 people you ought to know for doing business in Asia," and MicroTimes has said he is one of the 100 most influential people in the US information industry.
Stan has become the standard-bearer of Taiwan's electronics industry because he has been with it since the beginning, always leading the way. As a senior in high school, he opted for electrical engineering instead of medicine, the choice, he says, of 80 percent of his classmates. "I didn't want to do what everyone else did," Stan says. "Me-too is not my style."
Beg pardon? If Stan Shih is such an original, then what is he doing cranking out clones, which has to be the ultimate me-too business? Stan would probably answer that there is a world of difference between making clones and making compatibles. By definition, a clone allows no room for differentiation, whereas a compatible offers all sorts of chances for a canny maker to add value. Take speed to market, for example: in 1986, Acer was second only to Compaq - and ahead of IBM - in introducing a 386-based machine. And take original technology: in 1991, Acer introduced a socket called ChipUp, which makes it easy to upgrade your system with a faster processor. Acer has since licensed ChipUp to dozens of other companies, including Intel (and sued several Taiwanese clone merchants for infringing on its intellectual property).
But no matter how fast you are on your feet and how much techno-savvy you can muster, success in such a savagely competitive market as PCs ultimately depends on strategy. And it is in this domain that Stan's true originality resides.
Stan's innovations in corporate style have pushed Acer to the top. And by demonstrating that it is possible to transcend the limitations of the traditional, family-based Chinese company - in which the boss makes all the decisions and reaps all the rewards - he has set an example for other Taiwanese firms to follow, in much the same way that Bob Noyce and Intel did for the start-ups of Silicon Valley. "Stan has contributed much to Taiwan's PC industry," says Lance Wu, a former district manager at Bellcore who is currently deputy general director of Taiwan's Computer and Communication Research Laboratories. "He set the road model for many start-ups here."
Stan Shih was born 50 years ago in the Taiwanese port city of Lukang, 110 miles south of Taipei. An only child, Stan was just 3 years old when his father died, so from his earliest years he had to help out with the family business. "I learned business in primary school, selling eggs," Stan recalls. Through this experience he learned how to convert weight to unit price. Even today, Stan reckons that he is swifter at mental math than most of his employees.
Eggs were not the Shih family's only stock in trade - they also dealt in stationery goods. So Stan acquired a second business model, and a sensitivity to shelf life that would serve him well later. "With eggs, the margin is 10 percent and inventory is good for two days," he explains, "so it's a low-margin, quick-turnover business. With stationery, the margin is 50 to 60 percent, and you keep inventory for three to six months." Stan says he often spends time explaining product cycle times and inventory risk to his subordinates.
In high school Stan was a good student, but it was not until he got to Taiwan's élite National Chiao Tung University that he really began to shine. He graduated with a BS in 1968, did a year's military service, then got his master's degree in 1971. Stan came in at the top of his class asan undergraduate, the school's first crop of graduates since it was transplanted from mainland China. At the university he was good at science and math, but he also spent a lot of time on social activities, starting teams for table tennis (Stan remains a demon with the ping-pong paddle) and volleyball, as well as a photography society and chess and bridge clubs. "I was captain of all the societies," he says, "and from that I learned how to deal with people."
As he developed leadership skills, Stan began to develop ambitions. Initially these were academic, but he says after he came in second in his graduate school class, "I lost my interest in study."
In 1971, the electronics industry in Taiwan was just beginning to take root. Multinationals like General Instrument and Philips were setting up on the island, attracted by the availability of cheap, well-educated labor. Graduates were paid $200 a month, an unbelievably high salary for Taiwan in those days. At the same time, local home-appliance firms like Tatung and Sampo were licensing technology from the Japanese to produce electrical goods for the protected domestic market.
Stan's first job was with an outfit called Unitron Industrial Corp., one of the earliest Taiwanese companies to boast its own R&D section. There, among other things, he single-handedly developed the island's first desktop calculator. In 1972, Stan moved on to Qualitron Industrial Corp., a company dedicated to calculator production. Qualitron dispatched the 28-year-old engineer to Los Angeles (a 27-hour flight in those days, stopping in Manila and Hawaii en route) to buy microprocessors from Rockwell and to get trained in their application (everything from traffic-light controllers and medical instruments to pinball and slot machines). Stan understood that the microprocessor would be the core technology for a new industrial revolution.
Characteristically, upon his return to Taiwan, Stan set about spreading the word, giving lectures on microprocessors to enthusiastic young Taiwanese engineers. (Later, from 1976 to 1980, after Stan founded the company which would ultimately become known as Acer, he would train some 3,000 engineers in the fundamentals of microprocessor-based design, laying the foundation for the island's information technology industry. In the mid-'80s, Acer would make PCs available for hands-on training of hundreds of thousands of primary and junior high school kids. Such activities are of course not entirely altruistic: they also serve to create future customers for Acer.)
As an engineer, Stan's main claim to fame is that he designed the world's first pen watch. Not exactly a technical breakthrough, the pen watch was nonetheless a big hit commercially. And it taught Stan an important lesson: even a small innovation can create a lot of business.
Though successful, Qualitron ran into financial trouble. The company borrowed money to bail out a sister company that made textiles. But the textile industry was in a tailspin, and the sister company went bankrupt, taking Qualitron - and Stan, its product vice president - down with it. The way Stan tells the story, he had no choice but to start his own company. In 1976, he founded Multitech International Corp., the precursor of Acer, with $25,000. Stan and his wife Carolyn Yeh owned 50 percent of the firm, with four other co-founders sharing the remaining half.
Having your wife as a partner is not unusual in Taiwan, where most businesses are family-owned. ("Better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox," runs an old and oft-quoted Chinese proverb.) The boss's wife often takes the role of tightfisted keeper of the corporate purse. Even big companies tend to be centrally controlled, with the smallest budget items requiring the boss's approval.
One such company is Acer's arch-rival, Mitac. This is run by Matthew Miau, the son of a local petrochemicals magnate. It is hard not to be impressed by Miau, who is unusually tall for a Chinese, wears immaculately tailored suits, speaks perfect English, and back in the '70s was a member of one of Intel's early design teams. By contrast, Stan, with his humble manner, his toothy grin, and his hard-to-understand accent doesn't come across nearly so strongly. But even back then, as Stan tells it, Acer was twice as big as Mitac. Today, he says, that gap has widened: Acer is five times bigger. But why?
Because Stan was smart enough to realize that, to grow beyond a certain size, he would need to recruit and keep a team of talented managers. This in turn would require delegating authority and distributing rewards. Starting from Acer's third year in business, Stan began inviting managers to become shareholders in the company. Each year more and more employees picked up stock options, so that by the time the company went public in 1988, the founders had diluted their ownership from 100 percent to about 70 percent, and some 3,000 employees had a stake in the company.
"Stan's very generous about benefits and diluting stock for employees," says K.Y. Lee, president of Acer Peripherals Inc. "At Acer, we have a chance to purchase shares at a very low price."
Tolerance is another of Stan's virtues as a manager. "In meetings, people tend to get emotional, argue strongly," comments a second trusted lieutenant, Ronald Chwang, president of Acer America. "But Stan keeps his cool, never gets excited. He's able to control his emotions and to shift his view."
Such qualities have enabled Stan to retain the loyalty of his top managers. Lee has been with Acer 17 years, and the average for heads of the group's business units is 12 years. Chwang, who was with Intel, is a relative newcomer, having been with Acer just eight years.
Stan's record on delegation is also impeccable. "When Stan gives us a target," says Lee, "it's normally just an outline - the detailed stuff we work out for ourselves. We're very entrepreneurial; there's a lot of room for us to exercise our discretion."
The ability to delegate is particularly important, because Acer has no huge domestic market to depend on. Taiwan exports 97 percent the PCs it makes. By contrast, Japanese producers sell 85 percent of their production at home, according to Stan. "Since our markets are mostly overseas [56 percent North America and Europe, 44 percent Latin America, Pacific Rim, and Middle East], we have a much more decentralized structure than a US company, which would typically be dominated by its headquarters in the US," says Chwang.
Cracking the US market - which currently accounts for 30 percent of the company's sales - has not been easy for Acer. Stan's initial approach was to hire experienced outsiders, most notably Leonard Liu, a Chinese-American who was formerly general manager of IBM's software development laboratories in San Jose, California. In 1990, Liu arranged the acquisition of Altos Computer Systems, a small US maker of minicomputers, on the grounds that Altos had sizable resources in the US, which Acer would need to compete with US firms.
But the acquisition turned out to be a disaster, costing Acer more than $100 million, including severance payments for former Altos employees. At the same time, the recruitment of Liu and others parachuted in from the outside created tensions within the company, especially as the confrontational style of the newcomers clashed with Acer's more consensus-driven approach. These incompatibilities were probably the main reason for Liu's early departure in April 1992. (Now chief operating officer at Cadence Design Systems, Liu declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The 1990s began badly for Acer in other ways, too. A bloody price war in the PC business cut margins. At the same time, the construction and equipping of TI-Acer became a black hole that sucked in cash. In 1991, Acer hit rock bottom, with losses of $22.7 million. But for Stan, the worst moment came when, for the first time in its history, Acer had to lay people off. Or rather, ask them to resign ("in a Chinese company, we don't talk about layoffs," Stan explains). For Taiwanese long accustomed to hearing nothing but success stories about Acer, the layoffs were hard to understand. To his credit, Stan did not shirk responsibility for them. "He faced the public very bravely," says K.Y. Lee, "and explained why the layoffs were necessary."
At the same time, however, Stan was taking more positive steps to get Acer back on its feet. He realized that since going public in 1988, Acer had lost that crucial motivating sense of ownership, of shared risk and reward. Stan's solution was to spin off many of the company's units as separate but wholly owned firms, and invite employees to purchase shares in the new enterprises. (Acer has also launched joint ventures with local assemblers and distributors, like Computec de Mexico, in which it maintains only a 50 percent share.)
Future plans call for 21 companies to be floated worldwide. In the second half of 1994, two subsidiaries, Acer Peripherals and Acer Sertek Inc., will likely be listed on the Taiwan stock market. In 1995, Computec de Mexico is to be listed on the Mexican stock market. Also in 1995 or early 1996, Acer hopes to list Acer America Corp. on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1996, Acer Computer International will list on the Singapore stock market.
Further out, it is possible that TI-Acer will be listed in Taiwan in 1997. Acer Labs is in the initial phases of being spun off. Approximately 25 percent of equity in Acer Laboratories Inc. is held by management and employees.
Stan communicates this new arrangement using a metaphor drawn from computer terminology. He calls it the client-server model, in which strategic business units (servers) like Acer Peripherals provide regional business units (clients) like Acer America with services such as technology and manufacturing. In this model, Stan's role is to be - what else? - the operating system for the group.
The difference is that an operating system is an indispensable part of the computer, whereas Stan says he does not see himself as an indispensable part of Acer's future. "I've worked very hard to make sure Acer won't need me," the 50-year-old told Singapore's Business Times last December. "Before I get too old I should retire."
M. I. T. (Made in Taiwan)
The guts of the information age are manufactured in Taiwan. But if you think Taiwan is just another bunch of high-tech sweat shops, think again. Taiwan's Internet traffic is greater than Japan's. The brain drain of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists is reversing from Silicon Valley back to Taiwan. And Taiwan is now a functioning democracy.
By Andrew Leonard
Parked by the hundreds on city sidewalks, endlessly roaring down alleyways and avenues, and ignoring, like the rest of Taiwan's traffic, even the most basic road regulations, Taiwan's 10 million motorcycles clog every opening on the island. Yet even in the congested capital of Taipei, traffic rarely stops. Perhaps it's the inherent flexibility of motorcycles, or maybe it's what one observer called the "efficient exception-handling subroutines" of Taiwanese drivers. There's a constant flow, an order within the chaos, symbolic of a societywide impatience with going slow and an ability to overcome any obstacle.
At any intersection, waiting for a light to change, one gets the sense of a nation schooled from the cradle in the art of shooting the gap. Drivers jockey for position. A backlog of buses, trucks, and cars waits impatiently, immobile, but in its interstices a pack of cycles sneaks foward. There's the man hauling four propane tanks on a bamboo trestle above the rear wheel of his Honda, revving his throttle. There's the woman with a surgical mask over her mouth easing forward her red Yamaha, tapping her shoes on the sticky tar. When the crosslight turns yellow, the drivers accelerate in a mad frenzy, swerving around stragglers and rushing to the next light, where they do it all over again.
Taiwan didn't become the 14th-largest trading nation in the world by waiting for the light to turn green. To shoot the gaps in today's information age, the Taiwanese have latched onto the most crucial commodity of the modern era - computer components. Taiwanese companies sell more motherboards, monitors, mice, and scanners than any other nation's companies. Taiwan today makes 20 percent of the notebook computers in the world. Once a wellspring of cheap plastic toys and low-grade baseball mitts, Taiwan has turned to churning out silicon wafers and integrated circuits - the guts of the information age.
Two out of every five computers in the world have motherboards made in Taiwan. US chip designers can be made or broken by a Taiwanese manufacturer's decision to choose their products for inclusion on a circuit board. Taiwan is one of the few countries that can produce 16-Mbyte DRAM chips. The 1993 Computex computer show in Taipei drew 8,000 buyers from abroad along with 80,000 domestic visitors.
A mountainous island about the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, Taiwan out-maneuvered much bigger nations on its way to the technological front by getting to the crosswalk with products just the slightest bit better, or cheaper, or faster, than everyone else. Displaying the same virtuoso flexibility with which they pilot their motorcycles, the Taiwanese have adapted to the zigzags of market capitalism. They possess neither the resources nor the power to set the course of the world market, but the Taiwanese have few peers at nimbly dodging around it.
Flexibility has been an essential Taiwanese survival characteristic for centuries. Eighty-five percent of the population descends from immigrants who fled the Chinese mainland two or three hundred years ago, driven by famine, war, and the promise of opportunities. After the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, China's ailing Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan for a 50-year period that ended with Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1949, after years of militant struggle between Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and more than a million of his soldiers and followers (the Kuomintang) escaped the Communists in China by fleeing to Taiwan. Joining up with a provincial government that two years before had suppressed a rebellion by the native Taiwanese, the Kuomintang made the island their base for "retaking the mainland." The new leadership imposed a restrictive martial law regime, and Chiang's followers, referred to as "mainlanders," secured a monopoly over politics and the military that has begun to disintegrate only in the last decade, especially since martial law ended in 1987.
Still, the last 100 years of cultural and political turmoil haven't been sufficient to put a cap on what James Davidson, the United States Consul in Taiwan at the turn of the century, described as a national tendency toward "overabundant impetuosity." When Taiwanese society chances upon an opportunity to make money - or, for that matter, an opportunity just to have fun - it surges forward as one entity. All those decades of repression, argue some of Taiwan's social critics, have conditioned the Taiwanese to strike like lightning whenever they see an opening, and to swerve out of danger as soon as the gap closes.
Double E's: Home to Roost
Government encouragement of the "information industry" has played an enormous role in Taiwan's growth, but there's a grass-roots techno-infatuation going on as well. One day in May, in a cavernous exposition hall at Taipei's domestic airport, thousands of twenty- and thirtysomethings mill among hundreds of booths, scanning information pamphlets and scrutinizing Chinese character-laden computer monitors while loudspeakers alternately blare Madonna and Taiwanese folk songs. Some visitors stop in front of a full-scale stage to watch a mock Taiwanese folk opera celebrating the virtues of a virus-killing application (Taiwan is an ace producer of both viruses and virus-protection systems). Across town, tucked beneath an overpass cutting through one of the city's busiest neighborhoods, is Taipei's KuangHua Market. Buddhist antique stores share space with tiny retail computer outlets. Incense wafts past young men and women hunched in concen- tration as they compare prices on cut-rate 486 chips. In the larger basement section across the street, crowds of Taiwanese nerds sift through bins of transistors and diodes, inspecting serial cables and math coprocessors, searching for that last part necessary to get their jerry-rigged clone up and running.
Many of the people who visit the KuangHua Market have jobs with one of Taiwan's thousands of small or medium-size high-tech companies. A generation ago, most of them fled the country to become electrical engineers (Double E's) working abroad. In recent years, many have come back, a reverse brain drain that says volumes about how the country has changed in the past several decades.
There are now thousands of fluent English-speaking Double E's in Taiwan with PhDs from the United States who earlier spent years working for top US research laboratories and earning four times what they could in their native country. Throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, the exodus marked an embarrassing loss of face for the Kuomintang. By 1983, more than 80,000 students had left Taiwan to study abroad and only 13 percent had returned. In 1984, Taiwan's 20,000-strong student delegation in the US was the largest of any foreign country. Today, that generation is returning to a transformed nation.
Today, Taiwan's per capita GNP approaches US$11,000. Land prices in Taipei have skyrocketed. Night markets in which shoppers chose their own chickens and watched their throats cut (to guarantee freshness) have been replaced by Hong Kong supermarket chains. The city is a chaotic jumble of subway construction, cracked sidewalks abutting brand-new luxury hotels, and endless noise.
But just an hour's bus ride south, on the outskirts of a bustling town called Hsinchu, the Taipei-style anarchy has been tamed, at least within the boundaries of the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park, the jewel in Taiwan's high-tech crown. It is hard to imagine an environment more at odds with the madness of Taiwan's nearby capital city.
Hsinchu is the planned half of Taiwan's love affair with computer technology, the place where government activism has channeled Taiwan's energy to create the sixth-largest producer of information-technology products in the world: the government established the park; government-funded research institutes feed new technological breakthroughs to the park; and the government is a significant investor in many of the park's largest enterprises.
According to Lance Wu, the deputy general director of Taiwan's Computer and Communication Research Laboratories, more than a thousand Taiwanese scientists and engineers have returned from overseas to work in the Hsinchu area in just the last two years.
Besides the promise of good jobs in their homeland, a number of other factors contributed to the expatriates' homecoming. The US recession in the late 1980s eviscerated a once-thriving job market. The Kuomintang unleashed an aggressive government recruiting drive, offering cheap housing, high salaries, and other forms of government support. To encourage business, the government offered a sheaf of tax breaks and R&D grants, including a 30-percent tax break per dollar for "strategic" investments of over US$40 million in a Hsinchu-based enterprise.
The park's final drawing card is location: it sits smack upon a fiber backbone connected to the nation's telecommunications network, giving park enterprises great Internet access. That's important, Wu says, half jokingly: and w"We can't live without our e-mail." In fact, Taiwan's Internet traffic is greater than Japan's.
By the Shores of Man-Made Lake
David Tsao, an electrical engineer who earned a PhD from the Polytechnic Institute of New York in Brooklyn, spent most of the 1980s in New Jersey working for Bell Labs. "But business," he says, "is in my blood." So four years ago he returned to Taiwan to start his own company. A solidly built, round-faced man, Tsao is now chair and CEO of a 2-year-old, 50-employee business based in the park, a company he founded with several other Taiwanese alumni of Bell Labs.
Double E's like Tsao who live in the park have homes lining the shores of Man-Made Lake. They drive to work on wide, empty streets with names like Research and Development East Road and Technology Avenue. Shaded by identical 15-year-old trees, their offices and laboratories are, for the most part, in nondescript gray concrete buildings inhabited by companies whose names, like the streets, all sound the same: UMAX and Climax, Multronix and Microtek, Datatech and Yangtech. No traffic, no garbage, no noise - this planned community is one of the few places on the island where Taiwan can be fairly accused of modeling itself on Singapore.
But the calm is only skin deep. This "park" is no pastoral playground. Last year, some 150 businesses and 13,000 workers there pumped out US$5 billion worth of high-tech hardware. About half of that came in the form of integrated circuits.
Tsao's company, ALFA Inc., has its fingers in a number of telecommunications pies, including FDDI-based networking systems and PCMCIA cards. FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) networks provide a data transfer rate of 100 Mbits per second, and they're crucial, Tsao says, for effective multimedia networking. He enjoys showing off his Spartan offices, little more than a collection of open cubicles, where workers peer at dense circuit boards and flash their fingers across the keyboards of Taiwanese-made Sparc II workstations.
Hsinchu is a focal point for a worldwide network of joint ventures and technology transfer, much of which is fueled by the personal relationships established by these scientists during their sojourns abroad. For instance, Tsao's ALFA works hand-in-hand with AT&T. Philips owns shares in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the largest semiconductor companies in Hsinchu. Many of the returnees have left their families in the US, have American passports, and flit back and forth between their old companies in Silicon Valley and their new businesses in Hsinchu.
Tsao, as well as most Taiwan engineers, asserts that one of Taiwan's main strengths is its preponderance of small and medium-sized enterprises (you can't shoot a gap in the traffic with a Winnebago). But there is no agreement as to how Taiwan's economy came to be dominated by small enterprises. One theory has it that the mainlander-originated Kuomintang government saw any large native Taiwanese company as a political threat, and therefore tinkered with the tax laws to discourage their formation. Still, there isn't any dispute about the current role of thousands of motorcycle-like small businesses - particularly in the computer industry. In 1989, the island's top 20 computer companies made only 50 percent of its computers.
But when Taiwan's engineers are asked about the future, they lapse into a collective pursing of the lips. No one seems to think that the government's plans for a Software Park - for several years the government has been announcing the park's imminent founding in Beikang, a suburb of Taipei - will reap the same kind of harvest as Hsinchu. Similar efforts to promote the automobile and aerospace industries were dismal failures.
Part of the problem is Taiwan's own success. Martial law ended in 1987 - as economic growth continued, dissidents applied mounting pressure for representation, and the government moved to improve its image overseas. The Kuomintang legalized opposition parties, lifted press restrictions, and held free elections. It is no longer possible for the Kuomintang to unilaterally dispense tax breaks, clear public land, and budget hundreds of millions of dollars for a state-of-the-art research lab. Today, a growing portion of the legislature is made up of opposition lawmakers who daily demonstrate the full meaning of the word obstreperous. They cast a cold eye on proposed expenditures, particularly those that might involve tax relief for companies with close ties to Kuomintang legislators. The consensus opinion in Hsinchu: industrial policy in an open democracy is much easiersaid than done.
But just how crucial was industrial policy to Taiwan's flourishing high-tech industries in the first place? The computer industry itself, experts say again and again, started by accident.
National Compulsions
Back in early 1982, everyone in Taipei was playing games.
Taiwanese companies churned out knockoff versions of Space Invaders at a furious rate. Arcades sprung up all over the city. And then, in March 1982, the Kuomintang banned the manufacturing of videogames. Not to anyone's surprise: the government had for decades taken a dim view of any activities that might impact negatively on the people's "morale" - public dancing, gambling, a free press, opposition parties. Videogames joined the list of all things verboten.
Taiwanese game manufacturers hardly blinked. They stripped the old games of their key components and used them in cloned versions of Apple II computers. Apple, in turn, filed a trade action against Taiwan and unleashed a legal attack so fierce that the infant Taiwan computer makers quickly abandoned copycatting Apple IIs and moved into the far more friendly arena of IBM-clone manufacturing.
By September 1982, the Ministry of Economic Affairs designated the information industry a "strategic industry" and instructed the Industrial Technology Research Institute, a close neighbor to the Science-based Park, to develop IBM PC-compatible technology. As a result, even today, the domestic market is almost entirely IBM-compatible.
Taiwan's craze for videogames was a perfect example of "overabundant impetuosity," and it wasn't the last time, by a long shot, that the whole country lost its mind en masse. Throughout the mid-1980s and into the '90s, similar fads swept the island. An obsession with a Hong Kong lottery brought Taipei to a halt whenever winning numbers were announced. In 1991, some 300 cable franchises were wiring up the island in a frenzy of competition. In restless pursuit of the latest developments in telecommunicated moneymaking, Taiwan's gap-happy go-getters have suddenly charged towards the latest digital El Dorado: home shopping.
A hustling 29-year-old named Tommy Chen is one person poised to take advantage of the current home-shopping madness. Chen is a hardware tinkerer who has designed software and hardware for a cable home-shopping company. He is also one of the thousands of Taiwanese who have taken advantage of decades of economic growth to travel by car instead of the ubiquitous motorcycle, but his Daihatsu Charade is hardly the stuff of his dreams. A tiny two-door vehicle hardly longer than it is wide is not the kind of car that carries much weight with Taiwan's nouveaux riches, the sort of people Chen is constantly hustling for investment capital.
"They don't like my car," says Chen. "They look at it and go, 'Where's your Mercedes? If you're so good, how come you don't have a Mercedes?'"
"Give me a break!" he shouts, slamming his hands against the steering wheel. "I tell them, 'My Mercedes is on my desk!' I've got three Mac Quadras. Top of the line. Put them together and that almost adds up to a Mercedes."
Parking in a narrow alley, Chen passes a liquor store with cases of Remy Martin XO stacked in the window, and a golf club store (10 years earlier, the alley might have housed a family of five stuffing chopsticks into paper holders or assembling electric fans). In a building whose discreet sign announces the Taiwan Video Shopping Network, Chen finds Bronson Bao.
Bao, who says he used to be a product marketing agent for Intel, claims that TVSN was the first purely cable home-shopping network in Asia, and already, in only its third year of operation, reaches a million households. But profit growth, which he says reached nearly US$5 million in 1993, an 800 percent increase over 1992, has already begun to slow. TVSN's first competitor arrived after only a year and a half.
"And in the last six months," says Bao, who let Chen know that he just traded in his Dodge Dynasty for a minivan, "we've seen 40 to 50 new competitors." Made - and Designed - in Taiwan
Tommy Chen and his Daihatsu Charade provide just one example of a pattern that plays itself out millions of times over in Taiwan: he is the tireless hustler with 10 different projects in the air at once. But he is also an example of the close kinship that many Taiwanese, especially men, seem to feel to technology. It's a kinship that breeds the thousands of electrical engineering and computer science PhDs that Taiwan churns out each year, a passion for computer guts that packs Taiwan's many bookstores with pale teenagers poring over Unix manuals and C++ programming textbooks. While some critics of Taiwanese society say that this mass youth movement into geekdom is another result of repressive Kuomintang cultural policies in decades past - "there was no room to think about art or culture," declared one dissident - there's still no denying that techno-infatuation culturewide is a valuable trait for a nation in the 1990s.
Particularly a nation as industrious as Taiwan. The days are long gone when a customer could make a single phone call in Taipei, order any kind of software from the latest edition of Autodesk's AutoCAD to an up-to-the-minute upgrade of Lotus 1-2-3, and then pay a flat rate, per-disk charge to the guy on the motorcycle who arrived half an hour later. A flurry of copyright and other intellectual property laws has been enacted in the last four years, and some of them, swear officials at the de facto American embassy in Taiwan, are actually being enforced. In 1991 the US labeled Taiwan the Number One counterfeiting country in the world. Now Taiwan is earning a hard-won reputation for original design, both in hardware and software.
"Made In Taiwan." Hsinchu's engineering elite relish rolling out the phrase as an acronym: MIT. Made in Taiwan used to convey all the sorry romance of plastic forks and counterfeit Rolexes. Now, to the ears of the Double E's, it suggests high-tech mastery and hints of a future in which Taiwan has become the "Switzerland of Asia" - the R&D center for all of Greater China. They demur at the idea that they might one day be world leaders in technological development, but they are confident that whichever way the world goes, Taiwan will be right there, weaving through the thick traffic of international markets.
Andrew Leonard (email@example.com) is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, California. He specializes in cyber-Asia.


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Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
DEAdmonton… Prepare for a rampage!The second wave of sick flicks for DEDfest has just been confirmed! And topping the list is the new film by the man who defies the critics (and even punches a few) – Uwe Boll! His new film, the bloody revenge fantasy Rampage, is one of three new films in our lineup for 2009. Other additions include the Thai slasher film Macabre, and the buddy-buddy graverobbers-vs-the-undead comedy I Sell the Dead.
Best known for his critically reviled video game adaptations, Dr. Uwe Boll breaks away from the world of pixels to deliver a taut, brutally uncompromising tale of a young man beat down by life – and his plan to beat life right back. Armed to the teeth and encased in Kevlar, he decides to exact revenge on his small town through an epic bloodbath that will leave the streets paved with bodies.
"Rampage is Uwe Boll's explosive entry onto the moviemaking scene as a real, honest-to-god filmmaker." – Film.com
"Forget anything you ever knew about Uwe Boll. This is solid cinema and deserves praise." – Quietearth.us
Macabre CANADIAN PREMIERE!
Newlyweds on an interstate road trip encounter a lost hitchhiker, who lures them into a mansion inhabited by a cult-like family of psychos with murderous intentions. Soon the young couple will learn the horrible truth: that in this house, everybody bleeds… and everybody dies.
"…a gorehound's wet dream… an unashamed, in-your-face tour-de-force of butchery" – DreadCentral.com
"…a splatter film that spills buckets of blood as it doles out ladles of tongue-in-cheek, genre-savvy fun." – The Hollywood Reporter
I Sell The DeaD
A pair of grave robbers in 19th century Ireland find themselves going from rags to riches. But as their business booms, they run afoul of rival corpse snatchers, vampires, zombies, mad doctors, and other unspeakables. Starring Dominic Monaghan (Lord of the Rings), Ron Perelman ("Hellboy"), and Angus Scrimm ("Phantasm"). Named Best Independent Film at the Toronto After Dark Film Fest!
"…smart, gruesome and inventive" – The Hollywood Reporter
Lesbian Vampire Killers It's Hammer by way of Hustler! Two buddies on a hiking trip find a town full of – you guessed it – vampires. Lesbian vampires. And worse yet, their queen is about to unleash hell upon mankind! "One hell of a crowd pleaser" — Peter Cornelissen, TWITCH "Brashly entertaining… the humour is deadpan British" — Andrew L. Urban, URBAN CINEFILE
Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl
From the creators of last year's cult classick "Tokyo Gore Police" comes this tale of a high school love triangle between a young man, and two lovely female students. When an accident leaves one of the girls dead, her vice-principal father – who just happens to be the heir to the Frankenstein throne, stitches his daughter back together on a mission of revenge. But this patchwork diva gets more than she bargained for when she discovers her rival is a vampire!
These two supernatural schoolgirls fight to the death in a film that can be best described as the twisted love-child of Takashi Miike, David Cronenberg, and John Hughes.
"…a wickedly entertaining joyride full of ingenious visuals, memorable characters and more arterial spray than a GWAR concert" – EYE Weekly
Neighbor Meet the neighbour from hell: "The Girl" (America Olivo), a lovely and charming psychotic with a penchant for breaking into posh suburban houses and torturing and slaughtering anyone unlucky enough to be home. A young bachelor on The Girl's neighbourhood watch will soon endure broken bones, power-drilled toes, and unspeakable horrors as his new guest makes herself at home. It's the film that caused its own editor to vomit! "…this is smart, freaky stuff… we can't imagine finding a nastier film this year." – Mitch Davis, Fantasia
"…by far the most brutal film at Fantasia this year." – Montreal Gazette
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated
Romero's film – the movie that spawned a generation of zombie flicks – has rested in the public domain for over 30 years. In 2009, producer Mike Schneider decided to conduct a radical experiment in horror cinema: using the audio as a backdrop and the visual for storyboards, a host of talented animators from a variety of genres will re-animate and re-imagine the classic film. Stop-motion, CGI, and even sock puppets will be used to breathe new life into Night of the Living Dead!
Return of the Living Dead
Our retro film for 2009 is this horror-comedy classic from 1985. A young man on his first day at a medical supply company hears a tall tale from his supervisor: the film Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story. The proof is in the basement – a canister of chemicals that reanimates the dead. When the canister breaks open, the dead rise to terrorize the hapless clerk, his panicky boss, and his punker friends at the graveyard outside. The film that gave us brain-munching zombies, Return of Living Dead is presented in 35MM for the first time since its release!
For more details on the festival, sponsors, and a complete schedule, please visit www.dedfest.com.
"With so many horror fests… offering terrible films the fine folks in Deadmonton have decided to buck the trend and screen some cool flicks." – Horror-Movies.ca
"Welcome to a truly alternative film festival… where crowd pleasers rock the house between retro grindhouse trailers…" – QuietEarth.us
"Whoever thought living in Edmonton could be so cool?" – Johnny Butane, DreadCentral.com
Dedfest: Hellberta's Horror Festival
October 15-18, 2009
9828-101A Avenue
For more information contact:
Derek Clayton
Kevin Martin

subset: commoncrawl


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Maile Ogata has been through many painful surgeries, and her family has undergone incredible emotional and financial challenges.
The time has come to celebrate.
Maile was born with Apert's syndrome, which causes physical problems and developmental delays. But through a regimen of physical, occupational and speech therapy, Maile is now able to attend general education third-grade classes.
Cindy Ogata is marking her daughter's accomplishments at an event Saturday, the fourth annual "Maile's Dream: A Celebration of Differences," 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Washington Middle School.
The event honors Easter Seals Hawaii, which provided Maile with therapy and support.
Entertainment will be provided by Maile's group, A Class Act, and other performers with special needs. Other activities include a magic show, silent auction, white-elephant sale, face and nail painting, and activities that show the challenges faced by those with special needs.
Admission is free. Proceeds from the auction and foods sales will benefit Easter Seals Hawaii. Call 973-0177.


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Broker Note Briefing: Wednesday
Investors are waiting patiently for the return of U.S. trading following the Hurricane Sandy disaster. Volumes have been low over the past two days and direction has been difficult to come by, so the reopening of Wall Street will be welcomed.
Meanwhile, here are our top picks of European equity rating changes for Wednesday:
UBS has been raised to "conviction buy" from "buy" by Goldman Sachs following a 10% gain over the past two sessions. UBS's new strategy plans and repositioning of the bank have been well received.
"The announced changes, which essentially imply a "new UBS", have implications well beyond this initial share price move," said Goldman Sachs. Valuation wise, UBS's changes will have three key medium/long-term effects according to the brokerage: an improved profitability profile; reduced volatility; an improved capital position.
Away from banking and into U.K. utilities, BofA Merrill Lynch has downgraded Severn Trent and United Utilities Group.


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I know I have never written a letter to you before, or even really acknowledged you are here...but today I write to you to tell you how happy and grateful I am that you exist.
I've never seen your face, at least not as I see my own in the mirror each morning. I've never experienced your scent, not the way I can still conjure the mixture of Irish Spring soap, pressed powder, and geraniums that was my grandmothers house. I've never held your hand as I do a child's, or touched your skin as I have the body of someone I love. I cannot hear you sing, and I do not know the shape of your smile, but I know when you are not there.
For everything I do not know about you, that is what you know of me. This must be true, because when we are together, when you come into me, you never lead me astray. If I let you in to rearrange the furniture to your liking, you always direct me in the best direction. Regardless of best, most, peak of ability or form, it is always exactly what I need to learn.
You make me high. You drive me. You move so quickly, so elegantly, that sometimes all I can do is laugh...or cry. This usually causes me to abandon words, surrendering to deeper communications that are both more accurate and less specific. Thank you.
Sometimes you paralyze me and disarm all I have built only to show me how to walk into the fire while acknowledging the pain and coming out the other side exhausted and fragile with altered composition.
It is then that I grow. A seed germinating in volcanic ash. It just goes.
When you leave, I morn you. I find you, and once again I have found myself.
You are my greatest inspiration. You create through sabotage and encouragement, enthusiasm and chaos.
Sometimes you never shut up and I simply cannot chase you. You expand and touch every part of me, as air can, and I am overwhelmed by our relation.
You know all of this, because you never really go away. I will act like I do not want you but really, I need you everyday.
You are why I breathe.
You are why I love.
You are why I make.
You make me strong and fearless and I trust you with all that I am.
What's past is past. I will never stop trying for you.


text:
Book a strategy session
Let's have a chat about what's going on in your business, and where you want it to be.
If we're a good fit, we might talk about working together. If we're not, no hard feelings, I'll point you in the right direction and make sure you leave the call with profitable and/or time-saving tactics you can implement straight away.
Case study: "From the red to $100k profit last year"
Click here to learn the 3 key strategies they used
Jeremy & Sadie Roberts
"As a creative, I've never been enthralled by accounting but as a business owner, I knew I needed to understand my numbers better. One thing I really appreciated was Ben's non-judgemental and friendly attitude. He helped me see where I was going wrong and together we built a solid roadmap for growth."
Larissa Pickens
Founder & Creative Director
Float Design


text: TV Ex-BAFTA Chairman Johnny Goodman Dies at 87 8:04 AM PST 2/2/2015 by Alex Ritman FACEBOOK TWITTER EMAIL ME Hulton Archive/Getty Images Goodman worked as an assistant director on 'Ivanhoe.' The producer worked on the Elizabeth Taylor-starring 'Ivanhoe' and formed a close friendship with Roger Moore while working on 'The Saint.' Johnny Goodman, the U.K. producer behind a string of classic 1960s spy shows and a former BAFTA chairman, has died. He was 87. Former James Bond actor Roger Moore, whom Goodman formed a close friendship with after working with him on the TV spy series The Saint, confirmed his passing on January 30, saying in a tweet that his "dear friend and colleague Johnny Goodman left us for the great cutting room in the sky." Goodman began his career in the entertainment industry as a teenager, working in the mail room of London's Lime Grove Studios, which would later be bought by the BBC, in the office of Albert Fennell, who would go on to produce The Avengers. After WWII, Goodman went to the U.S., working for 20th Century Fox as a dialogue editor, before returning to the U.K. as an assistant director on a series of films in the 1950s. Among his biggest titles was 1952's Elizabeth Taylor-starring Ivanhoe with MGM British Studios. Read more BBC Films to Receive BAFTA Award for "Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema" But it was in 1962 when Goodman joined what would become his most famous production, working as production supervisor for four years on Incorporated Television Company's series The Saint, starring Moore, which would prove hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1960s would also see him ply his trade on ITC's other espionage shows The Baron and The Champions before returning to The Saint in the final year of the series as an associate producer. Goodman, Moore and producer Robert S. Baker went on to form their own production company and create The Persuaders!, also starring Tony Curtis, which was successful in Europe but failed to find its feet in the U.S. Read more James Bond Villain Richard Kiel Dies at 74 In 1987, Goodman became chairman of BAFTA for a two-year stint. Current BAFTA chairwoman Amanda Berry offered her tribute to the late producer. "We were deeply saddened to hear the news that Johnny Goodman passed away," she said. "Johnny was a highly respected producer as well as a longtime supporter of BAFTA. He had many friends at the academy, and he will be very much missed. Our thoughts are with his family." FACEBOOK TWITTER EMAIL ME Alex Ritman email@example.com @alexritman


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Results 1 to 3 of 3
Preventing local copies of fields
A little background. I want to dispose of certain instance properties, when I am done with the object, that I would normally declare final. I want to dispose of them because they create circular references. (I know, that should be avoided, but anything resembling a listener does that.) Most important, I want to avoid the possibility of threads making local copies of these properties. Normally, declaring them final does that.
My question is this: If I create a simple container object and declare that final, and then I put the actual property inside the container, will that prevent threads from making local copies? Looking at it, I think I will still have to declare t as volatile...
Java Code:
class SimpleContainer<T extends Object> { private T t; SimpleContainer(final T tParm) { t = tParm; } T get() { return t; } void clear() { t = null; } }
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I think it is hard to avoid that another thread creates a copy of an object. Is that really what you want or is it more about preventing a thread of changing the same object? You could do this via a defensive copy in the getter so that you never return the actual object but only a copy. Making the object immutable of couse also helps to avoid any changes by other threads.
Sort of both. I decided the overhead did not warrant the effort, even if it would work. I like to final fields in general, just to make clear that other programmers should not alter it, and set a field final in threaded applications avoids copy issues. On the other hand, copy issues are not significant if the value is set once at the outset and then only changed to null references, and a comment works (almost) as well as final.
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My last appointment with T (last week) was partially about Robin Williams, as I felt like it was interesting how it had affected me. RW was a part of my entire growing up years, both in film and on TV, and I was sad. Sad for him and sad for his family. But I also found it interesting how people responded–more about his life and his humanity than how it ended–so we talked about that a bit. Then we talked about how I've been kind of stuck on watching (or mostly listening) to Frozen. The songs seem to touch me in some way, and T encouraged me to continue to listen to the songs and "let them do what they need to do for you." I don't really like the animation–it in fact is rather offensive to me–but the songs are hitting me right now. So any time I have nothing on the television to watch, I put Frozen on and while I'm doing other things, I enjoy the songs. And it isn't just "Let it go" that works for me, it's almost all the songs…even though I don't necessarily know why.
Once we were finished talking about that, we started talking about my previous homework. T has asked me to listen to a couple of specific Miles Davis songs, to see if that kind of music would move me, but again it was a bust. I see music so different from her (and others, I'm sure) because it's more a "friend" or companion for me. It's not about the emotions of the song, or even the words…it's just about the companionship. I always have something going in the house–the TV or music–because I don't particularly like silence. Sure, there are times when I will be in silence, but most of the time I like some kind of noise when I'm alone. I have tinnitus, and the way I chose to deal with that is that I keep noise on all the time to keep the tinnitus at bay. So television and music is just background noise…company, that is all. So finding the emotion she is looking for just won't work for me.
We talked a little about the issues I have with eating–thinking about it so much, and how I not only pre-think it, but then I think about it as I'm eating and after I'm eating–and how that was going. I asked her if I'd ever told her about my grandmother. My grandmother loved us all, and was a huge part of our lives. Being the only girl, I got a lot more of her attention than the boys did, which was not always a good thing. My grandmother had her own weight issues, as did pretty much every woman in my family and in my life. As I was really in the hardest time of my life, pre-adolescence and etc, she was learning how to eat healthier and exercise. She went to extremes (which was "normal" for lots of people during that time period) on a low-fat diet, trying to control her cholesterol and blood pressure and weight. She went to extremes working out as well. And she talked about everyone around her, family and friends and strangers. She talked about their weight and how it fluctuated, and she talked about their size and the food they put in their mouths. And I was always overweight, so she put her hooks into me and tried to "help" me. She took me with her to her aerobics classes, and told me I needed to lose weight and eat differently. This went on for years and years. I never lost weight because I snuck food and I ate the things I wanted to eat when she wasn't around. I hated dealing with her during those years, even though I loved her so much. I wanted to please her, but I hated that she hated how I looked and who I was. As a child, I had no idea that it was HER who had the issues and that she was projecting them onto me. At about fourteen, maybe a little younger, I was out with my grandmother and my mom. We were shopping for bathing suits for my grandmother because she was headed to Florida for the winter and while there she taught water aerobics to her elderly community every day. So she needed multiple bathing suits and she wore them out. So we went to Loehman's, which if you don't know, they were a discount store and their changing rooms were just a big open room where everyone could see everyone. We found her a couple of suits to try and went into the room to keep her company while she tried them on. After she bought stuff and we were back in the car, my grandmother immediately starting talking about some of the other women in the room. How heavy they were, how they didn't look good in what they were trying on and if they just lost weight they'd look so much better.
I got so mad. I was always the good kid, I never talked back and I clung to my mother all the time. I never stood up to anyone, I never gave my opinion because I didn't want to have a confrontation. Maybe I was younger than fourteen, maybe I was twelve or so, I'm not sure. But I was sitting in the back seat of the car and I said, "You need to stop!"
"Stop what, darling?" my grandmother asked.
I told her to stop talking about other people's weight. Stop talking about what they look like or what they should or shouldn't be wearing, or should or shouldn't be eating. Stop judging them. She had no idea what I was talking about. I told her she talks about everyone like that, whether she knows them or not. And I said to her, "What if you overheard someone else talking about ME like that? That I'm too fat to wear a bathing suit? That I'm too fat to be eating that bagel? That my hips are huge and my thighs must jiggle…"
I don't think she got it because I recall her saying, "But you just need to lose some weight and you'll be so pretty!"
My mother looked at me over the seat back–she was driving–and I think she felt appalled. But she said nothing. I told my grandmother that every time she said those things about other people, she might as well have been saying it about me. Then I fell back against the seat and clamped my mouth shut. It's possible my grandmother may have apologized and said she would try not to talk like that anymore, but I'm not sure if that's real or I made that up as an adult to make myself feel better. I only know that things didn't really change, as she continued to watch my food intake and my weight.
T asked me if I had ever told my younger self that it was not my issue but it was grandmother's issue. I didn't answer, but apparently I had a look on my face because T sort of smiled and said that it was clear I didn't believe what she was saying, that it would make a difference. I asked why she said that and she said that every time she talks about being kind to my younger self, I make a face. I told her I didn't understand how to do what she was suggesting because I AM an adult, and as an adult I understand what the issues were. And how was I supposed to talk to someone (my younger self) who didn't really exist anymore. And she tried to tell me that younger self still lives inside me and she's STUCK because I haven't gotten past those traumas of my youth. I said I didn't understand how to talk to "my younger self" in the manner she suggested. So she asked me to try to picture that day and picture all the details. Then picture myself as an adult sitting next to myself as a child. And then talk to younger self about how the things my grandmother was saying and doing were HER issues and not mine. That I'm a fine and creative child, sweet and compassionate, smart and worthy.
I could only tell myself that it was my grandmother's issue, not OUR issue. Then I cried, and I asked T if I could go home and write this instead of saying it out loud. She said "sure" and asked me to email it her before our next session. I think mostly because our time was up. I still haven't written it, but I will. I just don't know how it will work for me or how it will make a difference. But I always promise to try things…and if they work that's great. If not, I will try the next thing.
Anyone else talk to their "younger self" ? Does it help you?


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The Parish Council
The Parish Council came into being in 1894 when the Local Government Act 1894 introduced the current Parish Council system.
The Parish Council is a Statutory Body, with members elected every four years and is funded through the local Precept (Council Tax). The income and expenditure for the next financial year are calculated in the form of a draft budget. The net amount (the Precept) is then added to the Council Tax bill collected by Chichester District Council and paid to the Parish Council in two separate instalments. The Parish Council can apply for other funding such as grants and funding awards, but it does not receive funding direct from central Government as the County and District Councils do. There are currently nine members of the Council all of whom are volunteers.
The Parish Council is responsible for play equipment, grass cutting of parish owned land and public open space. In addition the Parish Council is Custodian Trustees of the Kirdford Recreation Ground and the Kirdford Village Hall, both of which are currently managed by Charitable Management Committees.
As the first tier of local government, the Parish Council can deliver a vast array of public services at a local level. Currently there is a three-tier system of local government within West Sussex :-
Kirdford Parish Council
Chichester District Council
South Downs National Park Authority
West Sussex County Council
The Parish Council has a large range of powers and therefore is actively engaged on behalf of its residents on a variety of different activities within the community.
What is a Parish Council?
Kirdford Parish Council is the first tier of local government for the Parish of Kirdford which includes Strood Green, Hawkhurst Court and the village of Kirdford.
What Does It Do?
The Council has statutory duties and powers to provide services for the Parish of Kirdford. Within these powers, the Council provide dog and litter bins, community facilities, and it owns and maintains many areas of public open space within the village on behalf of the community.
Who Does It Work With?
The Council works in partnership with:
Other tiers of Government including Chichester District Council, South Downs National Park Authority and West Sussex County Council.
Local community groups.
Leisure providers – Recreation Ground Committee and various sports clubs.
Local churches and youth organisations.
Third sector organisations, such as Action in Rural Sussex
Powered by InTouch CRM


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WSCC Connect
WSCC Connect
WSCC Connect is our e-Business service designed to make your WSCC experience easier!
WSCC Connect provides employers with the ability to access services that typically require contact with the WSCC. Rather than having to call, email, or book a meeting with us to accomplish certain tasks, you can access WSCC Connect and have quick turn-around service at your fingertips.
Employer's Report of Incident e-Service scheduled to release April 2020, is cancelled until further notice as we focus on providing existing services.
April 2020: Employer's Report of Incident moving to WSCC Connect
WSCC is pleased to announce that employers will soon be able to complete their Employer's Report of Incident online through WSCC Connect. To prepare for the change, employers should identify who is responsible for reporting and that will need to use WSCC Connect e-Services in their organization, such as supervisors and OHS personnel. If you are a large employer, we suggest you provide your Access Administrator(s) with a list of the personnel to whom you wish to give access. You can grant access to the service as early as March 20, 2020. Benefits to Employer's Report of Incident on WSCC Connect:
- You can search incidents and injuries you have submitted.
- You can report faster.
- You get a copy of the report emailed to you after you submit.
- You can upload other documentation, such as pictures, worker's reports, and incident reports.
- In future, there will be a report you can print that lists your incidents.
To help you prepare, check out the User Accounts, Frequently Asked Questions.
Our e-Services
- Register Your Business: Submit a request to the WSCC to register your company for coverage.
- Report Payroll: Submit and revise your annual payroll reports online. There are two options to submit; Fast File, aimed at single-industry employers to report in one sitting; and Advanced Payroll Reporting, which provides a full range of payroll e-Services and allows users to save information before completing and submitting their reports.
- Obtain a Clearance: Quickly generate your own clearance letters.
- View Assessment Rates: View your own current and historical assessment rates, or view the WSCC's overall rate guide.
- Make a Payment: Pay your employer assessment fees online, or set up a preauthorized payment.
- Statement: View your transactions and payment schedule.
- Report Unsafe Work: Report safety hazards or unsafe work practices to the WSCC.
- Permits: Apply for Mining Permits.
- Account Management: Update your employer contact and profile information.
- Employer's Report of Incident (April 2020): Report, revise, and submit online. The submitter receives an emailed copy of their report.
Access WSCC Connect today!


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In studying the differences and the similarities between the beliefs of the early members of what came to be known as the Church of the Nazarene and those of what was labeled as the Fundamentalist movement of that same time period, one may come to recognize that while both groups were in agreement on many issues, perhaps even more similar than dissimilar, there were a number of issues, as evidenced in the writings of the early Nazarenes, on which the two groups differed drastically. Among these issues are seen six in particular that stand out among all the others and perhaps have caused the greatest amount of contention between the two groups.
Dr. Shelby Corlett listed five of these six issues in his April 1935 article titled "Nazarenes and the Fundamentalists" in the Herald of Holiness magazine. The first five to be addressed here are in the following issues: The "spirit" of Fundamentalism, verbal inspiration versus plenary inspiration of the Bible, the issue of eternal security, the influence of radical Calvinistic Pre-millennial positions, and the allowance made for "sin in the flesh" versus entire sanctification.[1] These five are the list that Corlett provides in regard to the major areas in which the early Nazarenes and the Fundamentalists differed. A sixth element may be added to this list for consideration, that being the issue of women in ministry.
The Spirit of Fundamentalism
While the Church of the Nazarene is not traditionally a part of the Fundamentalist movement but rather the Holiness movement, it still came into contact with and was strongly influenced by the spirit of the time in which it was conceived where the broad scope of Evangelicalism leaned towards Fundamentalism and the defense of the faith. The Nazarene church held in common many of the beliefs of those within the Fundamentalist movement, however, the church also recognized in general that what had become the Fundamentalist movement was a reaction to the modernism that was prevalent at the time.
One may see how the Fundamentalist movement came to have some significant influence over the Church of the Nazarene by reading the early literature of the church, especially the Herald of Holiness magazine during the time in which B.F. Haynes served as general editor for the publication.[10] Starting in 1913 up until the early 1920s, a number of articles ran that seemed to be in line at least in part with Fundamentalism, especially in the defense of the inerrancy of the Scriptures and in the rejection of modernism.[11] However, Haynes himself constantly criticized other elements that came to be associated with Fundamentalism, such as their rejection of the second blessing and other Calvinistic tendencies.[12] However, by the 1920s, growing support for Fundamentalism is evident, as the magazine began publishing more frequently articles which tended to use "hypostatic" language in regard to the Bible and which also insisted on the scientific accuracy of the Bible while at the same time recognizing that the Bible was not a science book.[13] Between 1923 and 1928 both the Herald of Holiness and the Preacher's Magazine were constantly publishing articles with outright Fundamentalist messages.[14] J.B. Chapman had become the editor of both publications during this time and was a key contributor to this "Fundamentalist leavening" which began to appear.[15] He had been growing significantly in popularity within the Church, showing how the general church had begun to fall more into the Fundamentalist camp at this time, and was elected as a General Superintendent in 1928.[16]
So great was the alliance of the church with the Fundamentalist movement during this time period that at the 1928 General Superintendent Address to the Assembly, it was spoken:
Every man in this body is a fundamentalist… We believe the Bible and accept it as being the revealed Word of God, immutable, unchangeable, infallible and sufficient for every human need. A modernist would be very lonesome in this General Assembly… We stand for the Bible; we stand for the whole Bible, an immutable Bible.[17]
The church at large considered itself to be Fundamentalist, however, what was meant by this is debatable in that while the church at the time generally stood for the inerrancy of the Bible and the rejection of modernism, the church still differed from most Fundamentalists by holding to the Wesleyan belief in entire sanctification and standing against Calvinism.[18]
This Fundamentalist influence can further be seen in the change made in the wording of the Manual in the Article of Belief on Scripture. In 1928, the assembly voted without debate to add the word "inerrant" to the Article.[19] The Article now read:
We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures by which we understand the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation; so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.[20]
However, it appears to have been the influence of H. Orton Wiley which caused the words "plenary inspiration" of the Bible to be used instead of "verbal inspiration."[21] Wiley took over as editor of the Herald of Holiness upon Chapman's election as General Superintendent.[22] He held this position from 1928 to 1936, during which time no more articles were published which spoke against modernism and leaned towards what seemed to be an idolatry of Biblicism.[23]
It was in this context that H. Orton Wiley began to emerge as a key influencer in the church who desired to help keep the Fundamentalist influence on the church under control and to remind the church of its Wesleyan roots. Although A.M. Hills had already begun writing his own systematic theology for the Nazarene church at the suggestion of his students,[24] H. Orton Wiley was commissioned in 1919 to write his own systematic theology to be officially used in pastoral education across the denomination.[25] At the time, he was president of Northwest Nazarene College, while Hills was president at Pasadena.[26] The choosing of Wiley over someone like Hills shows how while many within the church saw themselves as Fundamentalists (even within the ranks of the Generals), there was still significant leadership that felt uneasy aligning themselves completely with them. While Hills was not completely in line with Fundamentalist thinking, especially in his belief in postmillennialism,[27] he was still apparently too much of a Fundamentalist to write the church's official theology.[28] [29] This is evidenced when he joined with Chapman in endorsing the Nazarene church's first real case against modernism in a book by Basil Miller, published in 1925 by Nazarene Publishing House, titled Cunningly Devised Fables: Modernism Exposed and Refuted.[30] With Wiley's Theology added to the course of study for ministers one can see an attempt by church leadership to bring the people back from Fundamentalism. Paul Bassett writes, "It remained to H. Orton Wiley both to offer a genuine Wesleyan alternative to Fundamentalism and modernism and to place the official theology of the Church of the Nazarene, if not the grass roots, back on truly orthodox turf."[31]
Verbal versus Plenary Inspiration of the Bible
Wiley went on to say that it was not just the Bible which had at times been deified throughout history, but also the Church and Reason. Wiley believed in the importance of all three, but held that at times people had used them to replace Christ himself. The modernists had deified Reason, while the Fundamentalists had deified the Bible.[34] [35] Wiley also wrote that the two warring positions on the inspiration of the Bible by the Modernists and Fundamentalists both made inadequate assumptions.[36] He believed there to be a middle ground between the two camps. The Scriptures came into being by the will of both God and man, not just by man's intuition as the modernists tended to believe, and not just by God's dictation as the Fundamentalists tended to believe.[37] Wiley firmly held to plenary inspiration. He wrote, "By plenary inspiration, we mean that the whole and every part is divinely inspired. This does not necessarily presuppose the mechanical theory of inspiration, as some contend, or any particular method, only that the results of that inspiration give us the Holy Scriptures as the final and authoritative rule of faith in the Church."[38] Many, however, within the church wished to see a greater alliance with the Fundamentalists. This was mainly in regard to the understanding of the Scriptures. On some other issues, such as the issue of entire sanctification, almost all early Nazarenes disagreed with the majority Fundamentalist stance which contradicted the idea of entire sanctification.
Issue of Eternal Security
Wiley states that their belief is in that of positional holiness where "The believer is holy in his 'standing' but not in his 'state.' Holiness is thus a matter of imputation instead of impartation."[48] Wiley says that the idea that someone may experience an actual cleansing from all sin goes against the principles that this group teaches. He writes, "Actual cleansing from all sin is rejected as being out of harmony with their general principles. The 'standing' is eternal, and […] logically issues in the so-called doctrine of 'eternal security.'"[49] In this way, one may see how the early Nazarenes stood in contrast to those within the Fundamentalist movement who tended towards Calvinistic understandings of salvation and who were in wide support of the Keswick Conferences because of their active stance against modernism. Nazarenes were different from Fundamentalists because Nazarenes were Wesleyan rather than Calvinist. They believed that one could be completely cleansed of all sin in this life, so that holiness was imparted rather imputed. If holiness is an impartation within the individual rather than eternally imputed position, then doctrine of eternal security has little bearing because eternal security rests solely on a positional relationship and does not adequately fit into a Wesleyan understanding of salvation or of holiness.
Even those within the Nazarene church who tended to lean towards Fundamentalism, did not fully embrace much of the Calvinism that was also associated with Fundamentalism. Bud Robinson is an example. Robinson spoke of his thoughts on the issue of eternal security, saying, "Beloved, don't you forget that when the eternal security man is telling you that nothing can separate you from God, that Old Bud said if your religion won't keep you out of sin in this world, it will not keep you out of hell in the world to come."[50] One can see how the issue of eternal security is linked to the disagreement among Nazarenes and Fundamentalists over whether one could be freed from sin in this life or not. The defining belief of the Nazarene Church was in entire sanctification. Those who held to belief in eternal security often allowed for people to continue living in sin while believing that God would still let them into heaven anyway simply because they had prayed a prayer of salvation. Robinson continues, "There is nothing can put you in heaven but holiness. And as far as I have been able to see, the eternal security man takes no stock in holiness. Ridicule and scorn are his complete stock. What a pity!"[51] This shows a consistency among Nazarenes in the belief that only those who had been made holy by the cleansing from sin by the work of God would be able to enter into heaven. Robinson's words also hearken back the issue of the general attitude and spirit of the Fundamentalist movement, which was an attitude of defense. Robinson recognizes here that those who have disagreed with the Nazarenes in this regard have done so defensively and by means of scorn and ridicule.
Radical Calvinistic Pre-millennial Positions
In 1919, the year he was commissioned to write the official theology of the Church, H. Orton Wiley asked Olive Winchester to serve at NNC as "professor of biblical literature, academic dean, and vice-president."[57] Matthew Price writes that "She rejected the fundamentalist notion of pre-millenialism"[58] and that she saw how faith and science could work together without reacting out of fear towards modernism.[59] In this move, Wiley showed how he was in line with the teachings of the earliest Nazarenes who also rejected pre-millennialism, but who also believed that women ought to be able to serve in positions of leadership. Wiley also showed in this act that he had no need to fear the science of modernism even if he did not agree every modernist position. Also in keeping with tradition, Winchester "held to the instantaneousness of entire sanctification."[60]
In regard the millennium, the Nazarene church never advocated for one position over another, but allowed for people to form their own opinions on such matters contended as minor debatable issues.[61] In fact, the Manual of the Church contained the following footnote in the article of faith on "The Second Coming of Christ" from 1915-1923:
We do not, however, regard the numerous theories that gather around this Bible Doctrine as essential to salvation, and so we concede full liberty of belief among the members of the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.[62]
The church had always considered itself neutral on this issue, but it was a postmillennial perspective that was the driving force behind the mission of the earliest Nazarenes. A dispensationalist and escapist attitude which the Fundamentalists later brought into the church was not at all present.[63] The entrance of pre-millennial dispensationalism was linked with the era between the world wars in which many people, especially in the Midwest, began to lose hope that Christ's kingdom could ever be established on earth without Christ first physically returning to reign.[64] People began to become more disillusioned with the world in general and with the establishment in particular, which led to a rise in suspicion against science and educational institutions.[65] The suspicion in regard to science and pre-millennial leanings was paired with the Fundamentalist tendency towards neo-Calvinism and verbal inerrancy of Scripture.[66] People believed that Christ's return was imminent and that it was foolish to work towards the establishment of the millennial kingdom until he returned.[67]
"Sin in the Flesh"
Wiley also quotes from Chapman who understands the distinction between purity and maturity which people tended to have difficulty understanding. Chapman says, "Purity may be found in the earliest moments after the soul finds pardon and peace with God. But maturity involves time and growth and trial and development."[69] While the purity received in entire sanctification is understood as instantaneously given, there is still growth overtime as one becomes more mature as a Christian.[70] The Church of the Nazarene as a whole refused to stand down on its belief in entire sanctification even in the light of the Fundamentalist leavening at the time. Even the Fundamentalist Nazarenes held to this belief. While some Fundamentalist Nazarenes misunderstood it and began preaching perfectionism,[71] many still held on to the belief of the church, such as Bud Robinson, who wrote, "To teach that a man could not sin if he wanted to is unscriptural and unreasonable, for we all know that if a person wants to sin, he can sin. But it is scriptural and reasonable to teach that a man can have so much of the grace of God in his heart that he has no desire to sin."[72] This perspective differed from the Fundamentalists who believed that one could only attain this kind of perfection upon death and entrance into heaven. This belief that one could never be truly holy in this life is probably the most important difference between the two groups and is key to understanding the other differences.
Women in Ministry
While women were always accepted into ministry early on in the church's history, a change took place over time where one is able to chart a significant decrease of women in ministry in the Nazarene Church. It has been argued that the reason for this decline was due to the influx of people from a more fundamentalist standpoint entering into the Nazarene church over time.[75] These people over time came to influence the church at least in part with their projections of a more literalist hermeneutic when it came to the Scriptures and what Paul had to say about women in the church.[76]
While the Fundamentalist leavening began to take its toll on the number of women entering into the ministry and the number of churches who accepted women as pastors, the denomination overall held strongly to the belief that women had the right to preach. Four times, between the years 1922 and 1943,[77] did individuals within the general assembly attempt to point out a conflict with the church's position and the position of Paul in the New Testament, and "[e]ach time, the official answer declared that the calling of the Spirit is not limited by gender or race and that the historical position of ordaining women is faithful to the gospel."[78] According to Stan Ingersol, the intentions of P.F. Bresee when he started the Church in Los Angeles were "that women's right to preach and pursue ordination was sufficiently safeguarded so long as apostolicity was the hallmark of the church's ministry."[79] Even J.B. Chapman, who at times strongly leaned toward Fundamentalism, always believed that women should be allowed the right to preach. He wrote, "The fact is that God calls men and women to preach the gospel, and when He does so call them, they should gladly obey Him and members of the church and of the ministry should encourage and help them in the fulfillment of their task."[80] This support for women in ministry was a very important difference between the early Nazarenes and the more mainline evangelical fundamentalist groups. Ingersol again writes, "The inclusion of women was not simply an add-on to traditional notions of Christian ministry but represented an altogether radically different doctrine of ministry held by the more progressive Holiness churches."[81]
[1] Dr. Shelby Corlett. "Nazarenes and the Fundamentalists," Herald of Holiness, (April 1935).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Paul Merritt Bassett. The Fundamentalist Leavening of the Holiness Movement, 1914-1940. The Church of the Nazarene: A Case Study. The International Church of the Nazarene Website. <http://www.nazarene.org>.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Paul Bassett writes:
"To be sure, Hills is outside the camp of the Fundamentalists, generally speaking, with respect to the millennium, for most of them were pre-millennialists and he was unabashedly post-millennial, and he admits that 'we no longer have an absolutely inerrant Bible.' But his mode of argument, 'proofs' of inspiration and authority, and theological method all mark him off as belonging among them."
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] H. Orton Wiley. Christian Theology. Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Missouri, 1940, ch. 6.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Wiley argues that it was the Church that had been elevated during the Roman Catholic era.
[36] Wiley., ch. 7.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Wiley., ch. 29.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Bud Robinson. Religion, Philosophy, and Fun. Beacon Hill Press, Kansas City, Missouri, 1942.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Dr. Mark Quanstrom. A Century of Holiness Theology. Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Missouri, 2004.
[53] Timothy L. Smith, Ph.D. Called Unto Holiness. The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years. Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Missouri, 1962.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Timothy L. Smith, Ph.D. Nazarenes And the Wesleyan Mission: Can We Learn from Our History? Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri, 1979.
[56] Smith. Called Unto Holiness. The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years.
[57] J. Matthew Price. We Teach Holiness: The Life and Work of H. Orton Wiley (1877-1961). Holiness Data Ministry, Digital Edition, Sept. 29, 2006.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Quanstrom.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Smith. Nazarenes And the Wesleyan Mission: Can We Learn from Our History?
[64] Smith. Called Unto Holiness. The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Smith. Nazarenes And the Wesleyan Mission: Can We Learn from Our History?
[67] Smith. Called Unto Holiness. The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years.
[68] Wiley., ch. 30.
[69] Wiley., ch. 29.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Smith. Called Unto Holiness. The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years.
[72] Robinson.
[73] Dr. Charles Perabeau. "Scholar Week Presentation: The Church of the Nazarene in the U.S.: Race, Class, and Gender and Aspirations Toward Respectability." (presented at Olivet Nazarene University, Bourbonnais, Illinois, April 19, 2012).
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid.
[77] Richard W. Houseal, Jr., B.A. "Women Clergy in the Church of the Nazarene: An Analysis of Change from 1908 to 1995. A Thesis in Sociology." (Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree master of arts Kansas City, Missouri, 1996.)
[78] Ibid.
[79] Stan Ingersol. "Your daughters shall prophesy." Holiness Today, (March 2000).
[80] Dr. Janine T. Metcalf. "From Rhetoric to Reality: Putting into Practice Our Century-Old Polity of Gender Partnership in Ministry." The International Church of the Nazarene Website. <http://www.nazarene.org>.
[81] Ingersol.


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Sunday, September 26, 2010
Take Each Day As It Comes
This is Moa. She is a bit of a free spirit I think. For the moment she lives in Tyresö. Moa works when she has to. At the moment that means doing some interior decoration at a friends office. Whenever she feels like it she will try something new. Moa is a future novelist. She has a few finished books in a drawer at home. A few months ago she sold her apartment. Since then she has been on a few road trips, both in Sweden and in Europe. The last trip took her to Cardiff via Denmark and Belgium. Before that she visited Öland and Hjo in Sweden and she also stayed a few days in Barcelona. Oh, and she told me that she wouldn't take off her sunglasses.
8 comments:
- Lowell said...
And the reason she wouldn't take off her sunglasses is that she wanted to reflect on that handsome young man taking her picture!
She's quite beautiful ... and interesting.
Think she'd be interested in some Guinness flip-flops? ;-)
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- Washington Cesar Takeuchi said...
A free soul than! It is a brave decision to live like that. But if this is the way that makes her happy, that is exactly the way she has to be.
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- BlossomFlowerGirl said...
A lovely portrait, She's very pretty and yes, she does look like a free spirit. She exudes happiness.
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- Sharon Creech said...
What a great shot--love the reflection in the glasses, the knowing but sweet smile of the girl. I hope she does become a novelist.
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
I love the colors in this photo, and the glasses!
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- Jack said...
Another of your famous portraits, and now a self-portrait, too! Very nice. (The girl and the photo.)
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- Leif Hagen said...
Fun how you are reflected in your glasses! She looks like a friendly, cheerful type!
- Sunday, September 26, 2010
- Bill said...
Just as well she didn't take off her sun glasses or you wouldn't have the reflections in them.
- Sunday, September 26, 2010


text:
When Vivian Oparah was 10 years old, she met actress Freema Agyeman at her church in Manor House in north London. Agyeman is best known for role on BBC's 'Doctor Who,' where she played Martha opposite David Tennant.
"I was just really excited that someone I knew in real life was on TV, and I wanted to be like her," Oparah tells us.
Years later, when Oparah saw an open casting call for a new sci-fi series on BBC America that cited Doctor Who, she knew she had to audition—though she'd never acted professionally before.
Recommended Fodor's Video
Class, a Doctor Who spin-off, whose last episode airs on May 27, was created by Patrick Ness and produced by Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin (executive producers behind the original Doctor Who series). The show follows four teenagers navigating the trials of adolescence while simultaneously fighting the supernatural. In it, Oparah plays Tanya, the youngest of the group but wise beyond her years, with a knack for physics that comes in handy throughout the show.
Though it was filmed in Wales, the series is set in London's Coal Hill School (fans of the original will knows its significance), and portrays life in Shoreditch in east London.
"I just loved how diverse it is; it's not trying to tick any boxes," says Oparah. "If it was set in Shoreditch and you had four white kids, I don't know what you're talking about because that's not the Shoreditch I know," she says. "The show makes sense and it's current; [it's] something that I believe in and think is truthful…minus all the aliens," she says, adding, "but who knows, to be honest."
Below, Oparah tells us about growing up in Tottenham (a district in London's Haringey borough in the north), where to find the cheapest drinks in London, and what it's like to see a Tardis in the middle of the road.
Everything that's good and bad about London, all in one place
"When I go back to Tottenham it looks really different but it still feels like home. You just have really interesting characters, interesting shops with the weirdest trinkets. It's a good sense of community … to me, Tottenham is everything that's good and bad about London all in one place [laughs]. It's so authentic. You'll find struggle a bit more, but struggle, in my opinion, births the right kind of people, and you get these amazing characters and loving people who are so about community. You can have a neighbor who's Turkish, a neighbor who's black, a neighbor who's Asian, but there's just such a communal spirit."
Tottenham regulars
"You have the old men who if I wanted to know if I looked good they would offer their advice, even if I wasn't asking for it. It's annoying but it's sort of part of the scenery. Then you have the kids, and people who can live there for years and years and years and you never learn their names, but they feel like family."
Tottenham's wide range of cuisine
"You can have a Caribbean shop next to a chicken and chips shop next to a Chinese shop and that's like a win-win-win. I love food [laughs] so having that available was great. [This shaped] me as a kid, seeing these people around and seeing what they had to offer. In my head I put everyone on equal footing. You see everyone's work and what they bring to the community."
The best places to eat and drink in London
"Tally-ho pub in North Finchley. It's a Wetherspoons; the drinks are dirt cheap, which is perfect if you're a young person, or if you're any age. Who doesn't like cheap drinks? Simmons in Mornington Crescent is another place you can get great cheap drinks. In general there's always a spot to chill and be able to sit and see nice stuff. Boxpark [in Shoreditch], that's a good place to eat, especially if you're veggie or vegan."
Skip the London Eye, look for the peacocks
"[At Holland Park] they have peacocks, and I was literally astonished because they're so beautiful. This is their park; it's like you're visiting their house. There's [also] a really beautiful waterfall."
A Tardis in the road
"We went to Wales University to film the school [scenes], and the Tardis was plopped there for one episode. People's reactions to seeing a Tardis, even in Wales, which is like the home of Doctor Who…[their] pure awe and wonderment was hilarious.
On playing Tanya
"She's small in her character description; I'm actually tall—well I'd like to think I am [laughs]— small, brainy; she hangs around with people older than her, but the only thing that separates her from them is her age, because she's quite smart intellectually. When I was 14 a lot of my friends were already 16 or 17, and I think I felt like I was quite intellectually advanced; I felt like I was on their level in every way, but I quickly learned that I wasn't. Having lived through it and seeing myself now and realizing how immature I actually was, it's nice to sort of bring the two sides of that coin to a character."
If the Tardis was real…
"[I'd] definitely travel to the future … I just want to know what's going to happen to my precious London [laughs]."
Class airs Saturdays at 10/9c on BBC America.
Explore London with Fodor's guide.


text:
Ruth Lake Provincial Park northeast of 100 Mile House is a recreational day-use area that provides great outdoor opportunities for visitors and residents in the South Cariboo region. The park protects a unique landscape that illustrates the impressive geology of the last ice age, including large boulders, reminders of the great ice sheets of 10,000 years ago.
The 30-hectare park is found within the drier portion of the sub-boreal spruce biogeoclimatic zone of the Cariboo Plateau, and features moderate to steep slopes above Ruth Lake that are blanketed with undeveloped old growth Douglas-fir dispersed among forests of pine and spruce trees.
The forest surrounding Ruth Lake is a diverse and important habitat for wildlife such as black bear, mule deer, hawks, songbirds and waterfowl.
This area was home to the Shuswap First Nations, and supported their semi-nomadic lifestyle of sustenance hunting, fishing and food gathering.
Ruth Lake is very popular with local residents for swimming, canoeing, kayaking and power boating. A grassy area overlooks a small beach with a swim dock, and a swimming area is roped off using buoys. Note that there are no lifeguards on duty at Ruth Lake.
Ruth Lake is a favourite spot for fishing for rainbow trout, and a single rough boat launch ramp provides access to the Lake. Facilities include pit toilets, but there are no camping facilities provided at the park.
Ruth Lake Provincial Park is located 30km northeast of 100 Mile House. Turn off Highway 97 just north of 100 Mile House, drive towards Forest Grove. Continue straight on, following the signs to the park.
Nearby Regions & Towns
Park Notices


text:
Asset pledgeability and endogenously leveraged bubbles
Article [Version publiée]
Éditeur(s)Université de Montréal. Département de sciences économiques.
We develop a simple model of defaultable debt and rational bubbles in the price of an asset, which can be pledged as collateral in a competitive credit pool. When the asset pledgeability is low, the down payment is high, and bubble investment is unleveraged, as in a standard rational bubble model. When the pledgeability is high, the down payment is low, making it easier for leveraged borrowers to invest in the bubbly asset. As loans are packaged together into a competitive pool, the pricing of individual default risk may facilitate risk-taking. In equilibrium, credit-constrained borrowers may optimally choose a risky leveraged investment strategy – borrow to invest in the bubbly asset and default if the bubble bursts. The model predicts joint boom-bust cycles in asset prices and securitized credit.