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Random Linkage 31/10/09
Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema
'Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema won the €10,000 Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards last week for a body of work including Symbiosis, an experimental project that involved printing with bacteria.'
Detecting Life-Friendly Moons
'Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts traipsed across our Moon, making it "inhabited" for the first time – albeit for only two and half hours. A bona-fide habitable moon has never been found, but astronomers are considering how we might find one around distant stars.'
Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy
'Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars.'
Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life
'The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.'
Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.'
Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?
'From fungi to flies, some parasitic species have figured out how to control their host's behavior to get what they need. See what happens when bugs go really bad.'
posted by Paul McAuley at 11:26 am 0 comments
Solar Power Footprint
See it? That little black square in the middle of Saudi Arabia? It's 231 kilometres on a side, covering some fifty-three thousand square kilometres. That's the total area of solar panels needed to supply global electricity needs at its current rate of consumption, some 2 trillion Watts. Calculated by Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert of Chicago University, in an open letter that corrects global-warming denying innumeracy in Superfreakonomics.
(via Carl Zimmer)
Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (2)
At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
In this scene from Thomas Hardy's third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight, a geologist, has just saved the woman he loves and now finds himself hanging from a precarious ledge high on a Cornish seacliff. It's not only the prototypical cliffhanger, dutifully replicated in just about every Hollywood action film; it's also an early instance of another kind of vertiginous thrill: the abrupt contrast between ordinary human life and deep time that creates the famous 'sense of wonder' science fictional affect.
Hardy is best known for his Wessex novels, which mythologise a large swathe of south and south-west England where rural life embedded in landscape and its rhythms and seasons is undergoing changes forced by industrialisation. But at the time of writing A Pair of Blue Eyes, the early 1870s, Britain was in the throes of a scientific revolution too. Darwin's evolutionary theories threatened to displace mankind from the centre of creation; and geology and paleontology were opening up vast backward and abyssal vistas of time. Confronted by the dead gaze of the trilobite, Knight is immediately plunged into a vivid vision of scenes from the history of life on Earth that wouldn't be out of place in an SF novel:
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.
Hardy and other late Victorian novelists were concerned with both human individuality and the problems thrown up by industrialisation, urbanisation and scientific revolution. But after modernism overwhelmed the realists, and rejected the authority of science along with that of God and government, SF moved in to take up arguments and themes that have only just been rediscovered by the mainstream.
posted by Paul McAuley at 7:27 pm 10 comments
Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction
Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.
Arthur C. Clarke?
Olaf Stapledon?
Stephen Baxter?
Nope. Friedrich Engels.
Via infinite thought
More Distraction
On Twitter.
51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E
To Greenwich and the Royal Observatory on Friday, to take part in a discussion about 'whether science fiction authors are wasting their time writing about interplanetary travel, space colonisation and the spread of mankind across the universe given everything science has taught us about the realities, possibilities and costs of doing so'. The answer to which is of course no, they are not, but I hope the various ramifications and byways my colleagues and I explored were sufficiently entertaining to the small but perfectly formed audience. The organisers may have been a tad optimistic to expect large audiences for the three panel discussions and the screening of Star Trek which were all running at the same time, but I can't fault the location: our event took place in the circular library at the top of the observatory - the place where the telescope used to be housed, in fact. The round table at which we sat (with an inlay indicating true north) was directly beneath the dome that once opened to the night sky; there were some fine brass telescopes, astrolabes and other instruments in glass cabinets, and all kinds of wonderful books on the shelves running around the room.
The Royal Observatory is also the location of the Prime Meridian, where longitude is 0̊, the dividing line between east and west. Its location is arbitrary, defined by Sir George Airy in 1851, ratified by the International Meridian Conference in 1884 and observed by international convention (although not by everyone, to begin with; the French continued to use the Paris Meridian for a number of years). Appropriate then, that our panel discussion several times touched on the arbitrary division between science fiction that's based on what's possible, and science fiction that uses traditional but implausible tropes such as aliens and faster-than-light travel, reminiscent of a recent declaration by Margaret Atwood that she writes speculative fiction rather than science fiction, defining the difference between the two with her usual laser-like precision:
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
I'm sort of sympathetic to Atwood's need to avoid the science fiction tag (she believes that being defined as an SF writer would be the kiss of death to her career as a literary novelist), but her distinction between 'speculative fiction' and 'sci-fi' is not only as arbitrary as locating the Prime Meridian at 51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E, but is completely wrong-headed.
Obviously, novels about Martian invasions lie on the far side of the improbability, but it's not always easy to predict what we'll be able to do in the future. Who, in the nineteenth century, could have predicted that their great-great-grandchildren would be able to teleport photons, calculate the number of universes in the multiverse, or create black holes? These seem fantastical even now, yet they are as plausible as Verne's deep-ocean submarine - if not more so, given that the Nautilus was coal-fired.
Wells's The War of the Worlds is a realistic depiction of what we in the twenty-first century know must be a fantastical event - the invasion of Earth by Martians. We know now that the only Martians that might plausibly exist are some kind of bacteria or archaeobacteria because observations of the planet from orbit and from the surface have conclusively demonstrated that it is incapable of supporting advanced forms of life. But when Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in 1898, there was a strong strand of scientific opinion that Mars was not only habitable, but inhabited. In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed patterns of lines on Mars which he called 'caneli' - channels. Twenty years later, Percival Lowell argued that these channels really were canals, part of an irrigation network built by an ancient civilisation to transport water from the polar caps. He and others also claimed to have observed seasonal advance and retreat of vegetation across the surface of Mars. In the late nineteenth century, then, it was not at all fantastical to write about Martians because belief that some kind of life existed on Mars was commonplace.
Of course, even though some scientists in the late nineteenth century believed that there might be Martians does not mean that, when it was published, The War of the Worlds could have been included in Atwood's speculative fiction category. There was no absolute evidence that Martians existed; photographing or dissecting a Martian was not something that scientists could actually do. (Although the Martian heat-rays, then fantasy, now are not.) But it's a trivial exercise to think of novels that were once 'speculative fiction' but are now 'sci-fi' simply because the science or universally held assumption on which their speculations were based has since been disproved. One of the tropes in Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is the creation of weird new hybrid species of animals and plants by genetic engineering. But while that seems a pretty probable development of current science, we can't predict with absolute certainty that one day splicing parts of two different genomes together may be routine. We already know that genomes aren't simple instruction manuals but are highly dynamic and packed with delicate checks and balances, and there's now experimental evidence that rewinding evolution and deriving ancestral forms from modern genomes is far more difficult than was formerly believed. What was once rock-solid speculation too often melts into thin, thin air.
In any case, defining novels by a single characteristic - how realistic they are, how close they are to things we can actually do - is dangerously simplistic. The War of the Worlds is not just about a war of the worlds; at the heart of its narrative is a lesson in hubris founded on a powerful and unsettling scientific truth. Wells makes a famous comparison in the opening paragraph of his novel:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Wells studied biology under Thomas Huxley, who rejected current ideas of vitalism and strongly (and correctly) believed that all characteristics of living creatures could be explained by interactions between their constituent chemicals, and was a ferocious and famous supporter of Darwinism (he coined the term). And the idea that most strongly informs The War of the Worlds is not the possibility of life on other worlds, but Darwin's theory of evolution. If life could evolve on Earth, Wells argues, then why not on Mars? And if there are two separate kingdoms of life, what would happen when one contacts the other?
The war of the worlds is not a war between Martians and men, but an extreme example of the struggle for existence that has shaped the evolution of every species on Earth. Human beings are incidental to the struggle. They are collateral damage. Wells has his Martians land in England when it is at the height of its pomp: the centre of the British Empire, the largest ever known; the epitome of industrial enterprise and scientific innovation. Yet the combined might of the British armed forces is swatted aside by the Martians, English civilisation is swiftly reduced to anarchy, and in the end the Martians are not defeated by microscopic bacilli to which, because they are from another world, they have not evolved resistance.
The epigraph of The War of the Worlds, taken from Kepler's The Anatomy of Melancholy,* asks 'how are all things made for man?' Wells' answer is that the world and all that is in it is not made for us at all; that the belief that, by divine right, we are masters of the world and the apex of creation is a false and dangerous illusion. That's the heart of his novel, and we know that it is as true and real as television. Against that, the so-called difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi is trivial indeed.
*EDIT: Oops, actually a quotation from Kepler used by Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, and then borrowed by Wells. Thanks to Cosma for spotting it.
posted by Paul McAuley at 12:34 pm 6 comments


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How Do You Measure the ROI of Great Design?
By Daniel Kalick, Director of Strategy, Monstarlab
Design has never been more respected in business. Yet quantifying its value still presents a challenge. We need a practical framework for estimating its impact on the bottom line.
It is a question frequently asked, yet the answer is almost always unsatisfying. Companies want to know the expected return of designing best-in-class products, services, and customer experiences. But a meaningful projection of ROI is notoriously elusive.
This is a very strange state of affairs if you think about it. On the one hand, companies have never invested more in design, either by building their own practices or working with outside partners. And this has a clear impact on our daily lives, where it is the design-forward brands that we truly love (and spend money on). On the other hand, the attempt to make a strong, numbers-based business case for placing the same bet everyone else seems to be making, from industry leaders to startups, typically results in head-scratching, fluffy generalisations, unfounded claims — or all of the above.
Consultancies like McKinsey have admirably tried to fill the gap, publishing a rigorous study showing a correlation between a company's design prowess, on the one hand, and faster revenue growth and total return to shareholders, on the other. The study lends support to a hypothesis that is cropped up again and again for more than a decade: that investment in great design creates increased value for a company's stakeholders, including a higher share price.
Source: McKinsey & Company
Still, while the McKinsey report and similar studies have advanced our thinking about the business value of design, they do not answer the critical ROI question for any one company. Macro studies across industries, including self-reported surveys, might offer a bit of encouragement to stakeholders deciding whether to green-light a design initiative. The same goes for concrete ROI success stories touted by other businesses. But what executives really want is the confidence that comes from defensible ROI projections. And for that what is needed is a framework for evaluating design's expected impact on your company's bottom line.
Towards a practical framework
A lot has been written on this subject in recent years, some of it useful at a high-level. But ultimately, when it comes to the nitty-gritty details of measuring the ROI of design, there is no consensus on the steps to take. And most of the advice on offer faces two critical setbacks.
On the one hand, it can be too simplistic, propelled by cookie-cutter formulas that ignore the challenge of drawing a straight line between design and revenue. This advice risks feeding unrealistic stakeholder demand for water-tight justifications based on cut-and-dry unit economics. On the other end, the guidance can be too complex, stressing the need to create bespoke ROI measurement schemes across a range of quant and qual metrics, some with an unclear relationship to revenue. This approach is nearer to the truth, as it embraces the rigour and multi-factor analysis needed to arrive at a comprehensive view of design's business impact. But for many executives, it requires too much time and effort to be useful here and now.
At Monstarlab, we have developed a framework that aims to strike a practical middle ground, which we have used to help clients evaluate investments in everything from standalone apps to customer experience transformation initiatives that touch all areas of a business. The framework emphasises focused, justifiable projections that can be made with a bit of legwork, rather than an exhaustive all-hands-on-deck effort. And while it does not promise a one-size-fits-all ROI formula to which everything can be reduced, the framework helps guide you to the formulas that are right for your business and the design initiative under consideration. Part art, part science, it allows for creative thinking, but yields concrete, defensible numbers on which to base decisions.
As shown above, the framework entails a four-step process that is honest about the challenges of projecting ROI and offers pragmatic advice for working through them. It is flexible enough to be used to measure ROI for design-centric initiatives small and large, from conversion funnel optimisation to more complex customer experience transformation initiatives, which can entail business goals spanning growth, productivity, and cost-savings. Crucially, the framework depends on benchmarking but is flexible enough to accommodate the busy teams and imperfect data sets that exist in many organisations.
The key is to start small and focus on what we call "drivers," which are key performance indicators (KPIs) that are both influenced by design quality and directly tied to revenue. When the right drivers are selected, we can overcome the challenge of connecting design to business health, with measurable KPIs that allow us to compare the baseline performance of a product, service or customer experience to future iterations impacted by an investment in best-in-class design. All it takes is one driver to tell a meaningful story, but multiple drivers can be layered on to paint a more complete picture of the design's business impact.
The best way to understand the framework is to see it applied to a concrete case study. The scenario below focuses on a make-believe restaurant brand called "Farmer Frank's," which is considering an investment in customer experience transformation. The business model at hand is similar to retail and direct to consumer, making it easy to imagine how the framework could be applied to a range of other industries and verticals.
Case study: Farmer Frank's
Farmer Frank's is a farm-to-table fast-casual restaurant that sells vegan sandwiches and salads made from locally-sourced ingredients. Established in 2014 as a food truck in Nashville, the brand quickly attracted a cult following, with hungry customers waiting in line for up to two hours. Seeing such high demand, the owners of Farmer Frank's, a husband and wife duo, launched their first store in 2015, and from there the brand took off regionally and then nationally. Today, just seven years later, Farmer Frank's boasts 110 locations across the US and is among the fastest-growing fast-casual brands in the country.
Farmer Frank's made its first big investment in customer experience when it launched an order-ahead app in 2016, offering guests the convenience of ordering food at the push of a button and cutting the line at the restaurant's notoriously busy locations. As customers began to adopt the app, the business not only saw revenue from a new channel but a slightly higher average order value (AOV) when compared to the in-store register. On the heels of this success, Farmer Frank's made additional investments, adding web ordering in 2017, and in-store kiosks in 2018. All launched with out-of-the-box white label platforms, these channels have led to increased digital revenue.
Today, Farmer Frank's wants to push its customer experience to the next level, and the leadership is eyeing an investment in a robust, integrated digital ecosystem with a customised set of solutions. There are a few reasons for this. First, while the white-label platforms have served the business well, their one-size-fits-all nature cannot offer the control needed for a true expression of the brand's unique identity, nor do they provide a consistent experience across channels. Second, while customers have started to adopt digital ordering, overall satisfaction scores are low compared to in-store register. Third, employees and managers are not thrilled either, as digital ordering is the source of many operational pain-points that need to be addressed. Fourth, delivery will soon be added to the mix, and leadership wants to integrate it directly into app and web, to avoid high third-party delivery costs. Finally, with best-in-class competitors like Sweetgreen touting an eye-popping 55% of revenue from digital (pre-Coronavirus), investors sense there is ample room to grow, as Farmer Frank's is only at 21%, with digital growth slowing year over year.
Identifying drivers
What return can Farmer Frank's expect from an investment in best-in-class customer experience? The business impact can be felt in a few areas, but the leadership is hungriest for revenue growth, so it decides to start the ROI estimation process there. As for drivers impacting this overarching goal, there are again a range of options to consider, but two KPIs, in particular, stand out: AOV and purchase frequency. This makes sense as a starting point because there is a pretty clear relationship between these KPIs and top-line revenue growth, on the one hand, and best-in-class customer experience, on the other.
Think about it. Top-notch digital ordering experiences, as seen from the Amazons of the world, are designed to serve personalised offers that customers are more likely to buy, with intelligent cross-sell and up-sell mechanisms driven by algorithms or even machine learning. This is convenient for customers because it saves time, and it is great for business, too. Making progress here could deliver higher AOV for Farmer Frank's. Additionally, best-in-class customer experience entails personalised communication, including cross-channel promotions and loyalty. Assuming Farmer Frank's can progress toward the likes of Starbucks in this area, it is likely to see a lift in purchase frequency. The bottom line: top-notch customer experiences entice customers to spend more, more often, and that means an increase in top-line growth.
Setting benchmarks
The next consideration in the framework is what data are available for setting internal and competitive baselines. Farmer Frank's has readily available reporting on AOV across its digital and in-store channels, and also knows there is some good publicly available data on competitors for this metric. However, it does not have reliable purchase frequency data. This is a common roadblock; while it is possible to track the purchasing habits of authenticated users on the Farmer Frank's app and website, kiosk and register do not require a login. Farmer Frank's could expend additional effort to capture accurate purchase frequency data, but the leadership team recognises the ROI exercise need not be exhaustive to be meaningful.
The team proceeds to paint a partial yet accurate picture with a focus on AOV, doing the legwork to collect data on best-in-class competitors out there in mainstream media, trade publications, and earnings reports. While it does not find cross-channel AOV data on its direct competitors, it finds a credible study noting a 20% increase in AOV for digital vs. register in the restaurant industry. The team supplements this benchmark with a few channel-specific data points for validation, finding increases of 20% for Wendy's app, 29% for the IHOP website, and 30% for the McDonald's kiosk. Overall, Farmer Frank's underperformed by comparison. The average AOV increase across its app, web and kiosk is only 11%.
In the course of gathering benchmarks, the team also pieces together information on digital revenue growth rates from best-in-class competitors. Again, it sees a big difference. While the year over year growth rate of 35% from 2018 to 2019 achieved by Farmer Frank's seems decent, other brands in the fast-casual space have grown at a much faster clip. Chipotle, reporting 20% of its sales through digital — similar to the 21% of Farmer Frank's — experienced 78% growth after a big investment in digital. Chick-fil-A, also reporting 20% of its sales in digital, grew from roughly 11% the year prior, an 81% increase. Farmer Frank's team documents these figures and starts to consider how this can factor into its ROI projection.
Projecting ROI
With internal and external benchmarks in order, the formula for estimating ROI starts to come into view. Farmer Frank's team wants to understand the business impact of customer experience transformation, revenue growth in particular. To do that, the team wants to calculate the difference between the estimated revenue a higher digital AOV will yield in the future when Farmer Frank's has a best-in-class customer experience that performs like its competitors, and the revenue yielded by a lacklustre digital AOV today. The team then wants to factor in the accelerated digital revenue growth rate expected once it is best-in-class. In its simplest form, the calculation looks like this:
Growth = Δ AOV x Δ Digital Revenue Growth Rate
The team unpacks the formula and starts to plug in the numbers. Farmer Frank's earned an average of $7.66M/month from its three digital channels in 2019, with an AOV that was 11% higher than in-store register. With a best-in-class customer experience, the team is very confident it can get to an AOV that is 15% higher than in-store register, a difference of 4% across digital channels. That would yield an additional $306K/month from digital channels, for a total of $7.97M/month in digital revenue, assuming total transactions hold. Given its benchmarking exercise, the team is even fairly confident Farmer Frank's could get to a 20% higher AOV, which is what best-in-class brands achieve. The 9% difference over the current AOV performance would yield an additional $689K/month, for a total of $8.35M/month in digital revenue.
Now the team brings in the second factor, digital revenue growth rate. Digital reached 21% of total sales in 2019, a 35% increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, restaurant brands with a similar share of revenue through digital, like Chipotle and Chick-fil-A, saw growth rates closer to 80% after investing in customer experience. The Farmer Frank's team factors this into the ROI projections, with high confidence it could achieve a digital revenue growth rate of 60% one year from the launch of a revamped experience. If Farmer Frank's reached that rate of growth, which is almost twice its current rate, the estimated revenue increase from best-in-class digital would go from $689K/month to $1.18M/month one year from launch. With a growth rate of 80%, which the team has fair confidence in achieving, the increase would climb to $1.57M/month.
Considering costs
Additional monthly revenue of $1.18M to $1.57M would be very substantial for Farmer Frank's. And this ROI analysis is only a partial story; a next-level customer experience will surely impact drivers like conversion rate and purchase frequency, which in turn will lead to increased revenue. In addition, there are anticipated cost-savings from a delivery solution that is not reliant on third parties, not to mention gains to productivity and employee retention from a reduction of pain-points on the operations side.
The fact that these additional business gains have yet to be quantified does not stop Farmer Frank's from moving forward with its ROI analysis. With a partial yet defensible projection of revenue growth in hand, the team seeks to weigh the gains against the costs. It reaches out to its internal and external partners to understand the current state costs and begins to assess what it will take from an investment perspective to get to a next-level customer experience. Working together, they arrive at three potential paths forward: the first focused on optimising the customer experience within the brand's existing framework of white-label platforms, and the second two centered on custom solutions, with varying degrees of control over the experience and the tech roadmap moving forward. The team works out high-level costs associated with each of the three paths and makes a recommendation for the middle ground option.
The story of Farmer Frank's highlights just one tangible application of the ROI framework outlined above. While the case study focuses on customer experience transformation for a growing brand in the fast-casual restaurant space, the framework can be applied to design-centric initiatives pursued by companies across a range of industries, which all face a similar challenge of clearly making a connection between great design and a company's bottom line. With a practical framework that takes a middle path between approaches to ROI that are either too simplistic or too complex, it is possible to establish defensible projections that can help teams understand the business case for investing in best-in-class products, services and customer experiences.
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text:
Vasalisa the Wise
Vasalisa the Wise is a folktale that has many versions from Russia and Baltic countries. This story has several powerful teachings, but the ones we choose to emphasize in our program are trusting your intuition, facing what scares you, and cultivating discernment. We liked how this story explores the gifts of the darkness and how fear and uncertainty sometimes give us gifts we wouldn't necessarily receive otherwise. We kept much of the format the same but added in experiences, like making wild fiber cordage and practicing fire skills, that help the girls develop emotional intelligence.
The following rendering is from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarisa Pinkola Estes.
Once there was, and once there was not, a young mother who lay on her deathbed, her face pale as white wax roses in the sacristy of the church nearby. Her young daughter and her husband sat at the end of her old wooden bed and prayed that god would guide her safety into the next world.
The dying mother called to Vasalisa, and the little child in red boots and white apron knelt at her mother's side.
"Here is a doll for you, my love," the mother whispered, and from the hairy coverlet she pulled a tiny doll which like Vasalisa herself was dressed in red boots, white apron, black skirt, and vest embroidered all over with colored thread.
"Here are my last words Beloved," said the mother. "Should you lose your way or be in need of help, ask this doll what to do. You'll be assisted. Keep the doll with you always. Do not tell anyone about her. Feed her when she is hungry. This is my mothers promise to you, my blessing on you, dear daughter."
And with that, the mothers breath fell into the depths of her body where it gathered up her soul and rushed out from between her lips, and the mother was dead.
The child and her father mourned for a very long time. But, like the field cruelly plowed under by war, the fathers life rose green from the furrows again, and he married a widow with two daughters. Although the new step mother and her new daughters spoke in polite tones and always smiled like ladies, thee was something of the rodent behind their smiles which Vasalisa father did not perceive.
Sure enough, when the three women were alone with Vasalisa, they tormented her, forced her to wait on them, sent her to chop wood so her lovely skin would become blemished. They hated her because she had a sweetness about her that was otherworldly. She was also very beautiful. Her breasts were bounding while their dwindled from meaness. She was helpful and uncomplaining while the step mother and step sisters were, among themselves like rats in the offal at night.
One day the step mother and step sisters simply could not stand Vasalisa much longer. "Let…us…conspire to make the fire go out, and then let us send Vasalisa into the forest to Baba Yaga, the witch, to beg fire for our hearth. And when she reaches Baba Yaga, well, old Baba Yaga will kill her and eat her." Oh, they all clapped and squeaked like things that live in the dark.
So that evening, when Vasalisa came home form gathering wood, the entire house was dark. She was very concerned and inquired of her step mother, "What has happened; What will we have to cook with? What will we do to light the darkness?"
The step mother admonished, "You stupid child. Obviously we have no fire. And I can't go out into the woods because I am old. My daughters cant go because they're afraid. So you are the only one who can go out into the forest to find Baba Yaga and get a coal to start our fire again."
Vasalisa replied innocently, "Well alright, yes, ill do that," And so she set out. The woods became darker and darker, and the sticks cracked under her feet, frightening her. She reach down in the long deep pocket of her apron and there was the doll her dying mother had given her. And Vasalisa patted the doll in her pocket and said, "Just touching this doll, yes, I feel better."
And at every fork in the road, Vasalisa reached into her pocket and consulted the doll. "Well, should I go to the left or to the right?" The doll indicated "Yes," or "No," or "This way," or "That way." And Vasalisa fed the doll some of her bread as she walked and followed what she felt was emanating from the doll.
Suddenly a man in white on a white horse galloped by and it became daylight. Farther on, a man in red sauntered by on a red horse, and the sun rose. Vasalisa walked and walked and just as she came to the hovel of Baba Yaga, a rider dressed in black came trotting on a black horse, and rode right into Baba Yaga's hut. Swiftly it became night. The fence made of skulls and bones surrounding the hut began to blaze with an inner fire so the clearing there in the forest glowed with an eerie light.
Now the Baba Yaga was a fearsome creature. She traveled not in a chariot, not in a coach, but in a cauldron shaped like a mortar which flew along all by itself. She rode this vehicle with an oar shaped like a pestle, and all the while she swept out the tracks of where shed been with the broom made from the hair of a person long dead.
And the cauldron flew through the sky with Baba Yaga's own greasy hair flying behind. Her long chin curved up and her long nose curved down, and they met in the middle. She had a tiny white goatee and warts on her skin from her trade in toads. Her brown-stained fingernails were thick and ridged like roofs, and so curled over she could not make a fist.
Even more strange was the Baba Yaga's house. It sat atop a huge scaley yellow chicken leg, and walked about all by itself, and sometimes twirled around and around like an aesthetic dancer. The bolts on the doors and shutters were made of human fingers and toes and the lock on the front door was a snout with many pointed teeth.
Vasalisa consulted her doll and asked, "is this the house we seek?" and the doll, in its own way, answered, "yes, this is what you seek." And before she could take another step, Baba Yaga in her cauldron descended on Vasalisa and shouted down at her, "what do youwant?"
And the girl trembled. "Grandmother, I come for fire. My house is cold…My people will die…I need fire."
Baba Yaga snapped, "Oh yesssss, I know you, and your people. Well, you useless child…you let the fire go out. That's an ill-advised thing to do. And besides, what makes you think I should give you the flame?"
Vasilisa consulted her doll and quickly replied, "because I asked."
Baba Yaga purred, "you're lucky, that is the right answer."
And Vasalisa felt very lucky she had given the right answer.
Baba Yaga threatened, "I cannot possibly give you fire, until you have done work for me. If you perform these tasks for me, you shall have the fire. If not…" And here Vasalisa saw Baba Yaga's eyes suddenly turn to red cinders. "If not, my child, you shall die."
So Baba Yaga rumbled into the hovel and layed down upon her bed and ordered Vasilisa to bring her what was cooking in the oven. In the oven was enough food for ten people, and the Yaga ate it all, leaving just a tiny crust and a thimble of soup for Vasalisa.
"Wash my clothes, sweep the yard, and clean my house, prepare my food, and separate the mildewed corn from the good corn and see that everything is in order. I will be back to inspect your work later. If it is not done, you will be my feast."
And with that, the Baba Yaga flew off in her cauldron as the windsock and her hair as the sail. And it became night again.
Vasalisa turned to her doll as soon as the Yaga had gone. "What shall I do? Can I complete these tasks in time?" The doll assured her she could, and to eat a little and go to sleep. Vasalisa fed the doll a little too, and then she slept.
In the morning, the doll had done all of the work and all that remained was the meal to be cooked. In the evening, the Yaga returned and found nothing undone. Pleased, in a way, but not pleased because she could find no fault, Baba Yaga sneered, "you are a very lucky girl." She then called on her faithful servants to grind the corn and three pairs of hands appeared in mid air and began to rasp and crush the corn. The chaff flew in the house like a golden snow. Finally if was done and Baba Yaga sat down to eat. She ate for hours and ordered Vasalisa on the morrow to again clean the house, sweep the yard, and launder her clothes.
The Yaga pointed to a great mound of dirt in the yard. "In that pile of dirt are many poppy seeds, millions of poppy seeds. And I want, in the morning, to have one pile of poppy seeds and one pile of dirt all separated out from each other. Do you understand?"
Vasalisa almost fainted. "Oh my, how am I going to do all that?" She reached into her pocket and the doll whispered, "Don't worry, I will take care of it." That night Baba Yaga snored off to sleep and Vasalisa tried…to pick…the…poppy seeds…out…of…the…dirt. After a time, the doll said to her, "Sleep now. All will be well."
Again the doll accomplished these three tasks, and when the old woman returned home, all was done. Baba Yaga spoke sarcastically through her nose. "Wellllll! Lucky for you that you were able to do these things." She called for her faithful servants to press the oil from the poppy seeds, and again three pairs of hands appeared and did so.
While the Yaga was smearing her lips with grease from her stew, Vasalisa stood nearby. "What are you staring at?" barked Baba Yaga.
"May I ask you some questions, Grandmother?" Asked Vasalisa.
"Ask," Ordered the Yaga "But remember, too much knowledge can make a person old too soon."
Vasalisa asked about the white man on a horse.
"Aha," said the Yaga fondly, "That first is my day."
"And the red man on the horse?"
"Ah, that is my rising sun."
"And the black man on the black horse?"
"Ah yes, that is the third, and he is my night."
"I see," said Vasalisa.
"Come, come child. Wouldn't you like to ask more questions?" wheedled the Yaga.
Vasalisa was about to ask about the pair of hands that appeared and disappeared, but the girl began to jump up and down in her pocket, so instead Vasalisa said, "No, Grandmother. As you yourself say, too much knowledge can make one old too soon."
"Ah," said the Yaga, cocking her head like a bird, "You are wiser than your years, my girl. And how did you come to be this way?"
"By the blessing of my mother," smiled Vasalisa.
"Blessing?!" Screeched Baba Yaga. "Blessing?! We need no blessings around this house. You'd be best on your way, Daughter." She pushed Vasalisa out into the night.
"I'll tell you what, child. Here!" Baba Yaga took a skull with fiery eyes from her fence and put it on a stick. "Here! Take this skull on a stick home with you. There! There's your fire. Don't say another word. Just be on your way."
Vasalisa began to thank the Yaga but the little doll in her pocket began to jump up and down. And Vasalisa realized she must just take the fire and go. She ran for home through the dark forest, following the turns and twists in the road as the doll told her which way to go. Vasalisa came through the forest carrying the skull, with blazing fire from its ear, eye, nose, and mouth holes. Suddenly, she became frightened of its weight and its eerie light and thought to throw it away. But the skull spoke to her and urged her to calm herself and to continue toward the home of her stepmother and stepsisters. And this she did.
As Vasalisa came nearer and nearer to her house, her stepmother and stepsisters looked out the window and saw a strange glow dancing through the woods. Closer and closer it came. They could not imagine what it could be. They had decided that Vasalisa's long absence meant she was dead by now and her bones dragged away by animals and good riddance.
Vasalisa advanced closer and closer to home. And as the stepmother and stepsisters saw it was her, they ran to her, saying they had been without fire since she'd left, and no matter how hard they tried to start one, it always went out.
Vasalisa entered the house feeling triumphant, for she had survived her dangerous journey and brought fire back to her home. But the skull on the stick watched the stepsisters and the stepmothers every move and burnt into them, and by morning had burnt the wicked trio into cinders.


Farm Supervisor, livestock Farm. Working in a fast-paced environment with tight deadlines, physically demanding. Must be able to supervise employees (seasonal or otherwise). Attention to detail required. Employee required to develop work schedule, maintain work records and logs, perform general farm duties, operate and maintain farm machinery and equipment, hire and train staff. Operation and daily maintenance of heavy farm equipment, formulate feeding system.etc.
HOURS - 40 hours per week with overtime in busy seasons.
EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, preferably 5 years plus.
Please send resume to: anxinagro@gmail.com to apply.


text:
Q: Having issue with downloading files with same name from outlook using Python. Only one file is showing on folder from datetime import date
import os
import email

import win32com.client
import pathlib
import glob
import re
from pathlib import Path

path = os.path.expanduser(file_location + "/" +date_file)

outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")
inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6)  #from inbox
inbox = inbox.Folders['folder 1'] #Folder inside Inbox Folder

today = datetime.date.today()        #from todays date
received_dt = date.today() - timedelta(days=1)

messages = inbox.Items

def saveattachments():                                                  # subject= subject line t0 be inserted here.
    for message in messages:
        if message.Unread:# and message.Senton.date() == today:
            for attachment in message.Attachments:
                print(attachment.FileName)                                     # shows the file name to be downloaded
                attachment.SaveAsFile(os.path.join(path, str(attachment)))     #saves it the desired location
                if message.Unread:
                    message.Unread = False                                         #returns the email to read status

saveattachments()

I want to download all the files from unread emails. But files with same name gets replaced somehow only one file name is showing.
Example-

Files from outlook
filename which gets saved on desk folder

a_file
a_file

b_file
b_file

c_file
c_file

a_file
d_file

b_file

b_file

a_file

b_file

c_file

d_file

A: This is very much expected behavior. There can be only one file with a specific name in a specific folder. You will need to implement some logic to see if the file already exists, and rename it.
See below for a simple example:
import os

def autorename(filename):
    """recursive function to add " (copy)" to a filename if it already exists.
    """
    if os.path.isfile(filename):
        newfilename = f"{os.path.splitext(filename)[0]} (copy){os.path.splitext(filename)[1]}"
        return autorename(newfilename)
    else:
        return filename

For the os.path.splitext() part, see this answer.

EDIT
To add this to your code, you need to change this line:
attachment.SaveAsFile(os.path.join(path, str(attachment)))

to this:
attachment.SaveAsFile(autorename(os.path.join(path, str(attachment))))

so it generates a new filename if the file already exists

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Eduardo José Nunes Ribeiro, conhecido como Edu Ribeiro, (Florianópolis, 13 de janeiro de 1975) é um baterista brasileiro. Atua como compositor, professor e performer. Vencedor de dois Grammy Awards com o Trio Corrente e indicado ao Latin Grammy pelo seu álbum Folia de tReis, Edu detém quatro álbuns como líder e uma discografia ampla com seus diversos projetos musicais.

Biografia
Autodidata, aprendeu a tocar aos oito anos de idade e aos onze já se apresentava em bailes com a banda de sua família (Stagium 10).

No período em que cursava música popular na Unicamp, aproximou-se da música instrumental, e seu grupo Água (com Chico Saraiva e José Nigro) foi um dos selecionados para o projeto de música instrumental O Som da Demo, promovido pelo SESC/SP em 1995.

Em 1996 mudou-se para São Paulo, onde trabalhou com numerosos artistas, entre eles Yamandú Costa, Chico Pinheiro, Johnny Alf, Rosa Passos, Arismar do Espírito Santo, Joyce, Dori Caymmi, Léa Freire, Bocato, Hamilton de Holanda, Toquinho, Paulo Moura, Dominguinhos, Fafá de Belém, Toninho Ferragutti, Jair Rodrigues, Ernán Lopez-Nussa, Thiago do Espírito Santo, Eliane Elias, Randy Brecker, entre outros.

Sua experiência no exterior inclui festivais como o Festival de Montreux, Kutchan Jazz Festival e Blue Note Yokohama, Parliament Jazz Festival, Imst Jazz, Festival de Frascatti e Niemegen, e em teatros na Espanha, Itália, Portugal, Alemanha, Tailândia, Singapura, Taiwan, Chile e Equador.

Como pedagogo, Edu trabalha como professor na Faculdade Santa Marcelina desde 2006 e é coordenador da Emesp desde 2014. Realiza workshops para alunos de bateria no Brasil e também em outros países. Edu é dono de um portal pioneiro no ensino online de bateria no Brasil e no mundo, o Edu Ribeiro Music Workshop.

Como líder, Edu lançou os álbuns Já Tô Te Esperando, Na Calada do Dia e Folia de tReis (nomeado ao Grammy Awards Latino na categoria de Melhor Álbum Instrumental). Atualmente, Edu se prepara para lançar o primeiro disco do seu trio, o Edu Ribeiro Trio.

Com o Trio Corrente (Fábio Torres, Edu Ribeiro e Paulo Paulelli), ganhou o Grammy 2014 de melhor álbum latino de Jazz com o álbum Song for Maura, em parceria com o músico e compositor cubano Paquito D'Rivera.

Como membro do Trio Corrente e do Vento em Madeira, Edu lançou mais de dez álbuns. Como colíder, Edu gravou os álbuns Varanda com o The Reunion Project e At Play com Romero Lubambo, Helio Alves e Reuben Rodgers.

Edu também gravou álbuns com diversos artistas como Chico Pinheiro, Eliane Elias, Randy Brecker, Hamilton de Holanda, Amilton Godoy, Thiago Espírito Santo e muitos outros.

Discografia

Como líder

 2006 - Já Tô Te Esperando

2017 - Na Calada do Dia
2018 - Folia de tReis - com Fábio Peron e Toninho Ferragutti

Como co-líder

 2003 - Horizonte - com Daniel D'Alcântara, Vitor Alcântara, Sizão Machado e Tiago Costa
 2017 - Varanda - com The Reunion Project
 2020 - At Play - com Romero Lubambo, Helio Alves e Reuben Rodgers

Com o Trio Corrente
2005 - Corrente
2011 - Vol. 2
2014 - Song For Maura - com Paquito D'Rivera
2016 - Volume 3
2019 - Tem Que Ser Azul

Com o Vento em Madeira

 2011 - Vento em Madeira
 2013 - Brasiliana
 2016 - Arraial

Com Hamilton de Holanda

 2019 - Harmonize

Ligações externas
 Página oficial
Página do curso Edu Ribeiro Music Workshop

Bateristas de Santa Catarina
Autodidatas
Naturais de Florianópolis

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: WaypointMissionOperator.getAutoFlightSpeed missing Context
I need to get the current speed of the aircraft.
Efforts
Looking at the documentation, I can see that exists the method WaypointMissionOperator.getAutoFlightSpeed which gives me that info.
Problem
While implementing the code, this method was missing. Was it moved, renamed or something?
Environment

*

*OS: Android

*DJI SDK version: 4.13.1

A: Have a look at the FlightControllerState class, it contains the current status of pretty much all of the aircraft components.
Specifically, you should look at FlightController.setStateCallback().  This returns current information, specifically you want to use getVelocityX, getVelocityY and getVelocityZ.
There are also keys for each, the documentation gives the details.
Having X, Y and Z velocities, the speed can be computed in this way:
final speed = sqrt(pow(velocity.x, 2) + pow(velocity.y, 2) + pow(velocity.z, 2));


Use an opportunity to host your events at Kumu!
The museum, building, exhibitions, people, events, history, art and research … Kumu is for everyone who is interested in art and culture. Kumu – art lives here!
Come to Kumu to look, listen, think and experiment! We welcome both children and adults –alone or with their colleagues, with their families and friends, with school groups or tourist groups!
The Kumu auditorium is a notional, as well as practical, extension of the art museum and the foundations of its activity are interconnected with the exhibitions organised in the building.


text:
Q: How to check the size of a set in drools rules I have the following rule in drool
rule klFor2001 salience 30
when
 exists( Vgdokfag( Fagkode() == "FOR2001", ( Merknadkode() != "FAM13" ||
                   Merknadparameter() in ("FO1010", "FO1030", "FO1040"))))
 vgs: HashSet() from collect(Vgdokfag( Fagkode() contains "UPF",
                                 (Merknadkode() == "FAM13" ||
                                 Merknadparameter() in ("FO1010","FO1030", "FO1040"))) )

then
  insert(getKlIdr20xx("KL_IDR2001",true));
end

So what I am trying to do is to

*

*check if there is a Vgdokfag with For2001 as Fagkode and with either Merknadkode not equal to "FAM13" or Merknadparameter is one of the following strings ("FO1010","FO1030", "FO1040").

*check that there exist at least two VgdokFag facts which has "UPF" in their "Fagkode" and either Merknadkode is equal to "FAM13" or Merknadparameter is one of the following strings ("FO1010","FO1030", "FO1040").

I do not know how to do the second one. I am trying to get all facts with the given conditions and then some how check if the size of the set is bigger than 2, but for some reason I cannot write something like this
eval(vgs.size() > 2)

I am sure that I am doing something wrong here, can someone please help me.
cheers,
es

A: You were really close. You can add the size constraint straight into the HashSet:
vgs: HashSet(size >= 2) from collect(...)


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I went to Bowles Hearing Care Services not sure if I needed hearing aids or not. I did and the results have been wonderful. No problem coming back with any questions that I had. David treated me with the kindness that I did not expect. Nothing he did for me was too much trouble.
Mr. Bowles and his staff are friendly, caring and very professional. Each step of the process is explained. Any questions are answered and fully explained so you can understand. Appointments are easily scheduled and run on time. I can now hear what I have been missing.
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text:
Accueil>>>11th ITER International School
11th ITER International School
The 11th ITER International School will be held from July 25-29, 2022, hosted by the US Burning Plasma Organization, University of California San Diego, and General Atomics.
School goal
The ITER International School aims to prepare young scientists and engineers for working in the field of nuclear fusion and in research applications associated with the ITER Project. The adoption of a "school" format was a consequence of the need to prepare future scientists and engineers on a range of different subjects and to provide them with a wide overview of the interdisciplinary skills required by ITER.
ITER schools take place every other year in Aix-en-Provence, near ITER, and every other year at a partner abroad.
The first ITER School was organized in Aix-en-Provence, France, in July 2007 and focused on turbulent transport in fusion plasmas. Nine successive schools have followed on a variety of subjects: magnetic confinement (Fukuoka, Japan, 2008); plasma-surface interactions (Aix-en-Provence, 2009); magneto-hydro-dynamics and plasma control (Austin, Texas (US), 2010); energetic particles (Aix-en-Provence, 2011); radio-frequency heating (Ahmedabad, India, 2012); high performance computing in fusion science (Aix-en-Provence, 2014); transport and pedestal physics in tokamaks (Hefei, China, 2016); physics of disruptions and control (Aix-en-Provence, 2017); and the physics and technology of power flux handling (Daejeon, Korea, 2019).
This year program
The subject of this year's school is "ITER plasma scenarios and control" with a scientific programme coordinated by Peter de Vries (ITER Organization), David Humphreys (General Atomics) and Chris Holcomb (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). As the start of ITER operation approaches, it is timely to address this challenging multidisciplinary topic: the development of integrated operating scenarios and required plasma control to facilitate the ITER goals, particularly for plasmas self-heated by fusion-born alpha-particles.
Visit the web site of the school : https://iis2022.burningplasma.org/home
Registration information is available on our Participate page.
25 juil. 202229 juil. 2022
9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Les 5 dernières publications du laboratoire dans HAL
Flux dependence of helium retention in clean W(1 1 0): Experimental evidence for He self-trapping
Moonraker - an Enceladus Multiple Flyby Mission Submitted to the ESA 2021 M-class Call
Organic chemistry on the surface of jovian icy satellites: formation of complex refractory organic matter by implantation of sulfur ions into water-alkanes ices
The role of phyllosilicates in shaping the Galilean moons' density gradient


Three dates are very busy ones each year for county clerks such as Clare County's Lori Martin. The first Tuesday of May, August and November are when governmental municipalities can have elections.
Martin said her office is gearing up for the May 7 election.
"We're getting prepared for it," he said.
There will be three issues on the ballot. But it's not a county-wide ballot, Martin noted.
There will be an election in Franklin Township, asking for an operating millage.
The Harrison district library is asking for a millage renewal.
Farwell area schools have a bond proposal. There will be some precinct consolidation for the vote, Martin noted. Voters will be mailed a notice on this or already have received one.


text:
Ádám Kósa (* 1. Juli 1975 in Budapest) ist ein ungarischer Politiker (Fidesz). Seit der Europawahl 2009 ist er das erste gehörlose Mitglied des Europäischen Parlaments.

Leben
Nach einem Studium der Rechtswissenschaft an der Katholischen Péter-Pázmány-Universität arbeitete Kósa ab 2005 im ungarischen Justizministerium. Zudem war er Mitglied der Anwaltskammer in Budapest und Sportmanager an der Semmelweis-Universität.

Ab 2001 war Kósa Vorstandsmitglied, seit 2005 Vorsitzender der Ungarischen Vereinigung der Gehörlosen und Schwerhörigen (SINOSZ). 2006 wurde er Mitglied im Rechtsausschuss der Europäischen Vereinigung der Gehörlosen (EUD) sowie im Rechtsausschuss des Internationalen Komitees für Gehörlosensport (ICSD). Zudem ist er seit 2005 Mitglied, von 2006 bis 2008 stellvertretender Vorsitzender, seit 2008 Vorsitzender des Nationalen Behindertenrats in Ungarn. 2008 wurde er Mitglied im Rechtsausschuss des Weltverbands der Gehörlosen (WFD).

Bei der Europawahl in Ungarn 2009 wurde Kósa für die konservative Partei Fidesz in das Europäische Parlament gewählt Dort gehört er wie alle Fidesz-Abgeordneten der Fraktion der Europäischen Volkspartei (EVP) an und ist Mitglied im Ausschuss für Beschäftigung und soziale Angelegenheiten sowie in der Delegation für die Beziehungen zu Japan.

Weblinks
 Offizielle Homepage

 VoteWatch.eu: Abstimmungsverhalten von Ádám Kósa im Europäischen Parlament

Rechtsanwalt (Ungarn)
Mitglied des Europäischen Parlaments für Ungarn
Fidesz-Mitglied
Person (Semmelweis-Universität)
Politiker (21. Jahrhundert)
Gehörlosensportler
Ungar
Geboren 1975
Mann


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I have used both the gummy bears and the CBD oil. I got the CBD products to help with my hubbys cancer, and subsequent insomnia. Now we both use it (I like the dummies, he likes the oil). The companies products are excellent in our opinion in terms of helping us sleep. I have also found them to have a tranquilizing effect. I have recommended these products to 4 other people, and even gave them a few to try. Everyone ended up purchasing them too. A plus product.
Ordering was very easy and straightforward. They taste great and work well for my pain.
If you got insomnia or any problems falling asleep, this will do the trick. Very nice formula! Much high quality.
Got this to try and replace taking Celebrex. I stopped it once before. But after a week I had to restart it because of the return of knee, shoulder and neck pain. Going on a week and I seem to be having no more pain than when I was talking Celebrex.
My wife also says I'm calmer. Traffic doesn't seem to bother me as much.
Awesome product at great deal!
I am now a complete advocate for CBD gummies!! I suffer from insomnia, anxiety, and severe depression. Even though I already take medication it barely keeps my head above water. These gummies have been a life saver. I sleep better (first time in almost 40 years) I have more energy and am able to accomplish so much more each day. Even during my PMS weeks, which I am usually rendered useless, I take 2 instead of one and my life is a breeze. I literally don't recognize my life now. Plus it has helped with my aches and pains. I am no longer taking prescription Ibuprofen everyday. I have told everyone I know. Thank you so much!! This has truly been a life saver!!
Did not help with my back pain. They did help with anxiety after taking two each day. I would recommend anyone try at least one time. The price I thought is very high.
My husband and I both have either pain or anxiety issues. These gummies work great for relief.
Great flavors I love the 30 pack! Always something I need to have to give me a really good night sleep. Will continue to purchase!!!!
Helps a lot with the anxiety. Only helped a bit with the pain, and not for very long.
Wow!! I have tried several different brands of CBD gummies and this is by far the best! Had a wonderful night sleep and could immediately feel my anxiety slipping away. I will definitely buy these again!
I have a medical marijuana card but don't like being high – with fibromyalgia ive had a lot of pain some days worse than others. Although a little pricey these work better than other brands. I had a half and slept so well. Worth a try!
NEVER thought I'd be on here buying these products-But its saved my ANXIETIES and STOMACH issues along with not sleeping.
I have enjoyed this product for a while but what happened a few days ago shocked me. I was recovering from kidney stone emergency surgery while preparing to have surgery to repair a torn bicep tendon. While at work I was not feeling well but chalked it up to my body recoup from surgery and feeling the tear in my arm. I hate taking pain pills so I had a couple bottles of gummies on my last order. I ate 2 gummies in the morning, 2 at lunch and 1 Otw home the day I was shocked. When I got home a had to pee, so I handled business and to my surprise I passed 2 quarter karat diamond size kidney stones while at work! They came out as soon as I got home.
I cannot explain how but I didn't take a single pain pill that day and was in no real kidney stone pain. I wish I could post the pics of the stones… thank you Pure Science Lab! I'm a customer for life and now an advocate for your products. Let me know if anyone ever needs a first hand testimony.
This is an excellent product. I highly recommend it. Has helped with uninterrupted sleep and alleviated pain with in 30-40 minutes of taking a gummy.


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Home Entrepreneurship Growth #1 Thing I Need to See in a Startup— from a Venture...
#1 Thing I Need to See in a Startup— from a Venture Capitalist
By Cynthia Wylie July 9, 2021
– What do you need to see in a company before you'll invest?
– What is the main reason startups fail?
I'm not a venture capitalist but I have started and bought many companies. Some failed. Most succeeded. On a recent trip to my alma mater I stayed with friends and had the good fortune to meet their daughter who was the executive director of a VC firm in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, North Carolina area known as the Research Triangle.
I asked her the above two questions.
There has been a lot written on these questions, but I wanted to hear it first hand from someone in the trenches so to speak.
Here were her simple answers: Besides the typical requirements like a good idea and a good strategy, she needed to see a stellar sales person as a part of the team — someone with sales experience and a solid, provable track record in sales— before she would invest. And the main reason why startups fail, unsurprisingly, is not having that great salesperson.
In my article, "8 Reasons Why Startups Don't Succeed," I listed this (number 4 on my list of 8), developed from my years as a founding member of the Startup Founders group here in Silicon Beach. I saw a lot of fellow entrepreneurs walk in and out of the doors over many years, and it got to the point where I could tell if someone was going to "make it" after about three meetings.
On selling, I quote Steve Blank the famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Stanford University professor who said, "You will find no answers inside your office". You have to "get out of the building and knock on doors". Ah, the dreaded knocking on doors.
There are many great resources to close sales. I like, " The Asking Formula," by John Baker. It's a short read, self-published and it lays out a formula to get to yes that's simple and easy to follow. Everyone who needs to sell should read this book. I also googled, "How do I learn to sell?" My search gave me over 6 billion results. I read the first page, and honestly, there was a lot of great advice and training suggestions. And finally, I wrote an article on how I learned to sell, "Selling encyclopedias door-to-door taught me 5 crucial facts about selling."
I do believe selling is something many people are uncomfortable with, but one that every entrepreneur needs to do. And if you think you really can't sell, find a cofounder who can. That's the advantage of partners; they bridge gaps in our skill sets.
Cynthia Wylie is the founder of Bloomers Island and a published children's book author at Penguin Random House. She writes about big kid's stuff like economics & business, too. CynthiaWylie.com
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Cynthia Wylie
Cynthia Wylie is a hard-driving entrepreneur with a successful track record. She was raised on a farm which taught her the habit of hard work from an early age. Her recent startup, Bloomers Island has become the standard bearer brand for children to live healthier lives and make healthier food choices as well as inspire in them a love of gardening and nature. She has received two patents on her seed starters, SeedPops which have been sold in over 5,000 stores in North America including Target, Nordstrom and Costco Canada. The first five books of her nine-book series have been published with Rodale Kids, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Previous companies where she was a partner/co-founder include X-Large Clothing, the seminal streetwear brand, and Maui Toys, the activity toy company recently sold to Jakks Pacific. In addition to starting and selling companies, Ms. Wylie does business consulting with The Project Consultant. She focuses on raising money, turnaround actions, and strategic and tactical planning in operations for small manufacturers. She is a founding member of the Startup Founds Group in Silicon Beach, a group designed to process issues and problems that all startups inevitably face. She started her career in Investment Banking writing private placement memorandums and developed an expertise in helping companies to raise money, including over $1 million in seed capital for her latest company. Her B.S. degree is in agriculture from Pennsylvania State University and she has an M.A. in economics from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. She is the part-owner of her family farm in Western Pennsylvania. She raised four children and loves writing, reading, learning foreign languages, and growing plants and companies.
Why We Invested In Marigold Health — Chronic Disease Management Platform


Evening cruise on the Potomac River with gourmet dinner buffet, onboard DJ, full-service bar and dance floor.
Enjoy an enchanting twilight cruise with views of spectacularly lit national landmarks aboard the Spirit of Washington! This cruise has it all: Incredible views, great entertainment, and contemporary dining. Three climate controlled decks with panoramic windows let you take in the sights, whatever the weather. On warm evenings, head up to the rooftop lounge to feel the breeze in your hair.
Some of the special sights you'll see include the Washington Monument, the Capitol Dome, National Harbor and Admiral's Row! Dinner cruises run 2.5 to 3 hours in length, so you'll have plenty of time to savor a delicious meal, take in the sights, and hit the dance floor!
Spirit chefs concoct delicious courses like Orzo & Baby Shrimp Salad, Roasted Broccoli Florets with Toasted Garlic, Honey & Sesame Chicken, and Braised Beef Short Ribs. Don't forget the dessert course! Cannoli, fresh fruit, cheesecake and chocolate drizzle Rice Krispy Treats are just a few of the after-dinner offerings.
A talented onboard DJ will be spinning popular tunes throughout the night. After dinner, grab a dance partner and a signature cocktail and make your way to the dance floor. It's the perfect way for friends, families and couples to spend a unique night in Washington. Book now to experience the Spirit of Washington!


EirGrid – Spanish Point Technologies Ltd.
EirGrid is a state-owned company that operates and develops the national high voltage electricity grid in Ireland. They operate the flow of power on the nationwide grid, bringing energy from generation stations to heavy industry and every electricity customer in the country.
EirGrid selected Spanish Point to upgrade their SharePoint 2007/2010 environment to a SharePoint 2013 hybrid cloud environment. EirGrid also wanted the upgrade to redesign and optimise significant aspects of its information architecture and to implement a new modern workflow solution.
Spanish Point commenced the project with a detailed pre-migration analysis of the existing substantial SharePoint estate. This included the following services and tasks: "As Is" SharePoint Technical Farm Analysis, "As Is" Custom and Third-Party Farm Solutions Analysis and Farm Solution Analysis.
Following the analysis, our SharePoint team, led by our chief SharePoint architect, then started the design of the new hybrid SharePoint environment, building the on-premises SharePoint environment and configuring SharePoint online 2016 for the hybrid solution. This new hybrid environment now supports document management and collaboration services for over 600 employees in multiple locations including Dublin and Belfast, containing over 5000 sites and tens of thousands of documents.
EirGrid also decided to rationalise workflow processing as part of the upgrade. Spanish Point provided the design and build services to create a new workflow platform with the delivery of new workflows across the organisation.


November 20, 2018 admin Comments Off on Do You Know the Way? Alexandria, MN, Buyer Information, FHA, Homeowners, IRS, Lake Front Properties, luxury, market updates, Minnesota Real Estate, Mortgages, Paula J Jackson RE/MAX Lakes Area Realty, Real Estate, Retirement, sales, Seller Information, tools, VA Mortgages Do You Know the Way?
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(Reuters) – Global financial regulators are likely to impede growth rather than foster it unless they are better policed, an economist warned policymakers on Saturday.
While regulatory reform since the 2007-09 financial crisis has given added clout to government regulators, the concentration of power is likely to do more harm than good unless the regulators themselves are subject to proper oversight, Brown University economist Ross Levine said in a paper presented at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank's annual meeting here.
"As more responsibilities are heaped on official regulatory agencies, it is unclear whether they have either the capabilities or the incentives to properly shape the incentives of financial systems," he said in the paper.
If the notion that we are merely living through the aftereffects of a mere "recession" that ended in 2009 sounds somewhat ridiculous, that's because it is. If we were being honest with ourselves, we would call this a depression. That would certainly better convey both the severity of our problems, and the fact that those problems have no evident solutions.
Geithner and Bernanke could speak with authority. As two of the architects of the United States' own financial rescue starting in 2008, they had eschewed half-measures, instead marshaling hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks and successfully head off a new Great Depression.
Did you hear the one about Goldman Sachs selling investors mortgage-backed securities that plummeted in value soon after?
By chance you haven't the National Credit Union Administration, an independent federal agency that regulates federal credit unions, is suing Goldman Sachs on that allegation and is seeking $491 million in damages.
Editor's Note: The following article discusses the DC Circuit Court of Appeal's decision to vacate an SEC rule because the agency failed to appropriately analyze the costs and benefits of their regulation. In the attached Opinion, the court held that "the Commission acted arbitrarily and capriciously for having failed once again — as it did most recently in American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company v. SEC. . . and before that in Chamber of Commerce, 412 F.3d at 136 — adequately to assess the economic effects of a new rule. Here the Commission inconsistently and opportunistically framed the costs and benefits of the rule; failed adequately to quantify the certain costs or to explain why those costs could not be quantified; neglected to support its predictive judgments; contradicted itself; and failed to respond to substantial problems raised by commenters." The court decision further emphasizes the imperative that agencies adhere to the good government laws that regulate the regulators.


A leading regional law firm with an 11 office network across London, the Midlands, and the Home Counties is seeking a Residential Conveyancing Solicitor in their Stevenage office.
You will ideally be a Solicitor, Licensed Conveyancer, or Legal Executive with around 3 years of experience in Residential Conveyancing which should include sales, purchases, remortgages, and ideally some new build matters. The role will see you work closely with an established Partner and support team, acting for medium and high net worth clients throughout Hertfordshire and the Home Counties.
If you are a Residential Conveyancing Solicitor who is looking to join an established and highly regarded regional firm based in Stevenage, please apply now to be considered, or call Stephen Chantry to discuss this role further.


I've been loving the work of the Donaldson Adoption Institute more and more as I continue to get to know them. In 2014 I started getting to know their then new CEO April Dinwoodie. We hit it off immediately, talking about the challenges of supporting families, discrimination, LGBTQI issues, and promoting healthy dialogue on both legal and social issues. As an LGBTQI adoptive parent I had mostly thought about my family as an LGBTQI and multiracial one, focusing on the challenges of those identities. It was through that lens that I dealt with adoption. But over time I have come to a much deeper understanding of adoption and, in general, the impact of of the choices we make in how we have children.
That was a big reason I was so thrilled to go on a national tour with DAI to discuss adoption reform this past year. For Pride this year I was honored to be invited to write for DAI's blog. Here's my piece. I hope you enjoy it.
It is hard to write anything this Pride month without acknowledging the massacre of 49 LGBTQI people in Orlando on June 12. Such a savage event in a place of respite and safety, and on a night specifically for the Latino community will leave a scar on this nation and on our hearts. In sitting down to think about my own family this Pride season, I cannot help but think of all the parents who lostchildren, all the lives cut short, the families that were devastated and the love that was lost.
Whenever I speak in public, I try hard to say "I am gay. I am a parent. I am Jewish. I am your neighbor." The Orlando massacre is a terrible reminder why we need to name our identities and embrace all of the challenges that all of our communities and identities face. In a world where homophobia and transphobia, racism, and anti-Semitism are so prevalent, our creating a family and becoming parents happened through those lenses. So when my husband and I decided to add to our family and adopt our son, we saw ourselves as part of the LGBTQI community, but it took time to fully realize we are part of the adoption community too.
When I was coming out, most people had never even heard of an LGBTQI person with children. And neither had I. But in my heart I knew we could do it.
When the time came, we did everything we could to educate ourselves about what it meant to become a family, what it meant to be gay men becoming parents, and what it meant to adopt. We built a small community of other adoptive LGBTQI parents, we listened, we talked and we explored. Adoption felt right for us with all of its blessings and challenges. But if I'm truly honest, I think we were LGBTQI parents-to-be first and adoptive parents second. We chose adoption intentionally and learned what we could about what being adoptive parents meant, but the social and legal barriers we faced as LGBTQI people were front and center.
We confronted these barriers in every way we knew how. We learned about our rights, we engaged in community and we planned. Back then, we weren't legally married, we couldn't necessarily adopt in every state, and it was unclear whether being gay would mean that a mother who felt adoption was her child's best option would choose us as her child's parents. But we proceeded and, faster than we imagined we were parents in a multi-racial, LGBTQI, adoptive, Jewish, middle-class family. And, as any parent can attest, parenting in any situation is all consuming. You are literally figuring out how to keep a person alive. And how to get some sleep. Never mind all the social, cultural, and legal challenges you need to be preparing to face.
Our LGBTQI friends and communities were ecstatic, mostly. It was 2008 and LGBTQI parents were still novel to most Americans. And so that became the focus of our identity. We were 27 and everyone, from social workers to attorneys to sheriffs, commented on us being the youngest adoptive couple they'd ever met. The nurses and midwife at the hospital where our son was born were mostly excited about being part of the process and the relationship we had with our son's birth mother. We and most of the people around us saw the process through an LGBTQI lens: exciting, groundbreaking (not actually, but perceived that way), challenging the status quo.
For sure, not everyone was on board – some friends thought we were rejecting our LGBTQI identities. We were conforming to something that wasn't meant for us. For some of them, it was the painful confrontation of watching something that they had finally made peace with, not having children, become an opportunity for others.
Choosing to adopt, while natural for us, was clearly not seen by others the way we saw it. What we hadn't anticipated is that while we were just parents living out our family's truth, others drew lines in the sand. More than one person told us we were "brave" and that they couldn't do what we did. They couldn't imagine parenting children who "weren't really theirs." They needed their own "real children." This came from all kinds of people – straight and LGBTQI.
At one difficult moment, I was in a meeting – a meeting about securing lived and legal equality for families like mine – when the person I was with suddenly said they really couldn't relate – "I have two perfect white children who are really mine." And then he laughed a little. I smiled uncomfortably and nodded. "You know what I mean," he added.
In other meetings, I learned that people were all for securing the rights to have children, but not addressing the needs of our families beyond legal rights. Supporting children as they come to terms with being adopted, or have an anonymous egg donor, or sharing a sperm donor with a handful of other kids they didn't know? These were for other communities to address, not us. These weren't LGBTQI issues. But of course they are, because these are the stories of our families.
Over the last eight-plus years, we've learned, of course, about what our son and family needs from us. We've opened our eyes to see how we're part of a larger adoption community defined not just by being with others whose families are adoptive, but by the beauty and complexity of what our family story means for our son.
Sometimes these still feel like two different communities, but more and more we see them converge and are finding places where we can be our whole selves. And rather than see the complexities as things to avoid, we are realizing that the more we lean in, the richer our family is.
So during this bittersweet Pride season, let's embrace all of the communities we need to be part of. Let's see what LGBTQI issues what our families face because of their whole selves, not only what we face because of our gender and sexual identities. For me, that means embracing our story as an adoptive family truly and fully in addition and in connection to our transracial and LGBTQI stories.
I am gay. I am an adoptive parent in a transracial family. I am Jewish. I am your neighbor. And this is my Pride.


The State Department agreed Thursday to review thousands of messages from a private email account that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used for official government business, but it cautioned that the process will move slowly and perhaps take months.
The department announced its action just after midnight, soon after Clinton spoke for the first time about the political firestorm over her use of private emails sent from a private computer server using an Internet address traced back to Clinton's family home in Chappaqua, New York.
Clinton urged the State Department late Wednesday on her Twitter account to release the documents publicly.
"I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible," Clinton said on Twitter.
Secretary of State John Kerry said in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Thursday that the department "will undertake this task as rapidly as possible in order to make sure that we are dealing with the sheer volume in a responsible way." Officials have said that Clinton turned over more than 55,000 pages of emails to the department. But State spokeswoman Marie Harf warned that the review could "take time some time to complete" and officials indicated it could take months.
It was not immediately clear what procedure or protocols the State Department was using to review Clinton's emails, or what U.S. laws or rules might prohibit Clinton from releasing her own emails by herself immediately. Clinton's current spokesman and the State Department have said she never received or transmitted classified information on her private email account, so there should be no such concerns that disclosure of her messages could compromise national security.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the government can censor of withhold emails and other records under nine categories intended to protect information that would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas. But it wasn't clear whether the State Department would automatically apply those provisions to its review of Clinton's emails, or whether it would invoke its legally authorized discretion to release even emails that might be covered under those exemptions. Under the open records law, withholding emails merely because they might be embarrassing or expose government incompetence or malfeasance is not permitted.
"I understand the State Department will now redact personal phone numbers and other information, which may take some time, but I believe this decision is the right one," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
It also wasn't clear what resources the State Department intended to use to review Clinton's emails or how long the process will take. The agency has roughly 127 employees who review emails requested under the federal open records law, but they are already overwhelmed with nearly 11,000 other pending requests, which for complex cases can take an average of more than 18 months to review each one.
The possible release of Clinton's emails would come after more than 75 separate requests for her emails were filed with the State Department between 2009 and 2013 by media organizations and other parties. Associated Press requests for Clinton emails and other documents have been delayed for more than a year — and in one case, four years — without any results. The AP said this week it is considering legal action against the department to compel responses.
On Wednesday, the House committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, issued subpoenas for emails from Clinton and others related to Libya. It also instructed technology companies it did not identify to preserve any relevant documents in their possession.
Separately, the conservative legal group Judicial Watch filed suit against the State Department to compel its response to an open records request for communications between Clinton and Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi.
For a third day, Washington seemed preoccupied with Clinton's email practices, which gave Clinton — who is expected to run for president in 2016 — significant control over limiting access to her message archives. But those same practices also complicated the State Department's legal responsibilities in finding and turning over official emails in response to any investigations, lawsuits or public records requests. The department would be in the position of accepting Clinton's assurances she was surrendering everything required that was in her control.
The White House legal counsel's office was not aware of Clinton's use of a private email account and learned only after some of those emails were sought by a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to a person familiar with the matter. Once apprised, the counsel's office asked the State Department to ensure that her emails were retained for proper archiving, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity without authorization to go on the record.
Presidential spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged Wednesday that White House officials likely received emails from Clinton's private address and would have been aware of her use of the private account. But the person familiar with the counsel's office actions said White House officials were not aware that Clinton was using her private site for all unclassified email — a striking departure from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also had a private email site but used it in conjunction with a State Department account.
The revelation that Clinton relied exclusively on a private email account also raises questions about whether the agency or anyone else in government examined Clinton's private email server and network before it began operating and continued to regularly review it during her tenure. Federal regulations subject the computer systems of some federal contractors and other organizations to federal oversight when they interact with government systems to ensure they are protected.
Clinton's extensive use of her private account for at least 55,000 emails made it likely that in at least some exchanges, references were made to either classified or sensitive information, said J. William Leonard, who held high-ranking information security posts with the Defense Department and the National Archives.
Harf said that Clinton as Cabinet secretary never used a government email account on the agency's separate network for sharing classified information, which Clinton would have been prohibited from forwarding to her private email account.
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Riyadh and Brad Klapper, Nedra Pickler and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.


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