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Russia's largest gold producer Polyus Gold [RTS: PLZL] announced on Tuesday 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's largest gold producer Polyus Gold [RTS: PLZL] announced on Tuesday it would start developing a gold field in East Siberia's Irkutsk Region.
At a meeting earlier today, the company's ...
The new Mi-28N Night Hunter helicopter gunship will continue 01/29/2008 | Other
A court in the Egyptian city of Al-Umran granted a divorce 01/29/2008 | Other
The International Space Station (ISS) is celebrating its 10th anniversary 01/29/2008 | Other
Barely a month into the new year, the military have already 01/29/2008 | Other
The European Union's foreign policy chief said on Tuesday 01/29/2008 | Other
Tajikistan's foreign debt increased 29.3% year-on-year in 2007 to $1.12 billion 01/29/2008 | Business
A young woman, who was killed trying 01/29/2008 | Other
The official dollar rate set by the Russian Central 01/29/2008 | Business
The African swine fever virus (ASFV) has been discovered in Azerbaijan, 01/29/2008 | Other
The Moscow City Court will start hearings on the murder 01/29/2008 | Other
Units of Russia's Air Force and Ground Forces will conduct 01/29/2008 | Other
A court in northwest Russia's Leningrad Region convicted 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's state-run retail savings bank Sberbank said Tuesday its net profit 01/29/2008 | Business
A new supertanker built in South Korea for a Russian company 01/29/2008 | Other
One man was killed early on Tuesday in an explosion 01/29/2008 | Other
In his final State of the Union address, the United States 01/29/2008 | Other
French auto giant Peugeot Citroen signed on Tuesday an agreement 01/29/2008 | Other
India has begun talks with the United States on the purchase 01/29/2008 | Other
Poor organization was to blame for Monday's crash of a two-seater 01/29/2008 | Other
Credit institutions' balances on correspondent accounts with the Russian Central 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's investment index will open Tuesday at 813.64 points, down 2.16% 01/29/2008 | Business
One soldier was killed and three others wounded in a clash 01/29/2008 | Other
Japan urges North Korea to provide full information on its nuclear 01/29/2008 | Other
At least 25 people were killed and another 13 wounded after 01/29/2008 | Other
The Russian government has provided $200,000 in humanitarian assistance 01/29/2008 | Politics
On January 27, the Central Election Commission (CEC) officially denied registration 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's economics ministry has upwardly revised its Urals blend crude price 01/29/2008 | Business
An agreement regulating prices of key foodstuffs will be extended 01/29/2008 | Business
Admiral William J. Fallon, Commander of U.S. Central Command, visited Uzbekistan, 01/29/2008 | Politics
Four children died in a snow slide in the Republic 01/29/2008 | Other
Recently-appointed Russian envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, presented Secretary General 01/29/2008 | Other
An Estonian court Monday handed Valentin Zaitsev, a participant 01/29/2008 | Other
Sberbank could raise $6-7 billion by issuing global depository receipts (GDRs) 01/29/2008 | Other
The Tverskoi District Court in Moscow sanctioned the arrest of investigative ... 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia introduced its concept of regional security in the Persian 01/29/2008 | Other
A two-seater plane crashed in south Russia leaving the pilot 01/29/2008 | Other
The Uruguayan government has declassified secret documents on intelligence agents 01/29/2008 | Politics
Four so called empresses and one tsar attempted to register 01/29/2008 | Other
Ukraine will join the World Trade Organization February 7, the country's 01/29/2008 | Other
A Russian diplomat, expelled from Latvia last Monday, bribed local officials 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's former deputy economics minister, Stanislav Kuznetsov, has been given 01/29/2008 | Business
Russia's economics ministry has raised its forecast for 2009 inflation 01/29/2008 | Business
Although hope remains that talks could be resumed on Kosovo, currently 01/29/2008 | Other
The World Wildlife Fund Russia said in a statement on Monday 01/29/2008 | Other
French car giant Peugeot-Citroen will sign an agreement on Tuesday 01/29/2008 | Other
A Georgian parliamentary committee has passed a draft resolution to sanction 01/29/2008 | Other
Pakistani troops have captured a pro-Taliban commander among 66 alleged militants 01/29/2008 | Politics
More than 1,000 trucks are stuck in traffic queues 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's federal budget surplus in 2008 is expected to reach 01/29/2008 | Other
Egyptian security forces have detained 3,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip 01/29/2008 | Politics
The head of scandal-hit French bank Societe Generale has denied media 01/29/2008 | Business
Polymetal, one of Russia's largest gold and silver producers, reported 01/29/2008 | Other
Russia's economics ministry revised upwards the country's GDP growth 01/29/2008 | Business
Russia's Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko recently said the country 01/29/2008 | Other
A pro-Kremlin United Russia party MP has submitted 01/29/2008 | Other
Dec January 2008 Feb


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NCC sells Open Registry at huge discount
Kevin Murphy, January 6, 2017, Domain Registries
NCC Group has followed through on its promise to divest parts of its domain business, selling the Open Registry collection of companies at a huge discount to the original purchase price.
KeyDrive and a mysterious entity called Terrain.com SA have together acquired the companies for €3.75 million ($3.97 million).
That's compared to the minimum of £7.9 million ($12 million) NCC originally paid just two years ago.
NCC said in a statement that the sold companies are:
Open Registry SA, a registry back-end provider with a handful of new gTLD clients.
ClearingHouse for Intellectual Property SA, aka CHIP, which provides software and billing support for the Trademark Clearinghouse.
Nexperteam CVBA, a tiny registrar.
Sensirius CVBA, the original Open Registry company, a new gTLD consultancy.
Missing from that list is Artemis, the new gTLD registry for .trust, which NCC separately acquired from Deutsche Post for an undisclosed sum in February 2014.
NCC is also keeping hold of its data escrow business, which is widely used by gTLD registries to comply with ICANN rules.
It's not clear how the sold companies are being divided up between the two buyers.
KeyDrive is the Luxembourg-based holding company for the registrars Key-Systems and Moniker and other domain firms.
Terrain.com appears to belong to EuroDNS chair Xavier Buck, who was chair of Open Registry until NCC bought it, but the domain itself doesn't seem to resolve right now.
NCC said that €2 million will be paid up front and €1.75 million will be deferred for 18 months.
As .trust opens for sunrise, Artemis dumps .secure bid
Amazon is now the proud owner of the .secure new gTLD, after much smaller competing applicant Artemis Internet withdrew its bid.
Coincidentally, the settlement of the contention set came just yesterday, the day before Artemis took its .trust — which I've described as a "backup plan" — to sunrise.
I assume .secure was settled with a private deal. I've long suspected Artemis — affiliated with data escrow provider NCC Group — had its work cut out to win an auction against Amazon.
It's a shame, in a way. Artemis was one of the few new gTLD applicants that had actually sketched out plans for something quite technologically innovative.
Artemis' .secure was to be a "trust mark" for a high-priced managed security service. It wasn't really about selling domain names in volume at all.
The company had done a fair bit of outreach work, too. As long ago as July 2013, around 30 companies had expressed their interest in signing up as anchor tenants.
But, after ICANN gave Amazon a get-out-of-jail-free card by allowing it to amend its "closed generic" gTLD applications, it looked increasingly unlikely Artemis would wind up owning the gTLD it was essentially already pre-selling.
In February this year, it emerged that it had acquired the rights to .trust from Deutsche Post, which had applied for the gTLD unopposed.
This Plan B was realized today when .trust began its contractually mandated sunrise period.
Don't expect many brands to apply for their names during sunrise, however — .trust's standard registration policies are going to make cybersquatting non-existent.
Not only will .trust registrants have their identities manually vetted, but there's also a hefty set of security standards — 123 pages (pdf) of them at the current count — that registrants will have to abide by on an ongoing basis in order to keep their names.
As for Amazon, its .secure application, as amended, is just as vague as all of its other former bids for closed, single-registrant generic strings (to the point where I often wonder if they're basically still just closed generics).
It's planning to deploy a small number of names to start with, managed by its own intellectually property department. After that, its application all gets a bit hand-wavey.
.secure applicant loses CTO to Yahoo!
Kevin Murphy, March 7, 2014, Domain Registries
Yahoo has reportedly hired a new chief information security officer in the form of Alex Stamos, outspoken CTO of .secure new gTLD applicant Artemis Internet.
The news of Stamos' departure was first reported by Re/code, citing unnamed sources, a week ago.
Stamos did not respond to a DI request for comment but I gather he's been flagging up his departure from Artemis on ICANN mailing lists.
According to Re/code, he's going to be Yahoo's first CISO for a year.
Stamos' departure will be a blow for Artemis, which is owned by escrow provide NCC Group. He has been, I think, I pretty good front man for the company over the last couple of years.
I also wonder whether he sensed which way the wind is blowing in the .secure contention set, in which Artemis is in a two-horse race with the much wealthier Amazon.
NCC also recently bought the .trust application from Deutsche Post, which looked a bit to me like a backup plan.
NCC buys .trust new gTLD from Deutsche Post
Kevin Murphy, February 17, 2014, Domain Registries
NCC Group, owner of .secure applicant Artemis, has bought the rights to .trust from Deutsche Post, which has an uncontested bid for the new gTLD but decided it doesn't want it.
The price tag of the deal was not disclosed.
NCC, which is also one of the two major data escrow providers supporting new gTLD applicants, said in a statement:
Deutsche Post originally obtained the gTLD through ICANN's new gTLD allocation process during 2013 but has now chosen not to utilise it.
NCC Group will use .trust as the primary vehicle for launching its Artemis internet security service, which aims to create global internet safety through a secure and trusted environment for selected customers.
The Group remains in the contention stage with its application to ICANN for the .secure gTLD. It believes that there will be a benefit in having a number of complementary named gTLDs, all of which offer the same high levels of internet security.
While Artemis has applied for .secure, it's facing competition from the much richer Amazon.
Its initial hope that Amazon's bid would be rejected due to the controversy over "closed generics" seems to have been dashed after Amazon was allowed to change its application.
NCC may be characterizing .trust as an "additional" security TLD, but it's quite possible it will be its "only" one.
Deutsche Post, which as owner of DHL is the world's largest courier service, has passed Initial Evaluation on .trust but has not yet signed its ICANN contract.
ICANN's web site still shows Deutsche Post as the applicant for .trust and it's not clear from NCC's statement how the transfer would be handled.
Crocker to speak at second gTLD collisions summit
Kevin Murphy, September 28, 2013, Domain Tech
ICANN chair Steve Crocker is among a packed line-up of speakers for an event on Tuesday that will address the potential security risks of name collisions in the new gTLD program.
It's the second TLD Security Forum, which are organized by new gTLD applicants unhappy with ICANN's proposal to delay hundreds of "uncalculated risk" applied-for gTLDs.
The first event, held in August, was notable for statements playing down the risk from the likes of Google and Digicert.
While Crocker is scheduled to speak on Tuesday, anyone expecting insight into the ICANN board's thinking on name collisions is likely to be disappointed.
The title of his talk is "The Current State of DNSSEC Deployment", which isn't directly relevant to the issue.
Crocker, due to conflicts of interest protections, is also not a member of ICANN's New gTLD Program Committee, which is tasked with making decisions about the collision problem.
While Crocker's views may wind up remaining private, we can't say the same for Amy Mushahwar and Dan Jaffe, representing the Association of National Advertisers, both of whom are also speaking.
The ANA is firmly in the Verisign camp on this issue, claiming that gTLD name collisions create unacceptable security risks for organizations on the internet.
Also on the line-up for Tuesday are Laureen Kapin of the US Federal Trade Commission and Gabriel Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union, both of whom could bring new perspectives to the debate.
The TLD Security Forum begins at 9am at the Washington Hilton and Heights Meeting Center in Washington, DC. It's free to attend and will be webcast for those unable to show up in person.
Vignes joins Artemis
Kevin Murphy, September 24, 2013, Domain Registries
Former OpenRegistry CEO Jean-Christophe Vignes has joined new gTLD applicant Artemis as director of domain operations, according to Artemis.
Artemis, which is one of the hopeful applicants for .secure, said "he will be in charge of building our Registry and Registrar capabilities for .secure".
Vignes, a lawyer by trade, helped found registry service provider OpenRegistry a few years ago but left in July 2012 to go into private practice in Paris. He formerly worked for EuroDNS.
Artemis still needs to beat Amazon at auction or through some other means if it wants to win .secure, which Amazon wants to operate as a closed generic.
Artemis plans name collision conference next week
Kevin Murphy, August 16, 2013, Domain Tech
Artemis Internet, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, is to run a day-long conference devoted to the topic of new gTLD name collisions in San Francisco next week.
Google, PayPal and DigiCert are already lined up to speak at the event, and Artemis says it expects 60 to 70 people, many of them from major new gTLD applicants, to show up.
The free-to-attend TLD Security Forum will discuss the recent Interisle Consulting report into name collisions, which compared the problem in some cases to the Millennium Bug and recommended extreme caution when approving new gTLDs.
Brad Hill, head of ecosystem security at PayPal, will speak to "Paypal's Concerns and Recommendations on new TLDs", according to the agenda.
That's notable because PayPal is usually positioned as being aligned with the other side of the debate — it's the only company to date Verisign has been able to quote from when it tries to show support for its own concerns about name collisions.
The Interisle report led to ICANN recommending months of delay for hundreds of new gTLD strings — basically every string that already gets more daily root server error traffic than legitimate queries for .sj, the existing TLD with the fewest look-ups.
The New TLD Applicants Group issued its own commentary on these recommendations, apparently drafted by Artemis CTO Alex Stamos, earlier this week, calling for all strings except .home and .corp to be treated as low risk.
NTAG also said in its report that it has been discussing with SSL certificate authorities ways to potentially speed up risk-mitigation for the related problem of internal name certificate collisions, so it's also notable that DigiCert's Dan Timpson is slated to speak at the Forum.
The event may be webcast for those unable to attend in person, according to Artemis. If it is, DI will be "there".
On the same topic, ICANN yesterday published a video interview with DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris, in which he recounted some name collision anecdotes from the Mesolithic period of the internet. It's well worth a watch.
"Risky" gTLDs could be sacrificed to avoid delay
Kevin Murphy, July 20, 2013, Domain Tech
Google and other members of the New gTLD Applicant Group are happy to let ICANN put their applications on hold in response to security concerns raised by Verisign.
During the ICANN 46 Public Forum in Durban on Thursday, NTAG's Alex Stamos — CTO of .secure applicant Artemis — said that agreement had been reached that about half a dozen applications could be delayed:
NTAG has consensus that we are willing to allow these small numbers of TLDs that have a significant real risk to be delayed until technical implementations can be put in place. There's going to be no objection from the NTAG on that.
While he didn't name the strings, he was referring to gTLDs such as .home and .corp, which were highlighted earlier in the week as having large amounts of error traffic at the DNS root.
There's a worry, originally expressed by Verisign in April and independent consultant Interisle this week, that collisions between new gTLDs and widely-used internal network names will lead to data leakage and other security problems.
Google's Jordyn Buchanan also took the mic at the Public Forum to say that Google will gladly put its uncontested application for .ads — which Interisle says gets over 5 million root queries a day — on hold until any security problems are mitigated.
Two members of the board described Stamos' proposal as "reasonable".
Both Stamos and ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade indirectly criticised Verisign for the PR campaign it has recently built around its new gTLD security concerns, which has led to somewhat one-sided articles in the tech press and mainstream media such as the Washington Post.
Stamos said:
What we do object to is the use of the risk posed by a small, tiny, tiny fraction — my personal guess would be six, seven, eight possible name spaces that have any real impact — to then tar the entire project with a big brush. For contracted parties to go out to the Washington Post and plant stories about the 911 system not working because new TLDs are turned on is completely irresponsible and is clearly not about fixing the internet but is about undermining the internet and undermining new gTLDs.
Later, in response to comments on the same topic from the Association of National Advertisers, which suggested that emergency services could fail if new gTLDs go live, Chehade said:
Creating an unnecessary alarm is equally irresponsible… as publicly responsible members of one community, let's measure how much alarm we raise. And in the trademark case, with all due respect it ended up, frankly, not looking good for anyone at the end.
That's a reference to the ANA's original campaign against new gTLDs, which wound up producing not much more than a lot of column inches about an utterly pointless Congressional hearing in late 2011.
Chehade and the ANA representative this time agreed publicly to work together on better terms.
Artemis signs 30 anchor tenants for .secure gTLD
Kevin Murphy, July 4, 2013, Domain Registries
Artemis, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, says it has signed up 30 big-name customers for its expensive, high-security new gTLD offering.
CTO Alex Stamos said that the list includes three "too big to fail" banks and three of the four largest social networking companies. They've all signed letters of intent to use .secure domains, he said.
He was speaking at a small gathering of customers and potential customers in London yesterday, to which DI was invited on the condition that we not report the name of anyone else in attendance.
Artemis is doing this outreach despite the facts that a) .secure is still in a two-way contention set and b) deep-pocketed online retailer Amazon is the other applicant.
Stamos told DI he's confident that Artemis will win .secure one way or the other — hopefully Amazon's single-registrant bid will run afoul of ICANN's current rethink of "closed generics".
He expects to launch .secure in the second or third quarter of next year with a few dozen registrants live from pretty much the start.
The London event yesterday, which was also attended by executives from a few household names, was the second of three the company has planned. New York was the first and there'll soon be one in California.
I'm hearing so many stories about new gTLD applicants that still haven't figured out their go-to-market strategies recently that it was refreshing to see one that seems to be on the ball.
Artemis' vision for .secure is also probably the most technologically innovative proposed gTLD that I'm currently aware of.
As the name suggests, security is the order of the day. Registrants would be vetted during the lengthy registration process and the domain names themselves would be manually approved.
Not only will there not be any typosquatting, but there's even talk of registering common typos on behalf of registrants.
Registrants would also be expected to adhere to levels of security on their web sites (mandatory HTTPS, for example) and email systems (mandatory TLS). Domains would be scanned daily for malware and would have manual penetration testing at least annually.
Emerging security standards would be deployed make sure that browsers would only trust SSL certificates provided by Artemis (or, more likely, its CA partner) when handling connections to .secure sites.
Many of the policies are still being worked out, sometimes in conversation with an emerging "community" of the aforementioned anchor tenants, but there's one thing that's pretty clear:
This is not a domain name play.
If you buy a .secure domain name, you're really buying an NCC managed security service that allows you to use a domain name, as opposed to an easily-copied image, as your "trust mark".
Success for .secure, if it goes live as planned, won't be measured in registration volume. I wouldn't expect it to be much bigger than .museum, the tiniest TLD today, within its first few years.
Prices for .secure have not yet been disclosed, but I'm expecting them to be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. If "a domain" costs $50,000 a year, don't be surprised.
Artemis' .secure would however be available to any enterprise that can afford it and can pass its stringent security tests, which makes it more "open" than Amazon's vaguely worded closed generic bid.
Other ICANN accredited registrars will technically be allowed to sell .secure domains, but the Registry-Registrar Agreement will be written in such a way as to make it economically non-viable for them to do so.
Overall, the company has a bold strategy with some significant challenges.
I wonder how enthusiastic enterprises will be about using .secure if their customers start to assume that their regular domain name (which may even be a dot-brand) is implicitly insecure.
Artemis is also planning to expose some information about how well its registrants are complying with their security obligations to end users, which may make some potential registrants nervous.
Even without this exposure, simply complying appears to be quite a resource-intensive ongoing process and not for the faint-hearted.
However, that's in keeping with the fact that it's a managed security service — companies buy these things in order to help secure their systems, not cover up problems.
Stamos also said that its eligibility guidelines are being crafted with its customers in such a way that registrants will only ever be kicked out of .secure if they're genuinely bad actors.
Artemis' .secure is a completely new concept for the gTLD industry, and I wouldn't like to predict whether it will work or not, but the company seems to be going about its pre-sales marketing and outreach in entirely the correct way.
Demand Media slates GAC's new gTLDs demands
Kevin Murphy, May 9, 2013, Domain Policy
Demand Media has become the first new gTLD applicant to put its head above the parapet and tell ICANN that its latest batch of Governmental Advisory Committee advice is unworkable.
While its comment on the GAC's Beijing communique is very diplomatically worded, it's obvious that Demand reckons most of the "safeguard" advice it contains would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement.
The company has urged ICANN to refuse to adopt the advice, saying:
the spirit and actual letter of the GAC Advice related to these additional safeguards comes in a manner and form that is completely antithetical and contrary to ICANN's bottom-up, multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven policy development process. Because the proposed safeguards, if implemented, would effectively change how new gTLDs are managed, sold, distributed, registered, operated, and used in the marketplace, the GAC Advice is tantamount to making "top-down," dictatorial, non-consensus, policy which undermines the entire ICANN model. If ICANN chose to adopt any one of these three safeguards, ICANN itself would lose all legitimacy.
Demand seems to agree with many of the points raised in this DI post from a few weeks ago related to the GAC's demand that hundreds of new gTLD registries should compel their registrants to stick to data security standards when they handle sensitive financial or healthcare data.
The GAC's advice is extremely broad here and pays scant attention to the innumerable implementation questions raised. As such, Demand says in its comment (filed by applying subsidiary United TLD Holdco):
United TLD believes applicable laws and recognized industry standards should be developed and implemented by appropriate legislative, law enforcement and industry expert bodies and should not be developed by the registry operator.
It also takes issue with the GAC's demand for registry operators to "establish a working relationship with the relevant regulatory body including developing a strategy to mitigate abuse."
The company points out that many TLDs listed in the Beijing communique will have multiple uses, and even if there is a regulatory body for a subsection of registrants, it may not cover all.
For example, should a software engineer (an unregulated profession) have to agree to abide by rules developed for civil engineers when they register a .engineer domain name?
it would be inappropriate, and impossible, to find a "relevant regulatory body" with whom to establish a relationship related to the use of .ENGINEER. Additionally, what if the relevant regulatory body simply declined to work with a registry operator or does not respond to requests for collaboration?
The Demand comment is full of examples of problems such as this.
In broader terms, however, the registrar and applicant is utterly opposed to the GAC's insistence that "certain" unspecified gTLDs representing regulated sectors should be forced, in effect, to transform into tightly restricted sponsored gTLDs.
The GAC wants these applicants to forge tight links with regulatory and self-regulatory bodies and vet each registrant's credentials before allowing domains to be registered.
Demand said:
applicants, including United TLD, submitted their new gTLD applications believing that that they would be operating, managing and distributing generic TLDs. These three Safeguards completely change the nature of the new TLDs from being generic and widely available, to being "sponsored" TLDs restricted only to those individuals who must prove their status or credentials entitling them to register domain names with certain extensions. These three Safeguards are patently adverse to the core purpose of the new gTLD program and ICANN's mission generally which is to promote consumer choice and competition.
While Demand is the first application to slam the GAC advice as a whole (a few others have submitted preliminary comments on specific subsets of advice), I'm certain it won't be the last.
That said, .secure applicant Artemis Internet submitted what is possibly the most amusing example of "sucking up" I've ever seen in an ICANN public comment period.
The company actually requests to be added to the list of strings covered by the GAC advice on the grounds that its application was so gosh-darn wonderful it already planned to do all that stuff anyway.
I expect, by the time the comment period closes next Tuesday the prevailing mood from applicants will be more Demand and less Artemis.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Guess who did the crime?: The Facial Composite Game
By Eliseo Ortiz (University of Colorado Boulder)
In 1878, British psychologist Francis Galton wrote about the significance of photography in policing and incarcerating populations. Together with the famous jailer Edmund Du Cane, Galton investigated criminal behavior patterns by comparing the photographs of thousands of imprisoned inmates. Using eugenics as a guiding force to classify social behaviors, Galton developed several categories of criminals based solely on their physical features. Early on, this experiment consolidated a racist discourse fostered by the alleged truthfulness of photography. In the same way that the practice of phrenology called for measuring people's skulls to determine mental traits and social behaviors, Galton superimposed series of photographs in order to find common physical patterns in criminals and concluded that "if criminals are found to have certain special features," then "certain personal peculiarities distinguish those who commit certain classes of crime" as well.1
Galton inaugurated this approach back in 1878. Yet today, we are still experiencing the residue of a much more internalized racist discourse that justifies the persecution and systematic mass incarceration of people based on their physical appearance. Profiling criminals is not a new attitude, and when placed in this context, race and ethnicity are still considered "valid" arguments used to criminalize populations around the world. In 1959, facial composites became a standard practice used by US law enforcement in police investigation. Over time, this practice has been perfected by skilled composite artists and accompanied by elaborate interrogation schemes designed to misguide eyewitnesses to provide subjective information about alleged suspects. In turn, today, facial composites still serve as legitimate testimonies and are used as evidence to profile and persecute real people. How accurate could this process be if the questions asked by the police are replicating biased attitudes, racism and ethnic discrimination against minorities? If Galton provided the blueprint to justify segregation, US law enforcement today is successfully following that plan letter by letter. Today there are 2.3 million people serving time in local, state and federal prisons. 60% of these prisoners are African American and Latinx despite that when combined, they represent only 28% of the country's population.
Because racism and ethnic discrimination are internalized attitudes, the solution to this problem pertains to everybody. To use the words of antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi, the only way to undo this attitude "is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it."2 In response I am proposing a game to dismantle the complex relationship between the violence enforced by police and visual modes of representation that are racist and discriminatory. This piece reframes a problematic practice of police: Facial composites. Guess who did the crime? is an iteration of the popular game Guess who?. In the original game, players formulate questions casually because there is nothing at stake for the characters. They are simply caricatures. In real life, however, an attempt at identifying suspects based on their physical appearance, gives way to harmful biases and can become a way of targeting innocent people.
Guess who did the crime?, photo by Eliseo Ortiz
In Guess who did the crime?, players are invited to take turns performing the roles of cops and informants describing real facial composites used by the NYPD. This game encourages players to be critical about biased police proceedings today. The new iteration of the game seeks to model real-life repercussions. Instead of being neutral players, the participants of Guess who did the crime? take on the role of informants actively describing suspects. In describing the imagination of the criminal, I intend to raise awareness about the importance of denouncing police profiling. Incriminating fellow citizens based on their physical appearance entails a prejudice in itself. Thus, those marked bodies, described by informants and sketched by racist cops are very present in people's imagination.
Francis Galton, "Composite Portraits," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1878 ↩
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019) ↩
Filed under: Dialogues
Tagged with: game, game studies, police, race, surveillance
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Load your family into the 2018 Jaguar E-PACE. With less than 10,000 miles on the odometer, this 4 door sport utility vehicle prioritizes comfort, safety and convenience. Under the hood you'll find a 4 cylinder engine with more than 200 horsepower, and for added security, dynamic Stability Control supplements the drivetrain. The engine breathes better thanks to a turbocharger, improving both performance and economy. Top features include rain sensing wipers, leather upholstery, front and rear reading lights, power front seats, an outside temperature display, telescoping steering wheel, a power rear cargo door, and seat memory. Jaguar also prioritized safety and security by including: head curtain airbags, front side impact airbags, traction control, brake assist, ignition disabling, an emergency communication system, and 4 wheel disc brakes with ABS. Sophisticated all wheel drive assures superb handling in any weather condition. This vehicle has achieved Certified Pre-Owned status, by passing Jaguar's comprehensive certification process. We pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service. Please don't hesitate to give us a call.


The Henson family said publicly that it intended to donate over 500 puppets, in addition to sketches and props, to Atlanta's Center of Puppetry Arts. The centre was told that for it to receive the collection, it had to raise finance for a wing to exhibit it in. The collection spans over half a century's worth of Jim Henson's work in film and TV. If Jim Henson's name doesn't sound familiar to you, you might well know one of his more beloved puppets: a small green frog with round eyes, long limbs, and an adorable way of throwing his arms around. He's been on the small screen for over 50 years and on the big screen for close to 30. Yes, it's Kermit the Frog and he's the most famous of Jim Henson's Muppets. Jim and Kermit were present when the Center of Puppetry Arts first opened in 1978. Henson is often cited as the most influential American puppeteer of all. But what is a Muppet exactly? Some sources, including Henson's wife, Jane, say that a "Muppet" combines two words? "marionette" and "puppet". Jim himself, however, always maintained that he chose the word as he just liked how it sounded.
Muppets come in a number of different sizes, from mere inches to over eight feet tall. They can either be rod puppets, hand puppets, or a combination of the two. Some operators even wear the Muppets. They're in almost every style, colour, and shape you can think of. They can appear as an imaginary creature, a person, or an animal. They each have a number of things in common, however. They have dynamic and unique personalities, they're suited for movies and television, and they're made from flexible and soft materials.
Jim Henson created the very first Muppets on his own. He sketched rough drawings to suggest how he envisioned the Muppet before setting out to build it. The first Kermit was a lizard-like creature with a body made out of cardboard and a green coat that Henson got from his mother. The frog's eyes were two halves of a toy called Wacky Stax.
Muppeteering in film and in television calls for special measures as the Muppeteer is required to remain hidden in order to create the illusion that the Muppet is doing everything on his own. When the hit TV show Sesame Street started, Henson had the idea of "platforming sets" whenever it was possible. What this means is that the sets are 10 x 8 feet in the air, which allows the Muppeteers to stand at full length with their hands over their heads to operate the Muppets. Some put on built-up shoes in order to stand as tall as their colleagues. Just the Muppets action is framed by the camera, which is set up accordingly, giving the impression that they are moving themselves around on set.


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Peru. Rice Annual. Mar 2015
Peru. Rice Annual. Mar 2015 April 8, 2015
(1000 HA)
(1000 MT)
Yield (Rough)
(MT/HA)
Rice production in MY 2015/16 is forecast at 2.15 MMT (milled basis), remaining in the same level as current production. Rice production has reached a maximum level and is now limited by water availability and demand.
The total rice harvested area for MY 2015/16 is forecast to fall to 400,000 hectares, about the same as the previous year.
With good weather conditions and plentiful water, rice production in CY 2014 reached almost 2 MMT. Rice production is concentrated in Peru's arid northwestern coastal region (mainly in Lambayeque and Piura provinces). Production contends with poor quality soils and increasing soil salinization due to field flooding irrigation techniques. Peruvian rice is surface irrigated, dependent upon water draining from Andean rivers hundreds of kilometers away. Average rice farm size is about five hectares.
The government of Peru has sought with some success to expand rice cultivation along the eastern slope of the Andes (particularly in San Martin province). The policy has failed to fully dislodge the coastal rice producers. These low-income, small-scale farmers currently have no real incentive to switch to a less water intensive crop (e.g., quinoa or cotton). Water fees charged to farmers are almost non-existent (instead of the $250/hectare that should be assessed), and along with decent returns, hinder government attempts to shift production away from the arid coastal areas.
Rice is normally harvested April through May, averaging $317 per MT in CY 2014. This price represents a 3.6 percent increase compared to the previous year.
Despite the bulk of rice cultivation being undertaken by smaller producers, whose quality and yields fluctuate widely, yields averaging 7.82 MT/hectare are respectable (the world average is about 4 MT/hectare). Some farmers are reporting yields as high as 14 MT/hectare.
Rice is a staple product in Peru; per capita consumption hovers at 60 kilograms/year. Rice is traditionally sold in 50-kilogram sacks. But with the expansion of supermarket chains, consumer habits are changing towards prepackaged, one-kilogram bags.
Rice imports in MY 2015/16 at 220,000 MT, remaining at the same level as in the previous year. Imports in CY 2014 were 208,077 MT, led by Uruguay with 75 percent of the market share. Uruguay has dominated imported the rice market in Peru historically due to U.S. rice's less competitive price and a longstanding relationship between the main Uruguayan supplier and Peru's major importer. The former is said to supply advantageous credit conditions.
Import Trade Matrix
(Metric Tons)
CY 2014
Imports from:
Imports from Others
Total from Others
FAS Lima estimates that some 32,000 MT of paddy rice were unofficially exported from Peru to Ecuador in CY 2014.
Rice enters duty-free. Peru's unilateral elimination of import tariffs on rice eliminated many of the trade advantages afforded by the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement. However, the PTPA establishes a duty-free TRQ of 72,000 MT for U.S.-origin rice with annual increases of 6 percent and full duty-free access within 17 years.


Phasing out process of higher denomination currency notes from November 8 has not only created inconvenience during transactions in last three days, but also hit business in different sectors. It also substantially reduced the sale of railway tickets at stations under East Coast Railway (ECoR).
BHUBANESWAR: Phasing out process of higher denomination currency notes from November 8 has not only created inconvenience during transactions in last three days, but also hit business in different sectors. It also substantially reduced the sale of railway tickets at stations under East Coast Railway (ECoR).
Though the ticket counters of railway stations were accepting the old Rs 500 and Rs 100 currencies, the business was not so impressive. Lack of smaller denominations in the ticket counters might be the reason behind this, ECoR sources said.
According to the data provided by the ECoR, its A1 stations Bhubaneswar and Puri have witnessed sharp fall in ticket selling. The Bhubaneswar railway station had sold 15,680 general tickets and 3,180 reserved tickets on November 8, but it had sold only 13,650 general tickets and 2,511 reserved tickets on November 9 and 12, 161 general tickets and 2,395 reserved tickets on November 10.
Similarly, Puri station had sold 6,987 general tickets and 567 reserved tickets on November 8, but it could able to sale 6,612 general tickets and 525 reserved tickets on November 9 and 4,631 general and 528 reserved tickets on November 10.
'A' class stations of the ECoR like Cuttack and Berhampur have also seen the same situation in selling the general tickets. Cuttack had sold 6,304 tickets on November 8, but it decreased to 5,846 on Wednesday. As many as 12,213 tickets were sold on Tuesday, while the selling decreased to 7,881 and 7,312 on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.
Interestingly, sale of reserved tickets at Cuttack and Berhampur stations has gone up on the very next day of the announcement of demonetization of the old notes. Cuttack station had sold only 1,373 tickets on Tuesday, but it increased to 2,097 on Wednesday. Similarly, Berhampur station had sold 764 on Tuesday, but it rose to 1,358 on the very next day.
Sources from railways said some people have purchased tickets worth more than Rs 10,000 in order to exchange their old currencies by cancelling the ticket later. Official sources said Railway has kept strict vigil on the people who purchase tickets worth Rs 10,000 or above. Railway will refund the money through the customers' bank account, it added.
"We have seen a general trend of fall in ticket sales in unreserved tickets segment. This is the sector in which currency notes of denominations lower than the Rs 500/1000 notes are mostly used. We hope the situation will improve by tomorrow," said ECoR chief public relations officer JP Mishra.


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Safeguard Old State Executive Director Thomas A. Shakely will be appearing this week in an exclusive interview with the Pennsylvania State Television Network (PSN-TV), discussing the administration's plans to implement the Student Facilities Fee. The ten minute interview will be airing on PSN-TV this Tuesday, April 8 at 10:30pm.
PSN-TV is only available for on-campus student residents on Channel 5. Alternatively, we will be making the video of the interview available here on Safeguard Old State later in the week.
Remember to stay tuned to Safeguard Old State over the coming weeks as we provide exclusive commentary and coverage of the Student Facilities Fee.
UPDATE (April 12) — Thanks to PSN-TV, we're now able to make the video of the interview available online. The interview aired this past week and features background on Safeguard Old State and the administration's planned student fee reorganization.
March 21 – The Daily Collegian – Do We Really Need The Facilities Fee?
Note: The Safeguard Old State Executive Staff does not moderate the comments posted by the public to blog entries. The comments of Safeguard Old State readers do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Safeguard Old State.
you ought to post the clip.
The Sentinel is the primary blog at Safeguard Old State, and the voice of the SOS Executive Staff The Sentinel also features guest bloggers at Penn State.
Response To Collegian: State Patty's 'Lacks Relevance'?


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The Architects (US) announce live album mixed by Ray Toro (My Chemical Romance)
Note: This post has been backdated. I originally posted this on AltPress.com November 11, 2012 at 1:14 p.m. ET
UPDATE: November 13 at 6:11 p.m. EST
The Architects have announced that they will release Live In Los Angeles tomorrow, November 14.
TOMORROW IS D-DAY! We open the floodgates and release our new LIVE ALBUM "Live in Los Angeles" mixed by Ray Toro... fb.me/23DkMBJrv
— Brandon Phillips (@TheArchitectsKC) November 13, 2012
ORIGINAL POST: November 12 at 1:14 p.m. EST
Kansas City's The Architects have announced that they will release Live In Los Angeles "very soon" via Skeleton Crew Records.
The live album was recorded while the band were on My Chemical Romance's 2011 World Contamination Tour. So, fittingly, My Chemical Romance guitarist Ray Toro lends a hand on the album, both on the production side--the album is mixed by him--and with the music, as his guitarmanship makes an appearance.
Toro also mixed My Chemical Romance's live EP, iTunes Festival - London 2011 .
My Chemical Romance Ray Toro skeleton crew records the architects
The Architects (US) announce live album mixed by R...


Carnes Hill Marketplace is approximately 50km South West of Sydney and is positioned in the highly sought after Liverpool growth corridor. The Centre is a fully enclosed and air conditioned with a GLA of over 17,000sqm.
Carnes Hill Marketplace offers Carnes Hill locals with everyday shopping convenience and your business with success to a growing shopper base with three major stores including Woolworths, Big W and Dan Murphy's.
Carnes Hill Marketplace is home to a number of well known retailers including Priceline Pharmacy, Bakers Delight, Flight Centre and more.
The variety of speciality stores and 926 car spaces which are freely available make Carnes Hill Marketplace a well-patronised shopping centre by its young family demographic.


With a spring in our step, there is a new found feeling of motivation to get back into being active. We all know what comes with this change in season… hay fever. Preparation begins about a month before, ensuring we have all the appropriate medication for a sneezing symphony or irritated eyes and a packet of tissues are always on hand. However, what about our pets? They can also become victims of this allergy period. While we have a range of medication that can help prevent the symptoms of these allergies, fortunately your vet can help do the same for your pet.
Determining what is causing your pet to react this way can take some time, usually several months. An intradermal skin test can help to identify what is causing your pet this discomfort. This is usually conducted by a dermatologist. . In most cases, the reaction is due to an allergy to environmental stimulus, such as a grass or pollen, or type of protein they are eating e.g. chicken or beef. Environmental allergens tend to be the most common cause and unfortunately impossible to avoid!
If your pet has a food allergy, then diagnoses is made through trialling a special hydrolysed or novel protein diet, your vet is the best person to advise you on suitable options. This process generally takes 8 weeks and it is very important to only feed your furry family member the trial diet (so no treats or human snacks!). In some cases of food allergies, diarrhoea, vomiting and weight loss may also be observed.
Once your pet has been diagnosed with an allergy, they will have it for the rest of their life. Getting it checked early is very important so that you can help eliminate the causes of the itching and decide on the best treatment. This treatment can vary however often consists of daily tablets or monthly injections, so that walk time is enjoyed and not avoided!


Slowly, slowly, so slowly, we are finishing rooms one by one in our new house.
So slowly that this is only the 2nd room we ain't touching again for a loooonnnnng time. Hopefully. I mean, unless I come up with something I like better, and we have some free time.
Okay, no. Probably not ever again.
I knew going into this that we plan to be in this house, and have him in this room long through his adolescent years and into the teens, so every part of this space was designed with a 16 year old in mind.
You guys, I had to think about my little boy as a TEENAGER, for extended periods of time. It was awful.
The plan of attack was to start with a neutral base, then layer in fun pieces that would be easy and inexpensive to change out if/when he outgrows them.
To start, we put him back in a full size bed. The bunk/loft bed wasn't needed anymore since he's not sharing a room with his brother, and it was SO dang hot up there.
So we dusted off the headboard his dad built him when he was a toddler and swapped it out of the attic, leaving room for the loft bed in storage.
Then, thanks to Garnett Hill, his bed got a comfy jersey fitted sheet and pillow cases, and an Essential Core-Loft blanket (the size of the blanket allows it to drape over the bed). I skipped the top sheet because never in my life have I seen a 7 year old wake up with a top sheet still nicely sandwiched between their body and blanket.
We LOVE this bedding. It's well-made, washes beautifully, and I'm confident it will last a long time. The core-loft blanket isn't too hot in the summer or cold in the winter.
While most might not classify this wall as a neutral, I'm pretty confident it's a color and pattern that will blend into whatever decor he has in mind for the future, including piles of filthy t-shirts and posters of some future crush.
It was super easy to create. My husband used a long metal level to draw the lines on the wall, then went over them with blue painter's tape. He also used the clear caulk trick (MUST DO!) to get those crisp lines. The entire room was painted Sterling (Behr) prior to taping, then we went over the taped wall with Behr's Deep Blue Sea. Don't forget to pull the tape off while it's still wet!
That shelf is one we purchased at Ikea many years ago. It used to be an upright book shelf in Kendall's room, then it was a horizontal, wall-mounted shelf in our entry way at our old house. Now, it's the perfect storage solution for LEGOs, games, and other small toys.
We glued those LEGO plates to the top with Gorilla Glue.
Much like the old, repurposed book shelf, lots of pieces in this room have had a long life already. I used them to bring in layers of fun without much expense.
We bought that planet mobile from Pottery Barn Kids before he was born. Those tie-dyed pillows were DIYs made with dye from the craft store and cheap white pillow cases.
The side table is part of a set of nesting tables I've had since college. I painted over it's honey oak finish with Americana Decor chalk paint in Primitive, from Home Depot. It's slightly distressed with brown wax, then sealed with clear wax.
Sidenote: DO NOT BE AFRIAD OF CHALK PAINT. Stupid easy, this stuff.
The numbered bin shelf is a new purchase from Target.
I already told y'all how I turned old t-shirts into wall hangings and a throw pillow.
I recently purchased the curtains from Land Of Nod. The classic pinstripe ticking, with the fun pop of orange dye at the bottom was exactly the combination of unexpected and functional that I was going for. It was love at first click.
The reading corner has a Land Of Nod beanbag that he got for Christmas a couple years ago, a new metal cart from Target that we filled with his favorite books, and a floor lamp that we spray painted blue. I Modpodged pieces of an old road atlas that was floating around our trunk onto the lampshade.
This DIY memo board is just a piece of wood (Kendall painted this when he was 3!), with some elastic (from the sewing section) tied around it.
Kendall and I have been reading Harry Potter together, and I remember when I first read this out loud to him. I teared up. Total mom dork moment. It's such a powerful, important lesson to remember. So I ordered this print from Etsy, and framed it in a Target frame.
The bathroom still needs work, so just ignore that part. That's a whole other beast we're just not ready for yet. The hat rack is a piece of ironwork we bought on our honeymoon. I spray painted it silver for Kendall's space-themed nursery, and it used to hold backpacks and sun hats.
The robot art is by the brilliant Gregg Deal, also carried over from Kendall's previous room.
A CanvasPop canvas of Kendall and his dad that we've had for ages hangs in the entry way.
And a basket I scored at HomeGoods holds large toys for now. Maybe it will become a wastebasket or footstool in the future.
2. Buy pieces with the future in mind. It will be here before you or your bank account knows it.
3. Invest in the neutral stuff, get creative and cheap with the age/trend/phase-specific stuff.
Click here if you'd like to see the other room we've finished.
Love it! great work! and that etsy HP print? love it.


This swan step stool is truly a picture of elegance and grace. Tail feathers are splayed as her brilliant white body slowly moves across the pond. Dimensional waves ripple in her wake. This sophisticated piece will easily add a unique touch to your child's room.
(34.3 cm x 25.4 cm x 38.1 cm).


A distinctive Art Nouveau design features on the elegant Orleans cast iron radiator from Carron. The fluid, sinuous lines wind their way majestically up the columns in whiplash style, a distinctive trait of the Art Nouveau period. The beautiful curved feet and gently rounded top adds aesthetic appeal to the overall design.
The Orleans looks incredible in period settings, and yet with its distinctive nod towards aspects of nature would look equally stunning in modern and contemporary homes too.
With a wide range of RAL paint colour choices and finishes available you'll be able to blend this gorgeous radiator with your décor and colour scheme effortlessly. The finishes include hand-burnished which suit the Orleans beautifully. This is also known as a polished finish. It is achieved by hand-burnishing the radiator back to the bare metal. It's an effective way to add contrast to the decorative parts of the columns and feet as it accentuates the raised pattern with a brighter polish.
Available in a choice of sizes the Orleans can be used effectively throughout your home or also in other settings. We also stock a range of accessories to help integrate your chosen colour into your decor. Pipe sleeve kits are an easy way of covering copper pipes that come as standard.
Carron offer a great lifetime warranty on their Orleans cast iron radiators. These stunning radiators are assembled in Britain. A kerbside delivery is also available for your convenience.


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Posted April 2, 2016, 11:47 am
John Boyette
Kisner plays through trials to earn start in Masters
Aiken native plays through trials to earn start in Masters
Photos description
Kevin Kisner celebrates his first victory with his wife, Brittany, and daughter, Kate, after getting a six-stroke win in the RSM Classic at St. Simons Island, Ga., in November.
Kevin Kisner's 2015 season vaulted him into the top 20 in the World Golf Ranking and a spot in the Tour Championship. In turn, he received an invitation to play in his first Masters. invitation
Kevin Kisner hits balls on the driving range during the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Kevin Kisner (left) hits balls on the driving range during the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Kevin Kisner hits his tee shot on No. 2 during the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Kevin Kisner walks from No. 1 green to No. 2 tee box during the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Kevin Kisner hits out of the bunker on No. 18 during the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Steve and Christy Kisner (at top) lived in Woodside Plantation in Aiken, where their son, Kevin, was able to play golf on most days. At South Aiken High School, Kisner was part of a Thoroughbred team that dominated golf in South Carolina in the early 2000s. His success there allowed him to have his choice of colleges, and he went to the University of Georgia.
AIKEN — The simple envelope addressed to Kevin Kisner arrived at his parents' home in late December, just before he headed west to resume his PGA Tour season.
"When he first got it he said, 'Mom, look at this, and he showed it to me,'" Christy Kisner said.
Kisner and his family had wondered whether this day would ever come. All of the thousands of hours on the course, honing his skills, practicing his putting – would they ever pay off?
Kisner had been a star in junior golf, in high school, in college. He had turned professional and found success on the mini tours. The PGA Tour? Not so much. Only one top-10 finish in his first 50 starts at golf's highest level. A trip back to the Web.com Tour.
Then, work with a new instructor finally clicked. His confidence grew, and he gained a sense that he belonged. With a breakout 2015 season, Kisner challenged for his first PGA Tour win. He lost three times in playoffs.
Those close calls vaulted Kisner into the top 20 in the world rankings and a spot in the season-ending Tour Championship, which in turn earned him a special piece of mail.
Christy Kisner had no idea what her son was handing her that day in the kitchen.
She read:
The Board of Governors of the Augusta National Golf Club cordially invites you to participate in the Two Thousand and Sixteen Masters Tournament to be held at Augusta, Georgia the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth of April
Tears of joy flowed.
"The Masters has been such a big part of our lives, growing up in Aiken. For me to finally play in it is a dream come true for my entire family," Kevin Kisner said.
Christy Kisner rushed to find a frame.
"The only frame I had was the one with the cross," she said. "I said we prayed for this, so I might as well put it in there."
GOLF CAME EASY for Kisner. A natural athlete, he grew up at Woodside Plantation and gravitated to the same game his father, Steve, played.
"He was a good athlete when he was little, and he tried all the sports," Steve Kisner said. "He determined that golf was what he wanted to pursue."
The Kisners lived on the seventh fairway of the Jones Course at Woodside, not far from the ladies tee.
"By the time I was old enough to be independent, I'd be at the golf course, and we had tons of juniors," Kisner said. "And that's all we did all summer was play golf. Basically from the time you woke up until dark you were at the golf course. All the members were awesome. That's how we got into it."
Under the tutelage of head pro Jackie Seawell, the junior program at Woodside turned out multiple Division I players. Kisner was at the tail end of that talented group age-wise, and he naturally wanted to play and compete against the older players.
"He was a product of the environment around him," said Daniel Seawell, who helped his father run the junior program. "There were a lot of good players that he surrounded himself with that made the game more enjoyable and more attractive for him."
The stories about Kisner's junior days are plentiful – dominating the dogfights at an early age, becoming the best putter at the club at 7 – and true.
"I took him out of the dogfight," Jackie Seawell said. "I called his dad and said some of the men are uncomfortable playing Kevin for $5."
By the time he reached high school, Kisner had decided to pursue golf after dabbling in basketball, baseball and football.
"My basketball coach in high school was the golf coach as well, and he said, 'I think you ought to stick with golf,'" Kisner said. "'You've probably got a better chance of getting a scholarship to college doing that.'"
At South Aiken High School, Kisner was part of a powerful Thoroughbred team that dominated golf in the Palmetto State in the early 2000s. With Alex Hamilton, Dane Burkhart and Patrick Cunning among his teammates, the Thoroughbreds won back-to-back Class AAAA titles in 2000 and 2001.
In 2002, Kisner dominated his senior year. He won five of six individual titles, including the Southern Cross at Palmetto and the Joe Wyatt Memorial at Houndslake. In the latter event, Kisner defeated Dutch Fork's Dustin Johnson in a sudden-death playoff for the individual title. Johnson is now a multiple PGA Tour winner.
It was in high school where Kisner developed his love for the Masters.
"It's always our spring break in school, and this town kind of shuts down for the week," he said. "My earliest memory of going is working in high school. Guys would come over to tee off around lunchtime and they'd already been to the Masters, and I would grab their tickets and run over there after they teed off. I'd stay until dark watching, hanging out. That's how I grew up going over there."
AS ONE OF THE top high school golfers in the South, Kisner had offers from all of the top colleges. He decided early on that he wanted to go out of state.
"We drove to Athens one day and looked around, and I could tell immediately that was where he was going," Steve Kisner said. "He just loved Athens from the time he saw it. He became very close to the two golf coaches there."
Playing on a University of Georgia squad that featured future PGA Tour winners Chris Kirk and Brendon Todd, Kisner thrived in the competitive college atmosphere.
"I had four of the greatest years of my life playing golf there," Kisner said.
With coach Chris Haack's unique qualifying system – no player was guaranteed a spot in the starting lineup – Kisner became just one of three Georgia players who never missed qualifying in a four-year span. The others were Russell Henley and Brian Harman, who also went on to become PGA Tour winners.
"That's what I think has produced all those good golfers out of Georgia," Kisner said. "There's no 'if you miss qualifying we're saving a spot for you.' The five best in qualifying go, and it doesn't matter who it is. Sometimes we probably didn't take our best teams, but it was fair and how we did it. I think it's the only way to do it."
Kisner became Georgia's first four-time All-American, and he helped the Bulldogs win the 2005 NCAA championship.
"We started a rule, maybe after the second year, where if you finished in the top 10 in the tournament you got to get in the next one so you didn't have to qualify," Kisner said. "And that was pretty cool, because it incentivized you to play well in the tournament."
It was during his college years that Kisner first got to play at Augusta National. The Georgia team traditionally gets invited each year.
"It was really cool. It's just a special place," he said. "To be able to hit a shot instead of standing off to the side and watching is such a different thing."
Kisner turned professional in 2006 and became a regular on the NGA/Hooters, eGolf and Tarheel tours soon after.
"I had success early, so I was never in the financial peril that most mini-tour players are in," he said. "I was able to keep myself above water on my own until I was able to make it to the Web.com Tour."
Among his highlights was a win in the 2008 Savannah Lakes Resort Classic, an NGA/Hooters Tour event in McCormick, S.C.
In December 2009, Kisner shot a final-round 71 on the last day of the PGA Tour Qualifying School tournament to finish tied for 26th. The top 25 players earned PGA Tour cards for the following season.
"That was brutal," Kisner said. "I'd played well all year, and that was my year to get through. I didn't do it. That offseason was probably the hardest. It was either quit or get back out there."
A discouraged Kisner thought he might give up the game and go work for his father's construction business.
"I knew right away that construction and development was not going to be Kevin's cup of tea," his father said.
His mother asked the family's minister to talk to him.
"(The minister) said, 'Do you think your daddy gets up every day and thinks, 'My purpose in life is to build a house?' I don't think that's your daddy's purpose. You need to think about what's going on in your life besides golf,'" Christy Kisner said.
Kisner told his family that he was going to get a job, but his father suggested he work on his game instead.
After a brief dabble in sales, Kisner returned to the game he loves.
"The mini tours don't play in January, so I tried to make some money and see if I liked doing that," Kisner said. "I decided to go back and start practicing. I liked golf better."
KISNER PLAYED the Web.com Tour full time in 2010, and he won the Mylan Classic and finished 11th on the money list to secure his PGA Tour card for 2011. But he made only 10 cuts, so he had to return to
Q school. This time, he was successful with a tie for 11th.
Another mediocre season on the PGA Tour in 2012 – he made 10 cuts in 24 events – sent Kisner back to the Web.com Tour again.
After success at every level, Kisner had hit a brick wall.
His father remembered a conversation they had early in his PGA Tour career.
"I remember one time he told me his first year on tour, 'You know, Dad, I can compete with these guys. I'm a pretty good chipper, good putter. I'm determined to be good at it. But the difference is, these guys, when they hit a 3-iron they are trying to hit it to 5 feet and make birdie. When I hit a 3-iron, I'm just trying to get it on the green. I can't compete out here like that.'"
Kisner found the winner's circle in 2013, winning the Chile Classic on the same day that longtime friend and fellow Aiken resident Scott Brown won the Puerto Rico Open on the PGA Tour.
Again, Kisner was on his way toward the PGA Tour, but he knew he had to make changes if he was going to be successful this time.
"I had won earlier in the year, but I was still struggling," he said. "I was going to get my card, and I knew that I couldn't go play the PGA Tour the way I was hitting it."
Enter John Tillery, a former mini-tour player who became an instructor. He worked with Brown, and Kisner noticed the success his friend was starting to have. Kisner's biggest issue was driving accuracy, so he turned to Tillery for help.
"I've got to be playing from the fairway to play on the PGA Tour," Kisner said. "It's funny how my game works. If I'm driving it well, the rest of it goes in sync. But if I start hitting driver poorly, my mind starts wandering a little bit and I don't hit the rest of the shots well."
Kisner and Tillery clicked from the beginning.
"He was fighting a block, a miss to the right," Tillery said. "That was kind of the one that plagued him. And then the fear of that shot coming sabotaged him a little bit. There were some things we had to clean up in his golf swing, but fearing that tee shot was the biggest thing."
Despite his struggles on the PGA Tour, Kisner told Tillery that he believed he could win.
"He kind of laughed at that when I told him that and I'm shanking it out of his bay," Kisner said. "I think that's one of the reasons I play so well is that I just have that inner belief in myself and I know my abilities, if I'm given the right information. If I can get him to get me on the right track, I'll work hard enough. I knew I would spend every waking hour trying to get it figured out."
Success didn't come overnight, but Kisner played well enough to make 17 cuts with three top-10 finishes and earn nearly $1 million. He made the FedEx Cup playoffs for the first time, and he entered the 2015 season with some confidence.
In nine events before the PGA Tour reached the Florida Swing, Kisner's best showing was a tie for fourth at Sea Island. He had missed four consecutive cuts on the West Coast, but he stuck to the plan he and Tillery had set up nearly two years before.
"Until you really get out there and put your ability against the best in the world, you just don't know where you're going to peak out," his father said. "He had some difficult times in his first few years. There were doubts creeping in, and whether he was good enough. We always knew he had the ability and determination, but he had some mechanical things in his golf game that were holding him back."
KISNER BEGAN 2015 ranked No. 236 in the world. The struggles early in the season didn't do anything to improve his status, and once again he was relegated to the sidelines as the golf world focused its attention on Augusta and the Masters.
Up next for Kisner was the RBC Heritage at Hilton Head Island, S.C., and a familiar track in Harbour Town Golf Links. The short, tight layout with small greens favored Kisner's style of play, and he had played the course since his junior days.
Tillery predicted success for Kisner in his home state about two weeks before the event began.
"John and I were in his bay working on some things and he said, 'You're at a point now you're going to have to prepare to win,'" Kisner said. "And he said, 'The tournament for you to win is Hilton Head in two weeks. The golf course is perfect for you, and that's how your whole preparation needs to be.'"
With millions of dollars up for grabs each week, plenty of PGA Tour players make a handsome living without ever winning. That didn't suit the competitive Kisner.
"It's so easy on the tour, (if) you don't ever win, to lose sight of what the real goal is instead of playing well and finishing top 10," he said. "Our goal going into that tournament was to win."
Kisner opened with rounds of 68, 67 and 67 to get into the thick of things, but he still trailed Troy Merritt going into the final round.
"Standing on the range on Sunday I said, 'I'm going to win today,'" Kisner said. "I don't know why, I just had it going."
A final-round 64 at Harbour Town, including a closing birdie on the final hole, put Kisner into a sudden-death playoff with Jim Furyk. Both players birdied the first playoff hole, the 18th, and Furyk won on the second playoff hole with another birdie.
"I played great, obviously got outrun a little bit," Kisner said.
Three weeks later, Kisner backed up that performance on a much bigger stage at the Players Championship. He shot 73-67-67 to get into contention.
His parents were at St. Simons Island for a family wedding and decided to head down for the final round.
"It was Mother's Day, and (Steve) said, 'What do you want to do?'" Christy Kisner said. "I said, 'I want to go watch my son play golf.' We got up early and left. Boy, was that the most fun Mother's Day I've had in a while."
Kisner made birdies on TPC Sawgrass' 16th and 17th holes, and his 12-footer for birdie to win the tournament outright barely missed. That put him in a three-hole aggregate playoff with Rickie Fowler and Sergio Garcia, two of golf's biggest stars.
Kisner was clearly the interloper, but he didn't act like it. He thrived.
"I've always been good in that position when the pressure's on," he said. "I don't know why, it's just part of me and what I love to do. It's what I practice for and why I hit all those balls and putted and practiced all that time to be in that position. I don't ever want to be the guy who shies away from that feeling. I love having the nerves and excitement of trying to pull it off under pressure."
On the second playoff hole, the island par-3 17th, Kisner matched Fowler's birdie. It was the confidence that Kisner showed as he drained the putt that excited his instructor.
"Watching him the second he was fist-pumping a putt in on 17 at Sawgrass with the world watching?" Tillery said. "From then on, I don't care if he makes eight on the next hole, he's going to win. That's the stuff you can't teach. While my hands shake when I'm in that spot, he's walking it in fist-pumping."
All three players parred No. 18, and Garcia was eliminated. That sent Kisner and Fowler back to the 17th for sudden death.
Kisner hit his tee shot inside 15 feet, but Fowler stuffed it to inside 5 feet. Kisner missed, and Fowler rolled in his birdie putt for the victory.
"That was the first time I'd ever been in a golf tournament where it felt like a football game," Kisner said. "That's the reason they call it the Stadium Course. That whole setting, it was nuts. As soon as you made contact with the ball, the screaming and yelling, it got your heart pumping. It was awesome to feel that adrenaline."
While Fowler got the accolades for his biggest career win, Kisner earned respect.
"If any player watched this today, I'll tell you what, not one of them wants to be in a playoff with Kevin Kisner going forward," Frank Nobilo said on the Golf Channel. "He flat-out said, 'I don't care who you are, I'm going to take you on.'"
Even Johnny Miller, NBC's analyst, said Kisner was a "star in the making."
"Kisner, he's a clutch guy," Miller said on the air. "I don't know much about him but I'm impressed with what I've seen."
KISNER'S SUCCESS continued through the rest of the 2015 season. He followed with top-10 finishes at Colonial and the Memorial, and he tied for 12th at the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay.
At the Greenbrier Classic, he shot 64 in the final round to get in another playoff. But his tee shot on the first playoff hole found a gnarly lie and he was eliminated. That left him as the first player since Horton Smith to lose a playoff three times in the same season.
"I couldn't even see the ball," Kisner said of the Greenbrier playoff. "After I whiffed it twice my caddie said, 'What do you want to do?' I said, 'I don't know, let's just get out of here.' It was cool."
Appearances in the British Open and PGA Championship followed, and even though he missed the cut at both, he gained valuable experience. He breezed through all three rounds of the FedEx Cup playoffs and made it to the Tour Championship at East Lake, securing his Masters invitation.
After a month break, Kisner resumed play as the 2015-16 season began in late October. After a couple of average starts, he opened with 64 in the World Golf Championships event in China. After leading or sharing the lead through 54 holes, he finished second to Russell Knox.
"I played pretty decent but I didn't make the putts I needed to make to win," Kisner said. "I kept thinking he might give me a chance by making a bogey coming in, but he just played solid."
Kisner had one last start for the calendar year, and it came at a familiar location: St. Simons Island, for the RSM Classic. He was familiar with the Sea Island area from college golf and was living there while his home in Aiken was being renovated.
"We just kind of went into that week as a bonus," Kisner said. "To chill out, we had family and friends coming down. I'd just played great and secured my playing status for another year. Let's just enjoy it and have fun and see what we do."
Rounds of 65, 67 and 64, however, changed those expectations. With a three-shot lead going into Sunday, Kisner had a chance to shed the runner-up label.
"The only thing you can really do from there is mess it up," he said. "Either you play good and win or you mess it up. All my other tournaments I was either tied for the lead or one back; I was kind of a chaser. Now I was the one getting chased."
His parents were there, and they could sense he was nervous heading into the final round. But Kisner allayed any fears by making five birdies on the front nine at Sea Island to open up a sizable lead.
"He'll talk to me a lot when I'm walking in the gallery," his father said. "He'll find me and say something. He never acknowledged me or smiled or said anything to me until after he made that long putt at 9. He was walking down the 10th fairway and smiled at me and said something, and I thought, he's relaxed now."
With Kisner playing alongside former U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell, Kisner's mom inadvertently gave the Northern Irishman an assist. McDowell's tee shot hit her between her ankle and heel, and instead of going into a marsh, it was playable.
"Kevin said, 'Mom, nice assist. Next time, put it in the junk,'" she said. "Graeme's dad came up and said, 'That would be me son that hit you.'"
The elder McDowell had been hit by an errant shot the week before, and McDowell won that event in Mexico.
"I said it's Kevin's turn this time," Christy Kisner said. "He said, 'We'll see.'"
Kisner didn't have any trouble navigating the final nine holes, but his history in college events at the Sea Island course made his parents nervous. They don't normally walk together, but they decided to walk the final few holes as he closed in on victory.
"Steve said, 'I'm not going to be happy until he's on the fairway on 18,'" Christy Kisner said. "I said, 'I'm not going to be happy until he's on the green.' Then I said, 'I think we might do it.'"
Kisner was tight-lipped until the final hole, when he finally smiled after hitting the green. After two-putting for a six-shot win, he celebrated with his family.
"We did it," Kisner said as he scooped up his 17-month-old daughter, Kate, and greeted his wife, Brittany, behind the 18th green.
It didn't hurt that Kisner accepted the trophy from tournament host Davis Love III, who will be the U.S. Ryder Cup captain this fall.
"To come out and shoot 5-under on the front nine, what else could you ask for?" Kisner said. "It was a cool way to have my first win, kind of coast in to the finish. I made that putt on nine and knew I could pretty much handle it from there."
The big Aiken contingent of family and friends that converged on Sea Island enjoyed a memorable victory party.
"I was able to go meet up with all my friends and family, and they stayed afterwards and we had a big party at Bubba Garcia's," Kisner said. "The coolest part was I didn't have to go changing plans and fly on an airplane to get home."
WITH HIS SUCCESS in the past 12 months, Kisner is getting more attention than ever. Golf magazines want him for photo shoots, and he is a popular interview subject.
He and Tillery joke about what they call the "Ronda Rousey Project." The mixed martial arts star was plastered all over media before suffering a knockout loss to Holly Holm last fall.
"Now the landscape's changed," Tillery said. "It used to be me and him in shorts and hitting crappy range balls and fighting and fussing and working through it. Now it's cameras and magazines and photo shoots, all those things. Somewhere along the way that probably interfered with her training and preparation. We're going to try to make sure we don't get kicked in the face instead of making magazine covers."
Kisner agreed with a laugh.
"We don't want that to happen to me; we've got to keep our head down and do the same thing we've been doing," he said.
Kisner has carried over his success from 2015 into the early part of this year. He has been at or near the top of the FedEx Cup points race, and he has a shot to represent the U.S. later this year in the Olympics and the Ryder Cup.
"I can't think of a bigger honor than to represent our country in the Olympics or in the Ryder Cup," Kisner said. "Those are goals of mine, but all goals will be taken care of if I take care of my process, and results will come if I do the things I need to do to play well."
Avoiding the spotlight at the Masters will be difficult for Kisner. He's one of a handful of area players to make the tournament, and just the second from Aiken. He'll make his debut at age 32 and with a decade of professional experience behind him.
"I'm going to go off the radar and do what I do," he said. "Treat it like any other tournament and play as well as possible."
He's already had a few practice rounds, and in February he consulted local resident and Augusta National member Jeff Knox for some advice.
"I think part of the deal is you've got to realize it's still golf," Kisner said. "Just because it's Augusta National doesn't change the idea of getting the ball in the hole, and you've got to figure out how to attack the golf course and play your game."
Now, all of the hard work has paid off. Instead of standing on the practice green at Woodside pretending to have a putt to win the Masters, he will actually compete.
"Once he committed to golf, his dream was to get to this level," his father said. "I don't think he's any different than the other ones out there. They all had the same dreams and aspirations."
His mother said that his confidence rarely wavered, and he promised to one day make the Masters.
"We've never had tickets, and I always love going," she said. "He said 'Mom, don't worry about it, I'll get you there.' That's when I said, 'Get me there while I can still walk it.'"
Kisner has fulfilled that promise, and more. He's no longer on the mini tours or the Web.com Tour. He has made it to golf's ultimate level, and he has the invitation to show for it.
"I was playing and had a yardage book out, writing notes down on putts, and certain things like that," he said of a winter scouting trip to Augusta National. "It's come full circle from watching to now I'm actually preparing to play the tournament."
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Teachings of golf coach Chris Haack spell success
Furyk outlasts Kisner in playoff
Aiken's Kisner earns first PGA Tour victory
Kevin Kisner still adjusting to his elite status


text:
Amazon's Kindle Kids e-readers are up to $50 off right now
It's the first discount for the all new Kindle Kids that was released in September.
Mariella Moon
Amazon is selling the 2022 Kindle Kids at a discount for the first time since it was released in September last year. The e-reader is currently on sale for $85 or $35 less than its retail price of $120. If your child wants a device with a bigger screen, though, the Kindle Paperwhite for Kids is also on sale for $110, which isn't quite an all-time low for it but is still $50 less than its usual price. Like Amazon's other kid-focused e-readers and tablets, these Kindles come with a Parent Dashboard you can use to set age filters and device bedtime. They also ship with a year-long subscription to Amazon Kids+ that will give your children access to a library of age-appropriate books and audiobooks.
Buy Kindle for Kids at Amazon - up to $50 off
The e-commerce giant introduced its first ever Kindle Kids Edition back in 2019. This newer version comes with the specs the refreshed regular e-reader has, so it's pretty much the same device without the kid-focused features. It has a 300 ppi display, unlike its predecessors that had 167 ppi screens, which is the same resolution as the Paperwhite's. That enables text and graphics to appear crisper and more defined. It can last up to six weeks on a single charge, and its onboard has been doubled to 16GB from 8GB, allowing your child to store more books.
In addition, the all new Kindle Kids has adjustable front lights and a dark mode for night reading, as well as a USB-C port, so you can finally put that old microUSB charger to rest. With its 6-inch display, though, it is smaller than the Kindle Paperwhite Kids that comes with a a 6.8-inch screen. Both devices ship with covers and a two-year worry-free guarantee that gives you a way to easily get a replacement if it breaks within that period.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Brendan Fraser says he 'doesn't necessarily want to look' how he did in the Mummy films
'I've made peace with who I am now,' Oscar-nominated actor said


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A properly installed UNIX Agent is able to be started using the ServiceManager Dialog without any issues; however, it is not possible to stop the UNIX Agent via the ServiceManager Dialog. ?
1) Automic must be the owner.
2) The group must correspond to the identification "Automic". The change must take place under a privileged user (root, for example).
The ServiceManager program has to be owned by root in v9. In v9, the ServiceManager needs root "effective rights" to control the UNIX Agents.
A ServiceManager must be available on the same computer as the components which it uses. If the components are installed on different hosts, you must install a ServiceManager on each of these computers.
Possible Problems: An Agent cannot be ended ("permission denied" error) as of version 9.00A, the UNIX Agent automatically sets its real user to "root" after it has started. The ServiceManager must also run with effective root rights as otherwise, it cannot end the Agent because the OS denies the access. Ensure that the ServiceManager also runs under the actual "root" user in order to avoid this problem.
1) "Start " command on the popup menu starts an Agent via a ServiceManager.
2) This option can only be used if a ServiceManager is available for starting the Agent.
->> Additionally, the ServiceManager settings are required to be entered in the Agent object's "Attributes" tab either manually or with the command "Refresh Service Manager Scan" (does not necessarily have to be the v9 ServiceManager available).
->> Also, "Link to Service Manager" must be activated on the Agent's "Attributes" tab.
3) "Refresh Service Manager Scan" command on the popup menu refreshes the ServiceManager's connection settings for the selected Agent.
->> This command is only available in the popup menu if the ServiceManager's connection settings have been set previously on the Agent object's "Attributes" tab. ?


massive 350 million viewers per week in 170 different countries.
It features a number of regular features including a challenge for the presenters, Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car and power laps, where the show's 'tame racing driver' The Stig completes a lap around the Top Gear test track to gauge the performance of various cars.
In September, MailOnline reported how co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson was set for a 5million windfall after the BBC bought out his stake in Bedder 6, which he set up five years ago with Top Gear's executive producer Andy Wilman, to exploit the programme's global brand.
Bedder 6 has had huge success making money out of Top Gear merchandise, show tours, DVDs and international sales rights.
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The new series returns on January 27.
Jeremy Clarkson upsets animal activists after posting a picture of a dead mouse "killed during Top Gear rehearsals"


At the heart of Moule a Chique, near the island's second-largest town of Vieux Fort, lies this renovated family home with sea views, port views and distant Piton views. There are established neighbours all around and this is historically one of the most coveted residential areas in the south. Close to town but away from the hustle and bustle, this is a very child-and pet-friendly area to live in. If you work from home a lot, then it's nice to be able to keep an eye on the fishing boats coming and going, and the occasional ocean freighter being guided into the commercial port, nearby.
The town of Vieux Fort - with its shops, fish and vegetable markets, hospital, schools, banks and international airport - is just 3 minutes' drive away but the Moule a Chique peninsula is a haven for hikers and walkers, with lots of wildlife and greenery around and a lovely secluded beach on the Caribbean side of the headland at hiking distance.
This house was originally built - along with four others - to accommodate the management staff of the Heineken brewery. The company eventually sold off its real estate and this house was extensively extended by the new owner. It now accommodates five bedrooms and three bathrooms in the main part of the house, along with a one bedroom, one bathroom studio in the basement (which can be used for short-term holiday lets). The garden is fully fenced and measures 12,641 sq ft of flat and gently sloping land.
* Published prices and information are subject to change. Material on this website is intended for informational purposes only. Terra Online makes no express or implied warranties, representations or endorsements with regard to this website and its content.


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text:
Theatre from a disabled/ chronically ill person's perspective
Disclaimer/ Contact
accessible listings
Theatre Life
Me, my mouth and I and a discussion about accessible theatre
August 15, 2018 January 6, 2019 Access Theatre
© BBC [ Image description: Image shows a white woman wearing a black hoodie with the hood pulled down across most of her face against a black background. Her mouth, which is the main focus of the photo is wide open as though she is screaming]
Performance Live: Me, my mouth and I is a BBC documentary that was shown on BBC Two and can be seen on iPlayer for the next 5 days (from the time this post was published). It follows the rehearsal process for Jess Thom's, (also known as Tourettes Hero) performance of Samuel Beckett's Not I at Battersea Arts Centre.
Whether the play is to your liking or not, the documentary is still a worthwhile watch because of what this live performance, documentary and Jess's work is trying to do from a theatrical and social perspective. Which is to spark conversations about making theatre as an industry much more accessible for disabled audience members, performers and anyone wanting to work in backstage or administration roles. To make it much more inclusive, understanding and reflective of society as a whole. Which is something that as a former stage manager who had to give up due to illness/ disability and someone who for years felt even being in the audience was unachievable I can thoroughly relate to. And yet theatre is still my passion and lately, I've been trying to explore how accessibility can tie into that. So that's the reason I wanted to write a blog post about this documentary as a way of continuing that important conversation.
But even if you have no interest in the theatre this documentary is still a worthy watch in terms of learning and challenging our way of thinking about "disability, representation and social exclusion in the arts and in society in general."
So why is this an important issue for Jess? Jess has Tourettes syndrome and experiences both vocal and physical tics. She also uses a wheelchair to help her get around because she suffers from chronic pain and fatigue. The theatre for Jess has often been a place where she felt rejected, segregated and unwelcome. In the documentary she talks about a time where she went to the theatre to see a comedian and even though she had contacted the comedian and the venue beforehand and explained to them about her condition and the audience had been made aware that there was someone with Tourettes in the audience (at Jess's request) she was still asked to move because she was disturbing other audience members and made to sit behind the glass of the sound booth. An experience that left her humiliated, emotionally damaged and vowing never to enter a theatre again. However, rather than stay away completely Jess decided that rather than be put in that position again she would, in her words, "occupy the only seat in the house that she wouldn't be asked to leave- on stage," where she could create accessible theatre that welcomed varied audiences rather than isolated them.
What I personally loved about the documentary and the main reason I wanted to watch it in the first place was to see some of the ways Jess is championing accessibility in theatre and what she was implementing to bring that about. Obviously, the most notable one is being a disabled performer and not in a "small role" but in a leading role and played by someone who is actually disabled. And not just a performer who uses a wheelchair but one with different neurology as well. Allowing others to see themselves represented on stage and leading the way for anyone that might have an interest in performing but have always felt that they couldn't due to their disability.
And obviously having had such a negative experience in the theatre and being all too aware of how "we still make a world for a very particular mind or body," one of the key aims of this performance was to be "as accessible to as many people as possible. As a play that talks about exclusion it felt really important to us that we weren't creating barriers or excluding anybody from the experience." It was fascinating to see the role of the BSL interpreter for the live performance develop and be integrated into the performance including how they made the decision that all Jess's vocal tics throughout the performance should also be signed so that a deaf or hard of hearing audience received an equal experience to that of a hearing audience. Allowing everyone in the audience to have the same experience. Which is something that seemed much appreciated.
The live show also started in a relaxed performance style with the audience getting to see and hear from Jess as they entered the auditorium and she explained the process of what was going to happen, which can be helpful for audience members with a whole range of conditions such as being on the autistic spectrum, learning disabilities, anxiety and dementia. Having read some of Jess's blog I know she champions relaxed performances and is working with Battersea Arts Centre on becoming a relaxed venue.
After the performance, the audience was also invited to discuss their experience with other audience members and add their voices to the much-needed conversation about how theatre can become more inclusive and welcoming.
So whilst my brain is fizzing with ideas and my eyes are always on the lookout for changes that could be made/ adapted I wanted to continue this discussion with you.
What barriers do you face as a disabled person wanting to experience or participate in the Arts?
What would make going to the theatre more welcoming for you?
What would help alleviate any anxieties you have about going to the theatre?
Or even if you have absolutely no interest in theatre whatsoever but thinking about being disabled in wider society what do you think would make the world a more accepting place?
What changes need to be made to our social constructs and infrastructure?
I'd absolutely love to continue this conversation and hear your thoughts so please don't be shy, leave me a comment or reply on my social media.
You can learn more about Jess Thom on her website www.touretteshero.com or her Twitter @touretteshero
I'm looking forward to writing more blog posts on this topic soon.
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Hi I'm Sian and this is Access Theatre. I love theatre and am passionate about making it more accessible. When I'm not at or thinking about theatre you'll likely find me watching cycling, napping, reading or satisfying my sweet tooth. Please go to my about page to find out more about me and Access Theatre.
What are accessible performances?


Discussion in 'Pictus Catfish' started by Elsi Ouzts, Aug 8, 2015.
One of my loaches is missing. I have some rotted driftwood so he could be hidden in there I guess but I'm worried that my pictus has eaten him. I think they're too big but I wanted to get your opinion on it.
What tank size are these fish in? Bettas don't go well with guppies. They are aggressive for any community tanks. It also might mistaken the guppies as a betta. Pictus catfish also need at bare minimum 55 gallons and are schooling fish and need a group of 6 or more.
And yeah, bettas aren't compatible with other fish, imo.
My tank is 35 gallons atm but I will be upgrading to a bigger set up soon. My Betta has been fine with my guppies. He's only flared his gills a couple times when they were harassing him a bit in the first couple days but now everyone gets along fine.
I'm just worried about my loaches with the pictus cat.
Well, people on here have had problems because the betta will be fine for a long time then one day kill all his tankmates. So it may not be a problem now but it will be in the future.
The loaches will be fine with the pictus in a properly sized tank, they both get fairly big.
I would be much more concerned about the pictus and the guppies, or as he probably thinks of them, feeders. This is guaranteed to go badly for anything that the pictus can catch - and he will catch both the guppies and the betta eventually.
Like other loaches, the Yoyo has spines under their eyes, and they can use them to inflict great damage on any fish that messes with them. If the catfish tried to eat him, it would be seriously injured. More likely that he's hiding at this point.
Help! My Pictus Is Hurt!
Question Eradicating Detritus Worms? Please Only Respond If You Have Been Through It And Have Had Success!