text:
Snow hits London as the Met office issues an AMBER weather warning for the South East
One woman who "exposed" Hilaria Baldwin's "Spanish Grift" says she should own what she did
The woman who started the debate on Hilaria Baldwin's Spanish roots has said the influencer "should own what she did".
The woman, who posts @lenibriscoe on Twitter, said the influencer and yoga instructor is not getting clean despite posting videos on Instagram and interviewing the New York Times.
Briscoe – who is herself white and attended the elite Vassar liberal arts college in New York – said Baldwin was "insulting and false" to falsely claim she was from Spain for taking opportunities from people who are truly Hispanic Have roots.
In her first interview, Briscoe told DailyMail.com she had little regret and posted the tweet on December 21st out of boredom.
Briscoe, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "People asked me if you had nothing better to do and the answer is no, I don't.
"It's a pandemic, it's cold outside and I'm not celebrating Christmas."
The woman who started the debate on Hilaria Baldwin's Spanish roots said she should "own what she did".
The woman, who posts @lenibriscoe on Twitter, said the influencer and yoga instructor is not getting clean despite posting videos on Instagram and interviewing the New York Times
"Yes, I am a white girl. I'm a white girl, "the 36-year-old influencer admitted after a backlash. "Let us make it very clear that there are many white people in Europe and my family is white. Ethnically, I'm a mix of many, many, many things. & # 39;
Baldwin and her husband Alec Baldwin have been under close watch over their Christmas holidays since Briscoe's tweet sparked a firestorm on social media.
The tweet said, "You must admire Hilaria Baldwin's dedication to her decade-long grift in which she poses as a Spaniard."
It was liked 20,000 times and resulted in dozens of people finding examples of Baldwin with a Spanish accent, a harrowing contrast to her childhood in Boston, where she was known as Hillary and viewed as white by her classmates.
Briscoe, who lives in New York, said she fired the tweet because she was "locked up" during the pandemic.
There wasn't a particular thing Baldwin did that set it off, but Briscoe said, "My friends took their yoga class in New York and their accent was really consistent (Spanish)."
She added: "It is offensive and wrong to pose as an immigrant and speak English as a second language and use the real experiences of actual migrant women. That didn't happen.
She wrote in a post that people in the park think she is the nanny because her children are blonde and have blue eyes. Something happens to colored mothers who actually have an accent.
"This is offensive, these are tough experiences that people actually have, and she pretended to be. It's not really necessary. She could be a hot white influencer. Lots of people do that. & # 39;
Briscoe said Baldwin is seizing opportunities that should be given to people who are truly Hispanic. Because of the limited space on TV shows and magazines, those opportunities should have benefited someone other than a white person
Briscoe said, "She said in a post that people in the park think she's the nanny because her kids are blonde and have blue eyes. Something happens to colored mothers who actually have an accent. This is offensive, these are tough experiences that people actually had, and they pretended to be. It's not really necessary. She could be a hot white influencer. Lots of people do that & # 39;
Briscoe said Baldwin is seizing opportunities that should be given to people who are truly Hispanic. Because of the limited space on TV shows and magazines, those opportunities should have benefited someone other than a white person.
Briscoe said, "When I started I didn't know she was posing as (Spanish) and other people found articles in which she talked about (Spanish) culture. That makes it worse for me. & # 39;
When Briscoe sent the tweet, she thought "not that much was going to happen" and that "maybe people would talk about it on Twitter and it would be funny".
She said, "That was until they did these response videos and now they haven't really helped, right?"
In her video, Baldwin admitted, "Yes, I'm a white girl," while Alec made his own video berating critics and comparing Briscoe to a used coaster.
Briscoe replied on Twitter, "Did Alec Baldwin just call me Basura (garbage) and compare me to QAnon Sir, that's not it."
After that, Briscoe's notifications "got completely out of control" and their followers rose from 1,700 to 8,200.
She said: & # 39; The first couple of articles on NBC were very pro Hillary, as Hilaria shoots back, only the tone seemed very corporate as Alec Baldwin is on (NBC Show) 30 Rock.
"As it got bigger, I found it embarrassing for the Baldwins.
"People have asked me if you have nothing better to do and the answer is no, not me. It's a pandemic, it's cold outside, and I'm not celebrating Christmas.
"If I were that rich, I'd have better things to do."
Hilaria, who was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, appears in a Cambridge School of Weston yearbook photo and was listed as a senior in 2002
Internet experts quickly discovered details about Hilaria's parents, Dr. Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas, who had worked in the US for years before retiring to Mallorca in 2011. Hilaria's brother Jeremy (right) married a Spanish woman and they all live in Spain
DailyMail.com can reveal that she grew up in this 100-year-old $ 4 million home in the heart of Boston's most desirable neighborhood, Beacon Hill
Briscoe revealed that she had been inundated with messages since her original tweet, some of which were not friendly.
She said, "Some people said I did it because I was jealous and uglier. I don't care if I'm uglier. It seems like a lot of work getting them to look like. & # 39;
Briscoe continued her ongoing comment on Twitter, once writing, "Please don't ask me to expose Meghan Markle. There is nothing to expose. It is already public knowledge that her husband is a Nazi cosplayer who used racist slurs. & # 39;
Briscoe said she felt "some responsibility" for the social media storm and that a lot of people "reached out to me to try to lead the conversation".
She said, "In this case, it was fun, but social media can be really cruel and harmful when there is a bunch, when someone is doing something that people don't like. I don't think that's great.
In this case, people said some cruel and unnecessary things. That bothered me. There are so many things to criticize Hillary Baldwin for that there is no need to make fun of the number of her children, that was really offensive to me. & # 39;
In her video, Baldwin admitted, "Yes, I'm a white girl," while Alec made his own video berating critics and comparing Briscoe to a used coaster. Briscoe replied on Twitter, "Did Alec Baldwin just call me Basura (garbage) and compare me to QAnon Sir, that's not that?"
Hilaria Baldwin (left), who was recently called to present herself as a Spaniard, appeared in a cooking segment in which she apparently forgot the English word for "cucumber".
She added, "It reminded me of people making fun of Melania Trump for modeling naked. Who cares? It doesn't hurt anyone. She did other things to make fun of. There are elements of misogyny that come up, but it's important to call people up when they do things that are harmful to what I think. & # 39;
When asked what she would say if she sat across from Baldwin and her husband, Briscoe said, "I wouldn't be sitting at the same table with Alec Baldwin," who was taking an anger management class because of a confrontation in a parking lot last year in New York.
Briscoe said, "I have an instinct for self-preservation.
"If I could speak to Hilaria alone, I would say that she should apologize to all immigrants and English learners, as well as black mothers who are actually mistaken for their children's nannies. She should own what she did. & # 39;
Even after speaking to the New York Times, Baldwin doesn't own what she did. Briscoe added.
Briscoe urged people to seek the perspective of Hispanic women who are really affected by Baldwin's actions.
She pointed to a satirical video by comedian Suni Reyes in which she summed up her feelings and took up the controversy in a great way.
(tagsToTranslate) Dailymail (t) News (t) Spain (t) Twitter
How to clean your oven without harsh chemicals: Cleaner divides your simple three-step process
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's first episode on their £ 30 million podcast was beneath the whale noise


The Club at Las Campanas is a pretty special place, offering world-class sporting facilities such as an equestrian centre, tennis club and two Jack Nicklaus Signature golf courses, all of which are served by a rather grand, hacienda-style clubhouse.
Developed by the Lyle Anderson Company – the firm that created Desert Highlands, Desert Mountain and Superstition Mountain in Arizona – Las Campanas is located less than a half an hour drive from downtown Santa Fe, offering easy access for its members.
The Sunrise course is the older of the two 18-hole layouts here, opening in 1993 as the Golden Bear's 100th career design, and it was followed seven years later by the slightly shorter Sunset course.
Both courses measure in excess of 7,500 yards from the back markers but an altitude of 7,000 feet above sea level must be taken into consideration here, making these layout play a good bit shorter than the scorecard might otherwise suggest.
Highlight holes include the 446-yard 3rd, a slightly left doglegged par four requiring an approach over two large bunkers to a raised green; the 426-yard 11th, a downhill par four played to a pond-protected green; and the 654-yard 15th, a tough par five with trees, water and sand defending par.


September 04, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "Truth Dig" - We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. - This alticle originally ran on Nov. 10, 2008.


text:
OFF3R – Tinder for Equity Crowdfunding Connects to US Deals
The crowdfunding app formerly known as Tendr has rebranded to become OFF3R and will begin aggregated US based equity crowdfunding
Ron Finberg | Crowd Funding ( FinTech ) | Sunday, 16/08/2015 | 10:18 GMT+2 2015-08-16T08:18:29+00:00 2015-08-16T08:18:29+00:00
Photo: Ron Finberg
After launching as Tendr, the equity crowdfunding app has rebranded to OFF3R and announced that they are beginning to aggregate investment deals from US crowdfunding deals. Initially named Tendr, the app uses a similar approach as Tinder's dating app of swipe right to like or swipe left to pass and applied it to UK equity crowdfunding deals.
Aggregating deal flow from various UK platforms, Tendr/OFF3R users were able to quickly review campaigns and mark they ones they were interested in for further investing. According to OFF3R, in its first eight weeks since launching, the app has had 250,000 interactions. Of the UK platforms connected to OFF3R, crowdfunding campaigns raised $22 million, with average investor funding of $3,000. OFF3R believes that by providing a mobile interface for investments, the app will make it more accessible for investors to learn and get involved in deals.
As part of their growth strategy, adding US platforms occurs as the market for equity crowdfunding deals in that country has become much more open with Regulation A+ of the JOBS Act going into effect in June. With it, private companies can raise funds from non-accredited investors, which compose over 90% of the investing public. Included in the new US platforms being added are onevest, CircleUp and AngelList.
Commenting on the news, Lex Deak, CEO at OFF3R stated "Our decision to rebrand from tendr to OFF3R facilitates our global expansion plans and is in response to international demand. Our savvy users love the app as they can keep on top of crowdfunding investment opportunities whilst on the move. Now we are offering them US investment opportunities, making our app even more compelling."
Tags: Angel Investing / crowdfunding
Moneybox Continues Funding Success, Rakes in £4m on Crowdcube
Finstar Financial Group to Invest $150 Million in Fintech Startups
PayKey Mobile Payment App Raises $6 Million in Series B Funding

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Are you searching for home insurance coverage in Sasakwa, OK? Enter your Zip Code to compare the best options available nearby. Comparing multiple quotes is the best way to save money on your homeowners coverage in Seminole county.
Have you been asked by your mortgage lender to get homeowners insurance? Did you just purchase your first home and understand the value of insuring it but don't know what type of coverage to buy? If so, here is some information to help you get the Sasakwa, Oklahoma homeowners insurance you need.
Obtain quotes from insurance agents in person to get personalized help. Or, for more convenience, you can get Sasakwa homeowners insurance quotes free online. Protect your home with affordable insurance today.
Everyone out there requirements to buy a homeowners' insurance coverage coverage. Currently being a extended-time homeowner doesn't make you exempt. Just simply because catastrophe hasn't struck in twenty years will not indicate that it will not likely strike in the a long time to come or even tomorrow. Study and understand the tips in this write-up if you want to discover a excellent plan.
If you require to file a declare with your homeowner's insurance policies organization, do so promptly. Speedily react to any ask for for information as entirely as you can. The more information the insurance policies company has, the faster they can method your assert. Also, a lot harm suffered by residences will only worsen with time, which means that if you allow it sit, the cost will be larger.
To save funds when purchasing home owners insurance coverage, consider placing an alarm technique in. Most major underwriters will give a price cut for a home that has a monitored alarm put in. Numerous times the low cost you get will add up to more than what you pay for the regular monthly checking expense.
Consider increasing the deductible on your property insurance policies plan. A higher deductible on your insurance policies plan can significantly reduce your annual residence insurance policy rates. Regrettably, by elevating the deductible, your home insurance organization will no more time pay for tiny claims, this sort of as damaged window restore, leaky pipe fix and minor wind and flood harm repairs.
If you will not stay in an spot inclined to floods, you possibly have not even imagined about getting flood insurance coverage. Nonetheless, it may well be smart to have it. Residing in a reduced-threat area for floods does not indicate that flooding will by no means come about to you. You can get a great low cost on your flood insurance if you are in a medium or lower-danger places.
If you have a place mate you want to look to see if their items are covered in a catastrophe. Your plan could only include your private things. You need to have to find out what is protected.
Residence stability and alarm methods will lower your premiums. These normally do not value that a lot to place into your home and can make you truly feel safe when you have to go somewhere.
At the very least after a calendar year examine the price of your homeowners insurance to that of other businesses to see exactly where the savings are. You may really effectively discover yet another firm supplying considerably greater rates than your personal or a discount for signing up with them. If you believe you can get significant personal savings with one more insurance company, call them up and inform them you may be intrigued and they may possibly existing you with even much better quantities to get you as a buyer.
Many men and women are shocked that when they spend off their mortgage loan, their home insurance coverage costs fall. There is a dramatic drop in the value of residence insurance policies when you personal your home outright. This is probably because of to the truth that insurers feel that if you own it, you are probably to take greater care of it.
As mentioned just before, house owners insurance policy is a kind of protection that each residence operator must have. The insurance policy covers house damage this kind of as hearth and other residence related incidents, this kind of as theft. Use the useful guidelines from the post above when you are considering acquiring house owners insurance.


2018 | Is a Tree, Touched, a High Rise?
Jenn Egelfeld (b. 1995) Fair Lawn, NJ; is a multidisciplinary artist who works in book binding, papermaking, and digital fabrication. With growing concern over climate change and environmental degradation, she became interested in the way humans perceive nature as separate from themselves and their creations. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Florida State University and currently lives in Tampa, FL.
My work is informed by the ever-growing threat of environmental collapse, which has prompted the question of what can be done to mitigate these effects. While environmental action has largely been popularized as an individual pursuit, it's apparent that the solution does not lie solely in recycling, installing solar panels, or any individual action (as nice as they may be to practice). There are a near infinite number of ways people can address these issues, but at the core of the problems lies, I believe, a mental demarcation between what is "human" and what is "nature" that allows people (myself included) to remain apathetic or even hostile to the state of the environment. While this divide may well be impossible to fully close, I still seek to criticize separatist notions of man vs. nature and explore the categorical ambiguity of material that has been touched and refined by the human hand. So I pose the question: is a tree, touched, a high rise?


The government says Airbus EC 130 T2 helicopter was carrying an instructor and two trainee pilots when it disappeared.
Vietnam's prime minister ordered the military to launch a rescue mission after a military helicopter went missing on Tuesday during flight training.
The government said on its website that the Airbus EC 130 T2 helicopter was carrying an instructor and two trainee pilots when it went off the radar in southern Ba Ria-Vung Tau province.
The defence ministry has also issued a statement regarding the missing helicopter. But the ministry did not say if those aboard were military personnel or civilians.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc asked the military to search for the victims and review procedures to ensure safety. He also asked the rescue units and provincial staff to help in the process.
This is the latest incident in a series of deadly aviation accidents that involved military aircraft.
The defence experts and arms firms say Vietnam is buying up fighter jets, helicopters, surveillance planes radars and surface-to-air missiles as it is working on its military buildup.
Earlier this year, a CASA 212 coastguard plane went hunting for the pilot and the wreckage of a Russian-made Sukhoi SU-30 but it went down due to bad weather resulting in the death of all the nine people onboard.
Apart from this, the air force lost two fighter jets this year in June and August respectively.


text:
If Woodstock 50 Happens, It Won't Be A Festival And It Won't Be In New York
By Andrew Flanagan
Published July 26, 2019 at 12:05 PM MDT
Greetsia Tent
Carlos Santana is still expected to perform at Woodstock 50 ... if it happens at all.
Woodstock 50, the music festival intended as a celebration of the era-defining 1969 concert, has instead spent months unravelling in public. Now, if it takes place at all, the festival won't take place in the same area of upstate New York as the original Woodstock. In fact, it won't take place in New York at all, or even an adjacent state.
Seth Hurwitz, chairman of the mid-Atlantic concert promotion company I.M.P., said Thursday that the organizers of Woodstock 50 have approached the Columbia, Md., venue Merriweather Post Pavilion about hosting the event.
"The Woodstock folks are working on securing the artists now," Hurwitz said. "If the bands come, we'll produce the show. We're looking forward to getting an update as soon as Woodstock 50 has one."
A representative for Woodstock 50 declined a request for comment on the move to Maryland, but Billboard reported Friday that festival organizers have released all artists from their performance contracts, meaning whatever form the event takes would require new agreements between producers and performers.
Prior to that announcement, at least two artists made it clear they would not be following the festival south.
A source has confirmed to NPR that Jay-Z, who was scheduled to be one of the festival's headlining performers, will not travel to Maryland for the event. The Associated Press first reported that the rapper would not attend.
Another slated performer at Woodstock 50, Creedence Clearwater Revival co-founder John Fogerty, made his plans for Aug. 16-18 clear in a Facebook post earlier today. He wrote that he "knows where he will be for the anniversary weekend of Woodstock. At only one site...At the original one — the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts." The post went on to quote a Creedence lyric: "NO MORE CONFUSION ON THE GROUND."
Earlier this month, veteran artist David Crosby, also scheduled to play, told Good Morning America that the festival is "dead," "not happening" and that a person involved in the event's planning "is a scammer" who "scammed this," referring to Woodstock 50.
It's the latest twist in what has at times seemed like a game of snakes and ladders.
First, in late April, the event was announced as "canceled" by finance partner Dentsu Aegis. But that cancellation was itself canceled after a judge ruled that the company did not have the contractual standing to unilaterally stop the festival from going ahead. Instead, the company pulled $17 million of its funding from the company.
Then the original site for the event, Watkins Glen International racetrack, said it would not be hosting the festival.
The proposed replacement site, in the town of Vernon, N.Y., rejected no less than four times the producers' proposal to hold the event there. Producers responded by saying they were disappointed that town officials had rejected their "robust and thoughtful proposal." City officials later contradicted that characterization, saying that the organizers' final proposal was "worthless," as it contained a proviso that none of the information in the proposal, such as its safety planning, was guaranteed to be accurate.
Even now, the confirmed cancellations by Jay-Z and Fogerty does not, strictly speaking, spell the end of the road for Woodstock 50. There are still more than 60 artists scheduled to perform. But if it does take place at Merriweather Post Pavilion, that venue's capacity of just under 20,000 will pale in comparison to the original festival's estimated attendance of 400,000 fans. Tickets are not yet on sale.
Additional reporting by Anastasia Tsioulcas.
See stories by Andrew Flanagan


text:
Q: How to direct user to the contents and not the properties after clicking lookup field pointing to folder in WSS? Background
I want to put a lookup field in sharepoint list that will point to a folder. Thats the easy part, but I want user to be pointed to folder contents (not the folder properties) after clicking on the link. It's not possible from the sharepoint interface so I'm trying to create custom field type.
Question
What method should I overload in SPFieldLookup derived class (or anywhere else :P) to be able to point user to folder contents?
P.S. Please don't suggest creating a hyperlink field cause the link will break under different access mappings.

A: Instead of a custom field, I would consider a computed field (search for "computed" here) and keep your current lookup field.  The computed field is simply a UI representation of a column.  That is how SharePoint does Title, Title with link, Title with menu, etc.  Those aren't multiple columns, just multiple ways to view the same data.
To use this approach you need to be able to build your link from the data available to you.  We have done this using custom RESTful web services when the data is not immediately available.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Radio INQUIRER
Keeping voting clean and credible
By: Rina Jimenez-David -	1 year ago
On Jan. 21 next year, voters residing in the "core territories" of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARRM) will be asked to vote on the ratification of the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). Also to take part in the voting are residents of six towns in Lanao del Norte, and 39 barangays in North Cotabato, Cotabato City, as well as Isabela City in Basilan province.
The plebiscite on the BOL is seen to pave the way for the replacement of the ARMM with the BARMM or the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. It is the culmination, said ARMM Comelec Regional Director Ray Sumalipao in a public forum, of "the dream of Muslim Filipinos to be part of national politics."
Lawyer Anna Tarhata Basman, who served with the government panel under the Aquino administration, describes the coming voting as a "recognition of self-determination" of the Bangsamoro. It
will formalize in law and in governmental structures the special status of an autonomous Muslim region to be, said Sumalipao, "at par with other regions" in the country.
But next year's plebiscite seems, from a remove, quite complicated. Problematic are the polls in Lanao del Norte and North Cotabato provinces, where a "yes" among majority of voters — even those living in areas beyond the six towns or 39 barangays — are needed to move them into BARMM territory. The same holds true in Cotabato City and Isabela City which, as separate political entities, did not vote for inclusion in the ARMM.
Complicating matters is the staunch opposition of local political leaders, including members of prominent Muslim-Filipino political dynasties, who fear losing their hold on local politics — and subsequently economic and social power — once a new political leadership and structure takes over.
This seems to me a recipe for confusion and violence, although Sumalipao, for one, seems confident the continuing imposition of martial law in Mindanao would keep election-related mayhem, a common enough occurrence in Mindanao polls, to a tolerable level.
All the more reason, I would think, that automated voting could serve to minimize fears of cheating, intimidation and confusion. But Sumalipao said that on Jan. 21, a "hybrid" electoral process would be adopted, with manual voting and automated counting and canvassing.
The clamor to rethink or reconfigure the electoral process in place in the last three national polls is genuinely puzzling to officers of the automated voting/canvassing provider: Smartmatic. The use of a so-called "hybrid manual" method, says Elie Moreno, vice president for global services and general manager locally for Smartmatic, "would only make it easier to cheat" in subsequent elections.
Right now, Smartmatic is under scrutiny because — so losing candidates in the 2016 polls claim — the technology was somehow sabotaged or preconfigured to favor certain candidates and parties.
"This is like blaming a vacuum cleaner for not cleaning in the right places," says Moreno. "We just provide the technology, it is the human element that determines how the technology is used."
And, as far as Smartmatic is concerned, the technology and the humans behind it performed excellently the last time the system was employed.
"The AES (automated electoral system) protected votes; the will of Filipino voters was upheld," Smartmatic asserts.
The figures speak for themselves. In 2016, 44 million voters "voted and verified" that their votes were correctly recorded by checking the paper receipts before depositing these in separate containers. Exactly 2.7 million electoral returns were printed out by the vote-counting machines, with requisite recounts conducted, and 99.9 percent were verified. And even more important, 100 percent of transmitted results matched the election returns, despite existing protests to the contrary.
Right now, Smartmatic is merely joining in the bidding for peripherals like thermal paper and ink, since the majority of the vote-counting machines used in 2016 have already been purchased by the Comelec. It was, said Moreno, the most economical and practical arrangement for the poll body.
Embrace your skin
Unsubscribe from Notifications
ALI bares facts on Technohub deal: P4B in lease to UP, P171, not P22, per square meter per month
TWG, stakeholders to 'iron out' motorcycle taxi issues
Stephens is biggest casualty in Australian Open
Djokovic cedes Australian Open set in 1st round
'Parasite' invades Oscars race with stunning SAG award win


Our CAAM main office will be closed today Monday February 4,2019 for our clients and our staff due to the unsafe road conditions. We will reopen on Tuesday February 5, 2019. The Marquette County Sheriffs office is telling people to stay off of the roads unless essential. Road conditions are only getting worse. If you must travel today please take your time. We apologize for any inconvenience.
SHOW ME THE MONEY DAY!
Join us this Saturday for information, refreshments and prizes! Free child care available.


CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a representation style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents and SVG elements including (but not limited to) colors, layout, fonts, and animations. It also describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.
Every new developer inevitably finds that centering a div isn't as obvious as you'd expect. Centering what's inside a div is easy enough by giving the text-align property a value of center, but then things tend to get a bit sticky. When you get to centering a div vertically, you can end up in a world of CSS hurt.
A wide range of topics, tips, tricks and the ins-and-outs of working with the Bootstrap library and CSS framework with Asp.Net's MVC Framework.
An Image Sprite is a Collection of images compiled or put together in a Single image. The process of compiling images together does not necessarily benefit a web developer, but it definitely gives a tremendous boost to user experience by delivering or serving the graphic filled web page much quicker than usual.
If you mention printing with CSS to many people who work on the web, print style sheets are the use that comes to mind. We are all well used to creating a style sheet that is called upon when a web document is printed. These style sheets ensure that the print version is legible and that we don't cause a user to print out huge images. However, CSS is also being used to format books, catalogs and brochures — content that may never have been designed to be a web page at all.
"I recenly came across posts on Reddit and DesignerNews that were talking about CSS Puns, there were some really good ones in there. I have collected them and shared them with you in here."
Did you know that we can hardware-accelerate graphics-intensive CSS features by offloading them to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for better rendering performance in the browser?
The web has typically been a place of boxes and rectangles but an emerging CSS specification is going to change that.
Learning about CSS specificity will give you a deeper understanding of how CSS property values are resolved.
I guess you have used the float property a couple times. And I bet you wondered about some of its weird behavior, too. "How Floating Works" provides a very visual and clear explanation of floated element behavior.
The CSS power couple. When used together, these properties allow you to create simple animations and add valuable interaction and visual feedback for your users.
Since the documentation process is often the weakest spot for modern web teams, we're constantly looking for the right tools to help us.
CSS is an unstructured language. Everything can be accomplished in twenty-five different ways. (And if you're part of a team: everything will be accomplished in twenty-five different ways.) The biggest problem is arguably CSS's biggest selling point: there's a quick fix for every problem. Just put a new rule at the end, upping the selector's specificity a bit.
Unlike their musical counterparts, named for the "Rapid Eye Movement" during deep sleep, in CSS rem stands for "root em". They won't make you lose your religion nor believe in a man on the moon. What they can do is help you achieve a harmonious and balanced design.
When you want your CSS to be reusable, how do you have several people working in git branches on different pages without writing completely separate styles?
As web designers and developers, one of our primary goals is to bring focus to content and make it easy for our visitors to navigate that content. To accomplish this goal, we need a functioning layout where technology gets out of the way and the content becomes the hero.
Using CSS to style our React content is actually as straightforward as you can imagine it to be. Because React ends up spitting out regular HTML tags, all of the various CSS tricks you've learned over the years to style HTML still apply. There are just a few minor things to keep in mind.
Excitement about native CSS Custom Properties is generally tempered by the incorrect comparison to variables used in preprocessors like Sass or LESS.
Why, exactly, does our CSS abuse classes so mercilessly, and why do we litter our markup with author-defined classes? Why can't our CSS be as semantic and meaningful as our markup? Why can't both be more semantic and meaningful, moving forward in tandem?
If CSS is not the primary language you write, debugging CSS may currently feel like a dark art; following this guidance may help you isolate and deal with CSS bugs more effectively.
What all can you do with a single div element using pure CSS?
Few things are as annoying on the web as having the page layout unexpectedly change or shift while you're trying to view or interact with it.
Animating elements in your mobile applications is easy. Animating elements in your mobile applications properly may be easy, too… if you follow our tips here.
An introduction to CSS architecture that will help you design a structure for your code so your projects and teams can grow without becoming an unmanageable mess.
This one's for the absolute beginners. Once you've learned how the box model works, and how to float those boxes, it's time to get serious about your CSS. To that end, we've compiled a massive list of tips, tricks, techniques, and the occasional dirty hack to help you build the design you want.
CSS takes literally no skill to code. And that is absolutely true, styling one element at a global level with no other CSS to worry about is easy.
CSS has a long history of providing frustrating and nonsensical solutions to the simplest problems of front-end design, while thoughtfully implementing one-line features to solve problems nobody cares about.
The most interesting thing I learned reading the spec was exactly how un-thorough my understanding was, despite the half-dozen or so blog posts I'd read, and how relatively simple flexbox is. It turns out that 'experience' isn't just doing the same thing over and over for years on end.
What's the best way to understand Flexbox? Learn the fundamentals, then build lots of stuff. And that's exactly what we're going to do in this article.


text:
What Do We Know About People Who Turn Suicide Into an Act of Murder?
Andreas Lubitz.
Details are still emerging about Andreas Lubitz, the 28-year-old Germanwings pilot and the possibly "deliberate" plane crash into the French Alps that killed 150 people onboard. In one sense, this is an example of an extremely rare occurrence, potentially one of just nine aircraft accidents determined to be caused by pilot suicide since the 1970s.
But, then again, the major themes of this story are those we've heard before: a young man who decides to kill not only himself, but also a number of other people, in a spectacular fashion. "It's one thing to want to kill yourself," said Michelle Cornette, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, "but what would motivate you to want to take 150 people with you?"
One thing to make clear up front is that this is not typical behavior of someone with depression or suicidal thoughts — Cornette said her organization estimates that just 2 to 5 percent of suicides are murder-suicides. "In true homicide-suicides, the primary intent or motive is suicide, and the homicide is secondary," she said. This is the strongest shared characteristic, but other common themes emerge, too, said Adam Lankford, who has studied cases of mass murder-suicides and wrote about his findings in the 2013 book The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Shooters.
"In terms of mental illness, you can't cite just one diagnosis — there are a lot of variations there," Lankford said. Some are depressed, some have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, was deemed a psychopath by the FBI, he said. "But what I would say is that there are a few shared themes, but also some major differences, between people who just commit suicide and the people who are committing suicide along with these mass killings."
Usually, these acts of mass violence happen because the killer feels victimized, oppressed, or bullied in some way, and so he (and it is almost always a he) feels that the attack is justified. Sometimes, this means the killer will target people he knows personally. "A high percent of those people are killing people they have a personal connection to — someone who's killing their spouse and then killing themselves, for example," Lankford said. "But in these other cases — school shootings, mall shootings, things like that — a lot of the people they're killing are strangers."
In the latter case, the strangers act as a stand-in for whatever group the killer feels has oppressed him. "So in this particular case, I think a natural question would be, for instance, is there any evidence of the pilot perceiving himself as a victim?" Lankford said. Sometimes, these perceptions are at least somewhat valid, and sometimes, they're distorted and framed by mental illness and paranoia. "If he had reason to feel like he'd been mistreated by the airplane company, or had had negative interactions with passengers in the past, that would be a textbook explanation." But the explanation may not be so straightforward; in some of these cases, the targeted strangers simply act as a kind of amorphous stand in for society at large.
Beyond the issue of feeling like a victim, some mass killers who then kill themselves are driven by the desire for fame — something not at all typical of suicidal ideation. "The Columbine killers, they talked about … whether Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino would direct a movie about their lives afterward," Lankford said. "The Virginia Tech shooter, he filmed his own video and sent it to NBC News." Incidentally, Cornette said, the media plays a role here. "When this is a motive, they usually get what they want," she said.
A third common thread among mass killers who kill themselves: Sometimes, the attacker may want to minimize or disguise the fact that he wanted to take his own life. "It's a pretty common thing around the world to be ashamed about committing suicide," Lankford said. "So sometimes, with the case of mass murder, we see that the person who wants to commit suicide also wants to make it look like something else, so that the victims are part of that camouflage. … We see that a lot with suicide terrorism, in particular."
Indeed, some of the mass shooters Lankford has studied have seemed more fixated on ending their own lives than killing anyone else. He mentions an incident at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, when a 19-year-old math major fired just a few shots before quickly turning the gun on himself. "Sometimes, something that looks like a mass killing may be more like an act of suicide than homicide," Lankford said. As inconceivable as it may be, the deaths of innocent and random strangers may, in these cases, almost be "incidental" in the killers' minds.
Past instances of mass violence and suicide can tell us some things, but it's still so early in the investigation that there's not much to be said definitively about Lubitz and his intentions. "And at the end of the day, we may never know with certainty what really happened," Cornette said.
What We Know About Suicide As an Act of Murder


But what's the breakdown for DACA recipients? Everything I've seen says they pay more in taxes than they receive on benefits.
This is what I got from a quick search on the cost of DACA to the US taxpayer. I actually support allowing DACA to stay though. I just feel Trump should use it as part of negotiations to get the wall funded. Obama had his chance to help these people, but I guess didn't feel they were important enough.
Letting people who came to the US illegally as children remain in the country lawfully would cost taxpayers $25.9 billion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
More like get a little to spend a lot. The DREAMers are at least taxpayers. But there's nowhere near enough of them to fund the Wall.
These are lifelong residents of the US that are contributing members of society. Tying an unpopular, multi-billion dollar project to a bill that would allow 3+ million taxpayers to remain in the country doesn't sound very fiscally conservative or responsible.
It makes perfect sense to tie it to the wall funding. The only reason we have DACA / Dreamers is because of illegal immigration. The compromise is we will grant amnesty but in return we want the border fixed.
If they were so concerned about it, why didn't they pass the Bill that was on the floor last year?
Or get it done when they controlled the whole Govt. under Obama?
just more blah blah blah from the same old useless tools.
Or pass it when Democrats had the power in 2009-2010.
Because that's what Americans want right?
The CBS News poll, released Sunday, shows 70 percent of Americans favor allowing those who benefit from the program, often known as "Dreamers," to stay in the country.
Okay. Show me a poll that shows most Americans want the DREAMERS deported.
The accurate "polls" are not published because they are very expensive.
Another great argument to end all income taxes.
Out of control politicians re-distributing wealth to third world invaders for votes.


text:
OFFICE OF BRIDGE PROGRAMS Home
Environmental Websites
Bridge Permits
Guide Clearances
Radiotelephones
Bridge Lighting Manual
Contact Bridge HQ
District Bridge Contacts
5/23/2019: Maritime Commons has a new home! Update your bookmarks & feeds
5/22/2019: Thank you to all mariners on National Maritime Day
4/12/2019: 75th Anniversary edition of Proceedings Magazine now available
3/19/2019: Commandant to deliver State of the Coast Guard Address
2/28/2019: A century and a half of marine safety and prevention – The Congressional Act of Feb. 28, 1871
2/5/2019: Commandant discusses Arctic, Subchapter M, and more in INSIGHTS interview
1/24/2019: Commercial vessel safety during lapse in appropriations
10/11/2018: Coast Guard announces new Maritime Commerce Strategic Outlook
6/15/2018: 2017 Area Maritime Security Committee of the Year announced
6/14/2018: Maritime Commons launches official LinkedIn page
"Intermodal Mobility, Safety & Security"
To administer the various bridge statutes, environmental laws of the United States, pertinent regulations and policies in a timely, courteous, responsive and professional manner. This mission will contribute to the development of a safer, more efficient and convenient marine and land transportation system that will effectively utilize and conserve the nation's resources in a cost efficient manner, while providing for the well-being, general safety, security, and interests of the citizens of the United States.
In 1967, the Bridge Program was transferred from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Coast Guard within the Department of Transportation. On 28 February 2003, the Coast Guard became an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is responsible for approval of the location and plans of bridges and causeways constructed across navigable waters of United States In addition, the Coast Guard is responsible for approval of the location and plans of international bridges and the alteration of bridges found to be unreasonable obstructions to navigation. Authority for these actions is found in in the following laws: 33 U.S.C 401, 491, 494, 511-524, 525 and 535a, 535b, 535c, 535e, 535f, 535g, and 535h (Note: these are all separate sections, not subsections of 535). Section 535 and following is popularly known as the International Bridge Act of 1972. The Implementing regulations are found in Title 33, Code of Federal Regulations Parts 114 through 118.
The Coast Guard monitors and ensures approximately 20,000 bridges crossing navigable waters of the United States are not unreasonable obstructions to navigation. As projects are undertaken to replace aging bridges or to modify bridges to meet changing navigational needs, such as raising the bridge deck to accommodate new post-Panamax vessels, more bridge permit applications are being submitted to the Coast Guard for review and approval. The Bridge Program carries out this responsibility by executing four functional areas:
Permitting – issuing permits for construction or alteration of bridges over navigable waters.
Regulation – ensuring the operation of movable bridges meet the reasonable needs of navigation, and that all bridges are properly marked and lit to facilitate safe passage of vessels beneath.
Monitoring construction/maintenance/repair operations – coordinate waterway activities to ensure minimal impact to navigation.
Alteration – identifying bridges that are "unreasonable obstructions to navigation" as defined by the Truman-Hobbs Act, and ensuring that unused/abandoned bridges are removed. Review, inspection, and management of design and construction contracts when the federal government is the primary source of funding through the Truman-Hobbs program.


World famous manufacturer of precision aluminum plate,our clients are all over the world!
Well known aluminum extruded profiles manufacturer,our products used for moter shell,high-frenquency electric transformer,frameworks of solar cells and so on.
Our extruded aluminum profiles have been exported to many countries,our products include:aluminium pipe,flat bar,round bar,angle bar,u channel and so on.
We are very professional in producing industrial aluminum extrusions profiles and excellent in quality.
Henan Chalco Aluminum Fabrication Co. Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as China international brand Chalco), is a leading China heat resistant high strength and high toughness Aluminum Alloy and Aluminum Alloy precision plate industry pioneer and market. The national high-tech enterprises, the provincial intellectual property advantage, outstanding enterprises in Henan Province, the project of 100 key enterprises of Zhengzhou City, innovative enterprises, high-tech enterprises and strategic emerging industries.
* High efficiency,30 days delivery time!
* Excellent service,7*24 hours online communication!
* Professional services,20 years experience in Aluminium!
* Packaging with international standards !
* Packaged products are stored in neat, orderly storage rooms!


text:
Don't Fall Behind
Read up on the different things FCSN has been up to.
FCSN Website Enhancement RFP
Firefighter Cancer Support Network Releases RFP for Website Enhancements
Burbank, Cal., Feb 28, 2014 — The Firefighter Cancer Support Network (FCSN), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, provides support to fire and EMS personnel and their families following a cancer diagnosis. FCSN also develops and delivers vital cancer prevention education and outreach programs.
FCSN is seeking proposals for the enhancement, modernization and hosting of its existing firefightercancersupport.org website. The project is funded for an immediate start upon award of the contract. The successful bidder will work in partnership with FCSN to build and maintain the new website functionality and supporting infrastructure by:
Enhancing the FCSN website design for a clear, responsive, mobile-friendly user experience across the broadest possible range of devices and browsers;
Implementing a modern, searchable Content Management System (CMS) with feature-rich elements that can be easily updated and maintained by FCSN personnel without vendor assistance;
Adding a Wide Area Network intranet with tiered-access user forums, a Knowledge Base library, and an Academy area for streaming and downloadable training modules;
Configuring the FCSN website for current best-practice search engine optimization, Google rank improvement, analytics, and security functionality;
More fully integrating FCSN's existing social media presence (e.g., blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) with the website;
Integrating multiple components of a new nonprofit management system (e.g., DonorPerfect), including email news subscriptions with automated unsubscribe;
Adding easily configurable IMAP email accounts with robust (at least 2GB) storage per account for 50-100 FCSN leaders, coordinators, mentors and other volunteers;
Recommending a web/email hosting approach that provides a platform for desired features, including site backup and restore, plus future growth and cost efficiency;
Suggesting improvements based on bidder's web design experience;
Maintaining the live website and implementing periodic updates (e.g., themes, plug-ins, APIs) and other enhancements in a development environment;
Providing user training for FCSN IT liaisons, leadership, and volunteers; and
Offering technical support options with clearly defined response and resolution times.
FCSN seeks an implementation approach that enables us to demonstrate rapid results and make continuous improvements based on feedback from pre-launch test groups. The bidder should recommend an approach that supports this objective. FCSN will make the final award to the bidder whose proposal is deemed to provide the best value.
[ Download PDF ]
ABOUT FCSN
The FCSN provides timely assistance and one-on-one support to fire/EMS service members and their families after a cancer diagnosis, and it educates the fire/EMS service about cancer awareness, prevention, early detection and treatment options. The FCSN was founded in 2005 by LA County Fire Department FF/PM Mike Dubron (survivor of stage IV colon cancer) and was approved by the IRS in 2006 as a 501(c) 3 Charitable Foundation. FCSN is governed by an elected ten-member board of directors from across the country. firefightercancersupport.org
RFP Contact Info
Trey Kelso


ELAINE CECCONI is co-founder of Toronto's award-winning interior design firm, Cecconi Simone. She has presided over high-profile projects worldwide, including City Square in Shenzhen, The Pearl in Qatar and numerous residential developments across North America. She also consults for such manufacturers as Moen and Kohler.
JENNIFER GUTHRIE is one of the founding partners and directors of Seattle landscape architecture practice Gustafson Guthrie Nichol. Her clients include Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Campus in Seattle. In 2011, the firm received the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Award for landscape architecture.
MIKE KEILHAUER is president and founding partner of Canadian contract seating manufacturer Keilhauer, which has won a slew of international design awards and has made Arthur Andersen & Co.'s list of Canada's 50 best-managed private companies. He is an Honorary Member of ARIDO, a Director Emeritus of the Design Exchange and a Toronto chapter member of the World President's Organization.
BRIGITTE SHIM is a partner at Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, which has received 11 Governor General's medals and awards in architecture, as well as a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. She is a professor at the University of Toronto, as well as visiting professor at Yale, Harvard and Lausanne and has served on the Aga Khan Architecture Award Master Jury.
BEN VAN BERKEL is co-founder and principal of Amsterdam-based architecture and design firm UNStudio. He co-created such award-winning projects as Galleria Centercity in South Korea and the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. He is a professor of conceptual design at Frankfurt's Städelschule and was recently appointed Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
The jury will convene in March to choose the winners that will be published in AZURE's AZ AWARDS ANNUAL on newsstands June 2012.


text:
Ра — патера, или вулкан сложной формы, на спутнике Юпитера Ио. Назван по имени бога солнца Ра из египетской мифологии, название утверждено МАС в 1979 году.

Геология
Ра является активным вулканом диаметром 41 км. Расположен к западу от вулкана Пеле и к юго-западу от патеры Локи.

Лавовые потоки, радиально исходящие из Ра, формируют крупнейшее из известных на Ио  щитового типа, диаметром около 450 км и площадью около 250 000 км².

Предполагается, что продуктами извержения Ра является жидкая сера или вещество с высоким содержанием серы.

Открытие и исследования
Впервые Ра был изучен в 1979 году, когда по стереоснимкам КА «Вояджер-1» были определены его геология, топография и источник извержения. При открытии гора достигала 1 км в высоту и обладала множеством лавовых потоков низкой вязкости до 250 км в длину, то есть «высоким уровнем вулканической активности». Снимки КА «Галилео», сделанные в 1996 году, показали на существенное изменение внешнего вида Ра за истекшие 17 лет и наличие его активной вулканической деятельности.

Примечания

Ссылки
 Карта окрестностей патеры Ра

Р
Активные вулканы
Вулканы Ио

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Over the summer, Dr Dixon and Miss Charles took twenty-two of our Year 11 and 12 students (now Year 12 and 13) on an inspirational and exciting trip to Peru and Bolivia.
The group travelled with Outlook Expeditions and spent twenty-eight days in the Andes trekking, volunteering in an orphanage, and visiting sites like Machu Picchu and the Bolivian Salt Plains. They began in Peru in the city of Cusco, high in the Andes. It took a few days for them to get used to the altitude and get prepared for the rest of our expedition.
The Year 11 students then completed the four-day Salcantay Trek. This is one of the hardest of the Inca trails with a pass of nearly 5000m above sea level. The trek finished at Machu Picchu (the 'lost' city of the Incas). The group arrived at this amazing place to see the sunrise and the clouds lift. Whilst the Year 11s were trekking, the Year 12 students spent four days volunteering in an orphanage near Cusco. Here we built a retaining wall for a new study centre, which involved moving several truckloads of rocks and mixing a lot of cement! We donated four old school laptops to the new study centre and several bags of sport's kit. These will make a real difference to the orphans. After these four days the groups swapped, and after this, they made their way to Bolivia as one big group.
After an overnight bus ride from Peru, they arrived at the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The group completed an amazing four-day tour through the region where we saw stunning views of volcanoes, deep blue, yellow and green lakes, snow-covered peaks, geysers and amazing rock formations. The final stop was a giant blood-red lake made this colour by the billions of plankton that flamingos were feeding on. The last night was spent in a homestay nearly five thousand metres high, with a brilliant view of the Milky Way. Our students did phenomenally well throughout the trip, exceeding expectations from the very first day. Very well done to them all.
To see Dr Dixon's fantastic write-up from the entire trip please visit the PDF below.


Data on its own is useless. You have to be able to form analysis on it to be eventually take action. Cortana analytics can help you build your analytic solution, fast.
Today business want to reduce costs in their organization and get better insights of what's happening, provide better customer experiences based off of the data they pulling in and to organizations that will truly looking to transform business by creating new business models that the data analytics provide for them. We can see customers using data across a whole range of different scenarios today from sales and marketing to finance and risk, customer and channel to operations. Simplest examples are online fashion store, one of them notices that they're having a dip in customer satisfaction with their customers, and when they investigated they found that they were recommending pregnancy clothes to women that were not pregnant, so that wasn't going down too well. Hence they started to gather a lot of data to refine their recommendation algorithm, that bring data from their web sites together with that data out of their existing customer relationships systems bringing it together with other sentiment into the data and really sort of refine the data and manage it, provide much more personalized product recommendations for those customers. This really improve the satisfaction of customer shopping experience and improved the bottom line for the organization.
Another great example is predictive maintenance, one of the world's largest elevator company traditionally done that business was to send a regular maintenance to maintain those elevator, they would go out with a whole set of equipment, diagnostics materials to service the elevator. By just soldering the sensor to the elevator, elevators bring the data back in, and using that data and analytics on top of it, this company is able to start to do things like predicts when failures might occur, providing much more targeted maintenance schedules out to those elevators. Helping customers get a much better experience in terms of the uptime of those elevators and also allow them to provide much better maintenance scheduling. Helping them reduce costs and actually can even go further than that and provide better elevator up time because they now have that much more confidence on their elevators, that they can be serviced proactively and not only when they are down.
Data on its own is useless. You have to be able to form analysis on it to be eventually and ultimately take action that lets you take action to improve your business. You start at the bottom of following picture and work your way up and this is used to be the way that analytics happened.
Say you gather a set of data, produced a static report, grab a group of people, bring them together in a room, look at the data, to decide to take some action there, then go out of the room take the action, might be one off action in which case they done or it might be an action that they need to come back and see the results of and if they need to do that then they would wait some period of time. Then gather the next set of data come back in the room then review the data. Very long process to find those insights and take the action. As people became more and more savvy about the data that they wanted to operate with, they started to gather more of it and provide really sort of interactive ways to operate and explore that data in real-time, interactive slicing and dicing and dashboards and providing much more immersive experiences to find those insights on that data.
Things really start to change if you can start to predict what will happen in the future. Today is grateful looking in the rear-view mirror with you can really start to predict what will happen in the future it really starts to change the types of business outcomes that you can expect. You can get ahead of looking at things that have failed in the past, to predicting when things will go wrong in the future, taking immediate action to be able to take advantage of those things. If you can go the full way and actually all the way to being able to recommend and automate that action then you now completely automated everything. They let you go from data to action directly and that really changes the sort of productivity that an organization can expect. Personalized product recommendations delivered out of websites in real time are great examples of that. To been able to really automate that full process to go from day-to-day decision and action, really is the opportunity that we want to be able to enable for our customers. What does it take to build end to end solution, let's take a look at the services that comprise Cortana Analytics Suite which can help us build solutions fast and scalable manner.
Cortana analytic suite is an intelligent cloud platform, a fully managed services that let you transform data into intelligent action. So first we should be able to connect to a whole range of different data sources, existing business applications that you've written yourselves and then increasing number of sensors and devices which generates massive amounts of data along with data out of existing businesses and business systems. You need a rich set of information management capabilities to manage this data, services such as the Azure Data Catalog, which provides the ability to index all the different data sources and discover the different data sources that exist in your organization, so that you can quickly find data. Azure Event Hub allows you to ingest massively scalable amounts of event data into azure and Azure Data Factory offers a way to orchestrate and manage all the data movement and information management tasks that would really form part of one of these complex systems. This is large amount of data and storing it on-prem is going to be costly, this is where the power of the cloud really shines for me. the cloud to all intents and purposes offers to customers an infinite storage and compute and with that what can you do, well if you can store huge amounts of data in the cloud really cheaply and perform really scalable analytic, that opens up so many possibilities. But just storing large amounts of data efficiently for analytics is a real challenging, azure data lake and azure data warehouse can help in storing data efficiently. Azure Data Lake is actually a service that lets you store petabytes of data in a massively scalable HDFS compatible files for analytics and this is an innovation that actually came from inside of Microsoft, they've used to power a number of their own services such as bing, Xbox and some of the telemetry behind Office and Windows etc and they're bringing a set of these really powerful high scale analytics storage and analytic systems to customers. Azure data lake is massively scalable file system where you are able to do very high performance IO over huge amounts of data. The Azure SQL Data Warehouse is the industry's first truly elastic scalable data warehouse. This is a traditional relational data warehouse where you can use sql queries over your data. The beauty of this service is that it lets you spin up the query compute power that you need and spin it down as and when you need it. Data stays in exactly the same place, you can speed up computer to run queries over that data as you see fit. So you can imagine if you're running reporting and analytics over a set of data and you're running it on a weekly or monthly basis and data sits in-out warehouse then you spin up the computer you need it, only when you need it, and in the meantime if you don't need it you can pause it and and don't pay for it, don't pay for that compute.
On top of that storage have a rich set of analytics capabilities. Azure Machine Learning is a service which really helps you bring the power of predictive analytics to your data. It has very rich set of best-in-class algorithms both some that have come from inside the Microsoft but also fully embracing the open source community and in particular languages such as R and python to let you write and your analytics. HDInsight is our distribution of Hadoop, running as a service in azure, so you can walkup to azure, spin up a HDInsight clusters on it, run it for as long as you like and then shut it down. And again this is separate from the data, this is very powerful, best example would be a customers who were storing large amounts of data, gathered over years and then as they started to think about the analytics, they would start to spin up Hadoop clusters, run 100 node clusters for a week or two and then shut them down, the data remains until they want to do that next time. Azure Stream Analytics that lets you write streaming jobs in a very easy way with the simple language.
When it comes to consuming this data, there was number of different ways that data might be consumed. So there is dashboards and visualizations through as ervice called Microsoft PowerBI which gives very rich, very interactive, very powerful set of visualizations experience for both reporting, interacting and investigating your data. So Cortana Suite has really powerful and rich set of capabilities to effectively create intelligent cloud for analytics. Lets switch now to a demonstration and show these components. I'm going to talk about an example here of vehicle and driving behavior patterns. The interesting thing about it is that by 2020, 75% of cars built will be internet-connected.
That will make them one of the most powerful devices out there. Cars can generate an amazing amount of telemetry, truly interesting to think about what of some of the things that we might do with that data and this can range anywhere from vehicle diagnostics to help dealers and with maintenance schedules, usage based insurance which is already happening today where insurance companies are putting devices on cars to monitor the driving behavior and providing customized insurance policies based off of that driving behavior. You can also imagine much tighter control and improvement of the car itself through engine performance mapping, engine emission control and much tight control over the vehicle itself. So if I were a car dealership and I had a fleet of cars, so what's some of the things that I might want to do. So below is PowerBI dashboard.
We have used power BI and built a dashboard that shows two types of data. Real-time data streaming and aggregate data. Let's drill into a couple of these areas to see what we have and then go into the details of how this was built. Vehicles requiring maintenance, I've been pulling telemetry off the car checking things like engine oil pressure etc etc, are indicators of things that might suggest that car might require maintenance and I can see here that looks like a hybrid cars needed more maintenance and I can see that Redmond is the place that I should be targeting. So I can use this data to say for examples end out a personalized campaign into the Redmond district to a set of customers to bring in set of a hybrid cars and family cars for servicing, have dealer perhaps prepared with all of the right parts that they need for maintenance.
The aggregate side here I'm looking at aggressively driven vehicles, unsurprisingly sports cars look to be the cause of being most aggressive driven and compact cars at lowest on that. Also I have a map here showing that the majority of aggressive driving seems to be happening over in Seattle and Bellevue.
So what does it take to build this kind of a solution. When building solution like this, the dashboard I showed you had two parts to it, data in motion part, so real time and then data at rest, aggregate part, that capture data at the top and the bottom parts of this diagram. And the left or right flow here is data comes in, the typical processes is, the data needs to be ingested and stored, some form of preparation occurs and analysis over the data, that is published at some location and then the dashboard or some other form of data consumption. For the live data we use the data coming off of the car, goes to azure event hub, this is a massively scalable event ingest system that let you stream in millions of events per second, very scalable and we use stream analytics to persist data to storage, we also stream analytics to do some analysis over that data in terms of batch of aggregates and also applying ML algorithms over it.
Let's see what that looks like in azure ML. We are using the Stream analytics and here I'm pulling data from an event data stream together with some reference data from blob storage and what I want to do is bring that data, join it together, present and aggregate on PowerBI dashboard that I showed you earlier. So let's look at the query that it takes to actually accomplish that. This is really where the power of azure stream analytics really comes to the front, so here on below screenshot I've got all of the queries that I'm running on all of the code that's written to power the analytics for that dashboard. You can see here I'm writing with a normal sequel language that many people are very familiar with. See highlighted piece of the code, it says selecting from an Input Stream a set of values and I'm doing things like averaging the engine temperature and outputting that. I'm doing this on a on a window of every three seconds. Every three seconds a window of time will roll over so from the top of every minute from zero to three seconds one window, 3 to 6, 6 to 9 and so on. In these time slot I'm continually computing averages and that's actually quite a sophisticated piece of analytics to do and if you had to write that in custom code it's often hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it's hard to get right.
Azure provide very powerful primitives as part of the stream analytics language but let you do very powerful analytics very easily. Isn't this very cool. I know it is. So with this very simple query I can produce a set of analytics showing average temperature, engine temperature, oil pressure etc and show that into the dashboard. And how do I put into the dashboard, well I output the data to sql database and then from there i read in PowerBI Dashboard. So you might be asking, that this is great but what about running a predictive maintenance code over it. Well to answer that azure provides service called machine learning. Again another fully managed service that we can use very easily, you can build machine learning experiments really easily, share them with colleagues, work on them together and build out very powerful machine learning experiments. You can use the full power of R and python along with many out of the box algorithm both from Microsoft and community.
Classic problem in analytics is often that different people will work on different parts of the problems faced with different tools and when it comes to handing off the algorithms across organizational people boundaries, friction arises, it might be "hey i cant read R, I need to rewrite this in java or .net to expose as a web service" and it takes time, often this is the place where algorithm get screwed and end product don't produce accurate result. With azure machine learning you can take any experiment and can publish it as a as a Web service with few clicks. Then its just a matter of going to the web service and you have machine learning algorithm ready to be consumes in any damn technology, which is scalable, secure and you don't need to worry about the operationalization of that endpoint. you can very quickly go from your experiment to fully operationalize web service which you can then call, in real-time on a dashboard and that does really transform the productivity. This literally cut down the solutions building time to hours and days from weeks and at times months.
Now lets look at the aggregates data path. Here what I'm doing is bringing that data together which is coming in through the stream, with a set of data from CRM dynamics or from the business apps and I'm persisting it into a blob storage and using HDInsight clusters to run over that data. I'm using machine learning as part of the process and I'm using azure data lake to bring the data together, aggregate it, transform it, prepare it, analyze it, take the result set and put it into a data warehouse. Building these data pipelines is quite complex job, writing complex integration code to make all bits and pieces work is not easy, and not to forget scalability issues. Azure make it really easy to build and maintain such complex data pipeline. Azure data factory which basically provides again another fully managed service to let you focus on the analytics and it take care of running and orchestrating the work for you. Let's take a look at that service. Below is data factory for the connected car dashboards and here we see is the real live pipelines that are running behind the system. Here you can see how data flows through system, that's all it is. Saying is that the truth is always in the code, but here we can visual see what code is actually doing. For monitoring perspective everything is running great and it is immediately visible.
Lets drill into one part of this for the aggressive driving pipeline pattern and I can see here what I'm doing is I'm running a set of activities in a sequence and this is a HDInsight activities.
If I dig in more, we can see here this is the definition of what a a aggressive car driver looks like.
It says "hey it's anybody who's in fourth fifth sixth seventh or eighth gear, who hits the brake pedal hard, or who's speed was over 50 miles". So this is the analytics that we're running as part of the pipeline and the beauty of this is that I can from a single diagram navigate through my entire analytics processing pipeline. I can monitor and manage what's actually happening and if something fails, I can see that here really easily. Sometimes you just wonder if you want to rerun part of your data pipeline again, then you have to write custom code. Here it is literally a right-click rerun to run a parts of your data pipeline again. So I see here a live view of my full analytics pipeline. This is the overall system architecture that we have here for the dashboard. Really what I wanted to leave you with is that Cortana analytics suite is bringing together a very powerful set of analytics capabilities to really improve the productivity of building analytics apps in the cloud, to tie those in with different data sources to really reduce the cost of analytics solution, and time to build it, giving ability to experiment over the data quickly, finding sights on that data and then put those insights into action in a fully automated way to really close the loop in time it takes to go from data to intelligent action.
Like reading it, Share it.
We are a software company with enthusiastic, open minded and focused community of individuals. We try to come up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas to solve our clients' most notorious challenges, all while seeking to radically change the IT industry and create positive social change with agile as core part.


text:
Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. Completes the Acquisition of Four BURGER KING® Restaurants in Michigan
Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. Completes the Acquisition of Four BURGER KING® Restaurants in Michigan 12.4 KB
SYRACUSE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. ("Carrols") (Nasdaq:TAST) announced that on July 14, 2016 it completed the acquisition of four BURGER KING® restaurants in the Detroit, Michigan area.
Carrols is the largest BURGER KING® franchisee in the United States and has operated BURGER KING® restaurants since 1976. The Company has purchased 22 restaurants to date in 2016 and currently operates a total of 727 BURGER KING® restaurants in 16 states, including 54 restaurants in Michigan.
For more information on Carrols, please visit the company's website at www.carrols.com.


text:
Smart Dubai and IBM to Offer the First Government-Endorsed Blockchain Platform in the Middle East
October 30, 2018 Web Desk
– New service to be delivered through an IBM Cloud environment built in the UAE
– Organizations to benefit from keeping their data in-country and conducting transactions locally
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Smart Dubai and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of the Dubai Blockchain Platform, the first government-endorsed blockchain platform as-a-service in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Delivered through an IBM Cloud environment and built locally in the UAE, the enterprise-ready platform will serve as a stepping stone for organizations in the UAE and globally to transition their blockchain testing and development into full-production. It will also transform and digitize applicable government processes and citizen services.
Dubai has been leading efforts to encourage the use of blockchain, with a vision to make the emirate a paperless government by 2021. As part of the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, for which IBM is the official Blockchain Strategic Partner, Dubai has seen the launch of various blockchain applications in a number of government entities across different sectors, including roads and transport, energy, healthcare and education.
The new Dubai Blockchain Platform will help integrate digitized services and experiences run on IBM Blockchain into citizens' day-to-day lives. Organizations will also benefit from keeping their data in-country and conducting transactions locally, and in turn, lower operational costs.
The platform will conform to the Information Security Regulation (ISR)* standards issued by the Dubai Government. It will also be powered by IBM's mainframe technology, LinuxONE™, which is capable of running more than 6.2 billion web transactions per day.
The Dubai Pay Blockchain Settlement and Reconciliation System, officially launched on 23rd September, will be one of the first projects to migrate onto the Dubai Blockchain Platform. Through this service, a process that used to take entities approximately 45 days to reconcile and settle payments with other government entities, banks and financial institutions, is now reduced to real time.
Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr, Director General of the Smart Dubai Office (SDO), said: "Guided by the forward-thinking vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, Ruler of Dubai, and the directives of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, Smart Dubai has been moving rapidly towards our main objective of transforming the emirate into a full-fledged smart city that tops global competitiveness and happiness indexes."
"Dubai has been a pioneer in blockchain technology since its inception, while other major cities around the world were reluctant to embrace it for city-wide implementation," H.E. Dr Aisha added. "The Dubai Blockchain Strategy set a clear path for the emirate to have the world's first fully digitized government by 2021. The Dubai Blockchain Platform we are launching today with IBM – who bring a wealth of insight and expertise in the advanced tech industries – drives us forward in our mission and allows us to power all blockchain applications in the city from one united portal."
H.E. Wesam Lootah, CEO of the Smart Dubai Government Establishment (SDG), said: "As Dubai persists on its path to becoming a world leader in the industries of the future, Blockchain technology will occupy an increasingly significant status in Governments' and organizations' day-to-day undertakings, as well as in individuals' everyday lives."
"Blockchain is steadily moving towards becoming a multibillion market by 2019 and we, at Smart Dubai, have successfully embedded the technology in numerous services, the latest of which was the advanced 'Dubai Pay Blockchain Settlement and Reconciliation System', which eliminates friction from financial processes between government entities through automation and minimal human intervention. And with the launch of the Dubai Blockchain Platform today, we will be one step closer to implementing Blockchain-powered services and experiences into citizens' day-to-day lives," H.E. Lootah concluded.
"In the past few years, technologies such as blockchain have moved up on the agenda in Dubai. Today, proof of concepts are bypassed and organizations are moving into full-scale production," Amr Refaat, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Pakistan. "Blockchain provides an added layer of trust and transparency among government organizations and businesses and helps make collaboration more efficient. The new IBM Blockchain-based service will enable organizations to keep their data in-country and conduct transactions locally. It also conforms to Dubai Government's Information Security Regulation standards."
Through the collaboration with IBM, Smart Dubai aims to run all applicable government transactions on blockchain and make Dubai a global benchmark for city-wide blockchain implementation.
About IBM Blockchain
IBM is recognised as the leading enterprise blockchain provider. The company's research, technical and business experts have broken barriers in transaction processing speeds, developed the most advanced cryptography to secure transactions, and are contributing millions of lines of open source code to advance blockchain for businesses. IBM is the leader in open-source blockchain solutions built for the enterprise. Since 2016, IBM has worked with hundreds of clients across financial services, supply chain, government, retail, digital rights management and healthcare to implement blockchain applications, and operates a number of networks running live and in production. The cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform delivers the end-to-end capabilities that clients need to quickly activate and successfully develop, operate, govern and secure their own business networks. IBM is an early member of Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. For more information about IBM Blockchain, visit https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ or follow us on Twitter at @ibmblockchain.
*ISR mandates government entities in Dubai to implement specific requirements and controls to ensure appropriate level of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets.
CONTACT: Leesa DAlto, 212-671-9806, Leesa.dalto@ibm.com
Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/95470/ibm_logo.jpg
Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/776462/blockchain_platform_in_the_UAE___IBM.jpg
Tagged IBM, MENA
"دبي الذكية" و" أي بي أم" تقدمان أول منصة بلوك تشين معتمدة حكوميًا في الشرق الأوسط
First China International Import Expo Opens Nov. 5 with Focus on Smart Manufacturing


A ground breaking foundation with olive and yellow-gold undertones, creating the perfect skin-on-skin effect. A Hollywood A-list staple, this foundation provides seamless coverage in a lightweight, velvety formula.
Breakthrough formula that contains one quarter pigments, this concealer is one of the highest coverage concealers in the world. A luxurious, easy to blend formula that glides onto skin and covers traces of acne, blemishes and marks effortlessly.
Smooth as silk, this blusher glides onto the skin for a perfectly even application. Rich colour pigments in four different hues are designed to complement and illuminate your unique skin tone for a healthy and radiant looking complexion.
Another ground breaking formula which delivers your best ever colour match in a natural skin-loving formula. Contains clay particles that are scientifically proven to be naturally antibacterial.
One of the most scientifically advanced formulas in the world, this stunningly smooth powder glides evenly onto skin and is never patchy. Breakthrough particles absorb excess facial oils without drying the skin.
Read up on why the award-winning EX1 range is loved by celebrities, editors and top make-up artists across the globe.
Designed to look like skin, EX1 features ground breaking products with olive and yellow-gold undertones to create the perfect skin-on-skin effect.
Used by everyone from celebrities and makeup artists to the most popular social media influencers, EX1 is affordable but without compromising quality.
Formulated by biochemist Farah Naz, EX1's products were created in the world's leading laboratories to a strict formula using the very best raw ingredients.
EX1 Cosmetics is an award winning line of cosmetics dedicated to those with yellow undertones. Created by biochemist Farah Naz, its fan base includes Hollywood's A-list, top models and beauty editors alike. To learn more about this exciting brand check out our blog here.


Available for lease in the central city is this Level 1 tenancy at 111 Wellesley Street consisting of approximately 249sqm.
This office space includes an exceptional fit-out that houses one boardroom and a meeting room as well as making use of 42sqm of private deck ($4,385.74 p.a.).
Polished concrete floors complete this modern office area with ease of access to main arterial routes and motorways. Directly opposite is City Works Depot and a plethora of public transport options.


text:
Komsomolski o Komsomollski - Комсомольский  és un khútor del territori de Krasnodar, a Rússia. Es troba a la vora d'un petit afluent per la dreta del Sossika, tributari del Ieia. És a 18 km al sud-oest de Kusxóvskaia i a 164 km al nord-est de Krasnodar.

Pertany al possiólok de Pervomaiski.

Khútors del territori de Krasnodar


text:
Finally Starting To Forget
Well, guess what, six years after September 11, it looks like we're finally ready to forget it. Terrorists were never the biggest threat to our nation's well-being, in fact, they're just like us, and now that TMZ can openly call out their celebrity obsessions on TV Colin Powell can finally admit he never really got this whole War On Terror thing, and Bush can finally admit Iraq was a bad move, and New York can back off launching silly Singaporanesque policy initiatives, because no one is much enamored of Rudy Giuliani anymore, not his old aides and not the Republicans, and soon probably not his third wife, who will probably be next to be patted down by Jeri at the entrance to the Fred Thompson bandwagon, because in times when white West Virginian families are setting up sexual torture chambers for young black girls
and criminals are taking up swordfighting in the streets of Philadelphia, we've got worse problems in this country — like a 6% rise in health insurance premiums being the lowest rise in eight years, or the fact that our sports teams are losing to rogue states that have no food— and we could really use a tough, photogenic prosecutor who at least understands the Human Condition to the extent that it is portrayed on television's longest running crime show.


social media Archives | Beloved Brands Inc.
Too many marketers think about where the media is, but they should be thinking about where their consumers are.
Even when your consumers are online, you should align your brand with what are they doing and the mood they are in when they are doing it. If you just go for pure efficiency and reach, you are completely missing the real opportunity of targeting your consumers online. Not only do you have to find your consumers, but you also have to find them in the right mood, so they are willing to engage with your brand.
The reality is today's consumers live on their phones, tablets, and laptops. While there are many ways to reach consumers, your agency likely recommends the most efficient balance of reach and frequency. Look at potential sites that fit your brand, both from a functional and emotional stance.
Do things and control the variables.
As consumers move around the internet, their emotional mood state changes. I have matched up the 8 functional ways of how consumers use the internet, with their emotional mood states.
Match up your brand emotional positioning with the consumer's emotional mood when they are online.
If your brand is trying to own the staying in control zone, do not use sites where consumers are in the mood to escape or express themselves such as Tumbler or Instagram.
Conversely, a brand trying to own the get noticed space should not be on the Economist or The Weather Network. There are enough sites that allow you to line your brand up perfectly.
When consumers want to be smarter, they 'google it' or look at subject matter expert sites. And, when consumers want to stay aware, they reach for their favorite online news site or scan social media news feeds.
When consumers are in the mood to feel free, they try to escape, whether a 5-minute break at work or the subway going home after a long day, they look to escape with Youtube or Bleacher Report.
The line is getting blurry when consumers want to express themselves. While they might start with Twitter, they duplicate the post on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest as they are in the mood to get noticed.
One of the most apparent reasons for the internet is to connect with others, feeding their mood to be liked. They use email, texting or Facebook.
Consumers reach for their phone when they want to do things, checking the weather, looking up restaurant reviews or buying tickets to an event. While these consumers are looking to have fun, they use tools to stay in control, so nothing gets in the way of having fun.
When consumers want to buy things to fulfill a craving or desire to reward themselves, they want it now and use transactional sites such as Amazon or eBay. Moreover, they go straight to a favorite retailer's e-commerce site.
When consumers want to go somewhere, they use Waze for driving directions or Uber to hail a ride. If they're going to go on a vacation, they use Expedia to book a flight, explore things to do using TripAdvisor or look up cool places to stay using Airbnb. These consumers are in the mood to explore but also find comfort.
Where are consumers when they are in the mood that matches up with your brand's desired emotional space?
Here are some challenging thoughts for us going forward.
Sounds crazy, but with more tablets and instant internet access, the future will see us watching even more TV programming. Consumers love anything on video. But, it will not be traditional network TV. We are already seeing a considerable consumer shift to streaming TV, whether Netflix, specialty channels, on-demand viewing, and Youtube videos. Advertising has yet to figure out how it will fit into these new TV options.
2. How can brands capture young adults?
With two college-aged kids, I can tell you they never watch network television, never read newspapers and never listen to the radio. Yet, they are always connected, using Netflix, texting, SnapChat, and Instagram. One of the most interesting insights about this group is, 'They never go online, mainly because they never go off-line.' They put their lives online and expect instant access to everything. They are always multi-tasking, prefer apps over software, newsfeed over news stories. While high profile beloved brands can easily reach them, low involvement or indifferent brands will have a hard time reaching them.
3. Can newspapers or magazines even survive?
Newspapers and magazines appear lost. For too long, they linked their brand to the actual format and moved online too slowly. For many, news now is now instant, ubiquitous and more casual/social. Instead of seeking out news, consumers now filter news. Journalists are struggling to capture readers, and print companies are struggling to capture consumers to their online versions, as fake news, Twitter feeds, and social media are dominating traditional print. Can these print companies figure out new revenue and profit models with online versions?
4. Are there too many social media options?
Early innovation in social media led to a divergence of options. Yet, they become more similar than different. Potential power plays could see mergers where the strongest brands squeeze out other players—the first being Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn. Other than high profile brands, many Brand Leaders struggle to come up with relevant content that can engage their targets. Imagine who might be next.
5. Can brand leaders figure out how to win in the new world?
Brand Leaders are more confused than they ever have been. The exploding of media options has led to an explosion of agencies, each battling each other for a share of the spend, rather than directing the Marketer with clear advice. The biggest issue I see is that Marketers have become too involved, they are now do-ers taking on parts of subject matter experts rather than staying in the generalist decision maker role. For Brand Leaders, the changes are speeding up. Just as they are used to digital, there is a dramatic shift to social, and then another dramatic you shift to mobile. The problem is that unless you are a consumer of the media options, you will struggle with it. You will learn more about these media choices by trying them out than you will reading a presentation in a boardroom.
Here is a workshop we run on Marketing Execution that looks at both the creative and media sides of reaching consumers.
Microsoft just bought LinkedIn. This is a huge move into the world of social media.
Microsoft has announced a $26 Billion acquisition of Linked In. This is Microsoft's first entry into the social media world. (or second if you count MSN). My first reaction was "WOW. Just wow." I was expecting something, but didn't see it coming now, and with Microsoft. But good for them. And this is the first move, not the last move.
I normally hate mergers and acquisitions, but this one is pretty interesting. Microsoft is making an obvious play at the business world. While the Nokia experiment failed, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep pushing into the portable device space. The surface has done fairly well (I'm 100% Apple guy, but I see them around). And now Microsoft will now be able to package Surface + Office + LinkedIn + Slideshare + Skype.
In an email to staff, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted the pairing as a way to improve both companies by integrating LinkedIn's content and network with Microsoft's cloud computing and productivity tools. "This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete. As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow,"Nadella wrote.
Honestly, I have no idea where the current world of social media settles in, and who owns what. But the world of convergence will happen over the next 5-10 years. From a social media point of view, most of these sites are just about expresses ourselves, just in slightly different ways. If I look at my news feeds on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram, they are starting to look similar, some days almost too similar. Not all of them will survive or need to survive. There are already apps that allow one to post on each site. Why not take it a step further and just have one site, with 3 or 4 window. Facebook could easily have a personal window, business window, entertainment window or politics window. I don't see a need for Twitter, do you?
I could easily see Apple and Facebook getting together.
By the way, shares of LinkedIn surged 48% after the announcement, while Microsoft's stock was down 4%. Trading in Microsoft had been halted briefly for news pending before the announcement of the all-cash deal. So maybe the market's first reaction isn't so strong. I think this is a great fit for Microsoft and the market will settle in.