text:
Healthcare Industry News: regenerative tissue matrix
Devices Orthopaedic
News Release - March 7, 2011
Wright Medical Group, Inc. Announces the Commercial Launch of the PRO-TOE(TM) VO Hammertoe Fixation System
New Surgical Solution for Hammertoes Expands Wright's Market Leadership into Growing Forefoot Market
ARLINGTON, Tenn.--(Healthcare Sales & Marketing Network)-- Wright Medical Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:WMGI ), a global orthopaedic medical device company, announced the full commercial release of the PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe Fixation System. This system was designed in cooperation with world-renowned foot and ankle surgeons to offer a simple and efficient means to surgically repair the lesser toes following correction of a hammertoe deformity. The PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe System will be featured by Wright at the annual meeting of the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons March 9-12, 2011 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
A hammertoe is a contracture of the tissues surrounding the joints of the lesser toes, causing significant pain and discomfort in addition to an altered physical appearance. It is estimated that 10-20% of the U.S. population will suffer from hammertoes at some point in their life. As a result, over 500,000 patients seek surgical treatment each year. While a sizeable proportion of these surgeries are treated conventionally with pins, the PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe implant provides a stable and efficient alternative surgical solution for the deformity.
"We believe the PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe system will improve patient satisfaction over pin fixation, which has been the standard of care for many years. The PRO-TOE™ system's sizing scheme covers the full array of anatomic variations that are seen from patient to patient. Additionally, the system arrives in the operating room as a single, sterile-packed unit which has increased the efficiency of the procedure while removing costly cleaning and processing of a standard reusable instrument set," noted Aaron C. Smith, Senior Director of Foot and Ankle Marketing at Wright.
Jason Edie, Director of Research and Development, commented, "The PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe system offers a number of advantages over the present implant options. The implant's construction provides a solid and secure fixation that prevents shortening of the toe. The implant is also fabricated from stainless steel which simplifies the procedure by eliminating the freezer storage and special instruments required for other implant alternatives. The PRO-TOE™ VO system very clearly represents an evolution in the treatment of this complex problem."
The new PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe System will be made available immediately in the U.S. through Wright's specialized foot and ankle sales force. Additionally, the system will be marketed in select countries outside the U.S. through Wright's direct and distributor-based sales representatives.
The PRO-TOE™ VO Hammertoe System is the latest addition to Wright's market-leading suite of products for foot and ankle surgeons. These include the CHARLOTTE® family of reconstructive implants, DARCO® locked plating systems, ORTHOLOC™ polyaxial locking plating systems, the BIOARCH® subtalar implant, SIDE-KICK® External Fixators, ALLOPURE® and BIOFOAM® osteotomy wedge systems, DART-FIRE® small screw systems, GRAFTJACKET® regenerative tissue matrix, VALOR® Hindfoot Fusion Nail, and the INBONE® total ankle replacement.
Wright Medical Group, Inc. is a global orthopaedic medical device company and a leading provider of surgical solutions for the foot and ankle market. The Company specializes in the design, manufacture and marketing of devices and biologic products for extremity, hip and knee repair and reconstruction. The Company has been in business for 60 years and markets its products in over 60 countries worldwide. For more information about Wright Medical, visit the Company's website at www.wmt.com.
This press release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under U.S. federal securities laws. These statements reflect management's current knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, estimates, and expectations and express management's current views of future performance, results, and trends and may be identified by their use of terms such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "predict," "project," "will," and other similar terms. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to materially differ from those described in the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include the impact of Wright's settlement of the federal investigation into Wright's consulting arrangements with orthopaedic surgeons relating to its hip and knee products in the United States, including Wright's compliance with a Deferred Prosecution Agreement through September 2011 and a Corporate Integrity Agreement through September 2015, and those risks and uncertainties discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (including those described in Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2009, under the heading, "Risk Factors" and in Item 1A of Part II of our 10-Qs filed during 2010). Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Such statements are made as of the date of this press release, and we undertake no obligation to update such statements after this date.
Source: Wright Medical Group
Search: Wright Medical Group
Search: PRO-TOE
Search: Hammertoe


The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), said it has trained 24 health workers in Borno, on measures to prevent malnutrition among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the state.
UNICEF Nutrition Specialist, Mr. Walton Beckley, said this on Thursday at the closing of a workshop on malnutrition for health workers in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Maiduguri.
Mr. Beckley explained that the training was to teach mothers and caregivers ways to utilise their meagre resources to provide adequate nutrition for the children.
"The workshop is training on infant and young children feeding for health workers in IDP camps in Maiduguri. The purpose is to ensure that our health workers are in the position to counsel mothers and caregivers on methodologies they can adopt to be able to feed their children properly to prevent severe malnutrition," Beckley said.
Beckley said that with the training, mothers were expected to make use of little resources at their disposal to provide food that would be adequately sufficient for the children, to prevent malnourishment.
"We have 24 health workers drawn from Muna, Dalori and Bakasi IDP camps currently at the workshop. Our focus is to train health workers from all IDP camps on the subject," he said.
According to Mr. Beckley, getting access to resources is a big challenge in the North East at the moment, saying the purposes of the workshop is to ensure that mothers are taught on how they can make the best use of food materials at their disposal.


Are you currently searching for insolvency services in Chetwynd? Your local MNP LTD Licensed Insolvency Trustee is standing by ready to assist you. Regardless of the current financial situation that you find yourself in — whether it's contacting creditors or looking into options when it comes to filing for bankruptcy — we will work with you personally to ensure the solution implemented meets your exact financial needs. We pride ourselves on being able to help Canadians navigate through their financial troubles -- and we're standing by to help you too.


text:
Pakistani Student Receives the Queen's Young Leaders Award
LONDON: A talented student and tech entrepreneur from Pakistan, Syed Faizan Hussain, has received the Queen's Young Leaders Award. The 23 year old has been recognized for his work to support the use of technology in health related solutions.
Queen's Young Leaders Award
It is an annual award that looks for people aged between 18-29 years from the Commonwealth nations and acknowledges them for their leadership potential. The award was established via the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and Comic Relief and the Royal Commonwealth Society in 2014.
About Syed Faizan Hussain
Faizan has founded a number of startups, including Edu-Aid – a system that can translate sign language to spoken language – and OneHealth – a mechanism which can be used for disease surveillance and tracking to support medical institutions in dealing with epidemic outbreaks.
The young entrepreneur has also worked as a teacher with over 200 students from underprivileged backgrounds to train them in computer programming skills. He now plans to launch a tech consultancy and outsourcing company, Venture Dart, for skilled freelancers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Faizan Hussain said:
I am delighted to have received this Award and look forward to expanding my leadership skills and engaging with people from various fields who will be sharing their ideas and experiences.
An Honor for the Winners
During the ceremony held at the Buckingham Palace in the UK on June 30, Faizan was the only Pakistani to join the list of winners from across all Commonwealth countries. The award includes a program of meetings, networking opportunities and mentoring sessions, all curated to help the award winners progress as leaders in their home countries and increase their impact on people's lives.
Before the award ceremony all winners visited 10 Downing Street and took part in master classes at the BBC World Service and Facebook's headquarters in the UK.
The award winners were also hosted by the Commonwealth Secretary General. University of Cambridge will be offering workshops to each of the winners while senior executives from leading organizations will inform them about projects which are improving people's lives in the UK.
Chief Executive of The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, Dr Astrid Bonfield CBE, stated
The Queen's Young Leaders of 2017 are doing truly remarkable work within their communities. Their actions are having a positive impact not only on those around them but also by setting in motion positive change that will last for generations to come.
The residential programme is an opportunity for the 2017 Queen's Young Leaders to come together for the first time, to foster partnerships and share ideas about how they can work together as a group to improve people's lives all over the Commonwealth.
We are delighted that these young people are being recognized for their life-changing work by Her Majesty The Queen and we hope that their time in the UK will inspire and enable them to pursue their work for others on an ever greater scale.
2017 British Pakistanis Buckingham Palace Diamond Jubilee Trust Facebook Faizan Hussain Pakistani student Queen Elizabeth Queen's Young Leaders Award Syed Faizan Hussain UK	2017-07-08
Tags 2017 British Pakistanis Buckingham Palace Diamond Jubilee Trust Facebook Faizan Hussain Pakistani student Queen Elizabeth Queen's Young Leaders Award Syed Faizan Hussain UK
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Raymond Leroy Bonney (April 5, 1892 – October 19, 1964) was an American ice hockey player who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics. He was born in Phoenix, New York. He was the goaltender who competed in 1920 for the American ice hockey team, which won the silver medal.

References

External links

Raymond Bonney's profile at Sports Reference.com

1892 births
1964 deaths
American men's ice hockey goaltenders
Ice hockey players from New York (state)
Ice hockey players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in ice hockey
People from Phoenix, New York
Pittsburgh Athletic Association ice hockey players
Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets (USAHA) players
St. Paul Athletic Club ice hockey players

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
XCar: Experimental Racing Download (1997 Sports Game)
Sports Games:
Download full XCar: Experimental Racing:
Download - Easy Setup (480 MB)
XCar: Experimental Racing screenshots:
With XCar: Experimental Racing, Bethesda has pulled out all the stops to create a racing simulation that defies all the rules. In this game, you race using a finely tuned racing vehicle that does not conform to any existing rules of racing. Tweak your car any way you like, and race at incredible speed on any of ten tracks modeled after real race courses. You may race at Lime Rock Park, Mid-Ohio, Putnam, and more. Choose from any of a number of pre-configured racing vehicles, then modify it to suit your needs. Alter the engine, gears, brakes, suspension, and tons of other options. Modifying the car tunes it to your racing needs.
XCar is based on Bethesda's proprietary Xngine technology, seen in their Future Shock and SKYnet games. This is a good example of how useful the engine is, since this is not a 3D action game. It works very well. Graphics are supported from 320x200 up to 800x600 resolution. Many texturing and detail options are also configurable, texture the roads, buildings, grass, put in smoke effects, even affect the weather. The look is excellent, and if you have the processing muscle, you can really make for a realistic environment.
Sound effects are quite good, and the music is pretty good as well. All sound options may be turned on or off to suit your needs. The simulation aspects are excellent, you really get a sense of speed as you zoom along the various courses. You may race in preseason, a single track race, qualifying, or circuit racing. XCar may be configured as an arcade racing game, or a realistic simulation.
In realistic mode, it is extremely difficult to control the vehicle. This IS experimental racing, isn't it? At speeds approaching 200 MPH, the vehicles can get out of control very easily, and it actually becomes a chore correcting for it. In arcade mode, the game is not as realistic, but it is a LOT of fun. I am glad Bethesda put that option into the game, as I feel computer racing fans will get a lot of use out of the arcade mode. You may adjust the settings so that you car cannot take damage, or even reduce the amount of damage the car will take. In other words, the configuration options within the game will certainly allow you to customize the game any way you prefer - from as real as possible to simple arcade racing with no damage or need for repair.
A paint shop is included with XCar, you may use it to create your own personal vehicle and decorate it any way you like. Unfortunately, you will need the full install option to save any vehicles.
Multiplayer options include IPX Network play or direct connection via modem. Native TCP/IP Internet play is not included. XCar has many options trying to please everyone, and in many ways it succeeds. True realism in the game is extremely difficult, even frustrating. But almost every aspect of the game may be modified to your own personal taste.
Bottom Line: Excellent graphics, and a host of options so you can modify the game to suit almost anyone's needs.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
This game has been set up to work on modern Windows (10/8/7/Vista/XP 64/32-bit) computers without problems.
People who downloaded XCar: Experimental Racing have also downloaded:
Xpand Rally, Xpand Rally Xtreme, World Wide Rally, Wreckin' Crew, Dirt Track Racing, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, World Tour Golf, WWE Raw (a.k.a. WWF Raw)


text:
'We need the rest of Australia to stand up': black lives matter here, too, campaigner says
Aboriginal people are over-represented in prison populations at Mobilong and elsewhere.
The images of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck, and of the protests and crackdowns that have followed across the United States, have shocked Australian audiences during the past fortnight.
But can we claim to be much better?
Here in our own backyard, 20 per cent of inmates at Mobilong Prison self-identify as Aboriginal, according to the Department for Correctional Services.
Across South Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are 12 times more likely than the general population to be in prison, making up 23.8% of the state's prison population at the end of last year but only 2.5% of the overall figure at the last census, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Add it all up and it becomes clear that injustice is not a uniquely American experience.
In fact, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were "the most incarcerated people on Earth", said Cheryl Axleby, chief executive officer of the Adelaide-based Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement and co-chair of the national Change the Record campaign.
"We know the pain of black Americans because it's a pain we feel as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country," she said.
"We've had 432 Aboriginal people die in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission (into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody).
"The shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in his own house (in the Northern Territory in November) was the first time we've had a police officer charged with murder in this country, with all those deaths.
"There's been no accountability and no justice in Australia."
One recent effort to change that has come through the Change the Record campaign, which has called on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to:
Change bail, mandatory sentencing and public drunkenness laws
Raise the legal age of responsibility from 10 to 14
Introduce independent oversight for police and deaths in custody
Implement the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody
Enact an optional protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture which sets standards for inspection of detention facilities
Ms Axleby particularly highlighted the push to keep young children out of the corrections system – something that would benefit all families, not just Aboriginal ones.
"Brain development in children between the ages of 10 and 14 gives them the tools to make decisions and think about the consequences of their behaviour," she said.
"Once children that age come into the system it's very difficult to direct them away."
Prison department acknowledges the problem
Improving outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders is an official objective of the Department for Correctional Services.
Its strategic plan for 2018-22 includes references to reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders in the corrections system, becoming an employer of choice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and addressing the specific needs of Aboriginal prisoners.
The department's Aboriginal services unit holds forums for Aboriginal inmates inside a different prison every six weeks, invites Aboriginal elders to visit Mobilong and other prisons every month, and offers several specialist programs to Aboriginal prisoners.
The ALRM had delivered rehabilitation programs for prisoners at Mobilong, Ms Axleby said, as well as supporting people at court appearances and assigning case workers to inmates prior to their release into Murray Bridge or other communities.
Since October the organisation has been funded to support ex-prisoners for up to two years after their release.
She encouraged Aboriginal families in Murray Bridge and surrounds to contact the ALRM whenever they had dealings with the justice or child protection system, at the earliest opportunity.
What can white Australians do to help?
The recent protests in the US have brought more non-Indigenous Australians' attention to bear on the issue, Ms Axleby said – but what could they do to help?
Building a "critical goodwill" for reform was important, she said.
That meant using petitions and other means to make politicians aware that the rate at which Aboriginal Australians were imprisoned needed to come down, and that contributing problems such as poverty and a lack of appropriate housing needed solving.
"We need the rest of Australia to stand up and say ... we need to address these issues in our own backyard," she said.
Recent media attention, prompted by the situation in the US, had helped, she said.
"People are becoming more informed and vocal that this is not acceptable in our country," she said.
More information, sign Change the Record's petition: changetherecord.org.au.
Contact the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement: Visit www.alrm.org.au or call 8113 3777.
Photos: Change the Record.


text:
Q: Converting int[] to String in C++ I have a string defined as std::string header = "00110033";
now I need the string to hold the byte values of the digits as if its constructed like this
char data_bytes[] = { 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 3, 3};
std::string header = new std::string(data_bytes, 8).c_str());

I converted the initial string to int array using atoi. Now i'm not sure how to make the string out of it. Let me know if there is any better approach.

A: you could write a little function
string int_array_to_string(int int_array[], int size_of_array) {
  string returnstring = "";
  for (int temp = 0; temp < size_of_array; temp++)
    returnstring += itoa(int_array[temp]);
  return returnstring;
}

untested!
a slightly different approach
string int_array_to_string(int int_array[], int size_of_array) {
  ostringstream oss("");
  for (int temp = 0; temp < size_of_array; temp++)
    oss << int_array[temp];
  return oss.str();
}

A: Do this:
  char data_bytes[] = { '0', '0', '1', '1', '0', '0', '3', '3', '\0'};
  std::string header(data_bytes, 8);

Or maybe, you want to do this:
  std::stringstream s;
  s << data_bytes;
  std::string header = s.str();

Demo at ideone : http://ideone.com/RzrYY

EDIT:
Last \0 in data_bytes is necessary. Also see this interesting output here: http://ideone.com/aYtlL
PS: I didn't know this before, thanks to Ashot I came to know this difference by experimenting!

A:  char data_bytes[] = { 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 3, 3};
  std::string str;
 for(int i =0;i<sizeof(data_bytes);++i)
      str.push_back('0'+data_bytes[i]);

A: Assuming you're using a "fairly normal" system where the numeric values of '0' to '9' are consecutive, you can just iterate over each element and subtract '0':
for(int i = 0; i < header.size(); ++i)
{
    header[i] -= '0';
}

A: You can do this:
std::string header( data_bytes, data_bytes + sizeof( data_bytes ) );
std::transform( header.begin(), header.end(), header.begin(),
     std::bind1st( std::plus< char >(), '0' ) );

A: If integ[] is the integer array, and s is the final string we wish to obtain,
string s="";

for(auto i=0;i<integ.size()-1; ++i)
    s += to_string(ans[i]);

cout<<s<<endl;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I find these very useful...if I have eaten too much or something I shouldn't have before I go to sleep I just take a tablet and I know that my sleep will not be interrupted by my digestion playing up!!
I have been using this throughout my pregnancy and continue to use it now postnatally. It's better value than other brands whilst having a similar composition.


JAC supports the special bi-partisan relationship between the U.S. and Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East. It is critical that we elect candidates who share that goal. Visit JAC's website to see what JAC's candidates have said about Israel, as well as their specific positions.
In this cycle, there are 23 Democratic Senators up for re-election. We cannot afford to lose a single seat. These candidates need your support; and we need them in the Senate to ensure that Congress continues its unwavering support for Israel. Join with JAC as we work to send our friends back to the Senate.


Bathtub Floor Trim picture bottom is part of the post in Bathtub Floor Trim gallery. Related with Bathtub Ideas category.
Bathtubs should luxury products but features we today find in almost all residences. Thanks to this, a lavish and relaxing soak within the tub is no more time something you only indulge within when on an costly holiday and putting way up within an expensive hotel space. On the contrary is actually an important part associated with your bathroom which you seem forward to using at the end of a boring day at work or perhaps perform.
If you're within the process of supervisory the construction of your own dream house, you'll normally want every detail to mirror your feeling of design and taste, like the bathroom. This calls for some research about the kinds associated with bathtubs out there with the industry nowadays. Having a clear picture does not only permit you get a far better knowledge of what you would like but will also inform you of any prerequisite conditions for the installation of that bath tub.
For Bathtub Ideas, You can find many ideas on the topic Trim, Floor, Bathtub, and many more on the internet, but in the post of Bathtub Floor Trim we have tried to select the best visual idea about Bathtub Ideas You also can look for more ideas on Bathtub Ideas category apart from the topic Bathtub Floor Trim.
This post published on Monday, August 13th, 2018 . Read 54 Inch Bathtub or find other post and pictures about Bathtub Ideas.


text:
package com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.service;

import com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.dao.MessageDataDAO;
import com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.interfaces.IMessageService;
import com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.model.Message;
import com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.model.MessageData;
import com.mitchbarry.privoto.core.model.MessageType;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Service;
import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartFile;

import java.io.BufferedOutputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.UUID;

/**
 * Created by Mitchell Barry on 10/18/14.
 */
@Service
public class FileBasedMessageService implements IMessageService {

    @Autowired
    private MessageDataDAO messageDataDAO;

    @Value("${storage.dir}")
    private String uploadDirectory;

    @Value("${hostname}")
    private String hostname;

    @Value("${protocol}")
    private String protocol;

    public FileBasedMessageService() { }

    // TODO: deprecate once we can retrieve per-user
    @Override
    public ArrayList<Message> getMessages() {
        File dir = new File(this.uploadDirectory);
        ArrayList<Message> messages = new ArrayList<>();

        if (!dir.exists())
            return messages;

        for (final File fileEntry : dir.listFiles()) {
            if (!fileEntry.isDirectory()) { // do not search recursively ... this is short-term until db
                Message msg = new Message();
                msg.setId(UUID.fromString(fileEntry.getName()));
                msg.setUrl(String.format("%s://%s/api/images/%s", protocol, hostname, msg.getId()));
                messages.add(msg);
            }
        }

        // test mysql!
        MessageData data = messageDataDAO.getMessageData(1);

        return messages;
    }

    @Override
    public Message postMessage(MultipartFile image, String textMessage, long decay) {
        Message msg = new Message();

        if (image == null || image.isEmpty()) {
            msg.setErrorMessage("ERROR: File contents empty");
            return msg;
        }

        try {
            msg.setData(image.getBytes());
            msg.setId(UUID.randomUUID());
            msg.setType(MessageType.Image);

            // create storage directory
            File dir = new File(this.uploadDirectory);
            if (!dir.exists())
                dir.mkdirs();

            // create the file
            File newImage = new File(dir.getAbsolutePath() +
                    File.separator + msg.getId());

            BufferedOutputStream stream = new BufferedOutputStream(
                    new FileOutputStream(newImage)
            );

            stream.write(msg.getData());
            stream.close();

            msg.setErrorMessage(null);

        } catch (Exception e) {
            msg.setErrorMessage(String.format("ERROR: %s - %s", e.getMessage(), e.getStackTrace()));
        }
        return msg;
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
True North: Journeys into the Great Northern Ocean
Item# TRUE
ISBN13: 978-0-942679-33-5
Form: Paperback, Trade paperback (US)
Journeys into the Great Northern Ocean
By Myron Arms
From the fiords of northern Labrador to the ice fields of western Greenland, from the outports of Newfoundland to the tiny fishing villages of Iceland and the Faroe Isles, best-selling author and lifelong sailor Myron Arms chronicles the experience of two-and-a-half decades of voyaging into some of the most remote destinations on Earth.
Presented as a series of sixteen personal essays, True North is at once a tale of white-knuckled adventure, a celebration of natural places, and a quest for contact with the planet we live on. The first five essays explore the motives of the author and those who sail with him on their first forays into the summer Atlantic. The next six essays evoke the allure of northern landscapes—the challenges of a stormy night at sea, the uncanny light of the Arctic sun at midnight, the pathos of pilot whales being driven to slaughter. The final five essays explore the geology, the archeology, the biochemistry, and the natural history of these same northern landscapes, broadening and universalizing their meaning until they become windows into the complex workings of the planet itself.
Thought-provoking and environmentally savvy, True North expresses one man's fierce determination "to encounter the natural world, to live deliberately within it, to strive to minimize one's footprint upon it, and to bear witness to it before it is altered irretrievably—before it is lost."
What People are Saying Sample Content
Myron Arms
Myron (Mike) Arms is the author of four previous books, including Servants of the Fish and Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice. He has published more than fifty feature articles in Cruising World, Sail, Blue Water Sailing, and many other sailing and adventure magazines.
Ever since their marriage in the early 1960s, Mike and his wife Kay have been dreaming up ways to go sailing together. Beginning with their week-long honeymoon on a borrowed sailboat, they have followed their dream for more than 40 years.
In the early 1970s they stopped out of busy lives ashore to home-school their three children during a nine-month voyage from the northeastern United States to the high islands of the Caribbean. Later, with a new and stronger boat, they turned their sights northward, eventually logging more than 140,000 blue-water miles, including two high-latitude crossings of the North Atlantic, a voyage to western Greenland, a circumnavigation of Iceland, four summers exploring Scandinavia and the British Isles, and numerous voyages to the Atlantic coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. Readers may sample these and other writings and may follow the Arms' future sailing adventures on the Web at www.myronarms.com.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Review reproduced in full)
True North: Journeys into the Great Northern Ocean Myron Arms Upper Access (upperaccess.com), $16.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-942679-33-5
Veteran sailor Arms (Servants of the Fish) writes a notable collection of essays of the sea and sailing in the far reaches of the Great Northern Ocean, braving the frigid waters and dodging the dangerous ice fields. His trusty boat, Brendan's Isle, and his sturdy crew, which includes his youngest son, Steve, move through these cold crossings with few perilous incidents , maintaining watch and the standard sea responsibilities. Arms's narrative is rich, descriptive, almost poetic, and full of voyaging on the water as he journeys along the fiords of northern Labrador to western Greenland and among the fishing villages of the Faroe Isles. Much more than a slight travelogue, the book hits its stride when Arms cautions against "expanding human waste, changing atmosphere chemistry, disappearing species, rising sea surface temperatures, thinning sea ice, and melting glaciers." (Jan.)
©2009 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
SAIL MAGAZINE (Reviewer: Meredith Laitos)
After lifelong sailor Myron Arms finished building his 50-ft cutter, he set off to the northern seas in search of adventure. Over the next two and a half decades he found isolated cultures, new companions, harsh weather and an enchanting pilgrimage that took him on the route of an ancient Irish warrior, Saint Brendan. Written as a series of 16 personal esseays, True North will leave you entranced with its tales of ice, mystery and hardship on some of the world's most challenging waters.
MAINE HARBORS (Reviewer: Carol Standish)
True North is the latest in the slight but remarkable oeuvre of Myron Arms. Teacher, sailor, explorer, writer, his previous work includes Riddle of the Ice (1998), Cathedral of the World (2000), and Servants of the Fish (2004). I am embarrassed to admit that I have read none of these books. Considering the length and breadth of my reading on marine subjects, how they escaped me is a mystery. However, if you are in my regrettable state, True North is a perfect introduction to Arms' work . ..
The ambitious itinerary gives you an indication of the breadth of Arms' preferred cruising grounds as well as his curiosity. But he wasn't just cruising and he wasn't just curious. A high school teacher in the 1970s, he traded in the classroom for his first blue water boat and founded (and led) a program of "sea learning" experiences. As a licensed Coast Guard ocean master, he sailed with hundreds of teenagers for the next five years. While aboard, they conducted a variety of scientific experiments. "The teacher was the sea…It was the beginning, really, of my own emerging awareness of the stresses being suffered by virtually all of the world's marine environments.
As the essays follow the journeys of Brendan's Isle over the years, scientific information and analysis becomes more of a narrative focus than the more simple pleasures of the beauty of the physical world and the exhilaration of sailing. With this focus, the text becomes more engrossing, the journey more unique and urgent and ages of the crews grow up–from high-school-ers to young adult "sail-trainees." What they discover over the course of more than twenty years is that in an environment that at first seems huge, fierce and implacable is as vulnerable as an alpine flower.
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW (Reviewer Micah Andrew)
The northern seas were never meant to be lived upon by humanity, but that never stops some people. "True North: Journeys Into the Great Northern Ocean" tells the story of life in the northern seas from Myron Arms as he reflects on his times in the northern Atlantic through essays on his adventures. A new perspective on ocean life and the arctic circle, "True North" is an entertaining and intriguing read that should not be ignored.
AARP MAGAZINE
"Books for Grownups" Column
Veteran sailor Arms delivers a richly descriptive, almost poetic collection of essays about sailing up and down fiords from northern Labrador to western Greenland and among the fishing villages of the Faroe Isles. The sturdy crew of his trusty boat, Brendan's Isle, included his youngest son, Steve.
Perfect Travelers
Imagine a moment in the Northern Ocean one morning fourteen centuries ago, in a time when the Earth had not yet been ravaged by humankind: The surface of the water rises and falls in a lazy swell under a featureless gray sky. There is no sound of wind. The sun appears as a dim halo of light obscured behind ribbons of stratus cloud. Seabirds wheel and dive over a series of concentric rings in the water where a pair of whales has just sounded. Near the rings, shrouded in a veil of mist, moves a tiny ship, forty feet long and ten feet wide, fashioned out of animal skins and wood.
From a short distance away the ship looks like the discarded shoe of some gigantic walker of the Earth, covered as it is with rectangular slabs of blackened ox hide and sewn together with heavy thongs of horsehair, flax, and tallow. Brown flaxen sails are lashed to yardarms atop the two wooden masts, each sail painted with red ochre in the form of a Celtic cross. At the masthead above the larger of the sails, a long silken pennant hangs limp in the stagnant air.
A company of fifteen men lives in this ship. Several stand together this morning in the uncovered center section of the vessel, two facing forward on either side of the steering oar, four others facing aft and pulling together on a pair of long wooden sweeps. The remainder of the company rests in the ship's dank bowels where they endure the semi-darkness and the high animal odor of a place where too many men have lived and eaten and slept in uncomfortable proximity for too long.
The voyage these men have made is nearly six weeks old, although most of them have forgotten this fact by now. The continual parade of nights and days of wandering across ice-strewn seas has caused the measure of time to grow indistinct. Hours have passed into days and days have passed into weeks until there is no longer any certain means of counting the time. The men have sailed their ship to the accompaniment of rain and sleet and summer gales until it seems they will never see the land again… until this moment… this long awaited, terrifying moment.
Suddenly somewhere beyond the curtain of fog come the sounds of an unknown coast—the faint chatter of seals, the cry of gulls, the grinding of surf against a granite shore—sounds that stop the breath of every man aboard the ship. The dangers these sailors have faced for so long, dangers of storm and cold, hunger and fatigue, seem in this moment almost benign as they are replaced by the even more uncertain dangers of the land.
The leader of the company moves aft to take over the steering oar. He exhorts his shipmates to gather their resolve and to arm their spirits with hope. He utters a prayer of thanksgiving to the Christian God whom he is certain has brought them to this landfall, and he points the leather ship in the direction of the sound, urging his oarsmen onward.
The loom of a rockbound headland materializes slowly out of the mist as the helmsman maneuvers the leather ship into the mouth of a large bay. In another few minutes the air clears completely, revealing "a wide land, rich in fruit and flowers and autumnal trees." The helmsman propels the vessel deep into the bay until it is engulfed by the sweeping shoreline. Here he makes one final pull on the steering oar, driving the prow of the ship onto a beach of golden sand. He climbs to the gunwale, steps out onto the shore, and falls to his knees in prayer.
When he rises to his feet again, he surveys the shoreline and the lush forests beyond with a slow sweep of his eyes. Surely, he thinks, this is the land that has filled his imagination for so long—the land that Barrind described to him, the place Saint Mernoc visited so many times. Surely this is the green and fruitful glade that holy men and poets have for generations called the Promised Land, the "Blessed Isle of the Saints."
In this manner, on an anonymous summer morning in the sixth century of the Christian era, the Irish sailor-saint, Brendan of Kerry, is said to have achieved the object of his quest: landfall on the lush and elusive island referred to ever since as Saint Brendan's Isle. The tale of this voyage is recounted in the pages of a Latin text, written down several hundred years later and known throughout medieval Europe as the Navigatio Sancti Brendani. The story was widely popular during medieval times, attested to by the fact that more than a hundred hand-copied manuscripts still survive.
The tale continues in the words of the Latin text: [Brendan and] the monks disembarked… [and] when they had gone in a circle around land, it was still light. They ate fruit and drank water, and in forty days' exploring did not come to the end of the land.
The text concludes with reports of further exploration, with the discovery of a "great river" that divides the land, and with an encounter with a holy man who speaks to Brendan in his own language. This man cautions Brendan to return without delay to his home in western Ireland and foretells of the sailor's approaching death. In a few more paragraphs the story ends. Brendan sails home and dies soon afterwards among his friends and disciples, but not before he is able to describe to them—and eventually to the world—all the wonders he has witnessed.
Ever since the writing down of the Navigatio more than a thousand years ago, the question has remained: Was Brendan's journey to the mysterious island a real voyage? And is the place that he is said to have discovered a real place? Archeologists and explorers, geographers and historians have argued about this question for generations. Cartographers during the first few centuries of the Age of European Discovery drew imaginary locations for Brendan's Isle in every corner of the North Atlantic Ocean. On some of the maps it was located where the Azores are now known to be. On others it appeared near Bermuda, Iceland, or Newfoundland. But on most of the early maps, it was simply drawn as a mysterious terra incognita, a land shrouded in fog somewhere out in the trackless waste of the northern ocean, surrounded by strange sea creatures and monsters of the deep. In our own times there has been renewed interest in confirming (or debunking) the historical veracity of the voyages of Saint Brendan. In the late 1970s an intrepid young historian, Tim Severin, actually built a replica of Brendan's leather curragh and sailed it from County Kerry in western Ireland to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland in an attempt to prove the feasibility of such an undertaking. The story of his two-year odyssey was chronicled in a book, The Brendan Voyage, and later also appeared as a featured photo-essay in National Geographic. Yet even as Severin's modern voyage proved without a doubt that such a journey could be accomplished, it still stopped short of proving that a particular Irish cleric had made an actual historical voyage to a real place somewhere in the wilds of the western Atlantic.
In spite of all attempts to the contrary, it seems that the saga of Brendan and his fourteen "jolly saintes" belongs to the realm of legend—and here, in all probability, it will remain. Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps in the end it doesn't really matter whether there was an actual historical person named Brendan of Kerry who sailed an actual leather ship to the shores of the New World. The most important thing about this intrepid Irish explorer may simply be that we have his story. And his story, whether fact or legend, may be all we need.
The saga of Brendan's seven-year odyssey is unique in two important ways. Not only does it survive as the earliest written account of European contact with the unknown lands beyond the western ocean, but it also stands alone in the literature of European discovery as a testimony to a special kind of journey—a journey of the imagination and the spirit. Brendan and his crew set out in search of the Blessed Isle without economic motives or self-aggrandizing schemes. Their purpose was not to lay claim to new territories, subjugate native populations, or seek for gold or riches. They weren't looking for a northwest passage to the Orient. They weren't planning to trap for furs or establish a summer fishing station. They had, in fact, no other purpose for making their voyage than to witness for themselves the grand and terrible beauty of a wilderness they had heard extolled in legend but had otherwise only vaguely dreamed. "The themes [of the Navigatio]," writes American nature writer Barry Lopez, "are of compassion, wonder, and respect" as opposed to the more familiar themes of bloodshed, plunder, greed, and conquest that typify so much of the history of early European contact with the American continent. Nowhere else in the long chronicle of European discovery is there a tale of another voyage quite like this one.
The Icelandic Sagas of the tenth and eleventh centuries describe several attempts by early Norse explorers to wrest fertile lands from their aboriginal inhabitants and to establish permanent trading colonies of their own on the shores of the New World. Four centuries later, the record of the Columbus voyages echoes many of the same themes and establishes the rule for all who would follow—Cortez and Balboa, Verazanno and Cabot, Frobisher and Cartier—as they set out to plunder the American continent or to discover lucrative trade routes to the wealthy markets of the Far East. Hundreds (eventually thousands) followed in the footsteps of these early explorers, virtually all of them seeking land or power or economic gain. The Navigatio of Saint Brendan, in contrast, is the tale of a voyage with a simpler objective. As Lopez again observes, it is the story of a group of "impeccable, generous, innocent, attentive men [who] were, one must think, the perfect travelers." Their journey was a pilgrimage of sorts, yet they did not sail as proselytizers or missionaries. Instead, they pursued their quest as celebrators of the Earth and as chroniclers of its awesome majesty. It was enough for these travelers to bring home memories of what they had seen and afterwards to tell the story or their voyage to all who would listen.
I first learned about the voyages of Saint Brendan more than two decades ago, during a time when I was building a sailboat in my back yard. With my wife Kay and our friend John Griffiths, I worked full time on that boat for almost a year. In the evenings I would read a few pages of Severin's The Brendan Voyage—that is, when I could stay awake long enough to read anything at all. Then, when daylight came again, I would head back down to the boat for another ten or twelve or fourteen hours of work.
For much of that year the sailboat had no name, although I was too busy at the time to worry about such secondary details. The name would come, I knew, in its own good time. Meanwhile there were more important things to worry about: things such as designing plywood templates for bunks and settees, ordering the next three thousand board feet of Philippine mahogany, cutting out seven hundred cypress plugs on the drill press, gluing up thirty-five cupboard doors, building the icebox and the navigator's table and the companionway stairs.
I knew what I was hoping to do with this boat once she was finished and launched. I wanted to sail her to the lonely coasts around the rim of the North Atlantic basin. I wanted to explore some of the natural places and see some of the wonders that old Saint Brendan himself may have witnessed during his seven years of wandering about the northern ocean. It therefore came as no surprise when the boat's name suddenly occurred to me—not as an idea but as an incontrovertible fact, as something that had always been. It came while I was working one morning fitting a piece of cabinetry in the main saloon. I was staring at the plank in my hand, concentrating on the asymmetrical sweep of its grain, preparing to mark with a pencil and compass the line that it would take as it fit against the irregular inner surface of the hull. One moment there was nothing in my mind but the task before me. The next moment there was a name: Brendan's Isle. I felt as if I'd just emerged from some kind of temporary amnesia. Surely, I thought, I'd seen this name before. Maybe it had been written on the bill of lading from the shipping company that had delivered the empty hull and deck from the shipyard in Taiwan. Maybe it had been stamped onto the pine crates containing the spars and standing rigging that had come from New Zealand. Or maybe it had always been there, printed on the boat's transom in some kind of invisible braille, and I had only just now learned how to decipher the shape of the letters.
Brendan's Isle: the name had a romantic ring to it, a suggestion of faraway lands and olden times. It brought to mind the geography of the northern Atlantic—an apt connotation in light of the plans that were already forming in my mind about the places I wanted to sail. The name also suggested good luck. Saint Brendan, by all reports, had been an unusually lucky sailor. His chroniclers often used the phrase "Brendan luck" when describing the knack he seemed to have for avoiding dangers, weathering storms, surviving crises, finding safe landfalls.
On the more practical side, the name Brendan's Isle was short and unambiguous. On a radio call it would be quick to say. On a customs declaration it would be easy to spell. People would be able to remember it—unlike so many exotic yacht names that are virtually impossible to read or pronounce. In short, Brendan's Isle had all the necessary attributes a sailor seeks when he wishes to name a little ship. The phrase was both beautiful and simple. And it seemed to speak to the particular purpose of the boat I was building. It was a name for the grand and mysterious places my shipmates and I would one day be setting out to find, the questions we would be trying to articulate, perhaps even some of the answers we would be hoping to find.
By July 1983 the building project was far enough along that we were able to launch and sail Brendan's Isle for a month, from the Chesapeake Bay to the southern coast of New England and home again, in order to sea test her systems and shake down her rig. The following winter Kay and I worked (without John) for another fifteen hundred hours, completing all the final modifications that the boat would need in order to be ready to take on the North Atlantic Ocean the following spring.
Brendan's sailing plan for the next two years began with a high-latitude crossing of the North Atlantic, a route that took her out past the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, across "iceberg alley," close past the southern capes of Greenland and Iceland, and on toward the coasts of northwestern Europe. Her first landfall, some twenty-three days and three thousand nautical miles after leaving the Chesapeake Bay, was in the Faroe Isles, a mountainous archipelago several hundred miles east of Iceland and almost the same distance due north of Scotland. The Faroes were a convenient stopping place for Brendan's Isle and her crew on this frigid west-to-east crossing of the North Atlantic, just as they may also have been for old Saint Brendan as he made his way out into the wilds of the western ocean while sailing in the opposite direction. If, as Tim Severin argues, the old sailorsaint followed the so-called "stepping stone" route across the North Atlantic, he would almost certainly have visited the Faroes (preceded by landfalls in the western Hebrides of Scotland, and followed by visits to Iceland, southern Greenland, and perhaps also the Atlantic coasts of Labrador or Newfoundland). According to the Navigatio, Brendan and his shipmates made landfalls early in their travels in a pair of hauntingly beautiful places Details of the construction of Brendan's Isle's main cabin described variously as the "Isle of Sheep" and the "Paradise of Birds." Both names strongly suggest the Faroe Isles—as they surely must have appeared a millennium and a half ago and as they still appear today.
I had no conscious intention, as my shipmates and I started off across the Atlantic in the spring of 1984, of following in the footsteps of the old Irish sailor-saint. The legend of Brendan's voyage was engaging—the idea of a mysterious island somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic was romantic and exciting. These were reason enough, I felt, for the name that appeared on the transom of our little sailboat. I had no thought as our first summer's sailing plans evolved of following specific routes that Brendan may have followed or of visiting particular places that he may also have visited.
Yet the morning that Brendan's Isle sailed up into Hestur Sound, Faroe Isles, and anchored near a place called Brandarsvik ("Brendan's Creek"), I admit I felt a strange sense of oughtness, as if we had sailed all these three thousand miles just to be in this setting. There was an aura about this place, a ghostlike presence that seemed to bridge the centuries and transform legend into living fact. The ruins of an ancient Christian chapel hunched on the beach, casting the shadows of its crumbling stone revetments on the sand. The dark green hills behind the ruins were dotted with sheep. A thousand feet overhead a thousand seabirds circled in The ruins of an ancient Christian chapel at Brandarsvik, Faroe Isles silence, and for a moment I felt as if I could see the silhouette of a tiny leather ship lying at anchor near the mouth of the creek and the spectral forms of fifteen ragged sailors huddled at the chapel gates, seeking advice from the holy man within about where next to point their bows in their quest for the Blessed Isle.
Two and a half decades have passed since that day in Brandarsvik—two and a half decades during which I and Brendan's Isle have voyaged over one hundred thousand sea miles and have visited, in utterly haphazard fashion, virtually every one of the "stepping stones" that the old Irish sailor-saint might arguably have visited during his (equally haphazard) meanderings about the northern ocean. According to the Navigatio, Saint Brendan pursued his quest for seven years, ranging about the Atlantic each summer in a primitive and ungainly vessel whose speed and course were often dictated by the vagaries of wind and weather, and whose ultimate destinations were therefore often left entirely to chance. Each year at the end of their summer's voyaging, he and his shipmates would seek safe haven to rest themselves and to repair and reprovision their little vessel. Then, the following spring, they would set off once again with a renewed sense of purpose and an ever stronger hope that somehow, this time, they might happen upon the object of their quest.
In contrast, our travels aboard a modern, well-found yacht, efficient in its sail plan and equipped with all the miracles of modern electronic navigation, have been much more predictable. Each of the forays I've made into the North Atlantic during the past twenty-five years has been carefully conceived and painstakingly planned. Each has had a cruising agenda; each has had a timetable; each has had a set of predictable destinations. Twice I, with a small crew, have taken Brendan's Isle from the eastern seaboard of the United States across the top of the Atlantic to Scandinavia, both times calling at the Faroe Isles (and both times visiting the ruins at Brandarsvik). On the first of these journeys, after a winter layover in southern Denmark, we crossed the North Sea to spend a month exploring the western coast of Scotland, and another month visiting the bays and sounds of southwestern Ireland. On the second, we paused to visit the Westmann Islands, south of Iceland, then to circumnavigate Iceland in its entirety. And both between and after these journeys, we visited the Atlantic coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador on numerous occasions, one of which included a mid-summer crossing of the Labrador Sea and an exploration of western Greenland all the way to the great ice fields of Disko Bay, three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
In the beginning, as I've said, I had no conscious intention of following in the footsteps of the old Irish navigator, retracing his voyages, visiting all the strange and marvelous places he might have visited. But fifteen years later, as I began to reflect on the record of my own travels, I realized that Brendan's Isle and I had in fact been pursuing an unspoken pilgrimage of sorts, stringing together a series of voyages that may have seemed random and disconnected when considered separately, but that began to form a compelling pattern when considered as a whole.
Eventually, by the summer of 1998, I realized there were only a handful of stopping places along the old "stepping stone" route that Brendan's Isle had not visited, and I set about to rectify the oversight. That summer, during our second circumnavigation of Newfoundland, Kay and I and our shipmates visited the tiny village of Saint Brendan (as good a candidate as any for the actual historical site of Brendan's New World landfall). Two years later, during our second eastbound trans- Atlantic crossing, we paused to call at the volcanic Westmann Islands, south of Iceland, there to witness the eerie, desert-like nakedness of Surtsey, a recently formed volcanic pinnacle that may be a modern counterpart to Saint Brendan's "Island of Smiths," the smoke-belching A view of Brandarsvik from the road above the settlement island in the Navigatio whose inhabitants hurtled hot, molten rocks at the monks as they sailed past.
Finally, two decades and more after we had first made landfall at the ruins at Brandarsvik, I began to feel as if I and all those who had sailed with me were on the cusp of completing a quest that we had been pursuing, consciously or not, for many years. We had sailed for one hundred thousand sea miles around the rim of the northern Atlantic, and now, with our circumnavigation of Iceland, we had managed to assemble a sequence of landfalls that might easily have been made by our legendary predecessor— and thus to have fashioned a modern "Brendan voyage" of our own. The essays that follow are intended as a chronicle of this voyage—or really this series of voyages—and as a celebration of the natural places that Brendan's Isle and her crews and I have visited along the way. They are offered, with all humility, in the spirit of those perfect travelers, those "impeccable, generous, innocent, attentive men" who were satisfied simply to experience for themselves all the wonders of the natural world and afterwards to tell the story of their voyage.
There will be no overt political agenda here—with one important caveat. The "pristine wilderness" that Saint Brendan and his shipmates discovered in their travels and that were later described in the pages of the Navigatio no longer exists. Much as we might wish it otherwise, we, as a species, have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations over the past thousand years in taming the wild places, subjugating nature, establishing our imprint upon virtually every square inch of this planet. Some of this imprinting may be relatively harmless and inconsequential—styrofoam coffee cups washing up on the beaches of Antarctica, broken soda-pop bottles disintegrating into sea glass on the ocean floor. But much of it—the vast preponderance of it—is far more onerous. As we, the seven billion, have succeeded in taming the wilderness, we have also begun to alter it, often to the detriment of both the other species who live there and of ourselves.
Of necessity, the essays that follow are therefore set within an inevitable if often unspoken context of expanding human waste-streams, changing atmospheric chemistry, disappearing species, rising sea surface temperatures, thinning sea ice, melting glaciers. These things are. They exist as part of the landscape now—so that to claim to bear witness to the beauty of the natural places without also recognizing these threats to their survival is to fabricate a lie. Much as Rachael Carson did more than fifty years ago, I have also learned that it is no longer possible to celebrate the intricate natural rhythms of "the sea around us" without also becoming aware of the human-induced changes that threaten those rhythms from every side. The age of innocence is past. We can no longer roam the Earth as old Saint Brendan may once have done, marveling in childlike wonderment at a pristine and unaltered nature. Instead, if we are honest with ourselves, we now must travel as my shipmates and I have tried to do aboard Brendan's Isle: aware of the changes that are taking place, deeply appreciative of the beauty that remains, armed with a kind of urgency that moves one at every moment to encounter the natural world, to live deliberately within it, to strive to minimize one's footprint upon it, and to bear witness to it before it is altered irretrievably—before it is lost


Not surprisingly, when we advise clients to invest in a given investment, they ask not only for the details regarding the manager and the strategy, but also about how various economic factors might affect their investment in the future.
Among the various factors they reference, those that come up most often are: interest rates, stock market volatility, foreign exchange fluctuations, oil prices, and Canadian real estate prices. While we do make an effort to qualify (i.e., "good" vs. "bad") how variability in these factors might affect the investment over time, we assiduously avoid two things. First, we do not try to quantify the gain or loss to the investment in dollars or percentage terms. And second, we ensure that no factor is seen in a vacuum, acting independently of the others.
The problem with trying to quantify exactly how certain events will affect investment boils down to this: by putting a number on it ("If 2008 happens all over again you would expect to lose 16.85 per cent") gives the analysis far more credence than it deserves. All stress testing, irrespective of (or possibly in direct relation to) its level of sophistication and detail, requires the adoption of a multitude of assumptions that have a lot more to do with the "answer" than does the math itself.
For example, looking at the 2008 financial crisis from peak to trough and back again, there were so many moving parts that all contributed in some way to the market dislocation, many of which might not be present in the next iteration of a crash: years of easy money and lax underwriting in the real estate market, a lack of regulation in the banking sector resulting in "too big to fail" scenarios, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the election of Barack Obama, and a Fed chairman who just happened to be among the world's foremost experts on the causes and cures of financial crises.
Who's to say that that particular alchemy will ever appear again? A 2018 crash could be very different, resulting from wholly different causes and effects in the chain of investment experiences.
Thus, to plug numbers into a supercomputer and declare how a particular investment (or portfolio) would fare under something as broad as a future "2008 crisis" — and to two decimal places — lacks any probative value and is nothing but an exercise in meaningless mathematics.
Rather, we prefer to deal with stress-testing analysis that, while far less precise, is probably more useful. We think of everything in terms of a -3 to +3 scale, where zero is neutral, -3 is "very bad" and +3 is "very good." In this light, a crash in oil prices is necessarily "very bad" to an investment in oil stocks, while a decrease in interest rates is necessarily "very good" for long-dated corporate bonds.
Our goal, rather than to quantify gains and losses under difference scenarios, is to determine a weighted "good/neutral/bad" score for each economic condition across an entire portfolio, with the ultimate goal of having the weighted average for each factor hovering somewhere between -1 and +1 ("more or less neutral"), allowing investors to sleep relatively well at night.
For example, if I score each of my investments on, say, "interest rates go up," I would hope that my portfolio would be constructed with enough investments that would benefit from an increase in rates as those that would suffer under the same conditions.
Although the "good/neutral/bad" approach avoids the quantification problem, and certainly adds an analytical tool (especially from a portfolio perspective), its usefulness must still be tested in light of the fact that it's never the case in real life that one factor, such as interest rates, changes without affecting one or more other factors, such as foreign exchange rates.
For example, a simplistic view on oil prices would suggest that owning any oil stocks would be bad if prices were to decrease over time. But overlay on to that the possibility that oil prices might fall due to an increase in American production and reduction in American regulatory hurdles, all while the U.S. dollar would almost surely increase in relation to the Canadian dollar, and suddenly owning an America oil producer's stock might not look so bad when expressed in Canadian dollars.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine a world in which interest rates increase without a sound economy and strong stock market. In this light, simply saying that an increase in rates is "very bad" for long-dated corporate bonds ignores the fact that a strong market could lead to a decrease in corporate spreads that more than offsets an increase in base rates, thereby resulting in a score of 0, or maybe -1, as opposed to an automatic -3.
Here's the bottom line: it is very worthwhile to look at your portfolio, and its constituent elements, and engage in a "what if" exercise. It's also incredibly important that this exercise demonstrate that your entire portfolio is not utterly dependent on any single macroeconomic factor that is entirely out of your (or your investment manager's) control.
Once you have determined that you are, in fact, well diversified across "what if" scenarios, trying to overcomplicate or oversimplify the problem through complex math or stand-alone factor analysis will either give you a false sense of security or faulty notion of where your risk lies and how it is managed.
Rather, you should strive to have an investment portfolio that is nuanced enough in its construction to withstand the interconnected variability in economic factors that are sure to arise.


Back in December, we reported on ResetEra moderator Dusk Golem's claims of having insider knowledge on a Resident Evil 3: Nemesis reboot - they basically said that, yeah, it's happening.
Golem's been known to reveal Resident Evil-related content way before it's released. And given the attention that the just-released Resident Evil 2 remake had at the time (and its critical and commercial success of right now - it just debuted at number one in the UK), to say that Capcom might be toying with the idea is likely an understatement. It has to happen, right?
That's what my money's on, anyway. Especially considering what Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, producer of 2019's brilliantly bloody Resident Evil 2 remake, has recently teased: he revealed that Capcom will consider a Resident Evil 3 reboot as long as the game's original players are enthusiastic about it.
Translated by Gear Nuke, Hirabayashi told Japanese publication Game Watch that Capcom remade Resident Evil 2 because, even after 20 years, fans continued to request a revisit to the Raccoon Police Department.
And as long as this month's RE2 was well received, and as long as the studio has permission from fans to develop another remake (of course you do!), then a new and (hopefully) improved Resident Evil 3 may release, later down the line. So, basically, keep on at Capcom if you'd like it to happen; tell them what you want. Which is a Nemesis reboot, obviously.
It took *just* the 21 years to reintroduce Resident Evil 2. So even though the producer's comments are promising, don't be expecting a shiny new version of Nemesis any time soon.
Capcom's first complete remake is more than double the length of its original form, too. These things don't simply happen over night, you know.
In the meantime, let us know what do you think about his interview, and if you'd like to see a Resident Evil 3 reboot next.


text:
British Council Libraries Consortium
The Heretic's Treasure
by Scott Mariani
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AN EXHILARATING TREASURE-HUNT THRILLER FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart . . . packs a real punch' Andy McDermott An ancient fortune has lain hidden for thousands of years, one so powerful that men will kill to protect it. And only one man can unearth it... Ex-SAS operative Ben Hope is living a peaceful life in rural France – until a phone call from an old army comrade turns his world upside down. Eminent Egyptologist Morgan Paxton has been brutally murdered while working on the mysterious 'Akhenaten Project' in Cairo, and Colonel Harry Paxton wants Ben to find his son's killer. Ben is unable to refuse the request from the man who once saved his life – but when Harry asks him to avenge his son's death he's in dangerous territory. Made worse by the fact that he finds himself attracted to Zara Paxton, Harry's new bride. Carving through the seedy Cairo underworld, Ben soon realises that there was more to Paxton's research than meets the eye as he is plunged into one double-cross after another. His mission leads him from Italy and Paris via the coast of Scotland to the banks of the Nile, climaxing in a tense showdown in the war-torn Sudanese desert. At the end of the trail lies the ultimate treasure, hidden away by three rebel High Priests during the reign of the 'Heretic' Pharoah Akhenaten – a collection so valuable that some will stop at nothing to possess it... The Ben Hope series is a must-read for fans of Dan Brown, Lee Child and Mark Dawson. Join the millions of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to a new Ben Hope thriller begins... Whilst the Ben Hope thrillers can be read in any order, this is the fourth book in the series.
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Scott Mariani - Author
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The Constance Drive House is a Romanesque house facing western views across northwest Seattle's Magnolia Boulevard.
Rhodes Architecture + Light was asked to develop a design for a large addition to and renovation of this home including a new family room, kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, a master suite, foyer, and office. Crucial to the design was the creation of an eastern entrance since the house was always entered from this direction and the existing formal entrance on the southwest was not used. The creation of a new entrance included the landscaping of the rear yard, new terraces, new exterior and interior foyers and new open space incorporating the added kitchen, family room, a mudroom, and foyers. New electrical, plumbing, and radiant hydronic heating systems were also added to the house.
Since this was an extensive addition to an existing Romanesque house it was critical that the new space flow into the existing plan and feel original to the house. Rhodes Architecture + Light studied the period style and details of the house and selected forms, materials, and finishes that were contemporary yet derived from the colors and textures of the Romanesque period.


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Boot Dusseldorf cancelled for 2021
Conservation,News
Green Technology,News
Ocean construction area now larger than Belgium
A first-ever survey of marine-built structures projects rapid growth
By Ryan Swift	| 10 December 2020
A new study has revealed that manmade structures now cover 32,000 square kilometres of seacapes and coastlines. That's a size greater than the total area of Belgium. The authors of the report, a consortium of researchers from Australia, Italy and the UK, projected that the area of seascape altered by human construction would rise to 39,000 square kilometres by 2028, an increase of over 20% in just eight years.
Calculating the true extent of seascape construction was made difficult due to much of the construction being underwater. The report covered structures such as ports, oil rigs and underwater sea cables. The conclusions likely underestimated the true scale and impact of manmade structures in the ocean.
The report said that marinas were the fourth biggest manmade structure in ocean waters, after aquaculture, commercial ports and artificial reef structures. Approximately half of US coastline has been impacted by construction and development, limiting biodiversity and impacting ocean health. China and its Exclusive Economic Zone (an ocean area extending 200 nautical miles from shore) was now responsible for approximately 40% of global ocean construction.
The authors also suggested that such structures would leave shorelines more vulnerable to sea level rise, in addition to damaging habitats.
Land reclamation is a major source of coastal disturbance. Between 1950 and 2008, China reclaimed 13,380 square kilometres of land.
Manmade islands accounted for 282 square kilometres of seascape construction area, with 479 man-made islands found by the research team. The world's largest manmade island is 970 square kilometres in the Netherlands, and which constitutes almost the entire province in the Netherlands. The island was completed in 1968. More recent projects are located in the UAE and the Maldives, as well as new offshore airport structures.
Organisers announce preparations for 2022


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WATCH: Philip Rivers & Antonio Gates Get Standing Ovation
By	Jonathan Adams
Updated Dec 20, 2015 at 8:09pm
Rumors continue to swirl about the future of the Chargers in San Diego. The Chargers played what many believe will be their last home game in San Diego as the Chargers won 30-14 over the Dolphins.
The Chargers honored Philip Rivers, Antonio Gates and Malcolm Floyd by taking them out of the game during the final minute. Mike McCoy deliberately took a delay of game penalty to allow the trio to come out of the game. They received a standing ovation from the fans in San Diego.
Rivers, Gates and Floyd have been the backbone of the franchise for over a decade. It was a touching moment and showed how much the team means to the San Diego community.
Philip Rivers, Malcom Floyd and Antonio Gates all coming out of the game and receive a standing ovation from the crowd. ⚡⚡
— #MIAvsSD (@Chargers) December 21, 2015
Seeing McCoy pull Rivers, Gates and Floyd off for a last ovation from everyone at the Q made me super sentimental.
— Ranulfo (@lionheartghost) December 21, 2015
Whether the Chargers will end up moving remains to be seen. The NFL will be conducting research to see if a team and stadium in Los Angeles is viable.
Published Dec 20, 2015 at 7:51pm
Football, NFL, San Diego Chargers
Philip Rivers, Antonio Gates and Malcolm Floyd may have just played their last game in San Diego. Watch the reaction here.