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Free Agency Tracker
Hot Topics from Titans Coach Mike Vrabel's Monday Presser
Jim Wyatt
Senior Writer/Editor
NASHVILLE – The Titans returned to Saint Thomas Sports Park on Monday.
Next up is a game at Baltimore on Sunday against the Ravens.
Titans Coach Mike Vrabel held a quick video presser today, so let's touch on some of the things he discussed…
-The Titans (6-3) have lost three of their last four games, including Thursday's 34-17 loss to the Colts. If the playoffs started today, the Titans wouldn't be in. Vrabel was asked about the team trying to work back into the playoff picture.
"We're just trying to win a game," Vrabel said. "I think the message is: This is what it looks like every year, a lot of teams are bunched up just like they were last year. So, we're trying to win a game, we're trying to put our head down and focusing on continuing to improve at this point in the season, knowing teams are going in different directions. We need to improve, and we need to focus on us today and then get on to Baltimore."
-Titans kicker Stephen Gostkowski is just 12-of-20 on the season, so questions about his job security persist. Asked if his plan is to stick with Gostkowski, Vrabel talked about the present. Last week, the team signed kicker Giorgio Tavecchio to the team's practice squad. Vrabel was asked if he plans to stick with Gostkowski. "As of today, right now, we have one (kicker) on the practice squad, Tavecchio, who is kicking," Vrabel said. "But as of Monday, at 10:36, Stephen would be our kicker as of right now."
-Titans receiver Adam Humphries remains in the concussion protocol, Vrabel said. Humphries has missed games against the Bears and Colts after suffering a concussion at Cincinnati on November 1.
-Vrabel knows the Titans have a challenge coming up against the Ravens. "(They're) an excellent football team, a physical football team. And we are going to have to be at our best in all areas."
-The Titans have struggled on special teams of late, and Vrabel said the team has discussed adding some starters to some of the units. "I think that is something that we certainly want to talk about – that was mentioned this morning," Vrabel said. "I think we have to have all hands on deck. … If we need that, that is always something we should be able to do. We're trying to do whatever we can do to help us win."
-Three players were among the team's inactices on Thursday against the Colts because of injuries – cornerback Adoree' Jackson, tight end MyCole Pruitt, and Humphries. Meanwhile, the Titans have a number of other players on Injured Reserve who are expected to return at some point in the not-so-distant future, including running back Senorise Perry, running back Darrynton Evans and cornerback Kristian Fulton. The extra time should help, Vrabel said. "I think they are all getting closer, but time will tell," Vrabel said. "I think they are all working hard to get back, and then we'll evaluate them if they are able to practice. If they can do some stuff today, we'll see how they look, we'll see how they respond to that work and then we'll keep moving towards a decision later in the week."
Hot Topics From Titans HC Mike Vrabel's Season-Ending Presser
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a season-ending video conference call with reporters on Monday, one day after the team's 20-13 playoff loss to the Baltimore Ravens. On Monday, the team held a final meeting and players went their separate ways for the offseason.
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 41-38 win over the Houston Texans. Next up for the Titans is a playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday at Nissan Stadium.
Hot Topics from Titans HC Mike Vrabel's Monday Presser
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 40-14 loss to the Green Bay Packers. Next up for the Titans is a game on Sunday against the Texans in Houston. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call.
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 46-25 win over the Detroit Lions. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday night at Lambeau Field. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call...
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 31-10 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Detroit Lions on Sunday at Nissan Stadium.
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 41-35 loss to the Cleveland Browns. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Jaguars on Sunday in Jacksonville. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call ...
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 45-26 win over the Indianapolis Colts. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Browns on Sunday at Nissan Stadium. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call...
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 30-24 overtime win over the Baltimore Ravens. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Colts on Sunday in Indianapolis. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call...
Hot Topics From Titans Coach Mike Vrabel's Friday Presser
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Friday, one day after the team's 34-17 loss to the Indianapolis Colts. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Ravens next Sunday in Baltimore.
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 24-17 win over the Chicago Bears. Next up for the Titans is a game against the Indianapolis Colts on Thursday at Nissan Stadium. Here's a look at some of the hot topics from today's call ...
Titans coach Mike Vrabel held a video conference call on Monday, one day after the team's 31-20 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. Senior Writer and Editor Jim Wyatt takes a look at some of the hot topics as the team looks ahead to this Sunday's game against the Chicago Bears.


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Palicourea asplundii is a species of plant in the family Rubiaceae. It is endemic to Ecuador.

References

Flora of Ecuador
asplundii
Vulnerable plants
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Irineu Soares Rodrigues (28 de junho de 1956) é um ilustrador de banda desenhada brasileiro. Trabalhou na Editora Abril com os personagens Disney desde a década de 1970, principalmente com a Família Pato, Madame Min e Zé Carioca.

Possui cerca de 790 histórias, todas criadas e publicadas no Brasil.

É irmão dos desenhistas Moacir Rodrigues Soares e Verci de Mello. Em 1993, passou a atuar na MW Editora e Ilustrações Ltda., fundada por Moacir.

Ligações externas

 Irineu Soares Rodrigues Lambiek
 MW Editora e Ilustrações Ltda.

Autores de banda desenhada do Brasil
Autores de banda desenhada da Disney
Ilustradores de banda desenhada


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The Price Is Right Production on Hold Following the Death of Drew Carey's Ex-Fiancée Amie Harwick
"Amie and I had a love that people are lucky to have once in a lifetime," Drew Carey told PEOPLE of Amie Harwick's death
By Robyn Merrett
Credit: Valerie Macon/Getty Images
The Price Is Right has postponed production following the death of host Drew Carey's ex-fiancée Amie Harwick.
"In light of the passing of Amie Harwick, we have postponed production this week," Kristina Kirk, vice president of communications, at Fremantle tells PEOPLE.
Fremantle produces and owns the television game show.
Carey spoke out about Harwick's death on Monday after she was killed following a fall from a balcony after an alleged attack from her ex-boyfriend.
"Amie and I had a love that people are lucky to have once in a lifetime," Carey, 61, told PEOPLE in a statement.
"She was positive force in the world, a tireless and unapologetic champion for women, and passionate about her work as a therapist. I am overcome with grief. I would like to thank you in advance for giving myself and everyone who loved Amie privacy while we try to work through this tragic situation," Carey added.
In January 2018, PEOPLE confirmed that The Price Is Right host Carey proposed to Harwick, who authored The New Sex Bible for Women. The couple ended their engagement later that year.
On Saturday at 1:15 p.m., police responded to the 2000 block of Mound Street in Hollywood Hills on an alarming call of a "woman screaming," the Los Angeles Police Department revealed in a press release obtained by PEOPLE.
Drew Carey and Amie Harwick
| Credit: Michael Bezjian/WireImage
RELATED: Drew Carey's Ex-Fiancée Therapist Amie Harwick Dies After Fall from Balcony
When officers arrived on the scene, they were met by Harwick's roommate on the street, who told police that she was being assaulted by an ex-boyfriend.
Police then went to check the residence and found Harwick, a well-known therapist, unresponsive, lying on the ground beneath a third story balcony.
Officers shared that Harwick was "gravely injured."
"She suffered significant injuries consistent with a fall," police said in the press release.
Harwick was later transported to a nearby hospital where she later died. She was 38.
An investigation into the incident revealed possible evidence of a struggle upstairs as well as forced entry.
"A canvass of the area located further evidence of an intruder entering the property and leaving after the murder," police said in the press release.
Before her death, police say Harwick had expressed fear about a former boyfriend and had previously filed a restraining order against this person.
At the time of the incident, the restraining had expired and Harwick had seen her ex just two weeks before.
Amie Harwick
| Credit: Paul Archuleta/Getty Images
Hours after the assault, police arrested the suspect (Harwick's former boyfriend) 41-year-old Gareth Pursehouse in Playa Del Rey. He was charged with murder, police said in the press release.
Pursehouse is currently being held on a $2 million bail, according to inmate records, and a scheduled court appearance is not immediately available.
RELATED: Wendy Williams Appears to Make Price Is Right Joke About Amie Harwick's Falling Death
In her final Instagram post, shared on Friday, Harwick wrote to her followers about pressures felt on Valentine's Day, as well as the importance of loving friendships.
"Many people are celebrating love today," she wrote. "Whether you are in a relationship or not, exposure to this could feel overwhelming if you are in an unhealthy relationship, dissatisfied with your relationship status, unhappy in your relationship, or feeling pressure to be in a relationship."
She added: "I think that Valentine's Day is a wonderful time to be mindful and redirect thoughts about love to platonic love. There is so much cultural emphasis on romantic love, but let's be thankful for the authentic love that we give and receive to friends. ?"
If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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/Miscellaneous
/Sign Of The Crimes
Sign Of The Crimes
Essay by 24 • October 9, 2010 • 1,858 Words (8 Pages) • 1,434 Views
Essay Preview: Sign Of The Crimes
Sign of the crimes Members of a citizens anticrime group in Linesville, PA., have a new mystery to solve: Who stole their crime watch signs? Five signs and poles were removed from roadsides around Linesville in Crawford County. "We don't know if it was somebody trying to get even," said Ed Barker, chairman of the North Shenango Township Crime Watch chapter. "We don't think it was kids, because the signs were gone, post and all."
You're under abreast Michael Copp, 18, Sheffield Lake, Ohio, was charged with stealing his mother's credit card to pay for his 18-year-old girlfriend's breast enlargement surgery. According to a police report, Copp's mother, Gaelene Pakrandt, told officers she had closed the account because her son charged $2,100 in car repair bills. Police said Copp reopened the account without his mother's knowledge after he found the card in a drawer. He charged $2,496 to the card to cover the surgery. Most items purchased with a stolen credit card are confiscated and returned by police. But this case is a little different.
Death race 2000 PHILADELPHIA, PA - Tamika Ross, 26, is being held for trial on charges of the murder of Nathaniel Davis. Apparently Ross ran over Davis' hat with her car. When Davis confronted the driver a dispute erupted and Davis allegedly hit Ross. That's when the mother of five took matters into her own hands and ran him over with her car, killing him. When questioned, police quoted Ross as saying, "He hit me so I ran him down."
Dead man gets 2 years A man was sentenced last week to two years in prison for faking his death three times to beat drunk driving charges. Peter C. Gentry was first arrested in 1991, but an official looking death certificate sent to authorities said he had died in a Los Angeles auto crash, and the case was dismissed. In 1994, he was arrested again and sent in another death certificate. A year later, Gentry was again arrested and supposedly died this time of "denzor hemorrhagic fever" in Africa. There is no such disease.
Soul-mate! not cellmate! Karim Lackey, Philadelphia, PA was acquitted last week of fatally shooting Phillip Shirdan, 42, after his lawyer claimed that Lackey had been the victim of "mistaken identity." Two of Lackey's alibi witnesses claimed they were with him watching the "Soul Train Music Awards" on TV at the time Shirdan was killed in a lounge. Lackey got off free despite the fact that the "Soul Train Awards" were not aired on TV that night.
Driving Miss Crazy Paris - After France's 3-0 victory over Brazil in the World Cup championship game, the whole city erupted in joy. So much that they scared the bejesus of a woman driving her car near the crowd. She panicked and plowed into a group of fans, injuring about 60 people, some seriously. "Apparently it was a crazy car, which drove for several dozen meters, knocking people over on its way," said Cmdr. Phillipe Lavoil, a rescue official. Witnesses said the woman cut down revelers over a 50-yard swath, and then dragged some of them for several yards. When the car finally stopped, the driver was attacked by the crowd before police intervened.
Easy target Brooklyn, NY - In an effort to crack down on the sale of cigarettes to minors. the city has hired about 100 teens to visit some 15,000 stores, licensed to sell tobacco, to check whether salespeople ask for ID. Last week Bernard Weinstein, a vendor at Board of Education headquarters was busted. City officials chuckled with delight when they caught him - until they learned the old guy is virtually blind. "He didn't look like no kid to me," Weinstein said.Inspectors withdrew the violation against the vision-impaired vendor.
"Whacky" news In Albany, GA, a 17-year-old boy armed with a .38 pistol approached car dealer Oran McGlamry, 74, and demanded his wallet, announcing, "Old man, I've got you now." Recognizing the youth as the same person who robbed him the day before, McGlamry grabbed his weed trimmer and rushed towards the robber. The surprised teen tried to run but fell, where-upon McGlamry gave the trimmer full throttle and began whacking him in the buttocks. "I was just trying to do what any other man would have done to protect his business, his wife and his life," McGlamry said.
Yeah! ok Robert Townes, a.k.a. - Hollywood, received 11 years, 4 months in prison for selling about 55 semiautomatic rifles from the trunk of his car on the streets of North Philadelphia. It took the jury only an hour to reject Towne's defense. Townes claimed that two drug dealers kidnapped his 2-year-old son and held the boy for 20 months while forcing him to supply them and their associates with firepower.
Lawn of the dead Sarver, PA - A man fatally shot his neighbor after the neighbor, who was angry over a damaged lawnmower, came into his house and wounded his wife with a shotgun, state police said. Jack Bouch was questioned in the killing of Robert George McCrea, 50.
Matlock made me do it! Jan Steffen, 33, a hair stylist in Anoka, Minn., got five years in prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband after she allegedly botched two attempts of her own. During one of the attempts, Steffen used an exotic method of asphyxiation she saw on TV's "Matlock."
Disorder in the court West Virginia Judge Joseph Trosi is accused of biting the nose of defendant Bill Witten, 29, at a bond-reduction hearing in June after Witten reportedly made a derogatory remark against the judge. "Mr. Trosi stepped down from the bench, removed his robe, and there was a confrontation at that point," said State Police Capt. Terry Snodgrass. "During the confrontation, Mr. Witten's nose was injured."
MSN CarPoint - MSN CarPoint is the complete car buying service on the web that helps consumers research, buy and maintain their next car. CarPoint gives consumers access to a comprehensive collection of new and used car pricing and vehicle information.
Not so lucky after all Ricardo Aldape Guerra, 35, who spent 15 years on death row in a Texas jail, several times coming within hours of being executed, was released in April after a judge ruled that six prosecution witnesses lacked credibility. He returned to Mexico as a folk hero and was signed to appear in a popular Mexican soap opera. Four months later, he was killed in a high-speed
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Outline The View That Society Is Both Fearful Of And Fascinated By Crime
Outline the view that Society is both Fearful of, and Fascinated by Crime. To explore why Society is both fearful and fascinated by crime, we
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Q: Bivariate normal density function Let $F(\cdot,\cdot, \mu_1, \mu_2,\sigma_1^2,\sigma_2^2,\rho)$ denote the d.f. $(X,Y)$. Show that
$$\Bigg(\frac{X-\mu_1}{\sigma_1}, \frac{Y - \mu_2}{\sigma_2}\Bigg)$$
has a $N(0,0,1,1,\rho)$ distribution and, hence, express $F(\cdot,\cdot, \mu_1, \mu_2,\sigma_1^2,\sigma_2^2,\rho)$ in terms of $F(\cdot,\cdot, 0,0,1,1,\rho)$.
I know how to show the first part, but I am confused about the second part, how to express the relationship between the two? Any hint, advice or suggestion is appreciated.

A: You have done all the hard work already.
$$\begin{align}
F(x,y; \mu_X,\mu_Y, \sigma_X^2, \sigma_Y^2, \rho)
&= P\{X \leq x, Y\leq y\}\\
&= P\left\{\frac{X-\mu_X}{\sigma_X}\leq \frac{x-\mu_X}{\sigma_X},
\frac{Y-\mu_Y}{\sigma_Y}\leq \frac{y-\mu_Y}{\sigma_Y}\right\}\\
&= F\left(\frac{x-\mu_X}{\sigma_X},\frac{y-\mu_Y}{\sigma_Y},
0, 0, 1^2, 1^2, \rho\right).
\end{align}$$

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text:
Pianowo-Daczki  is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Nasielsk, within Nowy Dwór County, Masovian Voivodeship, in east-central Poland.

References

Pianowo-Daczki


NCC is currently offering up over 1400 hectares of OUR beautiful county (much of it within 250m to 1000m of historic woodland, villages, designated SSI's, Commons, National Monuments and nature reserves) as 'preferred sites' for exploration for open pit mining when it has a national requirement to find merely 20 hectares.
WASP needs your help with "Norfolk County Council: Norfolk County Council should rethink its flawed 'Silica review' before 27th June 2016". Join WASP and 1,342 supporters today.


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Europe Intelligence Terrorism	0
Morality in Intelligence Practice: Lessons from the British Experience in Northern Ireland
Photo by Hayes MKII/Flickr |
By Natasia Kalajdziovski |
The role of intelligence in successful counterterrorism efforts is undoubtedly critical. That role, however, can become complicated when counterterrorism efforts focus entirely on domestic terrorist groups. Questions of morality inevitably arise when liberal democratic states direct counterterrorism efforts against their own citizens; these questions stem from a state's responsibility to protect both individual citizens and society as a whole. If one understands morality as the principles that help us distinguish between right and wrong, do such concepts have a place within the conduct of intelligence collection by a democratic state within its own borders?
At the heart of this intersection between moral conduct and security is the question of proportionality. If the security of its citizens is of paramount importance to any good government, that government's ability to maintain security at a "bearable and sustainable cost" is critical.[1] Stansfield Turner, former Director of Central Intelligence, has posed the above conundrum in simple terms: the morality of intelligence conduct is a test of sound will, "that is, whether those approving [decisions] feel they could defend their decisions before the public if their actions became public."[2] Former director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Sir David Omand, however, has framed the issue as one of "sets" of morality; that is, the conduct of intelligence "requires extraordinary methods, involving a different morality than that of everyday life."[3] While neither presents intelligence within a moral vacuum, what Omand suggests – this "different morality" – is key. He identifies the question of morality in intelligence practice not simply as an issue of public operational viability, but rather says that the "rules we hope govern our private conduct as individuals in society cannot fully apply."[4] However, the crux of this conundrum for intelligence services and those who guide their policy and practice resides in distinguishing and defining where moral parameters must exist.
For the British security establishment in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, the issues in defining moral parameters in intelligence practice became acute. As their experience demonstrates, sometimes those parameters can be lost, muddled, or forgotten in the height of crisis, and definitions can be altered or changed as a conflict protracts. In an effort to uncover some of the moral questions faced by the British intelligence services throughout the Troubles, this article will chronologically investigate how these questions manifested and modified as the conflict unfolded.[5] It will examine three areas: initial intervention, service engagement with the "long war," and the sophistication of the intelligence apparatus in the latter days of the conflict. This article will not attempt to judge the morality of the decisions made by the services, but rather demonstrate how the ambiguity between moral codes and effective security is inherently difficult to navigate.
Intervention and the Fallout of Moral Responsibility
What initially started as a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s quickly became a very different beast. In this initial phase of the conflict, the security establishment formulated a situational appraisal using intelligence that was "hopelessly out of date," hindering a detailed assessment for the logic of intervention.[6] As then-Home Secretary James Callaghan noted at the outset of the Troubles, the British "government knew less about Northern Ireland than [it] knew about our distant colonies, on the far side of the earth."[7] The colonial undertone mentioned here is telling. During a phase in which the British state was withrawing from a number of its colonial holdings, it came to the conclusion (through preconceived notions about the Irish character and the intelligence assessment dervied from Northern Ireland) that intervention was the most logical response.[8] The question of leaving was "seriously considered," but the British government reached the conclusion that withdrawal would lead to sectarian violence as it had in British India.[9] The British state initially articulated its interventionist role as one of mediation. It saw itself as being morally superior to the two warring sectarian groups within the province.[10] Furthermore, it did not understand the conflict for what it was — "one of divided loyalties and overlapping territorial claims."[11] Intervention thus became, in the minds of the British, a moral responsibility to the citizens of the province — a decision that was predicated on a strategic misreading of the conflict and the state's place within it.
One key issue immediately emerged: as violence increased from 1969 onward, the need for accurate, timely, and actionable intelligence became critical. With this need, however, came moral quandaries, specifically surrounding the assessment of threats and the collection of information linked to the 1971 policy of internment. In their work on state-terrorist engagement, John Bew et al argue that interment was, "at best, a necessary but extremely high-risk evil," as the security establishment found itself in a position where it could envision no other option available.[12] However, the initial problem posed for the services by internment was one of threat assessment. Due to the lack of up-to-date information, the services found it difficult to distinguish between those individuals who were actively in the process of planning terrorist activity and those who shared "the religious or political beliefs or ethnic backgrounds of the terrorists."[13] Therefore, the services found themselves unduly targeting entire communities rather than individual perpetrators. Despite this, of the 357 people initially detained during internment's implementation, only 12 were selected as part of Operation CALABA for submission to what were known as the Five Techniques.[14] British intelligence expert Bradley Bamford has assessed that the use of the Techniques at this point in the conflict was the only way the services could collect actionable intelligence,[15] although this proved to be at the cost of radicalizing previously unengaged members of the Catholic community due to a "one-sided application" of internment policy to Catholics.[16]
British intelligence services have a long history of developed interrogation methods, honed through the various colonial campaigns of the early twentieth century. However, these were never codified until the creation of what vernacularly came to be known as The Bible, a "fully-fledged interrogation doctrine."[17] What was found therein were the previously mentioned Five Techniques, a form of "in-depth" interrogation that included "wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and restrictions on food and drink."[18] The Bible "advocated the highest standards of behaviour on grounds of both morality and effectiveness," although its use during the initial phase of the Troubles demonstrated a correlation between peaks of violence and the sporadic abandonment of the guidelines.[19] In the lead-up to the codification of The Bible, however, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had some difficulty in deciding morally acceptable parameters of in-depth interrogation. As Eunan O'Halpin illustrates in his work on the JIC during this period, they settled on "a range of techniques designed to break a detainee's will to resist interrogation," which, in the view of the British state, "fell short of physical abuse."[20]
While CALABA was initially deemed successful, its methods were critiqued as highly dubious and immoral. Despite a lack of criticism when performed in the colonial context,[21] when the Techniques were applied to British citizens "just 300 miles from Whitehall rather than nameless locals in the remote fastnesses of a dissolving empire," the reaction was somewhat more severe.[22] Moreover, many of the serious accusations of complicity in torture came from outside of the United Kingdom. For example, the European Court of Human Rights initially ruled in 1975 that the Techniques were a form of torture, although this was downgraded two years later to "degrading treatment."[23] The outcry resulting from this episode led to a reformation of The Bible. The resulting methods, which would be used throughout the remaining phases of the Troubles, now centred on "achieving empathy with the subject by building up a relationship over time," rather than the previous focus of quickly obtaining intelligence by any means necessary.[24]
Internment and the Techniques are demonstrative of some of the uncharted moral territory through which the intelligence services navigated in the initial phase of the Troubles. With violence on the rise and actionable intelligence still scant, British intelligence was faced with the question of how to balance its critical and acute need for information with the means through which that information would be acquired. Although leaders in the security establishment were responsible for how these moral questions would be handled, on-the-ground operational realities were hindered by "higher-level" hesitancy on behalf of policymakers who initially had a "lack of clearly defined direction" to intervene.[25] In this sense, moral responsibility was little more than a grandiose notion which lacked any real strategic objective or operational plan. It was derived from a weak initial assessment of the conflict, which resulted in poorly-constructed and haphazard decisions on the ground. Moreover, despite the government assessing that its intervention "would make it possible to inject the supposed virtues of British political culture […] into the province," by 1972, the security situation became untenable for the Stormont government. Direct Rule was implemented on March 24, 1972.[26] As terrorism expert Peter Neumann has argued, in strategic terms Direct Rule "represented no fundamental shift in British government policy," and is thus derived from the initial assessment of intervention as a moral responsibility.[27] In this sense, we are able to see one facet of the complex relationship between intelligence and moral action — assessment is rendered poor when intelligence is outdated. This in turn had a subsequent impact on the morality of the decisions derived from intelligence assessments.
Enemy Engagement – Touts and the Long War
The year that Direct Rule was implemented was also the bloodiest of the Troubles. More than 400 people were killed as a direct result of conflict-related violence.[28] As it became clear that the conflict had no immediate chance of abating, the services settled in for what became known as the "long war." One of the key strategies for the intelligence services during this phase was the use of informants, also known as touts. From a strategic standpoint, the value and importance of touts in collecting operational intelligence and in reducing violence are indisputable. As Mark Urban highlights:
The effects of the informer war are profound: the level of violence is reduced; the republican community is rendered increasingly paranoid and must eliminate a proportion of its own membership in an attempt to retain its integrity…[it is] key to the containment of terrorist violence.[29]
The role of touts became increasingly critical as the provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) moved underground and adopted a more sophisticated cell structure consisting of Active Service Units (ASU).[30]The tout system, in this respect, allowed the intelligence services two advantages: information and an increase in adversary paranoia. Touts could infiltrate into the deepest parts of the enemy organization, which provided the services vital operational intelligence and the ability to use that information to eliminate key players through arrest. On the latter point, Bew et al highlight that, "such was the rate of attrition that by some estimates the average 'life span' of the…Officer Commanding of the IRA's Belfast Brigade was reduced to just six weeks."[31] Moreover, the psychological impact — the very fear of infiltration — proved to be key for causing internal disunity. For example, from 1978-1997, the IRA's internal security unit, the Nutting Squad, killed 24 of its own members out of fear that they were informants.[32]
The tout system presented clear moral quandaries. From an outside perspective, Northern Irish journalist and Troubles specialist Martin Dillon suggests that engagement led "to an erosion of confidence in the law and a dark suspicion that anything can be contemplated in pursuit of the defeat of terrorism."[33] Intelligence specialist Peter Gill framed the concern by indicating that the "deception and betrayal" inherent in running touts "may have deleterious effects on the moral characters of both handlers and sources."[34] It is important to understand that the conflict reached a critical stage at the adoption of the tout system – operational intelligence needed to abate the threat was scant, and the conflict began to manifest as a near-run thing. In such circumstances, the intelligence services were forced to examine any and all options which might offer a strategic advantage, however morally ambiguous those options were.
In this respect, the biggest moral question encountered by the services during this phase was one of negotiating cost: what moral boundaries could be crossed in an effort to protect valuable assets? If we examine the role of Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife, we see the implications of this question come to a head. A career informer, Scappaticci was undoubtedly one of the most valuable touts — the "jewel in the crown" for the intelligence services.[35] Reportedly recruited as far back as 1978, Scappaticci held a primary role within the Nutting Squad. He led "investigations into suspected informers, inquiries into operations […] debriefings of IRA volunteers […] and the vetting of potential recruits."[36] Scappaticci's role in the Nutting Squad meant that he was inevitably involved in criminal activity, including murder. Moreover, the cost of protecting assets as integral as Stakeknife was high. The assassination of Francisco Notorantonio speaks to this issue. Brian Nelson, a member of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) tasked with identifying targets for the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) assassination squad, was asked by the UFF to begin a file on Scappaticci.[37] Nelson, however, was also a tout for the intelligence services. He was allegedly ordered by his handler to make a case to the UFF for targeting Notorantonio — a pre-Troubles republican paramilitary but who was no longer active — in an effort to save the strategically-critical Scappaticci.[38] The UFF then subsequently targeted and killed Notorantonio.[39] This assassination begs the question of what lengths are appropriate in maintaining the position of a key tout.
Martin Ingram, a former British Army soldier who served in the Intelligence Corps and later in the Force Research Unit, was familiar with the Stakeknife file. Ingram's activities give an interesting perspective on the cost of running high-level touts. Ingram attests that although he now believes the moral price was too high for the intelligence Scappaticci was providing, his opinion was reversed when he was still operational within the intelligence establishment in the heat of the conflict. Ingram's admission highlights an important issue in determining morality in intelligence: once removed from the conflict, hindsight forces practitioners to look at operational decisions through a lens of public morality rather than Omand's proposal of an alternative morality not applicable within the functions of everyday life. This is not an attempt to justify or condemn the cost of running Scappaticci, but rather it is an effort to demonstrate the murky moral line which must sometimes be straddled in the pursuit of security.
Intelligence Surplus and the Timeline of Action
Evidence suggests that by the late 1980s, the amount of actionable intelligence coming into the services "meant that sometimes they had foreknowledge of terrorist attacks."[40] While this was a strategic coup for the services, it also presented new moral problems. The issues encountered were threefold: the question of when to use that intelligence, how to use it, and who to use it on. As this section will demonstrate, the services grappled with all three issues on a consistent basis throughout the latter part of the conflict.
The foreknowledge of attacks left the services with two options: to arrest individuals pre-emptively if irrefutable evidence existed, or allow the attack to proceed as planned in order to catch perpetrators in the act. The latter option — what some have called a policy of ambushing — became the favoured option in practice by 1983.[41] This option almost inevitably resulted in a situation where terrorists (predominantly in these cases IRA volunteers) were killed rather than apprehended. This was seen by some as a deliberate "shoot-to-kill" policy on behalf of the security establishment. As Bamford argues, there is no legislative evidence that such a policy formally existed or that any such decision was taken at the highest level of the British government.[42] However, the "large number of terrorists killed during this period, in circumstances where many believe that an arrest could have been made, is seen as evidence that such a policy existed" in practice.[43]
Both the Loughgall and Gibraltar incidents, in 1987 and 1988 respectively, are examples of these supposed ambush and shoot-to-kill policies and are also reflective of how and when foreknowledge is used in practice. Loughgall involved the deaths of all 8 men in an IRA ASU headed by Jim Lynagh, after intelligence alerted the services to an impending attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary base in the area.[44] The SAS knew the time and location of the attack and waited for the ASU to plant its IED, but the ASU operatives were killed rather than apprehended.[45] The Gibraltar incident, named Operation FLAVIUS, cuts a similar shape. After intelligence determined that an ASU consisting of Seán Savage, Danny McCann, and Mairéad Farrell was headed to Gibraltar for an attack, the SAS was again called in.[46] All three were killed rather than apprehended. In both incidents, it is unclear who opened fire first. Moreover, both raise questions as to why the IRA volunteers were not arrested rather than terminated. Some argue that these ambush/shoot-to-kill incidences are examples of a deliberate policy between "the security service and the Thatcher government," whereas MI-5 biographer and intelligence specialist Christopher Andrew has argued that "there is no persuasive evidence that the decision was premeditated" in either the Loughgall or Gibraltar incidences to assassinate.[47] Regardless, the moral question here is centred on timeframe — knowing that last-minute efforts predominantly result in a perpetrator's death, how long is it morally appropriate to wait before apprehending someone planning terrorism?
The attempted assassination of Gerry Adams by loyalist paramilitaries in March 1984 poses another interesting moral question about for whom preventative intelligence is used. Information was received from a tout within the UDA regarding a UFF plan to shoot Adams.[48] Evidence suggests that there was no warning issued; only once the shots had been fired, missing their target, did the SAS – alleged to be present for the entire incident – apprehend the UFF members.[49] As Urban argues, it "raised uncomfortable questions about the difference between the security forces' response to foreknowledge of republican and loyalist attacks."[50] Urban's assessment is also in line with the Stevens Inquiry's finding that threat intelligence was not always treated equally between Protestant and Catholic groups.[51]
Finally, the question of to whom intelligence should be shared also demonstrates some moral quandaries for the services. There were repeated allegations of collusion between the services and loyalist paramilitaries groups throughout this period. For example, many inside and outside the conflict were convinced that the services were "behind the increasing effectiveness of loyalist paramilitary organization in targeting republicans from the late 1980s."[52] Practitioners such as former Belfast Special Branch head Bill Lowry dismiss these claims, saying, "If we colluded as much with Loyalists as is often alleged by Republicans why did they kill so many innocent Catholics and very few Republicans?"[53] From an independent standpoint, the Stevens Inquiry concluded that "collusion involving direct support of loyalist paramilitaries by security agencies was low level"; however, their forensic examination of contemporary classified documents found the fingerprints of eighty-one people on documents which "they had no lawful reason to possess."[54]
The question of morality by this latter stage in the conflict is rendered additionally complex when societal reaction is examined. Much of the public by this point seemed to "applaud the elimination of republican terrorists and [were] less than curious about the moral tightrope that must be walked to make such actions possible."[55] In this respect, the concept of conflict fatigue must be taken into account when moral questions are at hand. As Bamford notes, the Gibraltar incident in particular is a prime example of the public's growing indifference to violence: it "showed the moral ambivalence of a liberal democratic society toward the use of lethal force in counterterrorism operations."[56] While public opinion should not be the only barometer by which intelligence agencies should measure the morality of their decisions, how the parameters of morality alter and expand as a conflict protracts is worthwhile to note.
The standard argument today assesses that the conduct of the British intelligence services in Northern Ireland "was ultimately very effective but at the price of employing some highly dubious methods."[57] The conflict, as it presented itself from its inception, was one which demonstrated the difficult position of comprehending the complexities inherent in quashing domestic terrorism. As we have seen, negotiating methods vis-à-vis critical time restraints and information scarcity in the first phase of the conflict led to some hastily-implemented and occasionally counter-productive collection realities, some of which that had questionable moral groundings. As the conflict protracted and long-term engagement was established, the murkiness of moral conduct by the services became further complicated, somewhat paradoxically, by the increasing success and improvement of their intelligence capacity in the province.
From the broadest perspective, the most significant question raised by the British experience in Northern Ireland is one of scale: how far is a state willing to expand the borders of moral conduct for the sake of security? Perhaps the best way to approach these ambiguities is to consider Omand's recommendation. While there is not a suggestion that intelligence services should act within a moral vacuum or that they should conduct their business without the appropriate oversight and review mechanisms in place, there ought to be an acknowledgement that given the very nature of intelligence, its conduct and practice requires a "different morality" than to what is abided in civilian life. n
Ms. Kalajdziovski is an MA candidate in the Intelligence and International Security program at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Her research interests include the role and historical evolution of intelligence in counterterrorism practice pertaining to domestic terror threats.
[1] David Omand, Securing the State. (London: Hurst and Company, 2010), xviii.
[2]Stansfield Turner, as quoted in David Omand and Mark Phythian, "Ethics and Intelligence: A Debate," International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 26 (2013): 48.
[3]Omand and Phythian, 51.
[4] David Omand, "Ethical Guidelines in Using Secret Intelligence for Public Security," in Secret Intelligence: A Reader, ed. Christopher Andrew, Richard Aldrich, and Wesley Wark (London: Routledge, 2009), 406.
[5] For the purposes of this article, "intelligence services" will be referred to as any and all groups assigned with intelligence roles in the province. This includes both civilian and military services.
[6]Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2009), 619.
[7]James Callaghan, as quoted in Peter Neumann, Britain's Long War: British Strategy in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969-98 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 44.
[8]Ibid., 21.
[10]Neumann, 25; Andrew, 603.
[11]Neumann, 20.
[12]John Bew, Martyn Frampton, and Iñigo Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country (London Hurst and Company, 2009), 34.
[13]Kate Martin, "Domestic Intelligence and Civil Liberties" in Secret Intelligence: A Reader, ed. Christopher Andrew, Richard Aldrich, and Wesley Wark (London: Routledge, 2009), 361.
[14]Richard J. Aldrich. "'A Skeleton in our Cupboard': British Interrogation Procedures in Northern Ireland" in Learning from the Secret Past, ed. Robert Dover and Michael Goodman (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 163.
[15]Bradley Bamford, "The Role and Effectiveness of Intelligence in Northern Ireland," Intelligence and National Security 20 (2005): 589.
[16]Bew et al., 35.
[17]Aldrich, 166.
[18]Ibid., 163.
[20]Emphasis in text. Eunan O'Halpin, "'A poor thing but our own': The Joint Intelligence Committee and Ireland, 1965-72," Intelligence and National Security 25 (2008): 671.
[21] Through his analysis of JIC documents from the period, O'Halpin demonstrates that the JIC itself was taken by surprise at the negative reaction to interrogation methods used in the province considering the lack of such backlash when used in previous campaigns in the British Empire. O'Halpin, 672.
[22]The outrage domestically was best demonstrated through the reporting of the Sunday Times' Insight Team, who published numerous reports of individuals who had claimed "ill-treatment" during interrogation. The prevalence of these reports – which were then subsequently picked up by other media outlets – triggered a response from the government in the form of the Compton Inquiry. See Aldrich, 169.
[26]Its implementation saw the suspension and dissolution of Stormont and the transfer of legislative and administrative power away from the province to the seat of government in Westminster. See Andrew, 620.
[29]Mark Urban, Big Boys' Rules: The Secret Struggle Against the IRA (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 245.
[30]Urban, 31.
[32]Urban, 102.
[33]Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Arrow Books, 1990), 115.
[34]Peter Gill, Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1994), 156.
[35]Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin, Stakeknife: Britain's Secret Agents in Ireland (Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 2005), 64.
[36]Ibid., 62.
[37]Jon Moran, "Evaluating Special Branch and the Use of Informant Intelligence in Northern Ireland," Intelligence and National Security 25 (2008): 13.
[41]Urban demonstrates that between December 1983 and February 1985, ten individuals were killed in related incidents (8 were IRA volunteers) following a five year period in which no one was killed. See Ibid.
[42]Bamford, 593.
[44]Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Pan Books, 2004), 254.
[46]Andrew, 739.
[51]Sir John Stevens, Stevens Inquiry III: Overview and Recommendations (Belfast: Stevens Enquiry, 2003), 11.
[52]Moran, 14.
[53]Bill Lowry, as quoted in Mark Cochrane, "Security Force Collusion in Northern Ireland 1969-1999: Substance or Symbolism?" Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36 (2013): 86.
[54]Stevens, 10.
[55]Urban, xviii.
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One of the largest adoption support groups in the Chicago area.
A non-profit organization that demystifies and dispels stereotypes about adoption.
A New York-based support group for pre-adoptive and adoptive families and their children.
Promotes public awareness and recruitment, information and referral and publications for adoptive families.
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text:
M/S Viking Grace er en cruisefærge bygget for det finske rederi Viking Line. Skibet indsattes i januar 2013 på ruten mellem Stockholm i Sverige og Åbo i Finland via Mariehamn på Ålandsøerne. Skibet drives med flydende naturgas (LNG) som primære brændstofkilde.

Historie
I oktober 2010 blev hensigtserklæringen underskrevet under forudsætning af, at der kunne indgås aftale med gasleverandøren, og at der kunne opnås miljøtilskud på 28 mio. euro fra staten. Sidstnævnte bevilgedes i den 22. december 2010, og på denne baggrund kunne konstruktionen af skibet påbegyndes på værftet i Åbo den 28. september 2011. Miljøtilskuddet godkendtes efterfølgende af EU-kommissionen den 25. april 2012.

Køllægningen fandt sted den 6. marts 2012, og skibet søsattes den august samme år.
Skibet leveredes den 10. januar 2013, sejlede sin jomfrusejlads den 13. januar og indsattes i ordinær trafik den 15. januar.

Skibets første sejlads blev udsolgt på fire timer med priser fra 350 euro pr. seng, og inden julen 2012 - dvs. før skibet sattes i trafik - var der solgt 300.000 rejser. Skibet var ventet med spænding, da det var den første nybygning i mange år på Sverige-Finlandstrafikken. På ruten mellem Stockholm og Åbo erstattede Viking Grace den 25 år ældre MS Isabella.

Galleri

Se også
 Stavangerfjord

Referencer

Eksterne henvisninger

 Viking Lines hjemmeside (på engelsk)

Cruisefærger
Skibe bygget i Finland
Færger i Østersøen


text:
Home » Xpeng's New LOGO and new electric SUV
carsstory
Xpeng's New LOGO and new electric SUV
by Sep Editor November 17, 2021
written by Sep Editor November 17, 2021
Xpeng Motors plans to expand its product line-up with the launch of a new Smart EV in 2022. The fourth model will be a Xpeng SUV bigger and more advanced than the Xpeng G3i.
All available information about the upcoming Xpeng SUV indicates it will be in the same class as the Xpeng P7. Hence, Xpeng Motors might name their new vehicle the G7, following in the footsteps of its previous models. However, recent reports also state that the company is considering this as the Xpeng G9.
The top-end configuration of the new Xpeng SUV, possibly the Xpeng G7 or Xpeng G9, could have a twin-motor AWD powertrain generating at least 316 kW (430 PS/424 bhp) of power and 655 Nm of torque and be capable of accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h (0-62 mph) in under five seconds. An 80 kWh lithium-ion battery pack should be one option, offering a WLTP range of more than 500 km or 311 miles.
The Xpeng SUV's prices could start at around CNY 250,000 (EUR 34,194) after subsidy. That'd make it cheaper than the Tesla Model Y, the prices of which start at CNY 276,000 (EUR 37,750) after subsidy.
Besides the new SUV model, the State Intellectual Property Office has already appeared a new LOGO registered by XPeng.
XPeng Inc. (NYSE:XPEV) Shares Bought by Funds
What is the size of the electric vehicle market?


text:
Schmorda ist eine Gemeinde in der Verwaltungsgemeinschaft Ranis-Ziegenrück im thüringischen Saale-Orla-Kreis.

Geographie
Schmorda befindet sich auf einem höheren Plateau des Thüringer Schiefergebirges nordöstlich des Hohenwarte-Stausees. Die Gemarkung ist kupiert und meist von Wald umgeben. Nördlich liegt Ranis.

Geschichte
Schmorda wurde im Jahre 1525 erstmals urkundlich erwähnt. W. Kahl ermittelte die urkundliche Ersterwähnung  aus dem Jahr 1379.

Die heutige Kirche wurde im 19. Jahrhundert errichtet.

Bis in das 19. Jahrhundert wurde an mehreren Lagerstätten Kupfer und Spat abgebaut. Anschließend wuchs die landwirtschaftliche Bedeutung, was sich heute noch an den Vierseitenhöfen des Angerdorfes erkennen lässt. Schmorda gehörte bis 1815 zum kursächsischen Amt Arnshaugk und kam nach dessen auf dem Wiener Kongress beschlossenen Abtretung an den preußischen Landkreis Ziegenrück, zu dem der Ort bis 1945 gehörte.

Einwohnerentwicklung
Entwicklung der Einwohnerzahl (ab 1994: Stand jeweils 31. Dezember):

Datenquelle ab 1994: Thüringer Landesamt für Statistik

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Ort im Saale-Orla-Kreis
Angerdorf
Ersterwähnung 1379


text:
Law and disorder: The 'riot' double standard
Americans were shocked by the assault on the U. S. Capitol that took place on Jan. 6, ostensibly by Trump supporters.
The U.S. Capitol Police chief, who has since resigned, stated: "The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington, D.C."
Pat Buchanan noted: "What Americans watched was a mob occupation and desecration of the temple of the American Republic. And the event will be forever exploited to discredit not only Trump but the movement he led and the achievements of his presidency. He will be demonized as no one else in our history since Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy."
The fallout from last Wednesday will likely continue for a long time. The pitchfork brigade that frightened those in the Capitol for a few hours will likely become the face of "conservatives" on direct mail pieces of the Southern Poverty Law Center and their ilk.
But those inside the Capitol were not typical of the vast majority of conservatives, including those who attended the D.C. rally. Pastor and columnist Larry Tomczak was there.
TRENDING: WATCH: 'Senior counsel' for PBS wants 're-education camps' for GOPers' children
For WND (Jan. 6), he writes: "The diverse crowd was overwhelmingly respectful but righteously angry. The gathered multitudes were a far cry from the boisterous, violent and destructive protests of Black Lives Matter, Antifa and far-left extremists."
How are we to process all this? Dr. Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, commented on the attack: "Americans must always reject the resort to violence in pursuit of political goals. It is literally 'un-American' to engage in, or resort to, violent disregard of the law. This is not a question of conservative vs. liberal or Democrat vs. Republican. This is right vs. wrong."
One now-repentant participant inside the Capitol is quoted in the New York Post (Jan. 8): "My decision to enter the Capitol was wrong, and I am deeply regretful to have done so. Without qualification and as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, I condemn the violence and destruction that took place in Washington."
But, of course, if he's looking for forgiveness from the left, he will not find it. There is no redemption from the left.
Part of the story that is so difficult to stomach is the double standard – the way the media treats protesters on the right vs. those on the left.
Tristan Justice of The Federalist.com notes that in the last year there were 28 times that "media and Democrats excused or endorsed violence committed by left-wing activists." He points out: "Democrats and their allies in the media are ready to condemn riots now that the turmoil has shifted to fit their narrative."
Justice adds, "Incoming Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged her supporters last summer to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which provided bail money to the militant anarchists facing charges for setting fire to Minneapolis."
Looting and stealing and killing and violence for months was called "mostly peaceful protests." Some of the reporters saying these riots were "mostly peaceful protests" had burning buildings behind them. They were reminiscent of Baghdad Bob, spokesman for Saddam Hussein in 2003, who would report that his forces were winning while the viewer could see the exact opposite behind Bob.
For months, we saw looting and unprecedented destruction of people's livelihoods. Many of the people financially hurt were the working poor, including minorities, whose businesses and dreams went up in smoke.
America is all about the rule of law. The creation of the U.S. Constitution was in response to a riotous situation.
Some commentators note that the frustrated Capitol protesters did not go as far as trying to spark an insurrection. But, interestingly, the Constitution came about because of a true insurrection. It was called Shays' Rebellion (1786).
In her 1986 book on the creation of the Constitution, "Miracle at Philadelphia," author Catherine Drinker Bowen says, "Desperate farmers, ruinously taxed – 'by Boston,' they said – and seeing their cattle and their land distrained by the bailiffs, had risen in revolt. With staves and pitchforks they had marched on county courthouses after the best Revolutionary technique, frightening sound-money men out of their wits and rousing General Washington to express disgust and anger that a country which had won a difficult war was not able to keep order in peacetime."
Response to this ultimately led to the creation of the Constitution – something good out of the ashes of calamity.
Meanwhile, America's need to repent and return to God could not be clearer. One of the worst potential outcomes would be to encourage more Christian apathy on politics. It is never a good time to quit doing the right thing, even after major setbacks. After all, as Calvin Coolidge said, "If good men don't hold office, bad men will."
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
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One of the most challenging aspects of leading a data science team is gaining and maintaining stakeholder buy-in on a project. Developing the skills and process to do this well is critical to your success in this role.
In this article, I will go over three ways to maximize the chances of turning your stakeholders into happy customers and project champions.
1. Bring out your inner salesperson.
At its core, getting stakeholder buy-in on an analytical product is a sales job. As a data science leader, you are selling a stakeholder on an analytical solution to their business problem. Ultimately, you need to get him or her to trust that your solution is the right one and that you are the person to deliver it. Doing this effectively means cultivating the skills and qualities that make a good salesperson successful, part of which is confidence and charisma.
Salespeople have an energy that simultaneously makes people want to work with them and inspires potential customers to partake in their vision of a better world (by buying their product). However, not everyone is an extrovert and many struggle with doing this effectively. The good news is that this is a muscle that can be developed. Think about how your favorite game show host projects their voice and manages the crowd and contestants. It is unlikely that they act the same way around the dinner table. They have cultivated a persona for the show. You too should develop your "game show host" persona. One excellent way to do this practically is to take public speaking, improvisation, and even acting classes.
Excellent salespeople also have great empathy. They need to intimately understand what their customers want. Doing this successfully requires the ability to think like your customer. You should treat your stakeholders in the same way. Know their business and process inside and out and, by extension, their problems as well. Many data scientists struggle with this because they are more excited by the solution than the problem. However, in the end, your stakeholder does not care about the latest version of XGBoost—they care about a more productive sales pipeline or higher click-through rate on their targeted emails. Quite often, getting better at this is less about developing a new skill and more about a shift in attitude and perspective. A great way to do this is to spend as much time as possible with the stakeholder discussing their job (or shadowing them, if they allow it).
2. Set clear project goals with the stakeholder—then challenge them.
Any project that starts without clear goals will ultimately get derailed. Due to their inherent complexity, this is particularly important for data science projects. Align on what problems you are trying to solve up front and map these goals to tangible metrics as soon as possible. These metrics then become the yardstick along which progress is measured. Once you settle on the metrics, it is critical to then align on what "good enough" looks like.
Often in a data science project, there is a level of accuracy beyond which the business value of incremental improvements is not worth the resources required to drive the improvement. For this reason, it is imperative to agree at the start on what constitutes as "good enough," particularly for a minimum viable product. Ensure that in the process of creating this alignment, you require the stakeholder to provide tangible evidence of the link between model performance metrics and business outcomes. For example, evidence on how incremental lift on targeted emails actually converts to sales and the bottom line. This is important because stakeholders will often use "gut feeling" to decide on what good enough is and this can lead to chasing results that don't create a meaningful difference to the business.
It is also critical to set realistic expectations on what is possible and when it can be delivered. Non-data scientists can sometimes have unrealistic expectations of what the technology can deliver and often fall victim to the hype cycle. Be clear that a data science project carries greater risk than a typical engineering project due to the experimental nature of the work.
3. Make the MVP solution feel familiar and trusted.
To understand what we mean by making the solution feel familiar, just think about basic smartphone icons. Icons for the Calculator, Notes, and Camera are all designed so that the user already knows how to use these applications before he or she opens them. This same kind of design thinking should go into your MVP data science projects. In the data product context, this often means incorporating elements of existing reports and powerpoint presentations into your user interface.
My team did this effectively when we recently deployed predictive sales forecasting to replace an existing manual process run by our sales strategy teams to forecast quarterly sales revenue (This solution ultimately evolved into Einstein Forecasting). When we created a dashboard to communicate the machine learning-driven forecasts to sales leaders, we used the same graphs that the sales strategy team used in a slide presentation to show the manual forecasts. This meant that our sales leaders immediately understood relevant aspects of the forecast (e.g. the variance and historical revenue) with no explanation required. This "built in" familiarity meant that they were quick to start adopting our solution.
Using familiar business terminology also makes the experience more impactful. Invite the leader who owns the current process to join project standups and reviews, and be sure to report the accuracy in terms that make sense to the stakeholder. For example, lift in targeted email conversion will be much more interpretable for a marketer than the Area Under Curve (AUC) score of a classification model.
Furthermore, in order for the stakeholder to trust in the data science solution, you should always report the underlying factors that are driving model outputs. If you are building a solution to predict housing prices, make sure the factors that impact the forecast for each house, such as square footage and age, are reported along with the forecast. I have found when building internal data products for stakeholders within your organization, having clear metrics of the model's accuracy right on the report/dashboard/UX is another good way to get the stakeholder to trust your solution.
Finally, design model outputs to hide details that can be misinterpreted or used in unintended ways (e.g. a bucket of "Leads Most Likely to Convert" as opposed to "Lead X has an 85% conversion probability").
Follow these tips and your stakeholders will soon be evangelizing your solution better than you ever could! Ultimately the business outcomes will be better and you will drive more value for your organization.
Robin Glinton is VP of Data Science Applications at Salesforce.com. He leads a team dedicated to understanding the adoption of Salesforce products as well as applied research in machine learning-driven CRM offerings. Robin has held a number of positions across startups, industry, and academia.


AS OF OCTOBER 12, 2017, ALL SOLD UNITS HAVE BEEN RECOVERED BY DUI. THIS NOTICE IS AN UPDATE TO THE RECALL ALERT REQUIRED BY CPSC.
Hazard: The scuba diving regulators can malfunction, posing a drowning hazard.
Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled regulators and return them to DUI for a full refund. The firm is notifying all purchasers directly.
Consumer Contact: Diving Unlimited International at 800-325-8439 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, email at rcwatts@dui-online.com or online at www.divedui.com.
Description: This recall involves Ocean Management Systems (OMS) Airstream Evoque regulators for scuba diving. The metal regulator attaches to the scuba tank valve and controls the pressure of the air a diver breathes. Only regulators with the following serial numbers are included in the recall. "Airstream" and the serial number can be found on the body of the regulator.
Incidents/Injuries: The firm has received three reports of units malfunctioning during diving. No injuries have been reported.
Sold at: Authorized Diving Unlimited International dealers nationwide and online at www.divegearexpress.com and https://www.divedui.com/ from February 2017 through June 2017 for about $500.
Importer: Diving Unlimited International, Inc. of San Diego, Calif.
Manufactured in: Taiwan This recall was conducted voluntarily by the company under CPSC's Fast Track Recall process. Fast Track recalls are initiated by firms who commit to work with CPSC to quickly announce the recall and remedy to protect consumers.
We encourage all divers to purchase genuine DUI ZipSeal parts.


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Rickard Falkvinge: How Today's NSA Is Much, Much Worse Than Stasi Or Orwell's "1984"
Rickard Falkvinge
How Today's NSA Is Much, Much Worse Than Stasi Or Orwell's "1984"
Privacy: There are still people warning us of sleepwalking into a Stasi or "1984" society. They missed the boat by a long shot: we are already far, far past the point of Stasi or "1984". The apparatus that governments have built to trace, track, and record citizens is the stuff of nightmares.
The scene-setting paragraph in George Orwell's 1984 is still something that gives you chills, even as the book has so old it has come out of the copyright monopoly in Australia:
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
We're far, far beyond this point. Replace "Thought Police" above with the more general "Government", and you could fit this story into the United Stasi's NSA story, the Swedish FRA story, or any similar one.
The government agencies' claim of "we're not watching everybody all the time, we target different people" is exactly what is written above – for "at any rate, they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to".
Oh yes, the cameras? The government doesn't have cameras installed in every home, right? Well, no. But we do, and the government has taken itself the right to use them to watch us, breaking into our computers to use our webcams. Germany was famous for this a couple of years back with its so-called Bundestrojaner. The primary difference between this scene from 1984 and today, in terms of the cameras, is that we installed them ourselves.
So far, we're only at the 1984 or Stasi level. But things have become much worse.
Our movements as we walk about in the city are traced, tracked and recorded – almost down to the footstep level. Every step you take, they'll be watching you. If you deviate more than 100 meters from your usual path, that can be noted and flagged. The first time you see your own movement maps, and realize that somebody else is gather this information to use it against you, sends shivers down your spine. Where were you on April 17, 2012, at 13:21 European time? You were on the move, but at what speed? Whence and whither? Somebody has an answer to that question, and it's not you.
This leads us to the key difference between the Stasi horror dystopia and the worse society today. Those of us who have read or seen 1984 recall that if the government didn't catch what you were saying at the time you said it, you had gotten away. Words disappeared as fast as they were spoken and heard, or not heard.
That's different today. In those dystopias, anything you said could and would be used against you. In our today, anything you say can and will be used against you, today or decades into the future. Everything is recorded. Everything.
If you're redflagged for some stupid reason one year from today, what you were saying just five minutes ago will come under scrutiny, and whom you spoke them to. If the laws or social norms change to make the things you do right now suspicious in a decade, you're going to be seen as a suspicious individual if somebody finds out – for everything is recorded.
Stasi couldn't record what newspaper articles you were reading. For how long. And in what order. That, along with pretty much every thought you have ever explored while sitting at a computer, is now part of your permanent record – even if you never told a single human being.
So you use encryption, you say? Mumble, Redphone, PGP? How nice for you. But a particular encryption has a shelf life. What's breakable today wasn't breakable a decade ago, and the NSA is saving every piece of encrypted communications, too. What's not breakable today may be so in a decade. If you're encrypting things with the intent of keeping them safe forever, that's not what today's reality looks like. Oh, and when did you last change your key? Wait, you do encrypt in the first place, don't you?
We tend to think of a lost cryptokey as needing to change that key before we make any future communications, kind of like a lost housekey needs replacement. It's much worse than that. If we lose the key, we just decrypted everything we had ever sent encrypted – for somebody had saved it on the odd chance that such an event could happen.
A lost housekey doesn't mean your home immediately gets broken into a year ago, but that's the case with today's cryptokeys.
We are far, far beyond the point of Stasi or "1984". Isn't it time to at least stop, look and listen to what we've created?
CategoriesCultural Intelligence
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Disneyland Paris Begins Process to Select New Ambassadors for 30th Anniversary Year
by Laughing Place Disney Newsdesk | Jun 3, 2021 9:34 AM Pacific Time
Tags: Ambassador, Disney Parks, Disneyland Ambassadors, Disneyland Paris, Disneyland Paris Resort, Parks
Following a tradition put in place by Walt Disney himself in the early days of Disneyland, Disneyland Paris is looking for their next ambassador to represent the park during its 30th anniversary year.
What's Happening:
Disneyland Paris is looking for the next Disneyland Paris Ambassador! Starting today, June 3rd, eligible and interested Cast Members can apply to become the new Ambassador who will represent Disneyland Paris starting 2022 for the park's 30th Anniversary!
The Disneyland Resort Ambassador Program dates back to 1965 when Walt Disney selected the first Ambassador, Julie Reihm, and has carried over to every Disney Park in the world. Reihm is the role model that sets the bar for all Disney ambassadors to look up to since she was hand-picked by Walt Disney himself to be a personification of Disneyland's world-famous spirit of friendliness and happiness.
Disney Ambassadors serve as the Resort's "Emissaries of Goodwill," media representatives and as official hosts to Resort guests. As official spokespeople, Ambassadors offer the outside community a personal relationship with the Resort. They foster Walt Disney's original vision by hosting elected officials and business leaders at the parks and are active community partners through visits to hospitals, participation in VoluntEAR projects and frequent presentations in support of Disney's community initiatives. They also serve a primary role in cast member recognition celebrations.
Typically, to qualify, Cast Members must go through a series of steps in the application process, including writing essays, be subjected to observation for weeks at a time, and have a very strong knowledge in the company's history, including not just parks and movies, but their characters and songs, their merchandise, park policies, refund procedures, safety guidelines. Everything.
Cast Members can visit the HUB to learn more, and be sure to follow @dlpambassador on Instagram for updates as the search for the next Disneyland Paris Ambassador continues.
Laughing Place recommends MouseFanTravel.com for all your Disney travel planning
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Disneyland Paris 30th Anniversary Celebration Begins…


Charles Darwin must have been thinking about communications when he wrote the Origins of Species, because today it is survival of the fittest. At the core of successful communications is innovation in storytelling, technology and where the two intersect.
Canada's media environment is at a crossroads. Traditional publishers are having their audiences pried apart by on-demand services like Netflix and by the proliferation of social media influencers. Fitting somewhere between all three groups (publishers, audiences and influencers) are brands who, through content marketing and communications efforts, are finding a new voice to speak directly to consumers like never before.
As communication professionals we need to work on the new; whether you work for a government or airline trying to manage a crisis, an agency seeking to position a client's product, or a content creator hoping to attract views to your work — you are all in competition for the same readers.
In Innovation Imperative, you will read seven stories about professionals like you who are finding new ways to engage with their audiences. Read their stories to find new inspiration for success in this ever-changing media landscape.
The word "content" can conjure lots of different ideas to different people, but Ron Tite, CEO of the Tite Group, has one of the best definitions for content in 2016.
If you don't broaden your horizons and up your game, your content will never be a must have. It will just be ignored. The difference today, accordingly to Tite, is we have universal choice. We aren't passive in our content diets. We're carnivores.
For what you produce to become someone's meal of choice, Tite shared three rules for creating impactful content that can apply to any medium.
If you want to create the best content you need the strongest most experience voice possible to create it.
His answer to this content quandary for Johnson Insurance Group hiring Bruce Sellery, a personal finance expert with more than 20 years' experience as a brand manager, and as BNN's Bureau Chief in New York City, as the editor of the brand's content marketing program produced by the Tite Group.
As the sophistication of content evolves, the traditional structures that honed award-winning journalism for generations will move into content marketing. Hiring people like Sellery to lead content production will become the norm. You need a general to win a war.
"Community today isn't a set of geographic boundaries [but rather] it is a set of interests," said Tite, who suggests you find people who share your interests and you begin to congregate online.
Find your niche by monitoring how audiences respond to and engage with your content on social media. You may find that this audience isn't your target demographic so you need to look at your strategy or realign your product marketing to target the audience you have inadvertently built.
A shark has to swim to keep breathing, as does a content creator. With so much focus on writing, don't forget to keep consuming a diverse set of media. If you need somewhere to start looking, Tite points to comedian Louis C.K. who sells his own TV show Horace and Pete's on his personal website promoted through his proprietary email list.
With competition like Louis C.K., we all have some work to do.
Chapter 2: Why Communicators Need To Be H.O.T.
Trust is the foundation of every great relationship. When a public organization like the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) loses that, it can impact a city or government for years to come. Trust is measurable and can be lost in an instant.
To maintain that trust with the community, TTC's Executive Director of Corporate Communications Brad Ross says that corporate communicators need to be H.O.T.–honest, open and transparent.
In 2010, the City of Toronto faced a $100 million class action lawsuit levied by aggrieved business owners along the St. Clair street car line after mismanagement of the upgrade and repair project of the line by a third party contractor that caused delays and thereby affecting revenue for the businesses along the line.
"The TTC's portion arrived on-time and on-budget, but there was a misconception that it was [entirely] our project," said Ross.
Since then, the organization has launched a new community relations framework called the Good Neighbours Policy, which outlines how the TTC must consult and communicate with affected communities before and during construction.
At the core of this strategy is listening to and measuring the community's response to the group's work.
The TTC uses Twitter, email alerts, video screens at rail stations, and its employees at transit stations to directly inform passengers about ongoing delays in the system. One of the greatest challenges the transit authority faces is measuring the community's response. Here are five tactics Ross uses to overcome that hurdle and determine the effectiveness of his team's transparency efforts.
By regularly doing this type of survey, the TTC can build a series of benchmarks for future internal evaluation. Any brand can do this. Some use surveys such as a Net Promoter Score, or NPS, to evaluate the likelihood customers would recommend a product to their family or friends while others take the grassroots option of SurveyMonkey.
Deploying these takes time and the findings may surprise you, but if you don't know about a problem you can never fix it.
Even if you don't ask your customers whether they are happy with your service, it doesn't mean they won't let you know. Ross's team closely monitors Twitter, the go-to platform for most customers to voice their immediate concerns, on real-time nearly 24-hour basis. An increase in complaints is a strong indicator that a service disruption has not been communicated to the public effectively.
Social listening allows you to identify service issues and direct concerns to the appropriate service channel immediately.
Don't forget about phone calls! Every organization has customer service lines and, as professional communicators, you should be aware of the volume and content of those calls. Every touch point between a brand and its customers should be measured as an opportunity to bring value and build trust.
As an example when the TTC's new construction project, the Leslieville Barns kicked up dust in the summer, resident complaints were met with immediate action.
"We delivered air conditioners to those affect so they could close their windows and sill stay cool," said Ross.
The TTC could do that because it listened and responded. Put data behind the types of issues that arise with your brand and identify problems that you have to solve.
Consultation is the bedrock for a public organization's engagement with residents. Measure the number of people who attend a consultation, record the issues raised and evaluate how these two are interrelated. Under the Good Neighbours Policy this meant creating a staffed site office that featured all the information about the Leslieville Barns project and had team members available to answer the community's questions and take-in feedback.By having staff on-site, the city could be immediately aware of any issues as soon as they arose and relationships could be built with community members to make the situation less adversarial.
Not every aspect of a project can be up for the community to decide, but measuring the content provided by the community can direct future communication and awareness efforts. When you communicate uncomfortable truths clearly and consult with the public earnestly, you will face less vitriolic opposition.
Being H.O.T. becomes even more important when lives are at risk. John Reber, Director of Communications at Air Canada, saw this first-hand when Flight AC624 incident on March 29, 2015 at 11:43 p.m. EST.
When Toronto shut down because of a record breaking ice storm on December 21, 2013, Toronto Hydro's Director for Media Communications and Municipal Stakeholder Relation Brian Buchan had a plan. Bring the team together and communicate with everyone through every channel possible with a single voice.
How did he do it? His team used a social media management tool and trained hard.
Toronto Hydro manages electricity for more than 700,000 customers affecting about 2.8 million people in the city.
The outage reports increased by 6,100 per cent, website traffic grew by 680 per cent and that's while 416,000 customers were without power. When an emergency strikes, communication requirements skyrocket. Because ice storms are predictable—it's more a matter of "when" rather than "if"—Toronto Hydro has an emergency plan in place that includes social media guidelines. Knowing the right messaging and means of communication helped Buchan's team respond to hundreds of messages an hour and with accuracy.
While you may not have people's lives in your hands, this still means preventing further messages than can enflame a social media crisis. Arm your team to respond quickly in an emergency by preparing a response library for the usual types of complaints or issues that arise. Keep this as a living document during a crisis so teams can update it as new issues arise.
2. No cherry-picking Respond to everything.
You can't pick and choose the messages that you want to respond to whether its praise for your handling of the situation or a complaint. In case of the latter, try to move the conversation offline as soon as you can and direct that person to someone in your organization that can help fix the situation. While the critical messages during the ice storm centered on the location of down trees and power lines being relayed to repair teams, for your brand it could be critical service requests. Connect with everyone who engages with your brand and help them find resolution.
When something has gone wrong and it is being worked on, stick to the facts. If your brand is having a service outage and you don't know how long it will take to repair, tell people that.
Social media managers had to respond to questions from residents about how long it would take to restore power to their homes or communities during the ice storm. Being accurate became integral to people's comfort.
Keep the lights on by keeping your staff full and people trained. Otherwise, your brand's version of downed power lines will become unmanageable.
Agencies are often asked to communicate for public organizations and when the Nova Scotia Power Authority wanted to inform the province of steps to take to maintain safety during a winter storm, Stephanie McGrath, National PR's Director of Content Strategy pitched a video series.
This isn't just because video is latest hot medium for storytelling, but rather McGrath felt that it would be the most effective way to communicate the power authority's message. It would be direct, entertaining and measurable.
The Storm Wars Trilogy video series worked garnering sizeable shares on social media and even earning McGrath a Golden Quill Merit Award through the International Association of Business Communicators.
When you present to a client, find examples of how a similar campaign has worked for a company in their industry. These don't have to be your own work, nor only from Canada, but they should illustrate that your campaign concept can work.
You should know as much about your client's target audience demographic as you do about your client. For McGrath, she lives in Nova Scotia so she is the target audience. However if you don't have that imbedded knowledge, you can collect consumer insights through a social media persona analysis.
Nova Scotians have an affinity for a local named Frankie McDonald – who shares loud, eccentric ad hoc weather reports and has a passionate digital following. Featuring Frankie at the beginning of the first video in the series would help the series reach its target audience.
Nova Scotians widely use the #StormChips hashtag – a province-wide inside joke that discusses how residents eat during a storm. Vegetables need not apply. She used this as a theme throughout the video series.
This works because it is localized. It isn't a web series for all of the country to learn about what to do during a power outage or a storm but instead is content for Nova Scotians about how to act when the coastal province has a storm.
You've got the buy-in from your client, now it's time to convince the audience to watch your video. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Vimeo, YouTube, and Instagram are all using moving pictures as a content vehicle. Brands that aren't using video are losing out. Facebook even gives preference in its algorithm to live-streamed video. But the old-fashioned pre-recorded stuff will work well for you too.
When brands invest in video content, the worst thing that can happen is for the content to fall flat and the investment in money and time seems like a waste. Kevin Keane is the Co-Founder of Brain Sights a neural analytics company that studies the brainwaves of people watching video or otherwise engaging with content. Keane can track when you a viewer is engaged and when they drop off based on electroencephalogram (EEG) scans made multiple times a second that can even detect when memories are encoded into the brain and, most importantly, when they are not.
Keane's team has looked into the minds of thousands of people and, after years of reviewing how people respond unconsciously, he has two keys for successful video content that can hack your brand's messaging into anyone's brain.
"We see brands invest millions into commercial creative to then only make a brand reveal at the end of the video," said Keane.
According to Keane's research, this queues the audience to stop paying attention, illustrating that the content you need to pay attention to is over and you can go back to playing with your phone. Don't do it! Instead, integrate your brand into key moments of your content.
This plays out everywhere, whether it is in your press releases, company events or on your blog. You've created these content experiences to help people become exposed to your brand – help them do that.
People respond to content differently depending on where they are physically, the platform utilized to engage, and the content that comes before and after what they are reading. In each environment, a piece of content can be more or less effective.
"Super Bowl ads that matched the intensity of the game were as much as twice as effective as those that were slower paced," said Keane, who conducted analyses of the highly coveted commercial spots for the past two title games.
If you are planning for your content to be engaged with alongside a hockey game or in a sports magazine, include the target sport in your content.
"If you are making significant investments in content or ad placement, you need to find media integrations that will maximize that content's impact," said Keane.
Doing this requires that you plan each engagement carefully. You can't copy paste one piece of content from one context to another and expect positive results.
Writing satirical news stories is all fun and games until a story crashes the server and propels your brands to worldwide recognition. Alexander Huntley is a staff writer with Canadian satirical news site The Beaverton, an online publication staffed by volunteers from across Canada that holds its story meetings on a private Facebook group and chooses its headlines democratically using 'likes'.
If you spend any time on Facebook and are in the communications industry you've seen the team's handiwork.
For a team of volunteers, the group is doing extremely well with stories going viral and even being included in international news as fast. Huntley shared his team's secrets for creating consistently viral content.
Ideas in isolation are only as good as the individual writer but when brought to a team of creative professionals, good ideas can be made great and mediocre ideas can be discarded.
"We have story meetings on Facebook, where we'll write up headlines around a news item and vote by liking the most entertaining or catchy titles," said Huntley.
The real business of fake news is found in writing and editing as a team. You can do the same with your blog ideas by bringing your subject matter experts and creative teams into the content process.
Huntley wrote about Canadian astronaut Chris Hadield with the headline, "Hadfield Arrives Back to Earth With $1.75 million Rogers Phone Bill." The article actually broke the website with more than half a million hits in a day. Reddit users reposted it more than 20,000 times times .
Beaverton authors pitch two types of stories, those that are evergreen, which are comedic at any time and those that are pulled from the headlines. It is the later that often go viral.
"We can have a story online within half-an-hour of a news item dropping," said Huntley, who often other beats mainstream publishers to the punch that are following up on a broken news item.
Of course not writing facts or having to quote actual people helps but the lesson is clear — get your content online fast. Popular stories on the Beaverton will often see more than 500,000 page views in a day when there is a high point in news coverage.
If a story goes viral because it is offensive, you will have missed your mark and might create a social media crisis. (You read about handling those in Chapter 4 remember?) More often than desired, content can inadvertently be targeted to the wrong audience. Not all traffic is good traffic so remember who your audience is and what type of content they prefer.
While The Beaverton doesn't pull its punches, it selects whom it hits with a simple editorial standard — don't hit the little guy.
The story flipped criticisms about First Nations Peoples back onto the government's mismanagement of funds. The article received more than 20,000 shares on Facebook since its publishing in January of 2015, proving controversy can be an effective amplifier but you have to be careful.


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Секст Марций Гонорат () — римский политический деятель первой половины II века.

По всей видимости, Гонорат происходил из всаднического рода из африканского города Учи Майюс, где обнаружены надписи, возможно, посвященные его родственникам. В 110 году он занимал должность консула-суффекта вместе с Авлом Ларцием Приском. О дальнейшей биографии Гонората нет никаких сведений.

Литература
 Historia: Zeitschrift fur alte Geschichte, Том 27. 1978. рр. 594, 596.
 Papers of the British School at Rome, Том 22. R. Clay and Sons, 1954. р. 42.


WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR WOS?
The World of Spectrum was first created in 1995 and maintained by Martijn van der Heide alone.
In 1997, Paolo Perrotta helped redesign the entire layout for the site, and Marko Folle created most of the graphics, including the front logo, which was used up to early July 2003.
The current front page was created by Paul van der Laan, winner of the front page redesign competition in June 2003.
Generous uploads You, our visitors!
Everything else Martijn van der Heide.
and we'd like to specifically thank Michael Bruhn, Lee Tonks, and Nick Humphries for their valued help!
The ZZ Spectrum Java Spectrum emulator, used to play the games on-line is copyright Troels Nørgaard.
The ZX Certification exam is copyright 2001 Samir Ribic.
The Forum code is copyright Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
All web-content, including but not limited to text, pictures, layout and scripts is copyright © 1995-2013 ThunderWare Research Center unless stated otherwise. All rights reserved. All FTP content is owned by their rightful owners, as displayed. No part of this site may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior consent. Deep-linking and mirroring prohibited. Mirrorers will be banned.
We formed an association with SPOT*On, SPEX (SPOT Adverts Extension) and The Type Fantastic from Jim Grimwood, The YS Rock'n'Roll Years from Nick Humphries, The Tipshop from Nick Humphries and Gerard Sweeney, Project AY from bcass and Spectrum 2.0 from Philip Kendall, thus providing you with a huge amount of closely linked information.
- SMS Tributes, showing the games that also appeared on the Sega Master System.
Our primary server is a QuadCore Xeon @ 2.83GHz, with 4Gb of memory and 500Gb of disk space. It runs Slackware Linux and has a 100Mbit connection to the Internet.
Our backup server is located in our ThunderWare Research Center studio. It's a Core 2 Duo @ 1.8GHz, with 2Gb of memory and 700Gb of disk space. It runs Slackware Linux and has a 2Mbit connection to the Internet.
All hardware is owned by ThunderWare Research Center.
When this site was created (a night shift on 29 to 30 November 1995), it was placed on a host with the name julia.gns.getronics.nl.
About 3 months later, this host died and the pages were moved to a new machine, called pampus.gns.getronics.nl.
In January 1997, a new (virtual) hostname had been introduced, www.gns.getronics.nl, which was the new preferred hostname to be used for links.
We've been at the premises of Intermax BV in Rotterdam (wos.intermax.nl) until March 1999, where we were forced to move away from due to the incredible amount of abuse of the servers (under 1 month!).
We were then allowed back on a Getronics host, listening on void.jump.org (domain name kindly loaned from the University of Maribor (Slovenia)).
The bit at Demon stayed, everything else went to void.jump.org.
Since May 2000, everything has moved to void.jump.org, except for my own little Spectrum related efforts (SGD and TAPER).
As of December 2000, we're at the location of KPN, only 1 hop away from the Dutch Internet backbone!
March 2001 was quite a horrible month, with a LOT of downtime out of our control. Due to this, this month also saw the setup of a hot-standby fail-over secondary WoS server.
In April 2001, we moved the primary server to a stabler segment (on our development net).
As of 1 June 2001, WoS finally has its own domain name: worldofspectrum.org.
Starting October 2003, the borrowed void.jump.org domain is being phased out, after four and a half years of service.
In November 2003, we moved to our professional gaming network, Gamecity.
In June 2009, Gamecity was discontinued and we moved to XS4ALL.