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Tomorrow is built today. Technology, Telecommunications Forecasting, Consulting < TFI. MIT Media Lab: Things That Think Consortium. Welcome to Principia Cybernetica Web. Santa Fe Institute. The Aspen Institute.
MIT Media Lab. International futures programme. In 2006, the OECD launched the OECD Space Forum in co-operation with the space community.
The Forum aims to assist governments, space-related agencies and the private sector to better identify the statistical contours of the growing space sector worldwide, while investigating the space infrastructure's economic significance and potential impacts for the larger economy. Read more This project – involving telecoms, land transport, water and electricity – explores the many factors shaping demand for infrastructures worldwide over the coming decades, and points to the mounting difficulties, particularly in OECD countries, of financing growing infrastructure needs from public sector sources.
Read more. Institute of Nanotechnology. Futuribles. GBN Global Business Network. The World Economic Forum. Nanotechnology - Foresight Institute. Pour penser et agir autrement : La prospective.
THE CLUB OF ROME (www.clubofrome.org) Home. Cité des Sciences. Page d'accueil du CIRET.


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UNA congratulates Tyler Shandro on his appointment as Health Minister
United Nurses of Alberta congratulates Premier Jason Kenney and all members of his cabinet and looks forward to working with new Minister of Health Tyler Shandro to enhance and protect Alberta's public health care system.
"We look forward to meeting with Minister Shandro to ensure the expertise and education of Registered Nurses across Alberta is drawn upon to improve the quality of health care," said UNA President Heather Smith.
Shandro was elected as MLA for Calgary-Acadia on April 16, 2019 and was sworn in as Minister of Health today.
"Front-line nurses have enormous knowledge that can be used to protect and enhance the treatment of Albertans in the public health care system," Smith said. "We look forward to sharing that knowledge with Minister Shandro."
UNA also congratulates Jason Copping, who was named Minister of Labour and Immigration.
"This ministry is responsible for the protection of working people in Alberta and our constitutionally protected system of labour relations, and we look forward to his having the opportunity to hear our views on these important issues," Smith said.
UNA continues to advocate vigorously on issues that have a direct impact on patient care and the nursing profession and looks forward to working with the new government to improve the public health care system that Albertans depend upon every day.

subset: commoncrawl


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6am NRR:
I have a confession to make. I cheated on today's ride, and it was more than just the obvious big wheels. You see, and I'm not super proud of this, I had some caffeine prior to the 6am roll out. It doesn't excuse the blatant offence, but this morning is my last session for a couple of days, and I wanted it to be able to push hard.
Through very little of my own design, hard is what I got. Today was just plain old on from the start, and I loved it. I followed a standard routine, rolling a few turns on the way down, a couple on the way back, then a long one out of Black Rock. The difference was, they were all just a little bit faster than normal.
Sadly the sprint was baulked by lights, but I was curious how I'd go from 5-6 riders back, as I felt good and was setting myself to run at Tom Leaper's wheel when we had to abort.
Strava link.
D: 50.1km
A: 217m
D: 5.3km
PMPW: 93kg


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Senior Research Fellow
Willingness to take PhD students: Yes
Dr. Junichi Yamagishi's research interests are in speech information processing, where he has mainly concentrated on statistical speech synthesis. Yamagishi's research ideas bridge the gaps between speech processing and other research fields, including machine learning, linguistics and speech production. Yamagishi ultimately aims to place speech synthesis on a more scientific basis and create commercially and socially useful speech technologies.
|PhD, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Thesis title: "Average-voice speech synthesis"
Awarded Japan Tejima PhD Thesis Award
MEng, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Information processing
BEng, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Computer science
Dr. Junichi Yamagishi received MEng in Information Processing from Tokyo Institute of Technology. His PhD, also received from Tokyo Institute of Technology, was awarded Japan Tejima PhD Thesis Award, given to the best PhD thesis each year at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He was appointed Research Fellow for the Japan Society for Promotion of Science between 2004 and 2007. Then he became a Research Fellow for the School of Informatics University of Edinburgh in 2007 until 2013. Currently, he is an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He is also Associate Professor at the Digital Content and Media Science Research Division at the National Institute of Informatics, Japan, as well as Visiting Associate Professor at the Nagoya Institute of technology, Japan.
Dr. Yamagishi has been principal investigator for various high profile projects: EMC donation funded "Voice reconstruction"; The Royal Society of Edinburgh, RSE-NSFC (China) joint funded "Unified articulatory-acoustic modelling for flexible and controllable speech synthesis"; MRC Confidence in Concept Edinburgh Partners Devices and Diagnostic awards "Delivering personalised voices for patients with MND".
He is currently principal investigator for: EPSRC CAF funded "Deep architectures for statistical speech synthesis"; CREST and JST funded "User-generated dialogue systems: uDialogue", Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia programme awards "SIWIS: Spoken Interaction with Interpretation in Switzerland"; Sparkling Science BMWF (Austria) awarded "Speech synthesis for the blind, Apraschsunthese von Auditiven Lehrbüchern für Blinde SchülerInnen (SALB)"
Through these projects:
· Dr. Yamagishi developed a new algorithm enabling large number of different synthetic voices to be easily constructed using small amounts of speech data, resulting in HTS, an open source toolkit for statistical speech synthesis. HTS is used worldwide by both academic and commercial organisations such as Microsoft, Nuance, Toshipa, Pentax and Google (Android speech synthesizer is based on HTS toolkit)
· Dr. Yamagishi's synthesised speech was found to be as intelligible as human speech in the Blizzard challenge; the first time synthesised speech achieved this landmark result.
· Dr. Yamagishi's adaptive speech synthesis has been used to create dialectical and child speech using very small amounts of data. It has been successfully applied to clinical voice banking and personalised voice reconstruction for patients who have lost or are losing their voices due to conditions such as motor neurone disease or Parkinson's disease.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Project: Research
Project: Research
Project: Research


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Qualia Production Presents: "The Seven Seals of Security" (and Other Communications from QRI Sweden)
By Maggie Wassinge and Anders Amelin (now QRI Sweden and HR helpers; see previous letters)
Letter III: Donation Announcement
Hi everyone!
It's Anders and Maggie in Stockholm, Sweden, here. Volunteers in human resource coordination for the QRI.
We would like to hereby announce our commitment to donate fifty thousand dollars to the Qualia Research Institute for research related to the mathematical modeling of phenomenological valence.
We are pretty much just your ordinary Swedish transhumanist couple. With a passion for finding out from first principles how things work. We whole-heartedly agree with Elon Musk that at the end of the day, excellence is the only passing grade. Over the last couple of years we have arrived at the solid conclusion that the biggest bonanza in effective altruism could only be realized by first of all solving valence. Symbolically, in comedy form, this is like first spending the necessary computational resources to arrive at the conciseness of 42 as "the answer", before it can be determined what the right questions must then be. In our book it is with no doubt the Qualia Research Institute which corresponds to "Deep Thought" in what Elon Musk has called "the best philosophy book ever": The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Seriously here, it is advisable to balance this with a bit of David Pearce also, but indeed we do believe an encouraging "Don't Panic" is in fact compatible with the laws of nature in this universe. Immense reward is there for those who roll up their sleeves and start working systematically from first principles.
But again, excellence is the only passing grade. The universe is no picnic. It is a field of seemingly infinite potentialities, all of which are open to exploration and exploitation. It is still unknown what the proto-states of sentience are intrinsically like, but it is clear that biological evolution works as an optimization engine for valence polarization. A "passing grade" for a long-term sustainable and prospering technological civilization must involve a universally global first-principles solution to the horrific downside of this: suffering. That solution must be combined with optimal development of the state space of positive valence and intelligence. It seems plausible that experienced negative valence is a computationally economic way for evolution to drive behavior when the implementation is in biochemistry. However, information processing can also be done non-consciously, and it stands to reason that all the informational saliency achieved via negative valence experience can instead be had via non-conscious processes which would be available to future suitably modified embodiments of intelligence.
The QRI is the only real player in this game so far, as our civilization takes its first baby steps towards maturity. In the domain of effective altruism, the Qualia Research Institute today corresponds to what bitcoin was when first launched. The difference is that the QRI doesn't just promise to be a novel medium of exchange, but a novel competence about the first principles of well-being!
During the couple of years it took for us to come to the above conclusions, we set aside every penny we could spare. That became the fifty thousand we are now committing to the QRI. If enough others with the same visions were to do the same thing, soon enough it could begin adding up to real money. Money which at this foundational stage stands at quite a favorable exchange rate with respect to the ultimate currency of the universe: positive emotional valence.
Infinite bliss to everyone from a couple of Scandinavian old-timers!
Letter IV: On Psychonautics
Psychedelic trippers put effort into trying to interpret what it all means ontologically. Plant spirits may be at work, or one taps into the collective unconscious or is simulated by some alien superintelligence.
The QRI could perhaps guide interested psychonauts in the direction of writing more scientifically productive reports.
A scientifically minded tripper needs to start with the realization that human beings are perfect psychonauts because our brains have an enormous excess capacity over what is minimally required to perform any one of the tasks that we do in everyday waking life. The highly unusual aspect of human brains is that they can produce general intelligence. This is rare in nature but when you have it, you assume it to be the normal state of affairs.
Trippers are often in disbelief over the ability of human brains to produce the fantastic content of psychedelic experiences. As if there is suddenly a superpower there which one never uses when sober. How can that be? It must be something supernatural going on, right? Actually, no. Not that we should rule out the "supernatural" a priori but it is not necessary.
The human mind uses a superpower all the time. One which is hidden in plain view, we might say. It is the superpower of selecting from a huge range of possibilities for what the mind could be doing, and homing in on exactly the one choice in every moment that is most appropriate right then and there. When those tight constraints are relaxed the human brain becomes a system which can explore far and wide in qualia state-space.
Intelligence is a phenomenon which uses multiple optimization points to converge on some invariance. At the theoretical efficiency maximum this takes surprisingly (to us) little raw processing power. A jumping spider does not display less strategic and tactical intelligence than a human does when hunting. The spider's neural network is very much smaller than the human's but the evolutionary fitness search available for evolving small, numerous and quickly reproducing creatures is much larger than for animals like us. For us it is not so much a question of evolution having optimized what every cell does, but one of having added more and more cells to increase overall performance.
The spider's brain probably contains far less sub-optimal "spaghetti code" than the human's. It is possible that the spider has access to exquisitely fine-tuned qualia for the crucial task of sneaking up on big, highly dangerous prey and bringing it down without botching the job. On the other hand, there might not be much opportunity for spiders to evolve general intelligence since they have already done away with everything that is "useless" for their sober everyday lives.
A human brain is a mass of excitation-inhibition "spaghetti" which defies belief. An almost ultimate jack of all trades but master of none which cannot quite produce the hunting skills of the spider but can instead do a billion other things that the spider could not even in principle learn how to do.
It is the billion other things that we could do but don't, which is the human superpower, not the few things that we actually do on a sober basis. This is a power which can be harnessed for psychonautics. You've got an inner-space warp drive in your head. Aptly named. 🖖
Letter V: Exciting Research Leads
Here are some suggestions for titles of essays and research papers the QRI could write if we had the resources.
- "Alloy, anneal, quench and temper: Forging a blade to cut mind at the joints"
- "Play me like a violin: A compressibility analysis of neuro-acoustic patterns captured during person to person interaction"
- "Leadership and consonance: Aggregate neuro-acoustic compressibility as a proxy for computational efficiency of human group intelligence"
- "Neural annealing through laughter: Neuro-acoustics of humor as a factor for healthy mental adjustment"
- "The tree of music: An annealable branching tuning-fork model for nervous systems"
- "Same but different: Suggesting a qualia analogue for the comparative planetology of Earth and Titan"
- "Music of life: Consonance, dissonance, noise and symmetry as explanatory elements for evolution from single cells to human minds"
- "Compartments of harmony bounded by dissonance: A neuro-acoustic model of domain specificity in cognition"
The Seven Seals of Security or Safety Through Uncertainty – Transhumanist Satire
Letter VI: Earth as an Engine of Qualia Diversity
Handwaving Johnson & Gómez-Emilsson's law about the surprisingly large size of qualia state space:
Presume that consciousness and matter are interconnected information structures. Can any useful parallels be drawn from the matter domain of outer space to the consciousness domain of inner space? Consider that planets, as a group, are subject to variation and (anthropic) selection. An interconnection point is provided by observation selection: Certain planetary properties far from the universe median are going to be found by intelligent conscious observers for their own planet of origin. A small subset of conscious observers are the ones who, like humans, have general intelligence and broad curiosity. Those observers are the few who observe more and more aspects of their own planet as well as adjacent space and the state space of matter at large, and ultimately perhaps also of consciousness at large. The evolutionary reproductive selection of such observers is not the default condition of all life but rather it is conditional upon even more unusual properties of their planet of origin than for the average life-bearing planet.
Conclusion: Earth is likely to be a highly unusual planet, and human consciousness is likely to be a highly unusual seat of experience. They are causally linked. A structural property they share could be a high level of diversity but never reaching cosmically global extremes on any single parameter. A Jill of all trades planet is married to a Jack of all trades mind.
While fairly good at impressively many trades, Jack and Jill are master and mistress of none. For a tentative and very loose analogy which may be better than nothing, let's say planet Earth is like the human mind. The other planets in the Solar System are like altered human minds and some animal minds. Some basic properties like gravity, roundness and rotation are common to all the planets. Corresponding to suggested basic features of biologically evolved sentience, such as valence and some sensory modalities.
Then we follow Slartibartfast to the fjords of Norway. Here we see how Earth differs in diversity compared with the other "animals". The planet's surface is an energetic 3-phase regime. Solid crust, liquid water and solid water under highly dynamic conditions. Not widely separated like on Europa but forming extended areas of contact where unusual complexity emerges. It's worth an award, really. (No, not Belgium…).
Human cognition is like Earth with its' coasts and mountain ranges. A "just right" quantity and proportionality of ingredients is what allowed self-organization of Earth's environmental complexity and its' endurance over time via the mechanism of prolonged core solidification and plate tectonics. An unusual state of affairs in nature. It's not unexpected in principle, only rare in actual existence. The same may go for evolution of the general cognition accessible to human minds.
A type of mind which is generally competent over multiple domains of agency cannot function as such if not many crucial parameters in its' architecture fall within a tight range of "just right and not too much nor too little". Or, in Swedish, "lagom". If you loosen that constraint, such as by ingesting 5 grams of mushrooms blindfolded, your mind will clearly no longer function on your job or even in your body. But in exchange for giving up on that functionality as agent, you can max out on stuff like… well, it's beyond words.
General intelligence is not compatible with an easy achievement of extreme states of consciousness, though as a less frequently added mental ingredient for a group intelligence (like human hunter-gatherers) extreme states can be hypothesized to enhance abilities of that group intelligence.
But what does the current human "master of none" in qualia rendering imply for the future of consciousness, and what about cosmic matter beyond the neighboring planets?
Beyond the Solar System we find many types of stars, black holes, dark matter and various ultra-thin, ultra-dense, ultra-cold, or ultra-hot configurations of matter in the wider domain of spacetime. Nature usually has not developed nonliving matter into configurations with even remotely as high a complexity as for living matter, simply because of no evolutionary selection pressures. Some nonbiological matter objects could be strong qualia generators just by chance, though. The Sun comes speculatively and punlessly to mind. Doing an IIT and a CDNS analysis on its' surface magnetized plasma wave patterns may not be entirely far-fetched. But the big promise for expanding the diversity of actualized sentience comes through engineering. Jack and Jill is the couple who can pull that off, and their offspring can then grow up in that fabulous new landscape of experience. For they can become masters and mistresses. Dominatrices, even. The reason being that while the parents are tightly constrained experientially, the kids need not be.
For an efficiently organized advanced technological civilization, the constraints of being a highly general and resilient intelligence can be placed high up on the group level. Individual seats of experience with the sizes of today's human or animal brains, say, can then be allowed to render experiential states more specialized to feel meaningful, enjoyable and worthwhile. (A dystopian version could instead generate unimaginable suffering, of course. Need to watch out…).
Earth is by far the most diverse planet in the Solar System, but it does not have the deepest ocean, the tallest mountain, the highest gravity, the hottest days, the most explosive volcanoes or the most intense thunderstorms. Human minds who have only experienced their evolved biologically functional mental states have not reached the consciousness state space equivalents of the extreme environments on the other planets. They have never snowboarded down the tellurobismutite condensate slopes on Maxwell Montes or been ejected on a ballistic trajectory by a sulfur dioxide plume from Tvashtar Patera. These things may be comparable to being a bat or taking psilocybin. As different from sober human experience as they are, they still merely hint at the range of possible experiences in the qualia state space opening up beyond. If all goes well, there will be psychonauts of the future who are children of Earth and able to engineer any form of matter and energy into conscious brain architectures. They would become what Max Tegmark has called "Life 3.0".
Either that or, in a hopefully not terribly more likely scenario portrayed by imagined future historians, humanity stayed obsessed with the circulation of money to the detriment of all else.
"This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 🌎


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About Monthly Initial
Everyone loves a personalized gift because it is something that has been made just for them and The Monthly Initial offers you a chance to have handmade gifts and home decor shipped directly to your door each month. Upon signing up for one of our subscription plans you will receive a customer styling questionnaire so that we can learn all about your style of personalization. Do you like to have your monogram on everything you own? We've got you covered with monogram mugs, totes, and wall hangings! Are you a little more subtle and only like your first initial? Not a problem, by hand making each item you can be assured they look great with a single initial or a traditional monogram. Are you are picky as we are and like your personal items to have your first initial and your household decor to have your surname initial (oh, and your clothing to have your monogram)!? We hear you and that is EXACTLY why The Monthly Initial was founded. No other subscription service offers you handmade items that are genuinely personalized to fit your style and sense of decor. Not only will we get to know what style of monogram you prefer but also your likes and dislikes, favorite colors, interests, and hobbies so that each box exemplifies you! We are all about celebrating who you are as an individual! And the longer you stay with The Monthly Initial the more personalized your boxes will become- imagine a box that knows you so well that we celebrate your life events with you. We can't wait to be your initial subscription choice for all things personalized! Order one for yourself and one for that friend who has everything. Let's face it we all have one.
Monthly Initial Review
I think this is the cutest idea ever! A Monogram Subscription Box is brilliant and the way they provide you with some precut monograms to place where you want is way fun! I'm already scheming the different places I want to put mine ???? So watch my Instagram for their reveals.
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Property tax is levied on each property owner. The basic control A to be paid for agricultural and forestry holdings and land, property tax B for undeveloped and developed land.
The tax office performs the evaluation of real estate and created Einheitswert- and measuring communication. If the base value is multiplied by the multiplier, the result of the property tax amount. Tax notices are valid until the next change, so for several years.
For tax purposes, ownership at the beginning of the calendar year shall prevail. A change of ownership during the year affects tax until the next 01.01. out. This means that the seller has to pay the property tax for the calendar year. Regardless may be offset by private law with the purchaser according to the agreement in the purchase agreement, the prorated property tax.
The property tax is to 15:02., 15.05., 15:08. and 15:11. due respectively to a quarter. On request, the property tax can to 01.07. be paid in an annual amount. The application must no later than 15:11. last year be made.
Contact person /:
financial management
Mrs Kellermann
phone: 036841/34720
fax: 036841/34730
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Barcelona goalkeeper Jasper Cillessen has emerged as one of Manchester United's primary targets if David de Gea leaves the club this summer.
The Spaniard has just one year to run on his contract, and he is yet to agree on fresh terms amid concerns over his wage demands. As it stands, he could leave the club for free next summer, with Paris Saint-Germain keen on signing him.
Speaking on The Transfer Window Podcast, journalist Duncan Castles revealed that United are not prepared to match de Gea's demands, and they have now began looking elsewhere.
He said: "Problems with renewing his contract have got to a stage where Ed Woodward has informed the player that he will not meet the financial terms he's asking for to become the best paid player at the club, on the same level as Alexis Sanchez.
"What is definitely happening now is that Manchester United are looking for alternatives. They have started to look at the market and ask clubs for pricing on goalkeepers and to talk to the agents of those goalkeepers to see their interest in coming to Manchester United and what they would want in salary terms.
"One of the goalkeepers who is on that list of potential replacements is Jasper Cillessen, who is the second-choice goalkeeper at Barcelona. He transferred there from Ajax several years ago, at that point was regarded as one of the top young goalkeepers in European football, but has never fully managed to establish himself as first choice in Barcelona.
"He has a €60m release clause and two years left on his deal, but it's an indication of his status at Barcelona that Barca are asking for a €25m guaranteed payment, with performance-related bonuses on top."
Andy Mitten, editor of United fanzine United We Stand, told Sky Sports' Transfer Talk podcast that agents' fees are also proving to be problematic in keeping hold of de Gea.
He said: "The situation with David de Gea is that United have offered him a contract which would make him the best paid goalkeeper in the world and that is not enough. The agents' fees are alarming.
"I don't think United should be held to ransom just because they have this wealth. They are already overpaying for under-performing players. De Gea is not an under-performing player, he has been the player of the year for four of the last six years, but there are levels and he has been offered a deal to become the best paid goalkeeper in the world and it's not enough.
"I don't think United should just succumb to every agent's demands just because the fans are saying 'pay him whatever'. You can't just do that."


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Project Description
Old Hotel Learns New Marketing Tricks
The Henry Norman Hotel was a little hotel with enormous potential. Despite having great reviews, the majority of their bookings came from OTAs. This dependency on the OTAs not only hurt their bottom line but also kept them in the dark about their guest.
The Henry Norman was working with an agency that specialized in hotel marketing. They were so small that they felt lost in the sea of other small hotels, in the firm's client base. All their Ad campaigns were generic, and they did not have a clear understanding of what was working.
Within first few months of working with Think Work Media, the Henry Norman observed a steady rise in direct bookings with 76% increase in direct website bookings revenue. Thanks to our advanced analytics they were also able to see and understand the customer journey before a booking occurred. Average return on ads spend was $28. Email list for the hotel grew almost 200% within just 6 month of starting first campaign.
Campaign Collaterals


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Monument Toyota Constantia | New Toyota
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03 Dec 2019
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Press Release
Toyota South Africa
Toyota South Africa
Toyota South Africa Motors (TSAM) is on course to claim four decades of industry sales leadership by the end of 2019. While this will be a remarkable feat for TSAM, both overall industry and TSAM sales recorded modest totals in the penultimate month of this year. TSAM continued its admirable sales run, with 9 324 units finding new homes during November – representing 20.8% of the total industry sales of 44 738 reported by the National Association of Automotive Manufacturers of South Africa (NAAMSA).
Year to date, TSAM has sold no less than 119 136 units – translating into a 24.1% market share – out of the industry total of 493 860. Offering a full range of exciting models and spearheaded by the legendary Hilux, Toyota is on the cusp of claiming 40 years of uninterrupted market leadership end of 2019.
According to Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Calvyn Hamman: "The decline in the passenger segment shows a level of caution exhibited by the wider car-buying public and this can be directly attributed to the ailing economy. However, we would like to thank our loyal customers across Southern Africa and our dealer network for their support – not just in 2019 – but over the last four decades."
NAAMSA commented that aggregate domestic vehicle sales of 44 738 units reflected a decline of 2 740 units or 5.8% down from the 47 478 vehicles sold in November last year. While domestic sales of new light commercial vehicles (bakkies and minibuses) at 10 679 units during November reflects a decline of 3 038 units or a fall of 22.1% compared to 2018, Toyota recorded a remarkable total of 4 601 units which translates into a market share of 43.1%.
Top performers from the Toyota stable included the Hilux (2 588), Hiace (1 549) and Etios (858). On the truck front, Hino sold a total of 223 new trucks in November. The 300-Series recorded 122 sales (18.6% of the Medium Commercial V share) while the 500-Series ended the month with 74 sales (16.2% HCV share).
"While these figures may not be confidence-inspiring, the market remains challenging for both customers and manufacturers alike. Even so, such challenges inspire our sales team and our dealers to focus on the one thing that will definitely make a difference – delivering the best possible experience to every customer," says Hamman.
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Ensuring food becomes a vital part of the experience
Events caterers are using the Food for Life Served Here standards as a framework for better health and sustainability and as a means of showing their clients and customers that they really care about the food they serve. The independently inspected accreditation is a nationally recognised framework to bench-mark caterers and work out improvements, allowing for incremental changes, serving more fresh, honest and local food, working in partnership with ourselves, the UK's leading charity working on food and farming issues.
- Linking sustainability and food in a pioneering and meaningful way proving a commitment to ethical consumerism.
- Reducing the overall environmental impact of your company by reducing impact of the food served on your plate
- Championing local food producers and contributing to your local economy
- See a social return on investment of over £3 for every £1 spent, mostly in the form of increased jobs and opportunities for local food producers
- Increase food sales by accrediting food provision
- Showcase more appetising, freshly prepared meals
- Keep control of cost: Many caterers report that improving quality doesn't necessarily increase costs. Making more food from scratch and buying from the Food for Life Served Here Supplier Scheme members can actually save money
- Exceeding industry norms by distinguishing your organisation from other caterers
- Connects organisational values to a clients personal values


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'The Long Dumb Road' Trailer: Jason Mantzoukas and Tony Revolori Hit the Road, Probably Learn Lessons
Posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 by Ethan Anderton
When it comes to indie movies, road trips are a dime a dozen, featuring characters who just need to get out on the road to learn the life lessons that will set them on the right path. This year, one of those movies is The Long Dumb Road starring Jason Mantzoukas and Tony Revolori, bringing a little diversity to the proceedings, but seemingly staying comfortably in the confines of generic coming of age comedy. You'll see what I mean in The Long Dumb Road trailer below. Read More »


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Run a Deal on Coupaw
Please fill out the below form if you're interested in featuring your product, company or service on our Coupaw deal platform.
Coupaw provides deals on the latest and greatest pet products & services across North America. If you're interested in being part of our program please submit your information below and an account representative will contact you shortly. Thank you.


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The UC College of Medicine, founded in 1819 by medical pioneer Daniel Drake, MD, is one of the oldest medical schools in the nation.
From graduate degrees to continuing education, the college offers a broad spectrum of educational opportunities.
The UC College of Medicine is continuing its upward path in cutting-edge research to enhance discovery sciences and facilitate translation of these discoveries to improve health and clinical care while recruiting new faculty. The new undergraduate program fosters scientific curiosity and investigation for our students. We are creating an environment of advanced clinical care that surpasses any in the region.
The College of Medicine features 26 academic departments, offering clinical, education and research opportunities.
The UC Cancer Center focuses on disease-based centers of excellence to offer a multidisciplinary approach to cancer care, education and research.
The UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute provides advanced evidence-based treatment and active research of complex neurological conditions.
The UC Heart, Lung and Vascular Institute builds upon its nationally known cardiovascular diseases discoveries to make significant contributions to research, education and patient care.
The Center for Integrative Health and Wellness promotes the value of treating the whole person and works to provide evidence-based wellness initiatives across the Academic Health Center and into the community through education, research and clinical care.
Hoxworth Blood Center was founded in 1938 and serves over 30 hospitals and medical facilities in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Hoxworth Blood Center also is a leader in the coordination of research projects developed for the advancement of transfusion medicine, including clinical trials for transfusion medicine-related products.
The College of Medicine has identified four institutes in which we have outstanding quality, a track record of success, opportunities for funding and ability to advance translational research and deliver high-quality personalized care.
The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine is known for its strong educational programs. From medical degrees to summer research programs, the College of Medicine offers some of the most innovative and captivating science and research opportunities in the nation.
Today is
Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020
The Geriatric Psychiatry Fellow rotates on the inpatient and outpatient mental health services at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC) and the Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC). Additional experiences are provided at the Cincinnati VAMC Long Term Care Facility. Finally, the Geriatric Psychiatry Fellow is involved in a variety of specialty clinic settings, ensuring an adequate exposure to the diverse clinical problems of the elderly.
Each Fellow is required to complete a scholarly project by the end of the academic year. Fellows are encouraged to generate a work product that is suitable for publication.Past fellowship projects have also included developing oral and poster presentations for regional/national meetings.
The official textbook for the Geriatric Psychiatry Fellowship is "The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Geriatric Psychiatry, 5th Edition".
Structured written feedback on rotations
360 degree feedback sessions
Weekly supervision with the Program Director


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LED Jack-o-Lantern Pattern and Kit
This jack-o-lantern pumpkin design has creepy glowing eyes that light up with the flick of a switch thanks to the addition of LEDs! You can get the pattern which includes detailed step by step instructions for completing the pumpkins electronic circuit with conductive thread. There is a circuit diagram, and if you are not familiar with electronics, carefully follow each step to ensure your components are the right way around and linked correctly.
A list of the electronic components required is included with the pumpkin pattern, or you can buy the jack-o-lantern kit with all the electronic bits you need - you just add fabric and a sewing needle! The kit includes conductive thread so you don't need a hot soldering iron or any prior electronics experience.
With a little switch to turn him on and off to conserve battery power, this project is perfect for Halloween and can be used as a unique night light for a childs room, or great decoration for the spooky season.
Suggest a design and win a voucher if we make it!
There is also a great range of electronic components available to buy individually to suppliment your kit, keep as spare parts or make up your own electrotextiles kit. Find them in the Electrotextiles section of the shop.


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Keynote: Mike Farrell CD -- Long before M*A*S*H was a household word, Mike Farrell was involved in issues that were of concern to him. This involvement stems from his belief that being a responsible citizen means being willing to see conditions improve for the ultimate benefit of all. The issues are largely those involving human rights and the death penalty. But Mike is also known to speak out against local injustices, animal rights, environmental issues, etc.
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By Torsa Ghosal
One stormy night, Kajri (Madhuri Dixit) begs Swami Dharam Bhushan Maharaj (Anupam Kher) to let her perform the last rites for her deceased one-month-old son in the crematorium. This riles up the priest's minion, Kedarnath (Prem Chopra), who scoffs at Kajri for wanting to cremate a baby with no father's name or caste attached to it. He orders the priest's sevaks to throw Kajri out. In Prem Granth (1996; dir: Rajiv Kapoor), this isn't the first time Kajri, the daughter of a mashak wala, is being ousted from a site. Mashak wala or water-bearers (also called Bhisti) usually come from Muslim landless communities in north and west India. In Prem Granth, the mashak wala is a lower-caste Hindu who travels around, selling water. Kajri had accompanied her father to a fair, danced at a 'jashn' there, and was raped by Kedarnath's friend on the way back to her village. Subsequently, she fled the village, so that her entire family wasn't ostracised. She was also forced to flee a Mahila Kalyan Kendra, before she could terminate her pregnancy from the rape, as a staff member advanced to assault her.
In the film's denouement, Kajri seeks retribution, saying the law should allow every rape survivor to kill those who raped her. Her wish is fulfilled on Dusshera when her rapist is tied to Ravana's effigy and she shoots him with a flaming arrow. Good triumphs over evil in the fiery spectacle and through the scene's Rama-Sita-Ravana imagery, the reformed priest as well as the religion of which he is a custodian come out unscathed. Apparently, all the social and religious structures leading to Kajri's rape, persecution, her baby's death, and expulsion from the crematorium have been brought down by that one arrow.
These days in the aftermath of a rape that receives national attention, we inevitably see the surge of brief opinion pieces (read: status messages, tweets, politicians' statements) that argue something to the effect of "a rape is a rape; why put communal, ethnic, religious colors on it?" They point to certain universals: rape is heinous, hang the perpetrators. Blood for blood, that is justice. But beyond this, any consideration of the particulars related to the actual violence is interpreted as, either pandering to "party politics," or conspiring to defame the community to which the perpetrators belong.
What this commonplace plea to de-politicise conversations around rape overlook is that the heinousness of rape does not cut across communal, ethnic, and religious lines; rather it reinforces those lines. This is why rape continues to be a wartime practice. When a community's land is invaded or conquered, women of the community, often recognised socially or legally as the property of men (like the land itself), are raped just as the community's property is looted: For instance, in an attempt to supposedly retrieve Jerusalem from the control of infidels (Muslims), Crusaders (Christians) raped women on their way to Constantinople; during World War I the German army raped Belgian women; Pakistani soldiers raped Biranganas in Bangladesh during the 1971 war, and in occupied territories, such as, Kashmir, the Indian army has raped women. During Partition, the religious majority on either side of the newly drawn border raped women from the groups that would have to flee to the other side. Thus, rape is first and foremost a show of strength, an expression of the will to dominate over an 'other,' an attempt at forced ownership of body, historically tied to the annexation of land—which also means that communal, religious, and ethnic contexts determine who is more susceptible to be raped. Simply put, though the alarming frequency of rape in India might suggest the aphorism "no woman is safe," not all women are equally vulnerable.
Now, if women are especially susceptible to be abused when their community's land is seized, then, what becomes of women who don't belong to typically land-owning communities?
No land is hers in life or in death
An 8-year-old girl goes missing while grazing horses in the Rasana village of Kathua and after a week, her corpse is found in the nearby forest. She was raped and killed as part of a ploy to evict her tribe from the village, the Crime Branch's charge sheet suggests. Meanwhile, the girl's corpse had to be buried some eight kilometres away from the same village because the land where she had been raped and murdered refused to house her corpse. Or, more precisely, because lands do not speak, people who speak for it—the Rasana Hindus, in this case — decided that the girl had no right to the land.
The girl was of the Muslim nomadic community, the Bakarwals, who seasonally migrate to and from the high Kashmir plains in search of pastures for their livestock. Their relationship to land is not the same as that of the sedentary populations but the girl's family did claim to have purchased a plot in Rasana to bury their dead. The sedentary Hindu villagers, however, produced papers to contend the family's rights and insist on the illegality of the burial-in-progress. Thus, a girl who had been subjected to protracted sexual violence and brutality in life couldn't break free from communal dispute over land even in death.
This detail remained peripheral to the collective outrage over the Kathua rape, even prior to the splintering of this outrage following the Prime Minister-led Union Cabinet's stop-gap solution of approving an ordinance to impose death penalty on those convicted of raping girls aged 12 years or less. With attention shifting to the merits and de-merits of death penalty, the particulars of the Kathua incident — that a nomad girl was raped because the sedentary villagers wanted her tribe out of their way—recedes in public memory. At this point, it is easy to succumb to polarization, as one side holds the current right-wing government — BJP — accountable for the escalation of violence against women and minorities; and another, digs out "proofs" to exculpate the alleged culprits, arguing that the Jammu and Kashmir police's Crime Branch is framing the accused in order to slander "our religion."
However, the Kathua rape and murder brings to fore much more than a religious community's aggression and a political coalition's complicity in religious strong-arming tactics. Kathua reinforces the extent to which upper caste or upper class sedentary populations of major religions in South Asia (yes, across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka), stigmatise and oppress nomad tribes, such as, the Bakarwals, Chharas, Chungars, Bediyas, and Pardhis, and how this longstanding hostility culminates in violence against women. After all, the 8-year old's rape and murder has to do not only with her being born a girl in a violently misogynist society, but also with her being a Muslim and a nomad in the Hindu-majority and sedentary community of Rasana.
No land is hers because she is a charmer and thief
In Kamila Shamsie's novel Kartography (2002), an heir to a feudal family in 1970s Pakistan must reconcile the demands of a nomad tribe with those of the other villagers. Shamsie writes, "the nomad tribe had made this dune part of their migratory patterns. And now some of them wanted to build mud huts and settle, but the villagers and the farm hands considered them untouchables. To tell them that Islam had no concept of untouchables would have been futile, Asif insisted. So instead he had chosen compromise: the nomads could stay as long as they drank water from their own wells and did not mix with the villagers." This is a fictional representation of a longstanding ethnic rift, resulting in the segregated co-existence of nomad and sedentary communities in contemporary South Asia.
While tension between the sedentary people and the nomads may have preceded the British invasion and colonial settlement in the Indian subcontinent, criminalization of nomads in legal terms is British legacy. Obsessed with categorization and classification, the British implemented Criminal Tribes Act in 1871 to register nomadic and aboriginal tribes with hereditary "criminal" tendencies. Orientalist scholars of the period traced the origins of the European Romanis to the South Asian nomads and established that an affinity for felony ran in their blood. David MacRitchie's Accounts of the Gypsies in India (1886) translates one such treatise by the Dutch orientalist, Michael Jan de Goeje, and supplements it with a lengthy appendix where MacRitchie quotes the observations of Babu Rajendralala Mitra "a gentleman of Indian birth and descent" about the "Bediyas," a nomadic tribe. Mitra in his influential paper, "The Gipsies of Bengal" (1836), wrote that Bediyas are "'a nation of thieves,' and…like the Thugs, 'worship the goddess Kali'." MacRitchie footnotes "Thugs" to present additional evidence connecting nomads with thugs, concluding, "It may be noted that 'at least 500 Bediyas are annually convicted of theft, dacoity…'."
The popular view in the colonial period is that nomads will resort to anything—thieving, knavery, kidnapping—"to pass an easy, idle life;" that they avoid hard labor; and put up huts in villages, pretending to settle there, only to evade being pursued by the police. Mitra's observations about Bediyas was contested in the Journal of Anthropological Society of Bengal (1867) by Dr. Dutt on the grounds that "There were two classes called bediyas…The people of one class were not thieves, nor were they dirty in their habits, but they got their livelihood by juggling. The others, also called bediyas, were a class of rogues." As is evident, Dutt's defense of one group of Bediyas over another does not quite dismantle the stigmatized perception of them. These perceptions of the colonial era haunt the labels "Vimukta Jati" or "Denotified Tribes," applied to many wandering communities in India. Though not listed as a denotified tribe, the Bakarwals being nomadic are also victims of such perceptions. As the Crime Branch's charge sheet about the Kathua rape and murder says, "during investigation it transpired that a particular community had a general impression that the Bakarwals indulge in cow slaughter and drug trafficking and that their children were turning into drug addicts."
In the orientalist accounts, women of nomadic tribes are said to be carrying "real or pretended charms" that cure the sick and administering "philters" to unite estranged lovers. There are also references to women's tattooed bodies and MacRitchie, taking a cue from Mitra, describes Bediya women as having a "light, elastic, wiry make" with "considerable claims to beauty." MacRitchie writes, "there is a sharpness in the features of their women which we see in no other aboriginal race in India. Like the gypsies of Europe, they are noted for the symmetry of their limbs; but their offensive habits, dirty clothing, and filthy professions, give them a repulsive appearance, which is heightened by the reputation they have of kidnapping children, and frequenting burial-grounds and places of cremation." In other words, the women are characterized as magical, beautiful — even seductive – and repulsive at once. A catalog of her "filthy habits" undercuts the anthropologist's libidinous gaze.
No land is hers, so she is of the street
That stigmatisation and violence against women of nomadic communities go hand-in-hand isn't something that the South Asian public can claim to be oblivious of—in fact, it is so "mainstream" that it surfaces time and again in our popular culture as a matter of course.
The nomad woman of post-Independence Hindi cinema generally falls into two categories — the first is of the pouting and belly-dancing "Mehbooba Mehbooba" (Sholay) kind, who associates with goons. She conforms to the orientalist view of being sexually attractive but habitually, morally repulsive. She can also wander in and out of a story, dancing "Chaiyya Chaiyya" (Dil Se) or "Mehboob Mere" (Fiza), contributing to the filmic spectacle but not impacting the storyworld as such. The nomad woman as 'item girl' is, at her morally worst, the vamp, and at her best, a manifestation of the hero's mood. She has no interior life of her own. She is a woman of the street and any wandering woman can be understood to be a variation of her — a "light, elastic, wiry" body, or a voluptuous one for that matter, awaiting pillage. Women venturing out of the house beware—haven't we heard the moral police say? The second category of nomad woman is the Phagun (1958) kind: she is the female protagonist, a street entertainer who becomes the hero's love interest. However, it is soon revealed that she is the orphaned or abandoned child of a "good" sedentary family who has only been brought up among nomads.
In Phagun (dir: Bibhuti Mitra), Bijon (Bharat Bhushan), the son of a feudal lord falls in love with a singing and dancing girl, Banani (Madhubala) without realizing that she belongs to the nomadic tribe of Banjaras squatting on his family's estate, who he is about to evict. He has turned down their offer of labor in exchange for their right to stay on the land because their cattle destroy crops in the village. But, Banani enters his life, nimbly dancing to the tune of his flute. Banani's Banjara father warns her that a Banjara woman romancing a man outside the community is fated to die. However, the story is narrated by Bijon's servant who introduces it as a unique tale culminating in the marriage of a "Brahman" and a "Banjaraan," before quickly adding that Banani was a Banjaraan only in the eyes of the world. Her biological father, Shiv Narayan, had abandoned her at birth on the advice of a religious guru. So, the audience knows from the outset that though Bijon-Banani appear to be transgressing ethnic lines, they are both children of landholding families. Similarly, we learn that the street performer Mala (Jaya Bachchan) in Zanjeer (1973), skilled at sharpening and wielding knives, is not from a nomadic tribe as such, but the orphaned child of a potentially respectable (sedentary) household. And much of the film is devoted to the shedding of her street credentials and training in domestic chores. In the later years, the various dancing girls and street performers played by actors such as Hema Malini, Sridevi, and Madhuri Dixit (as in Prem Granth) would mishmash cultural practices and vocations of nomad tribes with those of poverty-stricken rural migrants. Khalnayak (1993) merges the two commonplace tropes concerning nomad women in Hindi cinema when a cop (also an orphan)—Ganga (Madhuri Dixit)—pretends to belong to a singing-dancing (nautanki) tribe that travels from village to village in order to capture the felon, Ballu (Sanjay Dutt). She loses her reputation in the process, but is restored to respectability in the end, uniting with the brave hero, Ram (could there be a more devout name?).
Released the same year as Phagun, Madhumati (dir: Bimal Roy) shares several narrative conventions with it. In Madhumati an aboriginal (not nomadic) woman becomes the male protagonist's love interest and falls victim to an old feud between the timber estate's Raja, who is the hero's employer, and the aboriginal villagers for control over land. The titular character (Vyjayanthimala) dies while trying to escape the Raja's lechery. Her love with the hero is consummated in a subsequent birth when she is sans any tribal lineage.
A Bengali folk tale made into blockbuster films in both Bangladesh and the regional film industry in Bengal, Beder Meye Josna, also presents a version of the narrative where a girl from an upper caste family is raised by a lower caste nomadic tribe (Bediyan). The Bangladeshi production (1989) mixes elements of the local Islamic culture with the caste-based politics underlying the story. The girl, Josna, takes up the Bede's vocation of snake charming and healing, which brings her in touch with a prince. Romance ensues to which the prince's father objects on the grounds that a Bede girl will tarnish the sanctity of the palace. Even in Shamsie's Kartography, legends float of the communal opposition to a nomad girl and a village boy's romance—in that legend, the nomad girl dies of pneumonia and the romance remains unconsummated. In Beder Meye Josna, however, the prince's father orders a minister to burn down the "Bede busty" and throw Josna's community out of the kingdom to prevent the prince from marrying her. In the end, when the royal patriarch has a change of heart, the nomad woman, Josna, is also revealed to be the abandoned daughter of his own brother-in-law.
A noteworthy aspect of Phagun and Beder Meye Josna is that though they conclude on the re-assuring note that the alliance between the male and the female protagonists will not taint the ethnic "bloodlines" (because, after all, they are kin), they also present the nomadic lifestyle and vocation as related to cultural upbringing rather than a matter of hereditary inclination. And in that sense, at least, these move past the orientalist approach to nomads in terms of racist evolutionary theories. Also, though tortured, evicted, and stigmatized over part of the story for not being a "respectable" woman tied to the hearth, the nomads in these South Asian films are not as menacing as the colonial era narratives had presented them to be. In fact, in the Bengali blockbuster, the "Bediyan" guardians of Josna are invited to stay in the palace at the end of the film.
Where does the nomad woman go from here?
Women from nomadic communities and denotified tribes not only struggle against the social stigma attached to their lifestyle but also the lack of protection from law-enforcing institutions. And this isn't an issue that has suddenly cropped up under a right-wing government, though the right-wing regime might have aggravated the existing problems by giving credence to bizarre narratives of religious and ethnic superiority every now and then and escalating jingoistic rhetoric about "land."
In recent years, organizations, such as the Nomad Film Trust and the National Alliance Group for Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, have sought to counter the simplistic representations and stigmatization of nomads in the South Asian culture. "Acting Like a Thief" (dir: Kerim Friedman and Shashwati Talukdar), a documentary about the Chhara community, opens with a dramatic representation of Budhan Sabar's arrest by the police and his wife, Shyamali's pleas to release her husband. Budhan Sabar of the Kheria Sabar tribe was killed in police custody in Purulia in 1998. In the dramatic performance, the woman playing Shyamali is called a "thief's whore" by the police and pushed over. Following the performance, members of the Chhara tribe recount their experiences of being pursued by the police, tortured and electrocuted, held responsible for any crimes around their settlement. But the contradictory aspects of the Chhara tribe's identity are most aptly captured in the moment when an elderly woman, grandmother of playwright Dakxin Bajrange, simultaneously boasts of her talent for dancing with swords and pots and her father's talent for theft. When quizzed whether she considers her tribe to be "chor jaati" (tribe of thieves) or "kalakar jati" (tribe of artists), she first responds, "kalakar," but after a pause she adds "chor," and asks, "Do you understand?" Theft, as she points out, requires dexterity and is a resort for people who find few opportunities for honing other skills that could result in employment.
The stigma and abuse suffered by nomad women (and men) is a complex, longstanding issue of which the Kathua incident is a gruesome reminder. This abuse is so integral to our culture, so central to the region's religious and casteist social systems, that the ruling government's meting out of death penalty or even the election of a different political party at the national level will not quickly fix it. However, opining that communal, ethnic, and religious politics played no part in the Kathua rape, that the particulars of the incident are of little consequence because rape has no religion or community is troublesome. Such a stance prevents us from confronting the inequities that are deep-seated in our religions and cultures; and we go on believing that all we need to put an end to rape is a noose or a flaming arrow.
Torsa Ghosal is the author of a novel, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, 2017), and a teacher of contemporary literature and experimental writing at California State University, Sacramento.


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Haven't blogged for a week. I've been trying to spend more time creating and less time on the computer. I'm afraid I've become a bit of an internet junkie. Etsy is very addictive and I love reading the blogs from other EBW members, posting in the forums and going on chat. Sometimes, I'm even moved to post a comment, although I'm still kind of shy about that.
My hard work all week paid off though. I finished a watch and a necklace, both of which I've gotten listed on Etsy. I've been wanting to try watch bands for the longest time and not too long ago I bought a lot of watch faces from BeadingUSA on Etsy. It was an assortment with some really pretty styles. My first one turned out so well, I'm really excited about working up the rest. Yesterday I finished my second. It's not as intricate as the first; a simple weave, but I'm just as happy with the result. Eight more to go! I'm having so much fun with these, I'll probably end up buying another lot.
The necklace I just listed this weekend I'm extremely pleased with. I think it's one of the prettier pieces I've done. It started out to be a bracelet, but then I realized I was going to run out of the cats eye beads I was using for the biggest bead in a cellini spiral so I thought, why not use it as a focal piece on a necklace instead. In the middle of it, I had to run to the store for needles and of course one simply cannot go into a store or aisle with beads and not browse just a little (translated: spends at least an hour looking). During my browsing, what did I find but the perfect faceted glass beads to compliment my spiral section! Gee, I'm glad I needed needles!


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State rejects proposed homeowners insurance increases
Posted December 19, 2014 10:50 a.m. EST
Updated December 19, 2014 3:52 p.m. EST
Raleigh, N.C. — North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin on Friday limited homeowners insurance rate increases, rejecting insurers' requests to raise rates by an average of 25 percent statewide.
"The rates I have ordered are the result of the most thorough inspection of North Carolina homeowners insurance rates in more than 20 years," Goodwin said in a statement. "After considering all of the evidence and data available, I have determined that no factors or events justified the excessive rates requested by the insurance companies."
The rates that take effect next June vary by territory and type of insurance. On average, homeowners insurance rates will drop by 0.3 percent, renter's insurance rates will go up by 11.2 percent and condo owner's insurance rates are to increase by 8.1 percent.
In Wake and Durham counties, for example, the approved rate will drop by 4.1 percent, compared with a requested increase of 24.8 percent in Raleigh and Durham and 32.6 percent elsewhere in the counties.
Homeowners in Orange and Chatham counties will see their rates drop by 14.3 percent, while those in Cumberland County will see a 0.6 percent decrease.
Goodwin approved the largest rate increase, 21.4 percent, in Avery and Mitchell counties, and other locations in western North Carolina also will see hefty increases. Meanwhile, homeowners along the coast, who usually see insurance rates spike will mostly see lower rates next year.


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Vanessa Coulson is a Guest Services manager who is here to accommodate any guests requirements, services and needs. She brings a vast hospitality knowledge and years of experience.
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Gynecomastia is a condition where a male's breast tissues enlarge or overdevelop. In most cases, gynecomastia occurs during the puberty period, which is also known as pubertal or adolescent gynecomastia and hormonal changes is the key reason behind it. New born babies suffering with this condition are given the neonatal gynecomastia treatment. While, most adult men have to deal with this condition because either they are overweight or have genuine glandular issues.
With the advent of technology, now it is possible to treat the issue of male moobs through the male gyno surgery but it is also important to support troubled men in terms of helping them cop-up with the psychological trauma behind it and overcome it. Typically called as male breast reduction or male breast liposuction, this surgery works on the targeted area, making the man's chest firmer, tighter and masculine.
Enlarged male breasts are caused by a medical condition known as "Gynecomastia" or "Male Breast Development", which can cause untold embarrassment and stress. A large number of men suffer from this condition, which creates a potential damage to their self-esteem. A surgical approach is required to treat this condition in most cases. This plastic surgery procedure works on reducing the breast size, flattening the chest and enhancing the overall appearance of the person.
After evaluating the type of Gynecomastia you are suffering with, your plastic surgeon will help you understand the procedure. Generally, the breast tissues are categorized into two kinds – Glandular tissues, which are dense and firm and Fatty tissues, which are soft. The ratio of these both tissues varies from person to person. If the fatty tissue is excessive, liposuction may be needed whereas if the glandular tissue is overboard then the excess of it can be surgically removed with a scalpel. At times, a combination of both surgeries may be required to treat Gynecomastia.
Our Cosmetic Surgeon Dr. Milan Doshi will put very tiny, keyhole cuts. He then inserts a small cannula and with the help of ultrasound, he makes sure that the fat melts. Since fat is melted, it can be removed with very gentle low vacuum. So, there is very less damage or trauma created on the treated area. Even if you have excess glandular tissues, Dr. Doshi removes them through these key-hole cuts with special advanced technology. This gives faster and smoother recovery with lesser discomfort level. At last, he does laser liposuction on upper layer, so you get tight skin. There are very few cases where excision may be required.
Anaesthesia: This surgery is carried out under local anaesthesia along with sedation or general anaesthesia may be needed.
Surgical Time: 1 to 1.5 hours.
Risk: Complications are rare and not really severe. A good pre-op consultation eliminates any risk of complications. Due to overall advancement in the field of medical science, gynecomastia surgery is now safer than ever. You can discuss in detail about the risks with your surgeon during consultation.
Recovery: No overnight stay is required. You can resume office work in a day or two. It will take around two weeks to start Heavy activities like gym, swimming, etc.
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Apart from two major categories of Gynecomastia, there are many other sub-types, which define the exact condition in each case. Before you decide to undergo the male breast reduction surgery, it is important to be well-informed about the different types of gynecomastia and their respective procedures. We suggest you to take a glance at each.


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There are factors from a variety of sources such as manufacturing issues, personal issues, supply issues which keeps industry personnel up at night. However, scrutiny of the labeling, marketing and advertising for food, beverage and dietary supplements has never been greater. As FDA and FTC get more pressure action from U.S. Senators and Congressmen and Public Action Groups to take enforcement action, companies have to be ever mindful of the morass of laws and regulations. In addition, litigation over alleged false advertising and labeling has exploded over the last 4-5 years. Class action plaintiff lawyers in California and other states are filing a constant stream of lawsuits over claims like "all natural" or "healthy". Yet, in order to distinguish their products from the myriad other products on the market, companies have to understand how they can market their products aggressively but without crossing the line.
This session by regulatory compliance expert, Justin Prochnow, will help companies understand where that line is and how close they can get to it without going over.
Making attractive claims to set a food, beverage, or supplement product apart from the large array of other products on the market is a difficult proposition. Companies have to steer clear of regulatory enforcing laws and regulations, public action groups championing causes like "non-GMO", and plaintiff lawyers suing over advertising like "all natural."
This webinar will discuss the most targeted claims and how to avoid attention from the various people and groups scrutinizing claims. Our expert will take you through the Top 10 claims receiving the most attention from regulators and litigators. You will get links to valuable reference guides posted by the FDA and other agencies. Plus, you will receive tips to keep in mind when formulating future labeling, marketing and advertising.
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Justin J. Prochnow
Justin J. Prochnow focuses his practice on regulatory and business issues primarily in the food, beverage, dietary supplement, and cosmetic industries. Justin works with clients to ensure regulatory compliance with statutes and regulations enforced by the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and o... More info
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We regret to announce that ProEdTech LLC and all its affiliate brands will cease operations on April 1, 2019.
We are no longer able to fulfill online orders. We will fullfill all DVD and book orders already placed.
Customers of canceled webinars and subscription products may request a refund at (800) 223-8720 or email@example.com. You must do so by April 1, 2019.
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Bicycle Quarterly
Few monthes ago I had the chance to grab an issue of Bicycle Quarterly. This magazine is edited by Jan Heine, altready known as the writer of some of the major books dedicated to competition or touring bicycles, and for his job about the René Herse rebirth. I purchased the '12 spring issue, mainly because the … Continue reading


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Angie's List Answers is the trusted spot to ask home improvement and health questions and get answers from service companies, health providers and consumers. For ratings and reviews on companies in your area, search Angie's List.
*Updates every 4 hours
I have about 700 square feet of 4-6 inch deep concrete driveway to tear out. What should I expect for cost?
Depends a lot on who your contractor i,and of course on whether he can dispose of it for free at a concrete recycling yard or has to pay to dump at a landfill.
An excavation contractor with his own large dump truck and large backhoe with hammer might charge from $2-3/SF for 4" - close to 50% more for 6" thick. I had one contractor do it with a concrete saw to cut the rebar and using a large clawed backhoe, stacked the individual slabs in a 30 foot sidedump trailer to haul to the dump site for $1.50/SF total, but that is the extreme case - usually most contractors will have to break it up to about 2 foot pieces to transport and dump it, which of course increases cost.
A concrete contractor doing it preparatory to placing a new concrete drive, using a jackhammer or a hammer on a bobcat say, would likely charge more like $4/SF, and I have heard of up to $7/SF for small jobs.
Above prices assume easy access, which is probably a safe assumption for a driveway, and no load restrictions on the roads.
I would guess probably $3-4 would be the likely range for your job unless you get just the right contractor with the right equipment and hungry for work.
Answered 6 years ago
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if you live near nky i will do it for 1,200 and you can dump it yourself a very cheap choice write me back
Answered 3 years ago
by earvin12


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The 4th of July 2013
Happy Independence Day! A few days late!
The 4th of July is one of my favorite Holiday's, but this year it just did not feel like the special day. We are so blessed to be Americans! and I usually love preparing for our annual cook-out, but I am still recovering from my gallbladder surgery so I just did not have the time or the energy to put into it :( also, it poured the rain almost all day so we had to have the cook-out indoors, we did get a quick break in the rain to grill out the hot dogs and hamburgers. My Granny's brother, Uncle Jim, usually comes every year to spend the 4th with us but due to his advanced age and health problems he was unable to come :(
Knock on wood I am feeling so much better since my surgery! I am still on the recovery road, but coming along! I have a bit more pep in my step and am looking forward to next year! and Halloween will be around the corner before we know it!
A few Pictures:
|My beautiful Aunt Carolyn
|I was quite proud of my fruit pizza
|I did feel like arranging some flowers
|More flowers
|We had to move the cook-out inside:( but everything still came together.
|Uncle Jay
|Uncle Ed
2011 4th of July (I had to work last year) http://thelittlehouseonbighorsecreek.blogspot.com/2011/09/very-late-4th-of-july-2011-pictures.html
Tutorial for a simple 4th of July wreath: http://thelittlehouseonbighorsecreek.blogspot.com/2011/07/simple-holiday-wreath.html


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My stupid neighbors.
After Robin Hood, there was Robin FROM The Hood.
Thirtysome years later, The Jacksons are No. 1 with a bullet again.
Post Apocalyptic group, Earth, Wind, and Gunfire hits number one song: We Are The World!
What Glenn Beck sees whenever President Obama is on TV...
Why we fight... So they don't have to.
All great captions!
Yeah, I got nuthin'.
All great captions!
Yeah, I got nuthin'.
Directing under the name Issaac Washington (his iconic bartender character in "The Love Boat"), Ted Lange has just released his cinematic reboot of "The Mod Squad."
Gladys Knight and the Pimps.
Ladies and Gentlemen, YOUR BOSTON CELTICS!
Yo yo yo! Which way to Michael Vick's house, cuz?
I'm sorry. What is this post about? I've been trying to remove the first picture for a couple of minutes now. Seems it's interfering with the remaining post.
Don: Ha, ha, you're so transfixed by that pic you've commented on the wrong post!
Durrell Johnson sings "Shaniqua,I just met a girl named, Shaniqua!" during a pivotal moment in the new off Broadway production of "East Compton Story"


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Working to Protect Ontario's Headwaters, Natural Heritage, and Watersheds
Submissions, PowerPoints, etc
July 1, 2019 – You are looking at a page on a revamped website that contains submissions made since January 1, 2019. During those six months, we have responded to series of mostly provincial initiatives that, for their part, generally depict environmental protection as red tape that creates unnecesary costs and delays. The onslaught of these regressive efforts is disturbing and requires great time and diplomacy. It also required the OHI to focus on core efforts. In some cases we have sent in our own submissions; in others we signed joint submissions; and in still others we made supplementary comments to those joint subs to benchmark significant issues of concern to the OHI. In these extraordinary times of unfounded and undocumented efforts to reduce environmental protection as costly red tape, we thank our sister organizations for providing research for our own subs, letting us sign on to their submissions, and/or taking the lead when we are overloaded. Together, we shall overcome the unfortunately myopic who think they can cut open the goose to get all the golden eggs.
Our subs since January include:
OHI submission on a draft new Canada-Ontario Agreement on the Great Lakes: OHI on COA ERO 019-0198 Sept 2 2019.
Supplementary comments to Premier Ford on Flooding and Aligned Issues, stressing the need for improved watershed management in Ontario: OHI to Premier Ford on Flooding Resilience June 29
OHI Submission on the Canada-Ontario Agreement for the Great Lakes, stressing the need for a new Annex to collaborate on watershed management: OHI on COA June 17
Supplementary Comments on aspects of Bill 108, stressing the harm of proposed changes to the Conservation Authorities Act, May 21: OHI Supplementary Observations on Conservation Authorities May 21
OHI Submission on the Far North Act, stressing the need for a comprehensive review prior to repealing the far North Act: OHI to MNRF on Far North April 15
OHI Submission on the aggregate review, including concerns about a secret industry-dominated "summit": OHI to MNRF on Aggregates March 26 2019
OHI Submission on the efforts to amend the Growth Plan, stressing the need for aspects of a sustainability lens therein: OHI to ERO 013-4504 Feb 22
OHI Submission during consultations on the housing plan, stressing the lack of evidence for claims about environmental red tape and suggestions for a series of sustainability lenses for land use planning: OHI to Housing Consult Jan 25
OHI Submission Bill 66, stressing the unacceptable suspension of environmental protections and democratic norms: OHI on Bill 66 January 20, 2019
OHI Submission on the draft Made-in-Ontario Environment Plan, stressing that it is not a plan, its selective framework, and a serious mis-statement of entitlement: OHI on ERO 013-4208 Jan 28


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Thou shalt not
January 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
Words & Phrases* the media should really stop using:
- "Speaking out" – as in, "So-and-so is speaking out about her ordeal."
- "Slam" – as in, "Celebrity A slams Celebrity B for her comments about Celebrity A's new movie."
- "Who's to blame" – as in, "Neighbors/the community/lawmakers/fill-in-the-blank want to know who's to blame."
If we can learn to avoid these trite and annoying pitfalls, I think we will be a better society, better citizens, and better human beings.
In other news, I think that in 2010, by using those shiny metal spoons from the cafeteria to eat my oatmeal in the morning, I prevented approximately 225 plastic spoons from going into a landfill. So I think I've already achieved better human being status right there. However, it didn't stop Them from manufacturing those 225 spoons, which still exist in real space, and which will eventually go into a landfill anyhow, so I don't think my little action is a net gain for the world's morality or a net loss for the world's trash pile. Also, it probably required energy, soap, etc., to wash the 225 shiny metal spoons. Not sure how to tally that up. However, if I managed to keep another human being employed as a dishwasher washing said 225 spoons, then maybe I've counteracted any other losses contracted. I wish there was a better system for measuring this. I wish we could assign units of recycling, or at least Brownie points or gold stars. Like calories. (They're not really real, but we treat them as if they are.) With my new patented Von Behren Recycling and/or Morality Brownie Point System (the VBRAOMBP system),we could have a metric, a rubrick if you will, for knowing whether or not we're goin' down the tubes as a people, or if we're gonna be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps! I'm going to award myself 5 gold brownie point stars for the whole spoon thing.
*Law librarian term of art!


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DPF Services, LLC is committed to meeting your needs and exceeding your expectations. We believe in honesty, integrity and five-star customer services. Our goal is to help you keep your fleet green, in the most efficient ways possible, and leave more green in your pocket.
Our company and expert staff always stay up to date with market trends, laws and daily news pertaining to the logistics and transportation industry. Your time is valuable and we want to keep you informed with the most current and accurate data.
Ports of LA and Long Beach to expand clean-air initiatives
The governing boards of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest two container ports in the US, have announced a joint public meeting to be held on November 17 to discuss updating the San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP).
On the agenda of the CAAP Discussion Document will be how to expand the clean air initiatives that have already shown significant success in reducing air pollution related to port activities over the past 10 years since the CAAP began.
The figures show the neighbouring ports' pro-active approach to lowering emissions has seen diesel particulates down by 85%, nitrogen oxides by 50% and sulfur oxides by 97% over that time.
Read more at: http://splash247.com/ports-of-la-and-long-beach-to-expand-clean-air-initiatives/
Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach Escalate Clean Air Plan
"…Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest ports in North America, also propose expanding programs that reduce ship emissions.
Ports officials met Nov. 17 to mark the 10th anniversary of the initiative and unveil the CAAP 2017 Discussion Document, which outlines new concepts under consideration for the third iteration of the CAAP."…
Read more at: http://www.ttnews.com/articles/basetemplate.aspx?storyid=43989&page=1


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On our travels through Namibia, we had a short stop in the Sossusvlei area of the Namib desert. Sossusvlei roughly translates to "dead-end marsh" in Afrikaans. It is one of the most popular and well-photographed areas in Namibia. One of the reasons for this is that it's home to the famous Dune 45. The sand dune got its name for a pretty straight-forward reason: it's 45 km from the Sesrium park entrance gate.
Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan located in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, which happens to be the largest conservation area in Africa. The Namib desert is over 5 million years old, making it the oldest desert in the world.
We got the opportunity to climb Dune 45, which is 170 meters high. (According to http://www.sossusvlei.org/attractions/dune-45/ it's only 85 meters, but most other sources claim it's 170 meters, so I'm going with the most common measurement). Dune 7 is the highest sand dune in the Namib desert at 388 meters, while Big Daddy is the tallest dune in Sossusvlei at 325 meters.
It really is a beauty, isn't it? The reddish colour of the sand is due to high iron oxide content.
The climb itself was really taxing though. The sand is fine and slips under your feet, pulling you down with each step. It was like walking in slow motion. It was also a bit windy the day we were there, so we had that working against us.
As we climbed higher, the wind picked up, blasting us with sand. This was really a workout. But we made it to the top eventually!
Of course, what goes up, must come down. Some people chose the easy way down – sliding on their backsides down the steeper side of the dune. Once we hurried (as much as one can hurry over deep, soft sand), up to the peak, we had to come back down again just as quickly, because the wind morphed into a sandstorm.
Once we reached solid ground again we hightailed it to our awaiting truck, where our guide had made us breakfast in the meantime. Everything was crunchy with sand, including the coffee. But how could it not be, with this much sand blowing through the air.
Still, it was totally worth it for the views. Not to mention the leg workout!


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Researchers released the clinical trial results for the investigational medication, larazotide acetate.
In a clinical trial sponsored by Alba Therapeutics, researchers from 10 clinical sites in the U.S. conducted a study to determine if the investigational medication, larazotide acetate, is safe and effective in preventing gluten-induced intestinal permeability and alleviating gastrointestinal symptoms in people with celiac disease.
Immune system responses are triggered in those with celiac disease when incompletely digested gluten peptides go between the cells of lamina propria of the small intestine and/or pass through the space between the epithelial cells. When this intestinal permeability occurs, an immune system response is triggered and the response results in the disassembly of the tight junction in the intestine and creates an opening. The goal of this study was to determine if larazotide acetate works, as it is believed to by preventing this opening of the tight junctions in the intestine.
The study involved 80 adults with biopsy-proven celiac disease. Some were asked to take on a gluten-challenge, which consisted of taking two pills containing 400 mg of gluten per day. All participants were divided into one of seven different treatment groups within the study; four groups underwent the gluten challenge along with .25, 1, 4, or 8 mg of larazotide acetate. The study drug larazotide acetate was taken three times a day. The remaining groups were used as the safety control group and were given one of the following: 8 mg of the study drug and no gluten challenge; a placebo drug and placebo gluten (also known as the "gluten-free control arm"); or a placebo drug and the gluten challenge. All participants were asked to maintain their typical gluten-free diet throughout the duration of the study.
The primary effectiveness of the drug was evaluated through the urinary lactose-to-mannitol (LAMA) ratio, a measure of intestinal permeability, while the secondary efficacy was determined through the Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale (GSRS). In people with celiac disease, intestinal damage leads to the simultaneous reduction of the absorption of monosaccharides and an increase in the absorption of disaccharides, which are both carbohydrates. As a result, an increase in the LAMA ratio is observed. This LAMA ratio varied greatly across all control groups and while some increases were reported, the data gathered was not statistically significant. In addition, no statistically significant changes were observed between the larazotide acetate groups and the placebo group. A decrease in the LAMA ratio would show a reduction in intestinal permeability.
The GSRS is a self-evaluation questionnaire used to determine the severity of gastrointestinal symptoms. Participants receiving the larazotide acetate placebo who underwent the gluten challenge reported severe gastrointestinal symptoms, especially in comparison to those receiving the placebo gluten. The participants who received the active larazotide acetate while on the gluten challenge reported less severe symptoms than those receiving the placebo study medication while on the gluten challenge. Study authors noted that those receiving the lower doses of .25 and 1 mg doses of larazotide acetate showed statistically significant prevention of gastrointestinal symptoms while the larger doses did not present any statistically significant differences.
Since the LAMA ratios did not meet statistical significance, the researchers concluded the primary efficacy goal of this study was not met. However, one of the secondary efficacy goals was met in that the drug limited the gastrointestinal symptoms brought on by gluten ingestion. The most common side effects of the investigational drug were urinary tract infection and headache, but the researchers concluded the drug to be generally well-tolerated.
"As this is the first published clinical trial detailing results of a clinical trial for a medication designed to prevent toxicity related to gluten exposure, this is a landmark in celiac disease research," said Daniel Leffler, MD, MS, Director of Clinical Research at the Celiac Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. "The primary outcome of LAMA is one that many of us question the significance of, and this test is not being used in any clinical trials going forward. It was also shown not to be predictive of intestinal damage in a subsequent study. Given that the side effects of the medication were similar to placebo and that there was significant protection against symptoms related to gluten exposure, this shows that rigorous clinical trials in celiac disease are possible and that this particular agent warrants further study."
The full study results are published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Related Reading:
Kinetics of the histological, serological and symptomatic responses to gluten challenge in adults with coeliac disease. Leffler D, Schuppan D, Pallav K, Najarian R, Goldsmith JD, Hansen J, Kabbani T, Dennis M, Kelly CP.Gut. 2012 May 22
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ROUGH PATH: Three New College graduates struggle to find employment after commencement. The first of three parts. (Times photo, John Pendygraft)
HARD WORK: Hillsborough expands its special education safety work group as it moves toward a Dec. 11 reporting deadline.
RESOLUTION: Countryside Montessori charter school settles terms on its admission policies with the Pasco school district.
TOP OF THE CLASS: St. Petersburg High student speaks on biotechnology at Toronto conference • The Tarpon Springs High marching band prepares for the 2013 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT: Escambia's two F-rated charter schools share their improvement plans, the Pensacola News-Journal reports.
COMPARISON: Mississippi leaders look to Florida for school accountability ideas, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports.
UNFAIR: Some Broward leaders criticize state rules on English-language learners that could lead to lower school grades, the Sun-Sentinel reports.
LESSONS LEARNED? Florida political leaders look for meaning in the failure of several constitutional amendments on the November ballot, the Herald-Tribune reports.
OPPOSED: Florida university students and professors rise against a proposal to create differential tuition rates for different degrees, the Gainesville Sun reports.