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A systematic review and meta-analysis of neurological soft signs in relatives of people with schizophrenia
Kishen Neelam1,2,3,
Deepak Garg4 &
Max Marshall1,3
Neurological soft signs are subtle but observable impairments in motor and sensory functions that are not localized to a specific area of the brain. Neurological soft signs are common in schizophrenia. It has been established that soft signs meet two of five criteria for an endophenotype, namely: association with the illness, and state independence. This review investigated whether soft signs met a further criterion for an endophenotype, namely familial association. It was hypothesized that if familial association were present then neurological soft signs would be: (a) more common in first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia than in controls; and (b) more common in people with schizophrenia than in their first-degree relatives.
A systematic search identified potentially eligible studies in the EMBASE (1980-2011), OVID - MEDLINE (1950-2011) and PsycINFO (1806-2011) databases. Studies were included if they carried out a three-way comparison of levels of soft signs between people with schizophrenia, their first-degree relatives, and normal controls. Data were extracted independently by two reviewers and cross-checked by double entry.
After screening 8678 abstracts, seven studies with 1553 participants were identified. Neurological soft signs were significantly more common in first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia than in controls (pooled standardised mean difference (SMD) 1.24, 95% confidence interval (c.i) 0.59-1.89). Neurological soft signs were also significantly more common in people with schizophrenia than in their first-degree relatives (SMD 0.92, 95% c.i 0.64-1.20). Sensitivity analyses examining the effects of age and group blinding did not significantly alter the main findings.
Both hypotheses were confirmed, suggesting that the distribution of neurological soft signs in people with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives is consistent with the endophenotype criterion of familial association.
Neurological soft signs are subtle but observable impairments in motor and sensory functions that are not localized to a specific area of the brain nor characteristic of any specific neurological condition [1]. Typically they are classified into signs relating to: motor co-ordination, sequencing of complex motor tasks, sensori-motor integration, and disinhibition [2]. Neurological soft signs are known to correlate with a range of neuro-cognitive and neuro-anatomical abnormalities, and it has been proposed that they represent an underlying defect in neural integration [3]. Until recently neurological soft signs have been considered of little practical clinical significance, but the prospect that they could be an endophenotype of schizophrenia has led to a resurgence of interest [4].
Endophenotypes are defined as trait-markers that are present independent of the manifestation of a disease [5]. They represent a phenotype "within" the patient below the level of overt behavioural or psychopathological symptoms. Five criteria for an endophenotype have been put forward: (i) association with illness (higher rates of endophenotype in people with the illness than that found in the general population); (ii) state independence (presence of endophenotype irrespective of the disease state); (iii) familial association (the endophenotype is present at higher rates in unaffected family members than in the general population); (iv) co-segregation (higher prevalence of the endophenotype in ill relatives of ill probands than in well relatives of ill probands); and (v) heritability (the extent of variation of the endophenotype that is attributable to the genetic variation) [6]. It has been proposed that endophenotypes may be of particular value to genetic research on mental disorders because they are more closely related to underlying gene expression than is psychopathology [7]. For example, endophenotypes could be used for the discovery of genes associated with schizophrenia [8].
Neurological soft signs are a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia, because: they are common in people with the disorder (ranging from 50 to 65% of people with schizophrenia [1], predate the onset of the disorder [9], and can be plausibly linked to the underlying brain abnormalities postulated by the neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia [1, 10]. It has been established, in a systematic review and meta-analysis [3], that neurological soft signs in schizophrenia meet two criteria for an endophenotype: association with illness (because they occur much more frequently in people with schizophrenia than in controls); and state-independence (because they are present whether or not the illness is active).
This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine how far soft signs in schizophrenia met a further criterion for an endophenotype, namely familial association. It was hypothesized that if familial association were present then neurological soft signs would be: (a) more common in first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia than in controls; and (b) more common in people with schizophrenia than in their first-degree relatives.
The search strategy aimed to identify all studies that had conducted three-way comparisons of neurological soft signs between people with schizophrenia, their first-degree relatives, and normal controls. People with schizophrenia were defined as having been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or schizophrenia-like disorder on the basis of a standardised diagnostic assessment. Three-way comparisons were considered more suitable for testing our hypotheses than two way comparisons because differences in effect sizes between comparisons (e.g. relatives versus controls and schizophrenia versus relatives) would not be confounded by the use of different assessment techniques, raters, or instruments.
Unlike randomised controlled trials, such comparative studies are not well indexed; therefore a search strategy was generated empirically by examining the indexing of relevant papers from the authors' personal databases and from the references of previously published reviews [1, 11, 12]. This search strategy was designed to be sensitive rather than specific, and was applied to the following databases: EMBASE, OVID-MEDLINE and PsycINFO. The sensitivity of the search was confirmed by checking the reference lists of the identified studies and reviews to ensure that no relevant papers had been omitted. Where an omission had occurred, the indexing of the omitted paper was scrutinized, and the search strategy was modified and re-run. This process continued until no new papers were identified. The original search performed in September 2009 was updated again in April 2011 (see table 1).
Table 1 Search strategy
Study Selection
KN screened each abstract, and copies of any potentially relevant articles were obtained. KN and DG independently reviewed the articles and any disagreements in selecting the studies between them were resolved by discussion. Unresolved disagreements between KN and DG were resolved by discussion with the third reviewer (MM). Studies were included if they compared levels of soft signs between normal controls, first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia and people with schizophrenia within the same study design.
The outcome variable for the review was the mean number of neurological soft signs. Data were excluded if: they only referred to subsets of the soft signs family (such as frontal release signs), they were combined with numbers of hard signs, or were reported exclusively in a categorical format (as there is no universally agreed cut off point for presence or absence of soft signs) [13].
Several scales are available for rating the number of soft signs, the most well known being: the Neurological Evaluation Scale [2], the Condensed Neurological Examination or Rossi Scale [14], and the Standardised Neurological Examination [15]. Since there is considerable overlap between these scales, data were included if any of these three measures were used [13].
Demographic and study variables were extracted and reported in tabular form, including: age, sex, number of years in education, illness duration, type of control group, and type of relative (primary or secondary degree, or if primary degree: sibling, offspring, parent or mixed group). In addition, each included study was rated on three quality criteria: evidence of inter-rater reliability on the ratings of soft signs; rater blind to the status of the participant (although adequate blinding is difficult to attain and this bias cannot be fully eliminated); and degree of age matching between comparison groups (see table 2). Data were extracted independently by two reviewers (KN and DG) and crosschecked by the double entry method. Disagreements were resolved by discussion and involvement of the third reviewer (MM).
Table 2 Description of included studies
The data were analysed using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis version 2, a dedicated meta-analysis programme (BioStat, Inc, Englewood, NJ). The analysis was based on all included studies and consisted of three comparisons: first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia versus normal controls; people with schizophrenia versus normal controls; and people with schizophrenia versus first-degree relatives.
The standardized mean difference was calculated for each comparison. The standardized mean difference (SMD) is a clinically useful effect size defined as the difference in means between two groups standardized by dividing by the with-in groups' pooled standard deviation. The SMD effect size can be interpreted as the average percentile standing of the mean in the comparison group relative to the mean in the control group. Thus, an effect size of "0" indicates that the mean in the comparison group is at the 50th percentile of the control group, and the distribution of scores in the comparison group completely overlaps with the distribution of scores in the control group. An effect size of 0.8 indicates that the mean in the comparison group is at the 79th percentile of the control group, and shows a non-overlap of nearly 50% in the distribution of scores between the two groups. Cohen has defined a standardised mean difference of 0.2 as small, 0.5 as medium, and 0.8 as large [16].
The results of the comparisons were illustrated in a Forest plot, in which the standardised mean difference for each study and the associated 95% confidence intervals were plotted on a horizontal axis ranging from -1 to 4. All comparisons were tested for heterogeneity using the I2 statistic. When significant heterogeneity was present, the cumulative standardised mean difference was calculated using random effects. When significant heterogeneity was present, and sufficient studies were available (greater than 9), meta-regression was used to determine whether the heterogeneity could be explained by moderator variables, such as: age, number of years in education, use of anti-psychotic medication or illness duration.
Scores on measures of neurological soft signs are thought to increase with age [14, 17], and may be sensitive to inadequate rater training, or rater bias. Therefore sensitivity analyses were conducted for each of the three comparisons that excluded studies that: had more than a decade age difference between comparison groups; failed to provide evidence of inter-rater reliability; or used raters that were not blind to the group allocation of participants. The possibility of publication bias was examined using the Orwin fail-safe N.
The search strategy identified 8678 articles, of which 120 referred to studies that were thought to potentially satisfy the inclusion criteria. After obtaining the full text of these articles, it was found that 105 referred to studies that did not meet inclusion criteria. Seven studies, described in 15 articles, met inclusion criteria and offered data for the meta-analysis [14, 18–31] (for details see study flowchart Figure 1).
Flowchart of meta-analysis.
All seven included studies compared levels of soft signs amongst people with schizophrenia, relatives, and normal controls, within the same design, using the same assessment method and the same raters. The participants in the included studies comprised: 558 people with schizophrenia or schizophrenia-like disorders, 471 first-degree relatives (there were no studies of second degree relatives), and 524 normal controls (see table 2). One study [28] included two independent samples from different countries (France and Tunisia). Within the meta-analysis, this study was treated as two separate studies. Of the remaining six studies the country of origin of two studies was USA [24, 25] and there was one study each from Sweden [27], Italy [14], Turkey [29] and France [26].
The Neurological Evaluation Scale [2] was used in 3 studies, whilst the Rossi Scale [14] and the Standardised Neurological Examination [15] were each used in 2 studies (see table 2).
The group of first -degree relatives was categorised as a "mixed" group in 2 studies [14, 24] as they included a combination of offspring, siblings and/or parents. In the first of these studies [14], the ages of all three groups were similar, suggesting that the relatives group were principally siblings and that there was little chance of an age difference between groups confounding the comparison. In the second study [24], the relatives group were 11 years older on average than the schizophrenia group, whilst the control group were 12 years older on average. This suggested a risk of an age confound, as neurological soft signs could increase with age. In 4 studies the first degree relatives group consisted only of siblings [25, 27–29] and in one study consisted only of parents [26]. In this study, parents were on average 32 years older than people with schizophrenia, whereas controls were 10 years older, again suggesting the possibility of an age confound.
Neurological soft signs in first-degree relatives versus controls
This comparison comprised 995 participants from seven studies (see Figure 2). Whilst all seven studies showed the same direction of effect, heterogeneity between studies was significant (I2 94.9, p < 0.001), so the data were analysed using a random effects model. As the comparison included less than 9 studies, meta-regression was not attempted. The pooled SMD (random effects model) was 1.24 (95% confidence interval 0.59 to 1.89). This indicated a large and significant effect size. This finding was stable (SMD 1.03 95% confidence interval 0.42 to 1.63, N = 917) when a sensitivity analysis was conducted excluding data from one study where there was greater than 10 year age gap between first-degree relatives and controls [26]. However it was not significant (SMD 1.19 95% confidence interval -0.99 to 3.35, N = 342) after the additional exclusion of 5 unblinded studies [24, 26–29].
Forest plot of neurological soft signs.
Neurological soft signs in schizophrenia versus controls
This comparison comprised data on 1082 subjects from seven studies. Whilst all seven studies showed the same direction of effect, heterogeneity between studies was significant (I2 93.1, p < 0.001), so the data were analysed using a random effects model. As no comparison included more than 7 studies, meta-regression was not attempted. The pooled standardized mean difference (random effects model) was 1.83 (95% confidence interval 1.28 to 2.38), indicating a large and significant effect size. This finding was stable (SMD 2.0 95% confidence interval 1.44 to 2.56, N = 955) when a sensitivity analysis was conducted excluding data from one study where there was greater than 10 year age gap between people with schizophrenia and controls [24]. It was also stable (SMD 1.60 95% confidence interval 0.64 to 2.56, N = 299) to a sensitivity analysis that, in addition, excluded 5 unblinded studies [24, 26–29].
Neurological soft signs in schizophrenia versus first degree relatives
This comparison comprised data on 1040 participants from seven studies. Whilst all seven studies showed the same direction of effect, heterogeneity between studies was significant (I2 74.6, p < 0.001), so the data were analysed using a random effects model. As no comparison included more than 7 studies, meta-regression was not attempted. The pooled standardised mean difference was 0.92 (95% confidence interval 0.64 to 1.12), indicating a large and significant effect size. This finding was stable (SMD 1.07 95% confidence interval 0.79 to 1.34, N = 869) when a sensitivity analysis was conducted excluding data from 2 studies where there was greater than 10 year age gap between the group of people with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives [24, 26]. It was also stable (SMD 0.93 95% confidence interval 0.54 to 1.32, N = 389) to a sensitivity analysis that, in addition, excluded 5 unblinded studies [24, 26–29].
Publication bias
Publication bias was assessed using the Orwin fail-safe N. The Orwin fail safe N estimates the number of unpublished studies that would be required to shift the effect size towards a null result [32]. The test was used to estimate the number of missing studies with an SMD of 0 that would be required to bring the overall SMD to under 0.2, which Cohen defined as a small but significant difference. For the comparison of schizophrenia versus normal controls this would require 54. Likewise, for schizophrenia versus first degree relatives and first-degree relatives versus normal controls 31 and 23 studies would be required respectively.
It was hypothesized that if soft signs showed evidence of familial association, then they would be more common in people with schizophrenia versus their first-degree relatives; and in first-degree relatives versus normal controls. Both these hypotheses were confirmed. As anticipated, it was also found that soft signs were more common in people with schizophrenia than normal controls. Thus, in summary, soft signs appear to be distributed across people with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives in a manner that is consistent with familial association.
A key limitation of this review was the finding of significant heterogeneity across all comparisons. The variance among studies could be due to factors such as variation among sample size of studies, source of normal controls, kind of first degree relatives, scales used and clinical factors such as being on medication. Insufficient studies were available to permit investigation of this heterogeneity using meta-regression. Likewise, higher scores for some signs in patients may be due to use of anti-psychotic medication and we could not conduct moderator analysis exploring the extent of its effects. Despite some similar labels, it should be kept in mind while interpreting the meta-analysis that the rating and the tasks that correspond to the individual NSS items vary between the different scales. However, all studies in the review had the same direction of effect, and the findings were stable to analysis using a random effects model. Moreover, with the exception of one comparison (first degree relatives versus controls, where the effect size remained stable but no longer statistically significant), the findings were also stable to a rigorous sensitivity analysis which ruled out those studies with poor age matching of controls, lack of reliability testing, and unblinded raters. Thus it is probable that the findings reflect true differences between the comparison groups, rather than bias or fundamental differences in study methodology. A further limitation is the possibility that the findings could be explained by publication bias. Tests for publication bias suggest that this is unlikely, but it cannot be ruled out completely.
Hence, the findings of this review add weight to the idea that neurological soft signs are an endophenotype of schizophrenia. Contrary, to other developmental markers such as 'minor physical anomalies' were early environmental factors are indicated, soft signs reflect familial association [26]. There is evidence to suggest that certain neurological soft signs correlate with region-specific structural brain deficits in people with schizophrenia [33, 34]. Future research should explore the potential of these individual signs as endophenotype of schizophrenia.
Neurological soft signs can be elicited quickly, reliably and cheaply [13], they could be used in ordinary clinical settings to establish that an individual had progressed along the neuro-developmental pathway to schizophrenia. There is evidence to suggest association of neurological soft signs in relatives with schizotypal personality scores, symptom severity and neuropsychological measures [30]. The presence of higher rates of soft signs has the potential to augment the predictive power of psychopathological tests for the prodrome of schizophrenia, such as: the SIP/SOPS [35], Comprehensive Assessment of At Risk Mental States (CAARMS) [36], or Basic Symptoms [37]. Our meta-analysis highlights the meaning of neurological soft signs in the context of neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia. Neurological soft signs have important clinical implications and they open an avenue for future research.
Neurological soft signs show a pattern of familial association in schizophrenia that is compatible with the status of an endophenotype for the disorder. The findings are based on a small number of studies. There is a need for more studies using a consensual rating tool and homogeneous sample to establish that neurological soft signs are an endophenotype of schizophrenia. Prospective diagnostic studies are required to establish how far the identification of soft signs in at risk patients can augment the predictive power of established psychopathological tests.
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The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/11/139/prepub
We thank Professor Shon Lewis of the University of Manchester for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank the librarians at the Lantern Centre, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust for procuring some of the full text articles.
Lantern centre, University of Manchester, Vicarage Lane, Preston, PR2 8DY, UK
Kishen Neelam
& Max Marshall
Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Bury New Road, Prestwich, Manchester, M25 3BL, UK
Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, Walton Summit, Preston, PR5 6AW, UK
Humber NHS Foundation Trust, Clarendon Health Centre (Victoria House), Park Street, Hull, HU2 8TD, UK
Deepak Garg
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Correspondence to Kishen Neelam.
KN and MM conceived and designed the study. KN undertook the literature search, identified potential articles, interpreted results, performed the meta-analyses, drafted and revised all versions of the manuscript. KN and DG contributed to study selection, study quality assessments and data extraction. MM contributed to study selection, study quality assessments, interpreting results, revised manuscript drafts, and supervised the study. All authors contributed to the preparation of the manuscript and read and approved the final version.
Neelam, K., Garg, D. & Marshall, M. A systematic review and meta-analysis of neurological soft signs in relatives of people with schizophrenia. BMC Psychiatry 11, 139 (2011) doi:10.1186/1471-244X-11-139
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-11-139
Standardize Mean Difference
Neurological Soft Sign
Soft Sign
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A new study on the topic of beliefs over basic Catholic tenets was released in February 2019. It compared the beliefs of Latin Mass attendees to their Novus Ordo-attending counterparts. The findings, though disturbing, can hardly be considered surprising in this day and age.


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Museum Shops
The Museum Church, Dillon´s house and the Granary for private meetings.
The Museum Church
The church in the Árbær Open Air Museum is of a type common throughout the country in the 19th century. It originated on the farm Silfrastaðir in Skagafjörður, where the turf-built church was erected in 1842. In 1896 it was dismantled, and a new church was erected. Timber from the old church was used to build an addition to the farmhouse, a living room/bedroom used until 1950. The addition was dismantled in 1959, and the timber was moved to the Árbær Open Air Museum. The pulpit is from the old church at Silfrastaðir.
Consecrated in 1960, the museum church is popular for christenings and weddings, and regular services are held there in summer and during Advent.
The museum church can be hired for ceremonies. Here is the rate list.
The church seats 40-50 people.
For further information, please send an e-mail to citymuseum@reykjavik.is
Dillon´s House
Dillon´s house was built in 1835, on the corner of Túngata and Suðurgata. The house derives its name from the man who had it built, Arthur E.D. Dillon. Dillon´s house was moved to the Árbær Open Air Museum in 1960. It houses the museum coffee-shop during the museum opening hours and is also used for small social gatherings.
Dillon´s house can accommodate up to 50 people for meetings. Here is the rate list.
The Granary
The Granary was built around 1820 and belonged to the trading company Örum and Wulff of Vopnafjörður in eastern Iceland. The house's name refers to the use the building was put to. The Granary was moved to Reykjavík in 1975.
The Granary is available for hire for meetings and conferences. The Granary can accommodate 70-90 people for meetings. Here is the rate list.
Kistuhyl
For groups (10+) bookings please send a request to:
Sept-May 13:00-17:00
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As Jeff Bezos Earns $191K Per Minute, Why Are NY & VA Giving Amazon $3 Billion in Corporate Welfare?
StoryNovember 14, 2018
Greg LeRoy
executive director of Good Jobs First, a watchdog group on economic development incentives.
Stacy Mitchell
co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She is the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses.
member of the New York State Assembly. He recently co-wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times headlined "New York Should Say No to Amazon."
"Amazon Doesn't Just Want to Dominate the Market — It Wants to Become the Market"
"New York Should Say No to Amazon"
Amazon has selected a pair of cities to host its new, expanded headquarters: Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, and Long Island City in Queens, New York. Amazon's decision came after a 14-month search that saw cities around the U.S. promise tax breaks, taxpayer-funded infrastructure and business-friendly ordinances in an effort to win what Amazon says will be $5 billion in new investment and thousands of jobs. Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam called the Amazon headquarter "a big win for Virginia," and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has similarly applauded Amazon's decision. But many local politicians have openly criticized authorities in New York and Virginia for backing the deals, which will create a total of 50,000 jobs. We host a roundtable discussion about Amazon and corporate welfare. In New York, we speak with Ron Kim, member of the New York State Assembly. He recently co-wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times headlined "New York Should Say No to Amazon." In Washington, D.C., we speak with Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a watchdog group on economic development incentives. And in Portland, Maine, we speak with Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She is the author of "Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses."
More from this Interview
Part 1: NY Politician: We Need to Block $3 Billion Handout for Amazon & Use Money to Forgive Student Debt
Part 2: As Jeff Bezos Earns $191K Per Minute, Why Are NY & VA Giving Amazon $3 Billion in Corporate Welfare?
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we continue to look at Amazon and corporate welfare as New York and Virginia agree to give Amazon over $3 billion in tax breaks to build new office complexes in New York and near Washington, D.C. Time Magazine reports: "According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos' net worth on Jan. 1 was $99 billion. On May 1, it was $132 billion, meaning it rose $33 billion. If you divide that difference by the 120 days in that period, you find that he made $275 million a day. Divide that by 24 hours in a day to get about $11.5 million per hour, the equivalent of roughly $191,000 per minute or — the clincher — $3,182 every second." That according to Bloomberg.
AMY GOODMAN: And you compare that to the median Amazon employee's salary, $28,000. Jeff Bezos makes more than that, Time magazine reports, in 10 seconds.
We're expanding our conversation. Joining us from Washington, D.C., is Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which has closely tracked public subsidies given to Amazon. In Portland, Maine, we're joined by Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, directs its Community-Scaled Economy Initiative. She's the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses. Earlier this year, Mitchell wrote a cover story for The Nation titled "Amazon Doesn't Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market." And still with us here in New York is Assemblymember Ron Kim, who's introducing legislation to block the Amazon deal and redirect taxpayer money away from Amazon subsidies and toward student debt relief.
Let's begin this segment with Greg LeRoy. Your response to the deal, and your concerns?
GREG LEROY: Well, I support everything that the assemblyman just said in his concerns. Look, we know that the price tag of the incentives alone in New York City is well over $2.8 billion. There's some parts of it we can't even put a price tag on yet. A lot of it's automatic and should have been capped. It's way too big for a single project. We know that there's unreported subsidies in the Virginia end of the deal, as well, so that the total packages together exceed $4.6 billion. Amazon is clearly, in the way it worded its own press statement, trying to downplay and kind of play a shell game with the numbers and hide some of these bigger numbers that are coming from New York. And look, everybody knows that Long Island City is very hot real estate. It's another example of Amazon getting paid to do what it would have done anyway. It wanted to be in the financial capital of the world—of the country and the political capital of the country, so no surprises about its location. And we're massively subsidizing, yet again, a company to do what it wants to do anyway.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stacy Mitchell, I'd like to ask you about this whole issue of job creation, because the politicians are always touting that it's important to put out these subsidies to be able to create jobs. But one of the unwritten stories I'm thinking you've been tracking is the job destruction, and especially of small businesses, that Amazon represents as it continues to grow in our economy.
STACY MITCHELL: Yeah. I mean, Amazon is really concentrating a lot of economic power. And as it does that, it's pushing other businesses out. We've lost about 85,000 independent small retailers in the last 10 years. We're seeing small and midsize manufacturers getting squeezed, laying off staff and disappearing, because Amazon increasingly is the gatekeeper to consumers. It increasingly picks winners and losers, and it uses that power to push others out of the marketplace and to gain more power for itself. And as it does that, it's actually, as you noted, eliminating far more jobs than it's creating. I mean, Amazon is a highly efficient, highly automated company, and so it's eliminating a lot of retail jobs. Our calculations suggest that we're losing about two retail jobs for every one job created in an Amazon warehouse.
But the picture for working people is even worse than that, because, you know, pathways to the middle class, being able to start your own business, to have a diverse economy with lots of different opportunities, that's really disappearing. And we think that one of the reasons that wages have not been growing, really at all, has to do with concentrated power and the fact that we no longer have that kind of dynamism in the economy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, Amazon, much like Uber, has a business model, a long-term business model, of capturing the market but then increasingly relying on robots to do its work, so that eventually the labor force will be reduced. Can you talk about that?
STACY MITCHELL: Yeah, that's right. I mean, Amazon's warehouses have become increasingly automated. They haven't figured out yet quite how to do everything that humans can do, but it's safe to say that, really, humans are literally cogs in a machine in an Amazon warehouse. These are highly automated. Humans fulfill the roles that only they can fulfill. But over time, we've seen Amazon's employment numbers, relative to its sales, actually decline. And that's a measure of this increasing automation. And we expect that, you know, fairly soon, Amazon will begin to have robots that can do the things that only humans can do.
But again, I think the jobs inside Amazon, you know, these are jobs maybe that we shouldn't—you know, they're hard jobs. They're not necessarily jobs that we want to preserve. I think the bigger problem, from a jobs standpoint, is that when you have a company that has a stranglehold on the economy—I mean, normally, if you go back in time, we've had technological progress that has at times wiped out entire sectors, entire areas of employment. And that's OK if you have an economy that's dynamic, where you have new businesses coming along, new industries, new creations. But what we're seeing, because of Amazon's market power, is that we're not getting those new businesses. We're not getting those new industries coming along and creating new jobs. And that's the real problem.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio applauded the Amazon decision.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: We're going to have an opportunity here for tens of thousands of New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers, kids who come up through our public schools, kids who go to our community colleges and our 4-year colleges, to have opportunity at Amazon. And not just at Amazon, but we know that Amazon's presence is going to help to build the entire tech sector. In this city now, that tech ecosystem is about 350,000 jobs. Just got a huge boost from Amazon's decision to come here. But we know that's only going to spark a lot more growth. We see a future where that tech community could be a half-million jobs or more.
AMY GOODMAN: So, New York State Assemblymember Ron Kim, if you could respond to the mayor and also this Business Insider report? Amazon is going to be placed in Long Island City in Queens. "Long Island City real estate brokers told The Wall Street Journal [that] they had witnessed a flurry of inquiries over the past week. Some of these people were even buying units, sight-unseen, via text message, The Journal wrote on Tuesday morning." "This is the first time in my 20-year career that I have seen the market go from a buyer's market to a seller's market overnight, based on a rumor," said Patrick Smith, a Stribling agent in New York City, a real estate agent. So, if you could respond to both this, what de Blasio is saying, a massive growth in the tech sector and jobs, good jobs, for New York's kids and students and people in this city, and what's going to happen to real estate?
ASSEMBLYMEMBER RON KIM: I think this is a great example of a misguided technocratic Democrat who is hiding behind big tech and pushing out the narrative to the public that the big tech will solve every single problem in our communities and to humankind. That is not the case. This is a clear example of how big tech artificially raises value. This isn't real value. As Stacy has said, real value comes from innovation, creativity, small business, local economies, circulation of wealth at the very bottom of our economies. That's not happening. Amazon, Uber, you name it, all of this is all based on an extraction economy that is designed to extract as much money and value out of our communities, and it's not going to add to sustainable job growth or economic growth.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Greg LeRoy, I'd like to ask you, in terms of the trend nationwide in terms of these government subsidies for job creation—obviously, the Foxconn example in Wisconsin is another one. Could you talk about what these governments, local governments, are doing and what they're getting in return for these subsidies?
GREG LEROY: I'd be glad to. And I just want to footnote something on the de Blasio quote there. You know, we know that about four out of five, typically, of the new job takers at a project like this will not be current residents of New York or Arlington. They will be people moving to the area from outside somewhere. And that means a lot of growth getting induced, a lot of schools having to be expanded and infrastructure built and public services provided. Guess who's going to get stuck with that tax bill if Amazon is not paying to help cover the costs of that induced growth.
This whole issue of what we call persistent megadeals—that is, these nine-figure, 10-figure subsidy packages, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars for individual transactions, whether it's HQ2 or Foxconn or data centers like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook—it's a crazy a dynamic. You know, there's a long history in America of a very corporate-dominated site location system. It's actually about 80 years old and was born in New York City with a company called Fantus Factory Locating Service in the late 1930s. Today, we have even a president who has endorsed this race to the bottom, this war among the states, so-called, by sponsoring and assisting Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, when he parlayed that auction last year, whipsawing a bunch of states against each other, for the big subsidy package in Wisconsin.
That Foxconn package now is really melting down. I mean, it was valued at about $3 billion from the state, to begin with. It's now north of $4.7 billion, because there's been a ton of local and infrastructure aid put on top of it. And now we're getting different product lines, high degrees of automation, rumors of—reports in The Wall Street Journal of Chinese engineers having to be brought in because they are having trouble recruiting a sufficient white-collar workforce. You know, it's no secret that Governor Walker, put out by the voters last week, had stopped touting that deal on the merits, because it was melting down so badly.
AMY GOODMAN: And jobs dropping from 13,000 to something like 3,000.
GREG LEROY: Correct. Yeah, the cost per job keeps going up, because that denominator keeps shrinking. It's the great disappearing deal of all time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Greg LeRoy, I wanted to ask you about the Virginia aspect of this deal and the—what's often overlooked is the amount of business that Amazon does with government agencies, defense contractors in its cloud business—and what its decision to locate in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., will mean.
GREG LEROY: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. A lot of people don't realize that Amazon has historically made very few profits, and only recently any profits at all, on its retail business. Most of the profits, including all of the profits for some years, come from its cloud computing services, from Amazon Web Services. It's the biggest cloud computing company in the world. It has roughly a 40 percent market share. And among its most lucrative clients in that space are the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies. And as Stacy and others have pointed out recently, Amazon is now pushing very aggressively to gain more control over federal procurement lines and also state and local government procurement lines. So, this footprint—people don't notice, but this Crystal City footprint that they have now said is going to be one of the HQ2s is very close—literally, practically a stone's throw from—the Pentagon.
AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, "Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families. Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life." I wanted to ask Assemblymember Kim about the progressive letter you referred to. This was the former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Ydanis Rodriguez, Jumaane Williams, Nydia Velázquez, the congressmember—all progressive leaders who signed on to the letter asking Amazon to come to New York. So, what is progressive about this deal?
ASSEMBLYMEMBER RON KIM: Well, I think many of my colleagues are regretting that they signed the letter. They didn't know what they were signing on to. So, I want to make sure—I want to be clear that many of them are saying now that they no longer have signed—they are no longer willing to sign on and keep their name to the letter.
There is nothing progressive about Amazon coming to New York. This is a corporate giveaway to the richest man on this planet. And we need to make sure that we can go back and claw back the agreement, to make sure that the taxpayers go where it's desperately needed: to the working- and middle-class families who are living with so much debt in the city of New York.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to put a question to Stacy Mitchell in Portland, Maine. In the piece you write for The Nation, the subtitle is "The company is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires." Explain.
STACY MITCHELL: That's right. You know, I think Amazon is so dominant in so many areas. It's now capturing one out of every two dollars that Americans spend online. As Greg noted, it controls the underlying infrastructure for a lot of the internet—you know, over 40 percent of the world's cloud computing capacity. It's increasingly moving into shipping and package delivery. It's taking on UPS and the Postal Service. It has the largest market share in home voice systems, through Alexa. And on and on it goes.
But I think, rather than think about Amazon as being dominant in any of these markets, the way to understand what this company is all about is that Amazon is about controlling the essential infrastructure that other companies need to use in order to reach the market. Its online platform, more than half of all product searches online now start at Amazon's website. And what that means is that if you're any company producing or retailing anything, increasingly, if you want to be able to reach consumers, you have to become a seller on Amazon's platform. And what that means is that Amazon now controls your business. They have the ability to gather data on what you're doing, to use that data to compete against you. They can levy a kind of tax on your trade. They can demote you in the search results. They can retaliate against you if you complain.
I mean, essentially, what has happened is that Amazon is privatizing the market, if you will. In a democracy, a market should be an open place, where the rules are set by the public, that there are public rules that govern the buying and selling of goods and how we're going to structure our markets. But what Amazon is moving us toward is a situation in which commerce occurs in a private arena, and Amazon sets the terms of trade. It basically creates the rules and regulations by which other companies and other participants are allowed to operate. And I think, in light of that, it's no surprise that Amazon is expanding its presence in Washington, D.C., because, you know, we have anti-trust laws that are designed to put a check on this kind of concentrated economic power. I think Jeff Bezos very clearly sees that as really the only threat to his future growth, and so cozying up to federal government is part of his strategy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'd like to ask Greg LeRoy, on this, the whole issue of whether Amazon needed to be courted and provided all these subsidies to relocate to New York City or—the reality is that because of the model that they've created of delivering products, the same day, in some cases, to people around the country, they need to be in certain places, especially in population centers. My students at Rutgers University did a whole series of articles about the 10 Amazon warehouses that had developed in central New Jersey to serve the Philadelphia and New York City markets. Fifteen thousand jobs were created virtually with no subsidies, so that they actually need to be in certain spots, and the politicians perhaps had more leverage than they themselves understand.
GREG LEROY: You're right, exactly, Juan. In fact, we've been—long before the HQ2 auction came out, we had been publishing about all the subsidies being given to the warehouses, making this very point. If you look at the history of the company, in the early years, they grew their market share by having the price advantage of not collecting sales tax. And they were legally able to avoid that by avoiding what's called nexus—that is, a sufficient physical presence in a state so that the state could compel the collection of sales taxes. They had a small number of warehouses in states without sales tax into which they shipped into the other states that do have sales taxes.
But over time, with the Prime business model evolving to rapid delivery—two-day, one-day, same-day—it was inevitable that they would have to locate lots of warehouses close to all those ZIP codes with lots of Prime household members. And so they started caving on this issue back in 2011, 2012, sometimes under pressure from states who found that they were skirting the law and actually locating in states without collecting sales tax ahead of time. So, over time, they had to do that.
And yet they still got paid. They discovered that they could "create jobs," even though, as Stacy pointed out, they're actually creating one job at the expense of two others, as bricks-and-mortar retailers continue to melt down and companies like Sears—is the latest example—go bankrupt, getting paid to do what they want. We said, publicly, to public officials, Amazon should pay to arrive, not vice versa. And I would say the same thing about HQ2. If Amazon is going to come and price a bunch of people out of a city and create a bunch of new expenses by inducing so much growth, they should pay to arrive rather than get paid to.
AMY GOODMAN: We didn't even get to labor conditions. But in September, we spoke to James Bloodworth, the U.K.-based journalist, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. While undercover at an Amazon fulfillment warehouse, he found workers toiling amidst abusive conditions, no bathroom breaks. This is Bloodworth describing working in an Amazon warehouse.
JAMES BLOODWORTH: If you took a day off sick, you were given a disciplinary for that. And if you received six of these disciplinaries, you would effectively lose your job. And this was taking a day off sick even if you had a letter from the doctor, even if you phoned in beforehand to say that you were going to be sick. So, if you took six days off sick, you would effectively lose your job. And this was the biggest employer in this town.
Other things, I mean, the people were afraid—people were receiving disciplinaries for taking toilet breaks. The productivity targets were so high that workers were afraid to go to the bathroom. I mean, a survey came out at the Amazon warehouse I worked in, recently, which found that 74 percent of workers there, order pickers, were afraid to use the bathrooms because of the productivity targets.
AMY GOODMAN: So, again, that was a British journalist, James Bloodworth, who went undercover in an Amazon warehouse. And I want to end with Assemblymember Kim. Again, Time magazine's headline, "The Median Amazon Employee's Salary Is $28,000. Jeff Bezos Makes [More Than] That in 10 Seconds."
ASSEMBLYMEMBER RON KIM: Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely ridiculous. But I want to end by also saying the EU has already—is already considering an open anti-trust case against Amazon. Imagine, for the last two years, instead of competing and embracing, every city and every state united, calling Amazon accountable, having open investigations by the attorney general's office in every single state investigating into their anti-trust practices. That's leverage. That's real leverage. Instead of doing that, we give them billions of dollars to come to our cities and states. Now, it's still not too late. And I think we should move forward and hold Amazon accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us, just the beginning of the discussion, New York State Assemblymember Ron Kim; Stacy Mitchell, joining us from Portland, Maine, at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; and Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First in Washington, D.C.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to the border. Stay with us.
Advocates: Trump Creating Border Crisis by Pitting Troops Against Women & Children Fleeing Violence


text:
Q: ckan local installation, 500 error on solr JSP support not configured I am trying to install CKAN on my local computer using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
I followed the instructions for installing from source found here and I try to check if solr is running by visiting http://localhost:8983/solr/.
I can see that Jetty is running because when I visit http://localhost:8983 I see that it is up.
I added the jdk as follows:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64
I am getting a 500 error when i try to open the solr page:

HTTP ERROR 500
Problem accessing /solr/index.jsp. Reason:
JSP support not configured
Powered by Jetty://

Any ideas? Should I redo the whole thing from the start?
Edit/Update
I just couldn't do anything with this installation. The bigger problem was that installation files were meshed up! I tried to install tomcat/solr instead of jetty/solr and things went sour. So I just created a VM and did a fresh install there. For anyone interested I did a tomcat/solr installation following this and a CKAN installation following this (with out of course the solr instructions). Also, for some reason the CKAN installation has commented out the solr URL, so even if it is right, I had to delete the comment.

A: A fix has been documented by @mstantoncook here [2939] & [1651] How to solr-jetty JSP support
Note the last comment, sudo service jetty restart

A: It's a Jetty BUG on Ubuntu 14.04!
There is nothing wrong with Ckan itself.
Actually, there is a bug in the libjetty-extra-java package (version 6.1.26 and newer) in Ubuntu 14.04. The bug was introduced after Jetty (in Ubuntu) has changed it's dependences from libtomcat6-java to libtomcat7-java.
You can get more info about this bug in Ubuntu Launchpad: Bug #1508562 "Broken symlinks for JSP support in libjetty-extra-java version 6.1.26-1ubuntu1.1".
The bug is already fixed on Debian, and I'm hope it will be solved in Ubuntu 14.04 soon.
There are workarounds that may work for your case
I proposed some workarounds in this bug report, and since they can be useful for the Ckan users, I'll also replicate them here.
All of them consist on use both jetty and libtomcat7-java, but adding/replacing some classes (code ported from libtomcat6, in put in the jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar file) to the Jetty classpath.
I don't know if they have some problem. Use them at your own risk!
Workaround 1 - Install the fix package proposed by vshn
I found this workaround here: https://github.com/ckan/ckan/pull/2966
In short:
wget https://launchpad.net/~vshn/+archive/ubuntu/solr/+files/solr-jetty-jsp-fix_1.0.2_all.deb
dpkg -i solr-jetty-jsp-fix_1.0.2_all.deb
service jetty restart

This will install a JSP jar that works (the file will be named jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar, but it contains classes ported from libtomcat6).
Workaround 2 - Manually install the JSP jar
Download the same JAR file that the DEB package above would install.
wget https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jetty/+bug/1508562/+attachment/4785985/+files/jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar

Now, move it to a proper location inside the Jetty config dir. I did it this way:
mkdir /etc/jetty/extra-jars
mv jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar /etc/jetty/extra-jars

And add a line like this one in the Jetty start.config file:
echo "/etc/jetty/extra-jars/jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar" >> /etc/jetty/start.config

And:
service jetty restart

Correct solution
The correct solution is to wait for the Ubuntu Team solution. However, while waiting for this fix, you can use any of the previous workarounds (I prefer the last one).
I hope they help you!

A: Try this steps:
sudo mv jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar /usr/share/jetty/lib/.
change own:
sudo chown root:root /usr/share/jetty/lib/jsp-2.1-6.0.2.jar
finally restart jetty:
sudo service jetty restart
I followed this steps and now I can see localhost:8983/solr and localhost/solr/admin

A: In Ubuntu 14.04 this can be fixed with:
cd /tmp
wget https://launchpad.net/~vshn/+archive/ubuntu/solr/+files/solr-jetty-jsp-fix_1.0.2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i solr-jetty-jsp-fix_1.0.2_all.deb
sudo service jetty restart

A: Following http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.6/solr-setup.html#single-solr-instance
(this one a bit old, but worked perfect for me )
You will have to edit /etc/profile and add this line to the end such as this to the end (adjusting the path for your machine's jdk install:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/ (or other version)
then
export JAVA_HOME
sudo service jetty start

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


One summer day Idil and I went for a walk and picked dates. Our hands and faces became very sticky. We passed slowly by the beach. Our hair became salty with sea air. In general, Idil and I become like little children in each other's company.


It doesn't look like much. In fact, it's hard to find. But inside your pancreas—an organ shaped like a squished banana that's tucked behind your stomach—tiny little beta cells rule your blood sugar. Healthy ones pump out plenty of insulin. Dysfunctional or dead ones don't.
Genetics: Beta cells with certain DNA variations may self-destruct or quit functioning.
Changes in the "incretin effect": Normally, the act of eating and digesting food stimulates the release of insulin. This is muted in some people with diabetes.
Faulty alpha cells: Also found in the pancreas, alpha cells balance blood-sugar levels by releasing glucagon. But too much can boost sugar levels too high.
Gut bugs gone bad: Some beneficial bacteria in the intestines seem to help control blood sugar – in part by encouraging the release of glucose-controlling hormones. People with a different mix of bacteria may have a higher risk for diabetes.
Immune-system troubles: An autoimmune reaction can destroy beta cells. Immune-system problems can also fire up inflammation, which harms beta cells.
Digestive dysfunction: For some people with diabetes, blood sugar levels rise extra-fast after eating due to quick stomach emptying.
Kidney woes: As they filter wastes and sugar out of the blood, your kidneys can increase re-absorption of sugar back into the bloodstream.
Insulin resistance in muscles: Muscle cells that don't obey insulin's commands contribute to rising blood sugar levels. Obesity and a lack of exercise contribute to this problem.
Insulin resistance in fat cells: This can dump more fats into the bloodstream, leading to more insulin resistance in muscle cells and higher blood sugar levels.
Insulin resistance in the liver: Liver cells that don't listen to insulin may dump more glucose than usual into the blood.


You visited the company's web page Moverman- Robert A.- Ph.D.. The company is located in the state New Hampshire, the city of Salem. The legal address of our company is 70 Butler Street Salem, NH 03079. For more information, please call (603) 893-2900.


A New York City non-profit group is using dance to spark girls' interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
What do science, technology, engineering and math have in common with the art of dance?
On the surface – not much.
But STEM From Dance, a New York City-based non-profit group, is using dance to expose girls, in low-income communities, to the opportunities available to them in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – also known as STEM education.
STEM From Dance uses movement to expose girls from low-income communities to opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineeering and Math, or STEM.
Yamilee Toussaint is the group's founder. She says many minority girls, from low-income areas, don't dream of becoming scientists or engineers, not because of ability, but because of a lack of confidence.
One of the program's goals is to expose these girls to the possibility of pursing a STEM career. Something they may not have considered before.
With nearly 80% of future careers requiring STEM knowledge and skills, STEM From Dance is using a creative approach to redefine access for girls and minorities and hopefully turn the tide of discrimination once and for all.


Everyone is Irish for one day in March and a loaf of this easy Irish Soda Bread is a worthy addition to any St. Patrick's Day meal! This traditional recipe calls for mostly pantry items, with a handful of raisins and caraway seeds tossed in for a sweet and savory texture and flavor.
I take back all the bad things I've ever felt and said about Irish soda bread.
If you've ever had both store-bought and homemade soda bread, you might know what I'm talking about. Tiny, dense, gummy, and chock-full of candied fruit and topped with crunchy sugar…sound familiar?
Barf. I've never been a fan. Not until I tried my hand at making it myself.
Night and day, my friends. Completely.
If you make anything Irish this week, make it a loaf of this soda bread.
It doesn't even need a main course to be enjoyed to the fullest. A little butter (or a lot of Kerrygold, if you're anything like me) and you're good to go! It's also a tasty vessel for some homemade apple butter if you're looking for something a little sweeter.
I'm still a little run-down from our trip to Cali, so I'm gonna keep today's post short, sweet, and as educational as possible. Trust me – this education showed me how to appreciate soda bread. Hopefully, it will do the same for you!
What is Irish soda bread supposed to taste like?
Traditional Irish soda bread recipes call for only 4 ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt, and some room temperature buttermilk. This will yield you a chewy, tender loaf of quick bread. To some, this true Irish soda bread method also means dry, plain, cardboard-like.
The recipe in this post has been adapted from multiple test batches. I've added some butter (to give it a little extra body), a tiny bit of sugar, and raisins and caraway seeds that are completely optional. If you're not a fan of either, a handful of black currants are another traditional mix-in you might prefer.
What can I use instead of buttermilk for soda bread?
This recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk. If you're fresh out, you can make a homemade version in a pinch! Simply measure out a scant 1 1/2 cups of whole milk and stir in 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar. Let it sit for 10 minutes and boom – buttermilk substitute.
This buttermilk substitute works in just about any baked good, as well! I use it all the time for cakes and other quick bread. Most of the time when I buy buttermilk, either half of it goes bad, or I freeze the rest into cubes and forget about them in the back of my freezer.
Very easily! You can be enjoying this tasty treat in about an hour if you're a quick mix artist.
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly flour a 12-inch cast iron pan or a baking sheet; set aside.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Massage in the cold butter with your fingers until a coarse meal is formed.
3. Stir in the raisins and caraway seeds, if using.
5. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface, kneading briefly before forming it into a round loaf. Place it in the prepared cast iron skillet.
6. Flatten the dough slightly, then use a sharp knife to cut a cross on the top. Bake for about 35-45 minutes (the cast iron will take a bit longer), until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Cool on a wire rack, then serve warm with butter.
Need something to chow down on with this Irish soda bread? Try one of these tasty dinner recipes!
Also – stop by the blog on Friday for an ALL NEW delicious stew recipe that this will be perfect with!
Everyone is Irish for one day in March and a loaf of this easy Irish Soda Bread is a worthy addition to any St. Patrick's Day meal! This traditional recipe calls for mostly pantry items, with a handful of raisins and caraway seeds tossed in for a sweet and savory texture and flavor.
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly flour a 12-inch cast iron pan or a baking sheet; set aside.
In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Massage in the cold butter with your fingers until a coarse meal is formed. Stir in the raisins and caraway seeds, if using.
Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface, kneading briefly before forming it into a round loaf. Place it in the prepared cast iron skillet.
Flatten the dough slightly, then use a sharp knife to cut a cross on the top. Bake for about 35-45 minutes (the cast iron will take a bit longer), until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Cool on a wire rack, then serve warm with butter.
PIN THIS EASY IRISH SODA BREAD RECIPE FOR LATER!
I love your tip for making buttermilk in a pinch! The photos were making my mouth water also I just popped a loaf into the oven. It smells heavenly!


text:
Home Life Freddy the Fresher 2014: Part 1-3
Freddy the Fresher 2014: Part 1-3
Donald Cloovin
Previously in 'Freddy the Fresher': Freddy arrives in Oxford – Freddy falls in love – Freddy has his heart broken – Freddy reconciles himself to his life.
Oxford…shit. I'm still only in Oxford.
It had not been a good Christmas for Freddy. The break had been punctuated by power cuts and flooding, and he'd had to spend Christmas sharing his bedroom with his grandfather, whose snoring felt like a passing train.
'Glad to be back?' Over-Eager-Twat asks him, a smug grin on his face.
'Yeah, really excited for this term.' Why, after months in Oxford, was he still lying about his levels of excitement? Why was he still pretending that he didn't hate this place? Without Bernadette…without Bernadette…well, that's another story.
Under the terms of his New Year's resolutions, Freddy had decided to have a better time. He had decided that he would drink more, party harder and generally 'put himself out there'. He'd do his work, of course, but not worry about it too much. If I fail, I fail, he thought, and I'm back where I started. No better, no worse.
On the penultimate day of 0th week, with collections looming like a ninja from the ceiling, Freddy decided that the first change he would make would be to visit a new library. (DISCLAIMER: His desire was in no way motivated by a profound longing to avoid bumping into Bernadette at the SSL).
Wearing a hoody and dark glasses, Freddy left Judas College and wandered through town, avoiding eye contact with anyone. This isn't really putting yourself out there Freddy, his internal devil's advocate told him. Shut up.
Skirting down Mansfield Road (past ATS, scene of that fatal chicken malay satay baguette of love), Freddy headed to the Vere Harmsworth library, occupying a booth from where he had a strategic view of the entire library.
After a few minutes of feeling generally paranoid and agitated – to the extent where he could hardly sit still – Freddy got up and headed downstairs, looking for the water fountain. Nothing cools off a young stud like an icy drink.
Arriving, he noticed another young man standing by the cooler, staring blankly at the cover of a copy of Time magazine. He was looking deep into the eyes of Janet Yellen, and she looked back at him.
'You can open it, you know? I think they're for everyone.'
The man looks up at Freddy and Freddy realises that this is someone even more paranoid and agitated than himself. The man nods and places the copy of Time back on the shelf.
'Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude,' Freddy blurts out, proffering a hand, 'I'm Freddy.' The man grasps it and gives it a light shake.
'Nick. Are you a fresher?' Freddy nods and asks: 'You?'
'Finalist,' he says, and skulks back off into the library.
'Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…'
His macro class sing it with a pointed lack of enthusiasm, but their new tutor, a blustery old man with a smiling red face, conducts them along all the same.
'Happy Birthday dear… Freddy!' Two or three people get his name wrong, which, considering he's only been here for about four months, isn't too bad going. There's muted applause at the end, mainly from his tutor who is wiping a tear from his eye as though he's been moved by particularly profound music.
After their class he heads back to his room and sits on his bed, alone, considering how it feels to turn 19. He certainly feels older than he did this time last year, when he celebrated his 18th birthday by going to the one nightclub in Worthing with his dorky best friends (both of whom are now Kettheads at Goldsmith's).
Outside his window a pigeon is pecking away at an almost-empty bag of chips. He wonders, briefly, how those chips came to be purchased on his windowsill. Probably a hate crime, he thinks, with resignation.
That evening he is taken out to dinner by his parents, along with a select group of friends that includes one of the Kettheads (down for the night), three college chums who are surprised to be invited, and Nick, the miserable finalist with whom he has struck up a tentative friendship over the past few weeks.
The nine of them cram into the upstairs part of the Golden Cross centre Pizza Express, and when the waitress comes, Freddy's father produces a ring binder file in which he has sorted a collection of printed Pizza Express vouchers. The deal works out that they can all have free dough balls, which they enjoy.
Freddy's mind, however, is, unsurprisingly, on a subjunctive history of what could've been, if he was still seeing Bernadette. Perhaps they'd be out for a meal, just the two of them… Perhaps she'd cook for him, and they'd eat it together in bed…
'Freddy!' he looks up, and sees his mother holding a package, wrapped in glittery silver paper. 'Here you go,' she says, smiling, and handing the present down the table.
Freddy unwraps it with all the enthusiasm of peeling a rotten satsuma, and, once it is open, he pulls out the box set of the complete West Wing. He smiles, 'thanks Mum,' she smiles back.
No-one else has brought him a present, thus the ceremony is concluded and they can all return to their American Hots, Sohos or Quattro Fromaggios. Conversation, it seems, isn't a necessity in this disparate group of misfits.
And then, at the end of the evening, once he has waved his parents goodbye at the train station, he goes back to his room, sleeps alone and dreams of the pigeon at the window.
Tap tap! The pigeon's beak rings against the window – his eyes open – tap tap, the pigeon strikes again. He walks over to the window and opens it. The pigeon hops in and flutters over to his bed, where Freddy joins it. Gently, he gets back under the sheets and tries to fall asleep whilst the pigeon whispers to him and strokes his forehead.
'My name eez Patrice,' he says, with a thick French accent, 'and eet is all going to be alright! Get zum sleep, leetle boy…'
'Try it!'
Freddy looks over his shoulder nervously. He would be nervous about this even if he was doing it with one of his close friends, but because he's only just met this shifty red-chinoed man he's all the more nervous.
'There's no one here, mate. Just snort it up and we'll be cooking!'
With one final glance behind – backwards towards his childhood, towards his pet dog Snuffles, towards his family who love and trust him – he leans in to the toilet seat and snorts up his lines.
'Shit…' he says, leaning back, whilst Red Chino guffaws with bilious laughter.
'Total head fuck, no? Let's get out of here; you've got to hit the books during the first part of your high, otherwise you won't get the full effect.
Red Chino hastily wipes down the toilet seat, scattering the surrounding area in a light dusting of what looks, to Freddy's untrained eye, like icing sugar. Delicious.
As they exit the toilets, they see a lanky, tousle-haired boy entering after them, carrying a stack of surgical looking swabs and humming 'Bailando por el mundo' under his breath.
Freddy frowns and scampers out onto the staircase that leads up to the Lower Camera. In an attempt to appear nonchalant, he takes a long drink from the water fountain and browses the posters, taking an excessive amount of time to study the Labour Club's action-packed term card.
Once he is convinced that no-one suspects a thing (not that anyone is around to suspect anything) he plunges down into the Glink, in order to really matter out some brilliantly gacky Economics work.
It takes him about five minutes before he realises that today's work is PURE SOLID FUCKING GOLD. It's unbelievable, but he reckons he's cracked Economics; not just at a university level, but for all humanity. There's a Nobel Prize for him here.
Swelling with pride, he looks around at the people who are studying diligently around the room. His mouth falls open.
Bernadette is there, scribbling away on a piece of paper and not looking up. Fuck, Freddy thinks, I've got to have sex with her. I can have sex with her. I can do anything I want. But I'm starting to sweat…it's too hot in here…
In order to solve his heat problem and also show off his abs which he momentarily believes he's been cultivating, he pulls off his jumper and t-shirt and lies back, shirtless, exhaling loudly until Bernadette looks up.
A shocked look passes over her face at the sight of Freddy, sitting topless in the Gladstone Link, winking at her and rubbing his thigh.
She begins to pack up her books, stuffing them into a Fleet Foxes tote bag, before standing up.
Before she walks away, however, she strides over to Freddy, leans in and whispers in his ear.
'Meet me in the toilets…'
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Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Sections 16A-I of the Railways Act 1993, as introduced by Section 223 of the Transport Act 2000, will be implemented once a number of exemptions from the new provisions it will put in place are completed. The exemptions are expected to be finalised shortly and hence permit commencement of the new provisions.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: The Strategic Rail Authority has published its conclusions and a paper, Sensitive Lorry Miles: Results of Analysis, which summarise the findings of the consultants' reports. A copy of that summary is being placed in the Libraries of the House.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: We do not have figures for vehicles imported from outside the European Union with bull bars fitted but we would expect the number to be small, given that a commitment not to fit rigid bull bars covers many non-European car manufacturers.
The most effective way of controlling after-market bull bars is via technical standards in European legislation. We have submitted a technical proposal to the Commission setting out how this could be achieved. We expect the Commission to bring forward its proposals on controlling such bull bars later this year.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: The Blue Badge Scheme and the enforcement powers to protect it do not apply to off-street car parks. There are no plans to change that position.
Vehicles can be clamped on private land, but the legality depends on the circumstances of the particular case and whether the clamper has acted reasonably in the protection of private property rights. Off-street car parks are private property and the conditions of use are a contractual matter between the owner and the motorist.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Although the Blue Badge Scheme does not apply to off-street car parks (such as supermarket car parks), the Government have offered their full support to Baywatch, a coalition of the four main supermarkets (Asda, Safeway, Sainsbury's and Tesco) and disability organisations, who are committed to encouraging more protection of disabled persons' parking bays in retail car parks from abuse by non-disabled drivers.
will be produced later this year on the findings of the study, at which stage consideration will be given to how best to take forward the project.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Train operating companies are free to decide whether or not to apply penalty fares. Those that wish to charge penalty fares must submit a scheme for approval to the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA). The scheme has to comply with the Penalty Fares Regulations made by the Secretary of State for Transport and the Penalty Fares Rules made by the SRA. The approval process includes consultation with the relevant rail passengers committee and passenger transport executive. The London Transport Users Committee was consulted on all the London area penalty fares schemes, including Thameslink and South Central. Thameslink and South Central charge penalty fares on most of their networks, including on their services between Gatwick and London. Gatwick Express and WAGN's dedicated London—Stansted Express service have decided not to operate a penalty fares scheme.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: The Channel Tunnel operator, Eurotunnel, has primary responsibility for ensuring the safe operation of the Channel Tunnel system. In order to fulfil this responsibility it undertakes a wide range of safety checks on all aspects of its operations. Its safety performance is monitored by the independent, binational Channel Tunnel Safety Authority on behalf of the Channel Tunnel Intergovernmental Commission (IGC).
The safe operation of through passenger and freight services is the responsibility of the train operators Eurostar UK Ltd and SNCF (for passenger services) and English, Welsh and Scottish Railway International (EWSI) and SNCF (for freight services).
To ensure a coherent approach throughout the system, safety inspections in the Channel Tunnel are carried out jointly by inspectors from both the British and French authorities, appointed jointly by the Channel Tunnel IGC and the Safety Authority. On the British side, these inspectors are drawn from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Kent and Medway Towns Fire Authority, and the Kent County Constabulary.
Eurotunnel's updated safety case, with (as supporting documents) the safety cases of the three train operators whose services currently run through the tunnel, was accepted by the Channel Tunnel IGC in February 2003.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: The Government are grateful to the Intelligence and Security Committee for its valuable work and its latest annual report. Following consultation with the Intelligence and Security Committee over matters which could not be published without prejudicing the discharge of the function and operation of the intelligence and security agencies, the report will be laid before the House today. Copies will also be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Sainsbury of Turville): The terms and conditions of the 3.4GHz Public Fixed Wireless Access licences are as follows. Licences are issued for an initial duration of five years. The licensee will have the option to renew the licence for up to two further periods of five years. Bankers guarantees are not required as payment must be made in full at the start of each period. No roll-out obligations are included in the licences.