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Home Art Ashley Bickerton's Art Is Having a Resurgence—but His Body Is in Decline
Courtesy Ashley Bickerton
Ashley Bickerton's Art Is Having a Resurgence—but His Body Is in Decline
The part-time L.A. artist, who shot to fame in the 1980s partying alongside Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, discusses his new show and new challenges
Michael Slenske
"I might be dying, I don't know," says Ashley Bickerton in a phone call from his hillside-home/studio compound in Bali where he's been dealing with a neurodegenerative disease that has left him weak and wheelchair-bound. It's a stark announcement in the run-up to his September debut at the ascendant Hollywood- and Seoul-based gallery, Various Small Fires, which began representing Bickerton in June.
"I don't want any pity. I'm not really in the mood for that shit," he says with resolution. "Life is to be lived and got on with, and I'm busy—too busy—for that."
When not in Bali creating vibrant paintings and sculptures celebrating this existential joie de vivre, the 62-year-old British-born artist and his wife and child share a home in Mount Washington. Bickerton has been unable to climb the 80 steps to the entrance for months, but his approach to art and life remain as vital as when he first gained notoriety as a young leader in the so-called neo-geo wave in New York in the late '80s and '90s, alongside Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. His Tormented Self-Portraits (1987-88), one of which now resides in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, combined steel, leather, and rubber sculptural facades festooned with logos from The Village Voice, Bayer, TV Guide, and Marlboro to iconic effect, sending up the Reagan era with expressionistic, if minimalist, flair.
Over the decades, Bickerton has embraced a wide range of materials and approaches, from utilizing coconuts and resin in hanging assemblage sculptures of sharks to Turneresque paintings embedded with beach flotsam and high chroma portraits of hybridized humans.
"I've changed the outward stylistics on purpose, but the internal machinery, the engine itself, has never deviated," Bickerton says. "I do not want to be a slave to a signature identifying brand look. I don't want to be Clyfford Still making Clyfford Stills forever."
He's adamant that no one associates his work with "surf art," especially after he first decamped to Bali in 1993. But that same year he did create a mathematically precise monochrome sculpture about tidal physics jokingly titled Waves Generated by Damien Hirst Thousands of Miles Away Breaking on a Reef in My Head. That piece was a nod to "those crazy drunken days when [Hirst] was snorting up half the Peruvian Andes in the bathroom at the Groucho Club," Bickerton says with a devilish laugh.
The question lingering now is not whether Bickerton will ever surf (or party) again, but whether he will live long enough to see an intelligent, historical reappraisal of his work. He's both cynical and optimistic about it all.
"Aren't we all just perfumed, ornamental poodles walking around on our hind legs for an uncaring plutocracy to mild applause?" he says. "Still, I take my role as a plastic philosopher seriously. We can do things like Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen have done for me. We can shape and color other peoples' experience and provide emotional structure to how they perceive things. Those are the good parts."
Below, read our full interview with Bickerton.
I don't know if you know, it's not public, but I'm also not keeping [my illness] secret. I'm kind of in the waters here. I'm in a wheelchair now.
Suspected motor neuron disease.
Are you OK right now?
I might be dying, I don't know. It happens. Someone was saying write your biography and I was saying I can do that later when I'm totally immobile.
Are you able to make work?
Well, you know, part of my work has been sitting at computers designing things and then overseeing it. I do everything. In my studio I've got 12 small canvases, but I haven't been able to go to my studio for four months because I live on a hill and I can't access [it] or I can't get back up the stairs. I've been in hospitals pretty much half the time over the last five months in different countries.
It started five months ago.
Oh no, no, no, no, no. I first noticed it about a year ago. When I was in L.A. I noticed that I couldn't do squats as well but I thought it was just from sitting in quarantine obsessing over Trump over the computer. They locked down the parks so we could no longer go for our walks, the beaches were shut down so we were just sitting around the house and Trump was just raging and like many I just death scrolled on the internet half the time. So I attributed it to age and atrophy when I couldn't do the squats. I used to do 30 squats regularly and the lag time before the muscles regenerated to do it again was like a week whereas on my upper body doing pull-ups it was two days and then you feel stronger, and this time it was a week and I didn't feel stronger. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't take it seriously until I got back to Bali and I tried surfing. I was doing the pop-up maneuver, which is going from prone to standing in one jump, and I couldn't do it. I could maybe get up into a squat position, but I couldn't push up from a squat position or something would go wrong. I tried to surf eight times and it was too discouraging. I had all these friends paddling out with me [with] this look of confusion and horror and pity just looking at me struggling to just do basic stuff. But it was during that time that I built my last show, so I was very active, I was running up and down the stairs to my studio still and ripping cardboard and painting. I knew something was wrong by then, but we thought it was some kind of stenosis from sitting at the computer for too long.
Flotsam Painting (Small Size), 2019
Courtesy Various Small Fires
Which show were you making at that time?
The one I just had up at Lehmann Maupin, the open face Flotsam paintings. The latest incarnation. It was a small filler show because I was supposed to be on the schedule to have a much bigger show, then COVID put a kibosh on all the scheduling and we had to reshuffle the deck. So this was a placeholder till my much bigger show next year. Now I don't know what the hell is going on because I have to come back to L.A. to go to Cedars-Sinai.
Last time we talked you were moving to L.A.
I bought a house there with 80 stairs and it is now rendered completely useless to me. I cannot get into my house. It's a nice house, I love it, but it's too much. If it were 20 [stairs] maybe I'd figure out a way, but it's 80 so I can't even use my own house.
Weren't your kid and wife in school here.
My wife was in law school and she was getting a degree from USC…and my son is in school right now. He's at our house.
In Mount Washington?
Yeah. School is online right now, but he's in college in Santa Monica.
So starting a year ago everything changed.
Well, yes. The beginning of it, but it didn't really change until the first of the year. It's gradual but it's all quite alarming because it's all happened in a year. When I first got a cane my wife looked at it and went, "Oh my god"—now that seems quaint. There's wheelchairs and walkers everywhere. We have a team full-time remodeling the house for disability access, so since I live on a hill, we've had to build a ramp all the way down to the garage so I can go to the car still. I live on a steep hill so there are stairs everywhere, and they're stairs that cut into the rock so they're not ergonomically scaled so it was a perfect metric to measure my decline because I could see which steps I could no longer do. One of the more difficult things is that every time we make a new adjustment it only lasts a certain amount of time before it's rendered obsolete. Like, we changed the grade of the kitchen steps and the amount of them and put a railing on, but I can no longer do it, so we built that for nothing. [Laughs] I'm waiting on my electric scooter so I can actually go back to the studio. The road has been built down to the studio, but I haven't got my cart yet.
So you were planning this L.A. life…
I wasn't planning an L.A. life, per se. I realized that the actual secret to life is living in two places.
But you were coming back to America in a sense.
Yeah, I think what we settled upon was that at one point my wife wanted to move to L.A. and I remember at one point being at a traffic light and I saw a guy about my age sitting in another middle of the road car stuck in traffic looking utterly miserable. I suddenly saw myself and my potential future, and I said, "Hell no, I can't"—the endless sea of concrete, the haze and the smog, I'd just shoot myself, but I'd also been wanting to kill myself in Bali going on and on in this endless grind of holiday stupidity and vacuousness that accompanies so much life here. But when I was living in both places, I realized that was the answer. You live in both places because you actually love both. You stay there just as long as you still love them and you get out before you start detesting them, so you get the best of L.A. in the wintertime. The high desert is the perfect temperature for backcountry hiking, and I wasn't there to surf there so I don't really care about that part. We got stuck there in lockdown, so I'd go out to Malibu to watch during the less severe stages of lockdown when they'd allow you on the beach, but I get to surf all year and in Hawaii on the North Shore at my mom's house. Since this accident has happened I used to bounce back and forth between surfing and art but my priorities are very, very clear and really spelled out in very graphic detail in where I stand. I have no great sadness knowing that I will probably never surf again, but if you took away my ability to make art, I would probably end it right now, right away, posthaste. I don't know how I would exist without it. It's who I am, it's what I do, it's how I breathe. I would just see no inspiration to function without it.
So what is happening with this show in L.A. at VSF?
The show in L.A. is already made. I was hoping to get some new pieces…but we don't know what will happen with me. I could be good for years. I've spent plenty of time thinking about artists who have been wheelchair bound, those present and those in the past, and there's quite a few of them. It doesn't stop us; it kind of goads us on. Dan Flavin lost his legs in the end. Frida Kahlo and then Yinka Shonibare, Chuck Close—there were quite a few.
Can you tell us a little about the work in the new show?
Basically, I am attempting to bring my work full circle. There seems to be bifurcated understanding of my career, which itself seems to be bifurcated in generating that reading. There are those who loved what I did in New York in the '80s and early '90s and they think I lost the plot when I ran off to Indonesia. Then I was equally surprised to find out that there was an equal number of people who knew the work I'd done subsequent to coming to Bali and who saw my earlier work and went, "Hmm, boring." I change the outward stylistics on purpose, but the internal machinery, the engine itself, has never changed, it has never deviated, but I do not want to be loyal to a style, a slave to a signature or identifying brand look. I don't want to be Clyfford Still making Clyfford Stills forever—I want to just speak, but it's now time to pull my work full circle and come back around in a way while still moving forward, of course, and embrace things I ran away from.
So what is the thrust of this show and this full circle.
I didn't want to throw away my Bali work so I kind of moved it in a slightly more conceptual direction than I had been of late. I had some long talks about going back to certain pieces. When I did the show with [Damien] Hirst I redid a Self-Portrait with Logos and had long discussions with many friends, some who were vociferously against redoing a piece with that kind of presence, doing an updated version and then I had other friends like Hirst himself saying, "Hell, it's your fucking language why do you kowtow to people who want to create false histories. They want markers for history when it's organic and it's yours."
Is that what made you want to leave New York?
Yes, precisely. Its curatorial laziness, its editorial laziness. Artists are dynamic and functioning in many ways and shapes over time but you're often given a window of being fashionable and that's marked and indexed into the dialogue of this so-called history and then you're placed and we move on unless you're one of the market darlings and then you become something else, which is a trading chip in a plutocratic pissing contest.
You were in both positions.
Oh, I've never been a market darling.
But you were on the cusp of that.
Yeah, but I never caught on. There's something in my work that disconcerts the collector mentality. As I've said before you can move too slow or too fast, but to be absorbed and put into use by the trading class by the art buying class you have to evolve at just the right speed, you can't scare them but you also can't bore them.
Did you have these conversations with Damien Hirst? He seems to have moved at the right speed.
No, Chris Wool is the perfect example. Chris is a friend of mine and I actually like Chris's work, but I do see it as being the perfect speed, just hip enough, just piss-ass elegant enough the perfect mixture of downtown heroin chic with piss-ass designer elegance. Moving just the right speed he does each cluster of work and each grouping just long enough and evolves just enough so that it doesn't scare people off but keeps them…it's the perfectly calibrated career move. Damien is much more erratic than that. Put Wool and Hirst together and Damien is much more erratic. He wanted to be a hands-on painter for a while after years of fabricating, he wanted to have what Bacon had. He tried his hand and got lambasted for it, and that was after these photorealist paintings where he did a Koons move with the hired hands making the paintings, so he had a lot of things that didn't go over.
Was there one catalyst event that pushed you over the edge and made you leave New York?
Yeah, but it was probably as much personal as it was professional. I had just had a bad divorce, and when we were pulled up our mantel, it wasn't a gentle fading while the next fashion absorbed the klieg lights—it was an angry exorcism because we were seen to have come up too quickly, so there was a purging, a reactive getting rid of this. We were on the tail end of the '80s wave that produced graffiti, neo-expressionism and we were on the tail end of that. Then right in the second or third year, we came into some kind of prominence as the Gulf War swept in and I remember watching all that footage of the smart bombs going down airshafts and thinking it's over. I've seen more historically cataclysmic events that haven't shifted art, but there was something about that moment that marked the end of something. We've had more cataclysmic moments—9/11, the election of Trump—but there was something about the timing of that war on the tail end of the Reagan '80s, the mercantile machinery in overdrive, I just knew there was going to be a purge. And New York is like that, it takes delicious delight in launching young things out into the stratosphere only to shoot them back out of the sky. That's its sport.
But I didn't answer your question. That's not what drove me out.
What did?
Divorce. Nothing makes people change geography like love. They either move somewhere for love or move somewhere else against love. So the town soured on me and I saw older artists like ghosts endlessly making the rounds of openings and some of them went on to be reasonably known.
Lately I've been stalked by shamans. Since this is concurrent with a show. I haven't made any announcements, a lot of friends know, but others don't. I post a lot on social media but I don't show pictures. People just think life goes on. I don't want any pity; I'm not really in the mood for that shit. Life is to be lived and got on with and I'm busy, too busy for that.
My inbox is abuzz with people named the Wandering Guru and Raven from Portugal sending photographs of Tibetan Buddhist scripts and various other gurus, Andrew the Shaman from Cornwall sending numerological codes for me to incantant after waking and before sleep. The shamans don't seem to care about the precise diagnostics, whether I'm suffering from specific neurodegeneration. I'm the child of two professors, I stand on that side of things, but the Greek root of the word science is ignorance which means I don't know so to be truly of the scientific mind one has to be open so instead of reading Raw Story everyday and hearing again how vile Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are I thought I could better spend my time incantating numerological codes or listening to gurus play the flute, so it can't hurt. There are things we simply don't understand. My wife Cherry and I adhere to functional medicine, which is holistic medicine, and we believe that western science has the answers for things deadline with trauma. You don't go to a healer for an auto accident you go to the ICU but for other things western medicine is married to big pharma, which itself is a corporate entity with its own interests, and it doesn't always work toward the same end as an ill person might want.
Bickerton and his daughter in Bali
Western medicine has become one of your Self-Portraits with Logos.
Yeah, but functional medicine would take into account every single aspect and diet would be a part of it. And with neurological diseases people are unwrapping how mitochondrial DNA is at the center of the entire picture and it is the battleground upon which any fight is to take place so the idea is to turbocharge the mitochondria so it can do the work and pick up and turn things around so I'm on a very radical diet it's called the Wahls Protocol Paleo Plus, where I eat nine cups of vegetables a day, leafy greens, colored and sulfur vegetables, no carbs, no sugars, no dairy, no a lot of stuff, and no fruit or berries. And, actually, after years of being an on-and-off again vegan, I'm eating meat again but all organic, grass-fed and wild-caught that we have to import from New Zealand or salmon from Canada because it's all based on our hunter-gatherer forebears. It involves the paleo diet and ketosis.
Well, here's the deal. I've suffered from chronic fatigue for 40 years, and it's something friends don't know because they see you out waving around with a bottle in your hand having a great time what they don't see is the next five to seven days you spend in bed just beat up because you got yourself hammered and you're dysfunctional for a week after that, not because you're hungover, your system is just depleted so they don't see that because you have no desire to be out there because you've retracted into your womb, tomb, womb. It's not manifest publicly and so 40 years of that. Why do I have that? We spent a lot of time running around the South American jungles as a kid. In this case, me being me the wildest of the Bickerton kids, I never bothered to wear shoes and running around the jungle I picked up a parasite which riddled me so badly that my entire system was just overrun by this parasite that was millimeters from entering my heart and my brain. I would have been dead, there was no cure, and nobody could do anything about it. Finally my dad, in desperation after we went to every doctor in Guyana, where we lived at the time in South America, they'd gone to every doctor including one who said it was psychosomatic and he turned to a biologist friend who sent a blood sample to Jamaica to his colleagues over there at a lab and they immediately knew what it was it was a rare parasite that was very new and there were only four cases in Jamaica at the time and none recorded in the South American mainland. I was apparently the first and we got a prescription and within a week or two I was better.
Shit.
The reason I bring that up, and I haven't thought anything of it until recently until the doctors asked me did you have any serious childhood traumas and I said," Well as a matter of fact I did. When I was about ten years old I had this thing…" And they said, yes, that is often a link to autoimmune problems. Autoimmune problems can often be stimulated by a childhood trauma something you have below the age of 15 years old. So to the best of my understanding I had this disease at ten, went eight years until I went to art school at 18 and then I started getting my regular chronic fatigue episodes and they lasted 40 years all the way until now. They were getting worse over time; you get sick more easily. Before, you had to not sleep for a night, go out drinking, smoke too many cigarettes, but then you go on a vegan diet and being very careful about meditating and eating well and you have a little stress and you break down so I think my system just gave out; it just buckled under the relentless onslaught of these physical challenges. But did the diet make me feel better? Will it help with the neurological disorder? I don't know. But I don't get the chronic fatigue attacks now that I'm on this diet. When I was in L.A. I was on a pretty stringent vegan diet. The difference between this diet and that diet is like five random people heading towards you on a street and this diet is a team of Navy Seals heading toward you in full combat gear and face paint. This diet is hard and heavy and dense and formidable.
So how does this affect the work?
I'm making work all the time. I'm working on my website. It's not public now, but being marginally OCD I'm having to rebuild every damn photograph because some of them need to be rebuilt. If you go back before a certain age that goes back before digital, even with professional photographers, the photos are abysmal before Photoshop could alter lighting. They have dust balls all over them they're grainy, so there was one piece I thought was important enough that I spent two days rebuilding it almost from scratch in photoshop but I used parts of other pieces that were similar, I'd lift corner brackets off another piece.
That's an interesting anecdote. You're sort of known as this live-every-moment-and-let-the-work-go-where-it-will kind of guy, but you're spending two days on a Photoshop rebuild.
Weird, huh, can you spend some time unwrapping that one? Because I can't. That's a mystery. I love artists that just go, but the anal part…First you've got to grapple with where you're at and I realize this is my story now. I think it was [Yuval Noah] Harari who said in Sapiens that even a severely ill person will adjust to their condition and have the equal amount of happy and sad days before their illness because we're just wired that way and I'm kind of realizing that too now and this is my story and this is the story I need to live and it doesn't alter in any way with what I've wanted to say but it possibly enhances the lens through which I'm able to see that because the work has often dealt with existential issues, being human, being on the planet, mortality. I'm only using that mirror in context of the illness I don't think I'd use those precise terms if the illness wasn't in the discussion but it is now the challenge that I face and the story that I have to tell and there's a bit of urgency now because I don't know how much time I have. There's the issue of death. If I have ALS proper which is what Stephen Hawking had you've got a two year life span on average if I have one of the other motor neuron diseases it could be four years if I have something like MMN multifocal moto-neuropathy which is still a possible diagnosis then I might have a longer time to live but with possible severe handicaps. So I don't know what I'm dealing with yet. I do know that the challenge as a sculptor is very interesting. The research is all my wife, she's the medical research goddess and spends a lot of time on the forums and that's not where my brain works properly but when it comes to figuring out the physical space I need to operate in with severe disabilities that's a challenge I like a lot. How do I work with walkers, walking sticks, and wheelchairs? How can I alter architecture to make it functional and these are all things a sculptor can think through, but that's not the work itself. There is an urgency to get things done, to speak. One of the things I'm involved in is my Ocean Chunk series and I like to think of it as a facsimile, a cutout, of the way a Catholic will think about a crucifix above their bed. It becomes the locus, the avatar of their projection, of their stability, of their balance of their warmth of their needs and my little Ocean Chunks work that way, for whatever the hell it is that I believe in, which basically, I guess, is just waters of world in the larger gaia and, more specifically, that the warm embalming fluid of tropical water as we return to the amniotic sac.
Floating Ocean Chunk, 2019
I think the art happens within the floating architecture. You're framing the device for this Turneresque moment.
I'm glad you brought him up. But some of them are getting much more simple the latest ones. They've got to remain somewhat abstract because I really don't like model building in art. I'm a big admirer of the Boyle family. But where it falls short is the model building aspect. I don't want to do models of the ocean. There's a whole lot of people who have done these coffee tables kind of like blue resin as water over some submarine topography to make these coffee tables and it's kind of kitsch and I'm like fuck people are going to say I'm ripping them off or going down this kitsch alley but then I'm like, "Wait you did these in '93!"
Is there also this indexical language because of your father as well?
I think it relates more to being a surfer. My dad was not a surfer. I will never do surf art—it's as lame or idiotic as doing golf art or tennis art and I can't imagine anything more riddled in poverty of vision than tennis art or golf art, but surf art, it's silly to do.
Is the work calming down and becoming more pure in a way, more stripped down?
That's interesting. One reason I went to the gurus is that one thing they can help you win against is a very dire prognosis with a serious disease: one of them is diet; one of them is modern medicine; and one of the key things is the mental game, and that's where I'm the weakest. Could it be my self-destructive mechanism? I'm trying to investigate that. I'm trying to focus meditation on that. I'm not very good at it. One of the problems I have is just baked into how my brain works and that's the double-edgedness. It's almost like if you're a born-again MMA fighter everything is lined up for god going toward a single end with no internal conflict. Internal conflict is my motor. Belief, disbelief, having several different contradictory thoughts and belief systems inherent in one idea is what it's all about and it always has been. I don't know if that bodes well for my fight against disease. I might want to have a more simple internal mechanism that's more straightforward and I'm trying to address that. How that will play out in my art, I don't know. I don't know, but there has been a greater shift toward empathy and obviously a move toward being less reckless.
How reckless were you before?
Fiercely I suppose. Not with the technique, but in the places I went, yeah. Because it was dangerous is what made me go there, for a quote unquote old cis white guy to be continually lured into dealing with gender and race I did it because it was difficult, because it was a no-fly zone.
Maybe this goes at this idea of you as a forever outsider.
I don't see it that way. I was as inside a player as you could get at one point.
Was it just the Bali move?
People tend to look for simple indexes, simple markers because the landscape is just so absurdly busy and active so it's easy to slap on these handy labels and cubbyholes to shove things in. For instance, my first show of gnarly figurative [pieces] in 1996, people thought, he's gone off to an island, he's Dr. Moreau. Actually, I dreamed up this entire show in New York, but because New York is so fraught with interruptions, I had to go far away to make labor-intensive work like this.
It's also the lazy thing of saying you're a foreigner in a foreign land making work about foreignness.
The truth is that this is where I'm comfortable. I remember coming back from Bali and ending up in Gavin Brown's Passerby bar and I was hearing conversations all around me that sounded just like myself and it made me deeply uncomfortable. They were smart, analytic, open-minded, questioning philosophical voices, asking certain questions that echoed in my mind and it made me deeply uncomfortable. I'm far more comfortable being the other.
That's what I'm saying. You have been put in that situation as a kid and you put yourself in as an adult so maybe this half-L.A., half-Bali situation is living precariously and maybe that's what most drives the work.
Yeah, I wish somebody would shine a curatorial light and probe with some intelligence on it all but unfortunately I haven't been the subject of any curatorial bukaki party, though that could all change. For some reason I've never set as well with curators as I have with the collector class and I don't really understand why. As far as I can tell my work is as probing and questioning as any out there and I'm relentless in that regard but curators, they can be lazy, too. I remain optimistic; unfortunately now time might be limited. I've long thought I'd be around to see it, I've had several good go arounds, several comebacks and sooner or later it will come back around again because I think the entire operation has been so singular that it's just a question of finding the receptive moment where things all come together and I've seen things come into focus more than once and oftentimes there are moments of historic revisionism that are driven by larger forces—like feminism, like race, like sexual orientation—but there are many others too, and it's just a reason to pull focus on you and that's really what the art world is, pulling focus.
Maybe this fall show is part of that.
I'm just now beginning to think I won't see it in my lifetime because I don't know how long my lifetime is anymore. Before, since both my parents lived to 90, I thought I had a good 30 year push. I'm 62. My mom is 92 and my dad died at 92, so I just figured genetics were in my favor for another 30 years push. Look all of this said and how I talk about the passion for fighting for the attention of the visibility of my work and my voice at the same time one can't help but realize how absurd this is all is. What are we, perfumed ornamental poodles walking around on our hind legs for an uncaring plutocracy to mild applause? What exactly are we doing? But I take my role as a plastic philosopher seriously. I'm a philosopher who doesn't trade in words, I trade in plasticity and visuals and chroma.
But that's important.
That is important. We're not just perfumed poodles. We can do things like Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen have done for me. We can do that for other people. We can shape and color their experience and provide emotional structure to how they perceive things, and those are the good parts.
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Ashley Bickerton
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As the season shifts towards the summer, the sights, sounds, and expectations change. In particular the color pallete in many geographies features more of the oranges, yellows, and even a tinge of red. Just look into the sky, and the vibrant colors are more often than not closer to an orange/yellow hue against a blue backdrop than grey against, darker grey. In this hour we dig the sounds and colors of summer.


Jerry Blumengarten The 2013 Global Education Conference starts today! 10:00pm KEYNOTE: Kim Cofino - Adventures in International Education 11:00pm ePortfolios as Environments for Global Engagement, Deep Learning and Authentic Assessment - Betty Hurley-Dasgupta, Professor and HP Fellow "In today''s society, we no longer have to hold meetings in the confines of four walls, stay in expensive hotels, and nibble on gourmet food we can''t pronounce.
Today was particularly interesting because I had a conversation on this blog with ePortfolio Keith (Keith Brennan aka @wiltwhatman), who was commenting on my Three Things post. Available online at [link] (Retrieved 19 February, 2013).
The end of the day today is the final deadline to get in a proposal to speak at next week''s free and online 2013 Global STEMx Education Conference (STEMxCon.com) , September 19 - 21.
Selfie was the word of the year for 2013 (Brumfield, 2013). Students can create eportfolios with social bookmarking tools and as a final project create eportfolio presentations in which they reflect on the learning for each module/unit. 2013).
Selfie was the word of the year for 2013 (Brumfield, 2013). Students can create eportfolios with social bookmarking tools and as a final project create eportfolio presentations in which they reflect on the learning for each module/unit. Check out my students' reflective eportfolio presentations here ! 2013). Selfie named word of the year for 2013. Recently added to the Survival Tips for Teachers !
If you choose to go on the EduHero Journey this year feel free to download any of these badges I made to go on your blog, eportfolio, or website : (Call to Adventure) Mission: Your mission this year is to join a League of EduHeroes and go on your EduHero Journey. 2013).


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The 2012 Vietnam Open Grand Prix was the ninth grand prix gold and grand prix tournament of the 2012 BWF Grand Prix Gold and Grand Prix. The tournament was held in Phan Dinh Phung Stadium, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam from August 20 until August 26, 2012 and had a total purse of $50,000.

Men's singles

Seeds

  Nguyen Tien Minh (champion)
  Dionysius Hayom Rumbaka (semi-final)
  Ajay Jayaram (second round)
  Alamsyah Yunus (quarter-final)
  Sony Dwi Kuncoro (semi-final)
  Takuma Ueda (final)
  Sourabh Varma (third round)
  Chou Tien-chen (quarter-final)
  Tanongsak Saensomboonsuk (first round)
  Rajah Menuri Venkata Gurusaidutt (first round)
  Chan Yan Kit (third round)
  Mohd Arif Abdul Latif (third round)
  Anand Pawar (first round)
  Suppanyu Avihingsanon (first round)
  Derek Wong Zi Liang (first round)
  Ashton Chen Yong Zhao (third round)

Finals

Top half

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

Bottom half

Section 5

Section 6

Section 7

Section 8

Women's singles

Seeds

  Porntip Buranaprasertsuk (champion)
  Eriko Hirose (quarter-final)
  Fu Mingtian (first round)
  Sapsiree Taerattanachai (semi-final)
  Xing Aiying (first round)
  Maria Febe Kusumastuti (second round)
  Bellaetrix Manuputty (quarter-final)
  Aprilia Yuswandari (quarter-final)

Finals

Top half

Section 1

Section 2

Bottom half

Section 3

Section 4

Men's doubles

Seeds

  Kim Ki-jung / Kim Sa-rang (semi-final)
  Bodin Issara / Maneepong Jongjit (champion)
  Mohd Zakry Abdul Latif / Mohd Fairuzizuan Mohd Tazari (first round)
  Ricky Karanda Suwardi / Muhammad Ulinnuha (semi-final)
  Alvent Yulianto / Markis Kido (quarter-final)
  Hoon Thien How / Tan Wee Kiong (quarter-final)
  Markus Fernaldi Gideon / Agripinna Prima Rahmanto Putra (quarter-final)
  Gan Teik Chai / Ong Soon Hock (first round)

Finals

Top half

Section 1

Section 2

Bottom half

Section 3

Section 4

Women's doubles

Seeds

  Shizuka Matsuo / Mami Naito (second round)
  Eom Hye-won / Jang Ye-na (withdrew)
  Vivian Hoo Kah Mun / Woon Khe Wei (quarter-final)
  Ng Hui Ern / Ng Hui Lin (final)
  Rie Eto / Yu Wakita (quarter-final)
  Pia Zebadiah / Rizki Amelia Pradipta (champion)
  Suci Rizki Andini / Della Destiara Haris (second round)
  Chien Yu-chin / Wu Ti-jung (semi-final)

Finals

Top half

Section 1

Section 2

Bottom half

Section 3

Section 4

Mixed doubles

Seeds

  Maneepong Jongjit / Savitree Amitrapai (withdrew)
  Danny Bawa Chrisnanta / Vanessa Neo Yu Yan (first round)
  Fran Kurniawan / Shendy Puspa Irawati (semi-final)
  Irfan Fadhilah / Weni Anggraini (first round)
  Thitipong Lapoe / Peeraya Munkitamorn (quarter-final)
  Tan Aik Quan / Lai Pei Jing (final)
  Riky Widianto / Richi Puspita Dili (quarter-final)
  Kim Sa-rang / Choi Hye-in (first round)

Finals

Top half

Section 1

Section 2

Bottom half

Section 3

Section 4

References

Vietnam Open
Vietnam Open (badminton)
2012 Vietnam Open
21st century in Ho Chi Minh City
2012 in Vietnamese sport

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Hipparchia pyrenaica är en fjärilsart som beskrevs av Ribbe 1909. Hipparchia pyrenaica ingår i släktet Hipparchia och familjen praktfjärilar. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Praktfjärilar
pyrenaica


text:
Танский (XVIII век) — малорусский писатель-комедиограф XVIII века, предок Гоголя.

В современных гоголеведческих работах Танский отождествляется с Василием Танским (:uk:Танський Василь; 1678—1763) — белоцерковским и переяславским полковником, происходившим из знатной польской семьи, оставившим родину во время войны Петра I против Лещинского и перешедшим со своим отрядом на Слободскую Украину; он поступил к Петру на службу и в 1709 году отличился в Полтавской битве против шведов, за что удостоился от монарха благодарности.

Писал интермедии, высоко ценившиеся современниками, с которыми сам же выступал перед народом. До нашего времени они не дошли. Согласно воспоминаниям современников, выступал «во вкусе площадном, Плавтовом».

Дед Гоголя был женат на Лизогуб, которая по матери была из семьи Танских; сам Танский приходился Гоголю прапрадедом. Через посредство литературной деятельности отца Гоголя можно, как считают литературоведы, проследить некоторую преемственность между малорусскими повестями Гоголя и интермедиями, которые писал Танский.

Примечания

Литература

Писатели Российской империи


text:
The Chronicles of From The Front
From the Front Twitter Facebook Mail
Your customers WANT to pay your testing budget
New video from last year's edition: it's time for Andre Jay Meissner, one of the founders of the Open Device Lab initiative, Jay talks about testing, opens source, working with a community and helping the web community to grow and form stronger connections.
Inspired by Jay, during the conference we proposed to some friends to create a temporary ODL at the conference and we are proud that's still operating in Bologna!
"We know that we won't code the site right at the first try, problems may arise, nobody is perfect and we want our customers to understand that without tests we are going out in the dark, with half backed products.
Nobody will ever argue against the fraction of the cost of a car spent in crash tests, or the portion of the cost of ticket spent in security and simulation.
Jay gave us motivation and suggestions on how to make our customers understand that they really want us to test our websites (and pay for that)."
"The thing I love about Jay's talk is that, even tho it's about testing and responsiveness and process and..., it really is about collaboration: the Open Device Labs is a revolution that we can start and it's a benefit not for us only but the whole local dev community, isn't that awesome?"
2014, videos
We are a no-profit organisation of professionals taking care of a series of events, among which the main italian front end conference.
© 2013-2021 FromTheFront The Chronicle of FtF is based on Kirby & designed by Sid05 Privacy Policy

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text:
5 Labels / Record Deals 1 Management Deals
5 fully mastered 5 broadcast ready 2 rough mixes
3 Non-Exclusive 2 Exclusive
Bentley Records Europe Seeking Demos for Artists Trying to Build Their Brand
Bentley Records Europe office, based in the Netherlands, is seeking demos from artists looking to build their brand.
Bentley Records is an international record label operating since 2013, specialized in building careers of artists. Throughout the years we have laid the foundation to jump start the careers of many artists. We're all about the quality of music and the quality of everything else we do. The artists who work with us are a prime example of this principle. Our roster includes well established, industry standard artists, producers, and songwriters. A well-experienced team is at your disposal to guide you to take your music to the next level.
Mission: Create stars out of talent!
Clients: Universal Music, Sony BMG, Warner Music, Zooland, Kontor
Experience: We have worked with international record labels and built the careers of multiple artists.
"We don't just make music, we create Classics!"
NYC Based International Record Label
www.Bentley-Music.com
- Leon Schotman CEO Bentley Records Europe
Deal Structure: Non-Exclusive
Dalyce Entertainment Seeking Artists for Label / Management
Dalyce Entertainment is scouting to sign to artists to its roster. DE works hand in hand with its artists to promote their music through their various channels of PR, College Radio, Distribution, Licensing, and Festivals. Please submit your best track(s) for consideration.
- Dalyce Entertainment
Management Consulting Company Looking for Amazing Artist for Consideration for radio Promotion, Licensing and Bookings
Dalyce Entertainment is looking for amazing artist for radio promotion, music licensing bookings and consideration of management/label We are looking forward to hearing your best tracks and open to all genres. We have relationships worldwide with radio and concert promoters. -Dalyce Entertainment proposing music that compliments the narrative of a story
Looking for New Artists to Shop to Major Label
Looking for new artists to shop to a major label and sign to a management deal. Artist must submit mix and mastered music. Please submit your best track(s) for consideration.
- Brandon Carter - Ceo/President - Xclusive Management LLC
Touch Records Seeking Songs & Artist for Roster Consideration
Our label is looking for songs in key genres of: R&B, Soul, EDM, CCM, Gospel, Jazz, Light Rock, and Pop. All music must be positive and theme oriented. We are also looking for artist that are looking to advance their career to the next level. Please submit your best track(s) for consideration.
Touch Records is now the culmination of specific services provided with the professional skill and experience developed over the years by its founder. Touch Records now provides itself exclusively as a; Music Publishing, Music Production, and Worldwide Distribution Label with Label imprints that support artist around the world with Radio and Licensing Campaigns, and shipment to digital and physical stores.


text:
About the DGNB System
About the DGNB
DGNB Blog English
DGNB Blog all about sustainable building
All posts tagged: Sustainable Building
Time's running out – why the German BEG funding for new buildings is needed
Published by Dr. Christine Lemaitre
For days now, everywhere we look we're forced to hear outcry, warnings and worries about changes to building efficiency funding – the German BEG scheme for new buildings. The criticism being levelled at the new rule, which means subsidies will only be awarded if sustainability factors are taken into account, comes in as many guises as the topic of sustainable construction itself. We no longer want to watch what is happening without passing comment.
Impulse / Sustainable Finance
Sustainable Development Goals: "better model for the future" (Part 1)
Published by Pia Hettinger
End poverty, protect the climate, equality, leaving no one behind. The content of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sounds just right, but how do you get there? Many have racked their brains over this, including Marc Buckley. He has been appointed by the UN as an advocate for the SDGs. In this first of a two-part interview he talks about his role and how the SDGs are really to be understood.
Knowledge from around the world: Master Classes for climate-friendly construction
Published by Tamira Bethke
On 22 July 2021, Dr Christine Lemaitre (CEO, DGNB – German Sustainable Building Council) and Prashant Kapoor (Chief Industry Specialist, IFC Climate Business Group, World Bank Group) kicked off the free Master Classes of the Building Sense Now initiative and MISEREOR. Since then, people from 47 countries have participated in the global knowledge exchange on climate-smart building. All past events are available online. One more Master Class will be taking place in February, and more are in the planning.
"Sustainable building should be a sport for the masses"
Published by Levke Maria Kehl
Replicable solutions for sustainable and climate-friendly construction worldwide – projects that adhere to such principles are honoured by the international Green Solutions Awards. This year's award ceremony took place on November 10 at the 26th Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Among the jury members was Thomas Kraubitz, Director and Head of Sustainability in Europe at Buro Happold, and a member of the DGNB board of directors. We spoke to Mr Kraubitz about recent developments in the industry worldwide and current trends in the area of sustainable building.
Interview / Sustainable Building / Worldwide
For those in doubt, time has run out – statement on the IPCC report
What we're hearing isn't surprising – sadly – but that doesn't make it any less shocking or, above all, any less significant: the Sixth Assessment Report on the world climate puts an end to the era of climate change denial. To maintain tolerable levels of life on Earth, decisive action is required now. The only real option available to us is to systematically cut carbon emissions. This is where action is called for across the entire building sector – and time is running out.
Building and biodiversity – our commitment
The 15th UN Biodiversity Conference has been rescheduled to take place in October of this year in the Chinese city of Kunming. At the conference – known as the CBD COP 15 – member states will set a new 10-year strategy until 2030. Currently, the DGNB is the only association in the building sector to have made a clear commitment to the CBD. Why? Because there are many overlaps between building and biodiversity – as this post explains in a nutshell.
Climate Action / Climate Positive / DGNB / Phase Sustainability / Sustainable Building
The implications of new supply chain legislation for the building sector
Published by Dr. Anna Braune
Too many firms are still going about business in ways that lead to exploitation of both people and nature. This also applies to the construction industry. Long overdue, the proposed Supply Chain Actin in Germany will bring us a step closer to focusing more attention on this issue. But the requirements still fall short in terms of consistency. The DGNB has a clear vision of what a fair supply chain looks like, and it continues to appeal for more voluntary action.
A new European Bauhaus movement? Count us in!
With its Green Deal, the EU under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen has caused quite a stir. When it comes to climate protection and sustainability, there's a new spirit of optimism. It's right and important that the building industry plays a central role on this path to becoming the 'first carbon-neutral continent'. The penny has finally dropped and not been 'lobbied off the stage' by reservations and objections.
The myth of increased costs in sustainable building
"I would like to build more sustainably, but the costs…": The fear of additional costs due to sustainability often leads to doubts and hesitations during planning and implementation. A new study from Denmark now shows with regard to new building construction that this is unfounded. Here it becomes clear: more sustainable does not equal more expensive. On the contrary.
Impulse / Research
"Structural engineers can make a big difference in terms of sustainability"
Buildings contain a lot of material. These in turn are valuable resources that are becoming increasingly scarce and are responsible for many CO2 emissions. Structural engineers can counteract this consumption of materials on a massive scale. At least that is how professor Patrick Teuffel sees it. We spoke with him about built heavyweights and the current state of research in the world of materials.
Phase Sustainability – exchanging ideas openly and honestly at the first network get-together
Architects and specialist planners involved in the Phase Sustainability initiative 'met up' for the first time on 28 July. The main idea of the get-together was to share people's experiences dealing with sustainability issues when building. By the end of the day, the participants had benefited from a number of long-overdue discussions and gained many valuable insights. Time for Phase Sustainability to enter the next round.
Impulse / Phase Sustainability
Sustainable urban development – now the cities are talking
Published by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Anke Karmann-Woessner
Changing travel infrastructures, the green energy transition, climate protection, demand for affordable housing, civil participation schemes, digital transformation – the major challenges of our time are part and parcel of life in the city and conurbations. A great deal has already been undertaken to translate sustainable urban development into action on a municipal level. And demands to do something are no less pressing given the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it's important to promote transformative power in government administration!
Impulse / The New Decade
A call for more sustainability at universities
Published by Prof. Anett-Maud Joppien
Many architecture departments have yet to develop a proper understanding of the role played by sustainability in teaching and research. It's such an important opportunity to introduce young people to the topic early and pave the way for the future. All universities should place climate protection and the conservation of resources high on their agenda.
Making the property industry sustainable
Published by Hermann Horster
It has been a decade since developers started erecting sustainable buildings. They now account for an increasing share of the property market. Now it's existing buildings that need to catch up. An important point of leverage in achieving this will be to instil sustainability as a fixed feature of the financial industry. There are reasons to be optimistic, however, thanks to initiatives like the European Green Deal and the increasing use of carbon pricing.
The New Decade
#ClimateActionNow
Any conversation about climate protection and introducing key measures likely to make a real difference quickly moves on to the topic of buildings. Our choices regarding how buildings are planned, constructed and used have a considerable impact on the carbon levels of our planet, which are currently somewhat worrying. But there's also good news. We can turn things around and make positive contributions to climate protection in the way we need to – but only if we work together, approach things systematically and act as quickly as possible. How specifically this should happen is addressed by a number of services recently announced by the DGNB.
Climate Action / Climate Positive
One year later: How the winners of the last DGNB Sustainability Challenge are doing
Building material recycling, gold of pleasure and green hydrogen: these elements gave three finalists of the DGNB Sustainability Challenge 2019 victory in their respective categories of research, innovation and start-up. It is now almost a year since their presentation at the DGNB Sustainability Day. Reason enough to take a look at how their innovations for more sustainability in the construction and real estate industry have developed since then.
Impulse / Sustainable Building
Architects – the conscience of the building sector
Published by Martin Haas
The role played by architecture in climate change is not yet entirely clear. We're still trying to work out if we need to take a new stance on architectural culture. Architects now bear a major responsibility. They have become the 'conscience of construction' – the ones expected to ask the right questions. Answering these questions is something we can only do together.
Wanted: innovators offering new building materials!
Published by Prof. Josef Steretzeder
As public awareness grows for the need to protect the climate and save resources, there is also increasing demand for appropriate building materials. Manufacturers are expected to 'do their bit' in raising the standards of the environment we build around ourselves. There are some interesting ideas out there – but companies need to get more proactive.
The dawn of a new decade – time is running out
Published by Prof. Alexander Rudolphi
Increasingly worrying climate predictions, limited carbon allowances and a rapid rise in public awareness – a lot of things have happened over the last ten years and we've all learnt a lot. Against this backdrop, the DGNB has evolved and moved forward, and we face a number of completely new challenges as 2020 gets underway.
Sustainability with top marks: highlights of 2019
A DGNB Certificate in Platinum means meeting the highest standards for holistic quality in all aspects of sustainability – for new buildings as well as buildings in use and urban districts. To kick off the new year, we would like to take time to look back at a few DGNB certification highlights of 2019 and use them as a source of inspiration for an ambitious 2020. Let's get started!
Climate Positive / DGNB / DGNB Diamond / Sustainable Building
Green Solutions Awards: worldwide role models of sustainable building
192 projects, 37 countries, 3 categories – these are the key statistics of the Green Solutions Awards, recently awarded in France to international beacon projects of sustainable building. The aim of the competition, which is backed by the DGNB, is to highlight reproducible examples of sustainable solutions in the construction sector and urban development industry. Allow us to introduce you to the winners across the main categories.
Sustainable Building / Worldwide
COP25: Disillusionment and stagnation: 1, Optimism and action: 0
What are we doing anyway? This is the question I kept asking myself after going to this year's UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid. Last weekend the COP25 drew to a close, once again without any real results or ambition to show for its efforts. After three days at the conference, this came as no surprise. But instead of shying away from this painful topic, it is now time for some honesty and openness.
General / Impulse / Worldwide
An expensive attempt at image cultivation? Five facts showing why that's not the point of a DGNB certificate
Published by Johannes Kreißig
Once a year, the German Taxpayers Federation (BdSt) publishes its 'Schwarzbuch' containing examples of what it considers to be wasteful uses of tax revenues by government departments. The current edition names the DGNB certification system as one such example, under the heading of 'Expensive Image Cultivation'. This leads us to question whether the selection and research methods used by the authors were as thorough as they should be. In this case at least, it shows that judgement was handed down without understanding the subject in the necessary depth. So here in the blog – with the necessary brevity of the format – we present the most important reasons why certification is actually worth it.
certification / DGNB / Sustainable Building
"Good architecture is inconceivable without sustainability"
DGNB CEO Dr Christine Lemaitre was joined by four architects at Expo Real 2019 to discuss 'Sustainable Architecture in the Future' and how this dovetails with their responsibilities, current trends and strategies. They also talked about how sustainability can become the new normal in construction.
General / Phase Sustainability / Sustainable Building
Distinguished for being climate-positive – feedback from key stakeholders
You can erect and use a building without having any negative impact on the environment. Really? Is that possible? Yes, it certainly is. Even today. For the first time, the DGNB bestowed its new Climate Positive award on eleven projects at the Expo Real 2019 trade show. We spoke to the designers, architects and users of the award-winning buildings.
Climate Positive / DGNB / General / Sustainable Building
Answers to Climate Protection Issues – an interview with DGNB President Prof. Alexander Rudolphi
Published by Felix Jansen
Very few could claim to have influenced German sustainable building developments in Germany as much as Prof. Alexander Rudolphi. To the DGNB, he has been an initiator, founding member and president in one – from the very start. His was reappointed to his post in 2019. We spoke to Rudolphi at the Expo Real trade show in Munich, took a snapshot together and looked beyond the horizon.
DGNB / Impulse / Interview / Sustainable Building
Much more than "just" German – the international role played by the DGNB
Yes, it's true: the D part of the DGNB name stands for Deutsch. We're German. This has no impact on our operations as an NPO, however: we act on the global stage. Whether it's in Europe or many other corners of the world, we set up networks and are a much sought-after partner and platform of knowledge for many issues affecting sustainable construction. Probably one of the best examples of this is a recently initiated partnership in Spain.
DGNB / General / Sustainable Building / Worldwide
Moving beyond 'Yes, but…' – No more excuses
The sustainable building philosophy is generally viewed positively, yet large swaths of the construction and real estate industry drag their heels when it comes to implementation, often with a 'Yes, but…' on their lips. In a new publication, the DGNB examines the most common misgivings.
DGNB / Impetus
DGNB & Co. compared – Part 1: basic differences
For many people, the three leading international systems for certifying sustainable buildings – DGNB, LEED and BREEAM – are sometimes used in the same breath and the public perception is that they're largely interchangeable. But if you take a closer look at the obvious overlaps between the systems, there are actually a number of fundamental differences, so it's not quite right to consider them synonymous.
DGNB / DGNB System Version 2018 / General / Sustainable Building
DGNB at Expo Real: record number of certifications and a comprehensive programme
Ten years ago, when the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) was founded, sustainability was a niche topic in the German construction and real estate industry. A decade later, we have made considerable progress.
The circular economy and its role as a driver of sustainability
Thinking consciously about how natural resources are used has always been a core topic at the DGNB. Right from the beginning, the DGNB has offered a certification system that favours a holistic approach to carbon footprints. Therefore, this has always involved not only the conscious selection of building materials according to their composition and origin, but also a methodical assessment of the 'reclaimability' of individual residual materials – all based on strict criteria, criteria that have thus become established in the market.
"Everybody in the project understood the quality improvement"
The DGNB System has been applied in China for some years now and the first projects have already been certified. During BAU Congress China, taking place in July 2016 in Beijing, we talked with two experts that have practical experience in applying the DGNB System on the Chinese market. Their conclusion: The DGNB System is very well received and fits perfectly to the needs of the Chinese market.
DGNB / Interview / Worldwide
Beyond organic: sustainability in the supermarket
Published by Marcus Herget
When we're shopping and we think about sustainability, our thoughts quickly turn to the many shades of organic, green and vegan. But the supermarket itself – or rather the building, how it was built and the technical equipment – can also be an impressive testimony to the powers of sustainability, as the retail chain REWE has shown. I recently went on a store visit in the Frankfurt suburb of Praunheim and it was a chance to take a first-hand look at what green building means to the company.
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text:
Kentucky Democrats Unveil Proposals To Address Surging Pension Costs
By Ryland Barton
Photo: Thinkstock
Democrats in Kentucky's House of Representatives have unveiled two bills to try and address surging pension costs currently being experienced by the state's regional universities and small agencies like health departments.
The proposals come as Gov. Matt Bevin has been trying to rally support for his own bill and has promised to call a special session for state lawmakers to vote on it.
A Republican House leader said Wednesday that the session might start on July 19 during a narrow window when enough lawmakers will be back from summer vacations or conferences.
Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, the top Democrat in the House, said that his party's proposals would provide more "stability and certainty" to the agencies than the governor's version.
"We have several days left here to meet in a good faith effort, to bring together what could potentially be a proposal that will bring about bipartisan support," Adkins said.
Optimistic Or Pessimistic Assumptions?
Regional universities and the "quasi" agencies had to pay 68 percent more into Kentucky's pension system starting July 1, leading to worries about cuts in services or closures.
The spike is happening because in 2017, the board that manages the pensions of most state workers, adopted more pessimistic assumptions for investments and payroll growth. As a result, government employers have to kick in more money to keep the system going.
Both bills proposed by Democrats would freeze the payments at the lower rate and shift money from the state's retiree health insurance fund to the pension system for five years.
Democrats said Kentucky's health insurance fund is better-funded than other states' and would be replenished by higher payments in the future.
One of the bills put forward by Democrats would adopt slightly more optimistic assumptions for pension investments and payroll growth — moving current predictions from 0 percent payroll growth to 1 percent and 5.25 percent returns on investments to 6.25 percent.
Rep. Joe Graviss, a Democrat from Versailles, said the state needs to find more revenue to fund payroll growth.
"We believe that we cannot continue to cut and take away services away from Kentuckians and provide a government to them that serves their needs by continuing to shed employees and cut and cut and cut," Graviss said.
The number of employees in Kentucky's main pension system has been declining for years, while the number of retirees has been increasing.
The system's assumed rate of return on pension investments is the lowest of 129 state pension plans across the country, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
House Speaker David Osborne issued a statement saying he was reviewing the proposals, but that he already had concerns.
"Our preliminary concern, of course, is that these are the very same policies that led to the pension problems we face today. Adopting assumptions that defy ten years of trends with regards to investment returns and payroll growth is particularly concerning," Osborne wrote.
"As always, we have to realize that this money has to come from either the pockets of Kentuckians or from the services that state government provides."
Ryland Barton @RylandKY
Ryland Barton is the Capitol bureau chief for Kentucky Public Radio.
By Ryland Barton @RylandKY


Okay, i'm not saying they commute by bus at all (doubtful), nor am i necessarily implying that they take the short bus (of course not), but the one thing of which i'm 100% sure is that they don't use the Miami-Dade bus route 72.
Let me explain. One of the most important stops for bus 72 is the South Miami Metrorail stop, the transfer point for inbound commuters heading downtown. The route that the 72 takes to get to its bay at the station is a most hair-pullingly, circuitous thing. The kicker is that it's completely unnecessary, and this is why i started with such a click-baity generalization: surely nobody who has to set foot on this bus gave the greenlight to this plan!
Here's a map of the station under scrutiny, taken from this view of Open Street Map.
Morning inbound commuters are traveling east on Southwest 72nd Street, as artistically indicated by an arrow. The bus comes to the end of its line at the point underlined with red. Apart from the parking garage, fire station, and the overhead metrorail lines, the half-block with the station is open and either paved or covered in grass. How do you think the 72 bus reaches its bay?
Here's the Google Street View of the intersection at the lower left, looking toward the metrorail station and the bus bays.
Scuttlebut has it (okay, so it was actually a bus driver) that, once upon a time, when bus 72 arrived at the station, it would make a left turn onto Southwest 59th Place, and then immediately right into the bus depot, pull into its bay, and stop to drop off the passengers so they could hop on the incoming metrorail train. Simple and efficient, right? It can leave the station on its return trip by continuing on through to the exit at the northeast corner. It sure makes sense.
It makes a left turn onto Southwest 59th Place, after waiting at the light on 72nd Street (a major street). It trundles north to the traffic light at Southwest 70th Street, turns right, and proceeds east to the intersection with US1, probably the most traffic-choked surface street during rush hour. It waits for the light, turns right onto US1, travels the length of the station, and finally makes another right turn into the station itself. In other words, it completely circles the station, like an enormous, ungainly dog trying to settle down for a nap. At this point, not only is the bus out of diesel, but everyone has missed the train.
This jaunt around the station requires an additional two stops and almost 1/2 mile of extra travel. Depending on traffic conditions and light timing, it can delay riders for as much as five minutes. And it does it every single trip it makes, 29 times each weekday. Even with a very conservative mileage estimate of 10 miles/gallon, that comes out to more than an extra gallon of gas a day, nevermind the lost time and wear and tear on the brakes, transmission, and passenger nerves.
You might think that the bus driver's story is merely a rumor, and that some obscure property or zoning law is standing in the way of this thing making sense and not wasting thousands of dollars a year in public resources and private time. You might think it's just one of the myriad little red tape issues that puzzle us.
You might think that, until you see this Google Earth image from 2004!
So my question for the responsible parties, in amazingly sardonic tones (if you don't know me, you will have to take my word for it): Why is there no longer a bus entrance to South Miami metrorail station from Southwest 59th Place? Why was it removed, along with the trees, and converted to a couple pedestrian pathways and sunbaked dust-grass? Why are you wasting so much time and money and creating ill will for the Miami bus system?


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Home Poker News Poker Bot Pluribus wins AI award for its creator
Poker Bot Pluribus wins AI award for its creator
Published by: Jon Pill
Pluribus, Carnegie Mellon's poker bot, has won an AI award for Tuomas Sandholm, one of its creators.
Sandholm received the 2021 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) as recognition for his research in the field of AI and for his service to the AI community.
As well as being part of the team that cracked the complexity of multi-opponent games, Sandholm's intelligences are currently running the U.S. kidney donor bank. Around 80% of U.S. kidney transplant sites have been using his algorithms to pair donors and recipients since 2010.
How to think like a killer app
The basic way a bot works is by assessing the current situation and then simulating all the possible moves it could make, then all the possible answers to those moves, then all its possible answers to those answers and so on. After a set number of imagined moves into the future, it looks at the strings of decisions and makes the move that results in the best possible outcome for itself, assuming that its opponent plays the best possible moves for them.
The job of AI programmers like Sandholm is to create an algorithm that simulates all the possible moves efficiently, assessing the results (or end state) accurately.
The more options a bot has, the more simulations it must run. The clearer the metrics for assessment, the more straightforward the process. Poker has enormous complications in the first of those spheres, which Sandholm helped to crack.
Luckily assessing the outcomes is a bit easier: what move wins the most or loses the least amount of lettuce?
The clockwork ticking
In 1996 it was chess. Garry Kasparov lost the deciding match to Deep Blue.
In 2016, Go was next. Lee Sedol lost his match 4-1. It was almost a whitewash but something seemed to go badly wrong with AlphaGo's search function in match 4.
AlphaGo has moved on to solving unsolvable problems like protein folding, leaving the playing fields to younger AIs, and setting forth to solve real scientific issues.
But it left one stone unturned. That of poker. Poker may be a less elegant game than Go, but that is precisely what made it the next holy grail for AI research.
Go is played by two players. Both players know the full state of the board. Poker, one the other hand, can have up to ten people per table. And players are never privy to an opponent's hand until the showdown. Information is messy and incomplete.
It is this incomplete information that makes poker hard for an AI to handle. Each bit of information missing from the board makes for an extra set of simulations. The software has to run all of them to an end state before it can decide what to do. That costs time.
An additional complication with poker comes in table-stakes games. Two factors dictate the number of possible bet sizes: the player's effective stack sizes and the increments in which a player can bet. A $10,000 effective stack has 1,000,000 possible bet sizes if you can bet in one cent increments.
To counter this, Sandholm's Pluribus simply ran its simulations using a limited set of possible bet sizes. For example, with effective stacks of 100bb, it might run 20 simulations, each using bet sizes with 5bb increments.
This greatly reduces the computing power required.
It was enough to make Pluribus's forefather, Libratus, good enough to crush the best players' heads-up. In June 2019, Pluribus was able to do the same in the chaotic world of six-max.
A year is a long time in silicon valley. There's already a new shark in the AI player pool. This one is called ReBeL, it does everything Pluribus does from a smaller starting blueprint. And it's owned by Facebook.
Enjoy your prize while you can, Sandholm. The singularity is coming.
Interested in working in the AI field? See our article: Top AI Job Trends in the U.S.
WPT reaches archival distribution deal with Fubo Sports Network
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Partypoker closes 306 cheating accounts during 2021
Alexander Yen's FT curse ends with $975k win at WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open


Most of the people who work in the restaurant as a waiter or waitresses, know how easily mistakes are made. Errors happen on a daily bases and can vary from small mistakes to harmful incidents. Problem-solving is a science itself with plenty of stakeholders considerations: It may not cost too much money, but bad word-to-mouth is also not wanted. Either way, guests should be motivated to complain because in the end, it is only feedback on which can be improved (Willott, n.d.).
and Boo S. (Kim & Boo, 2011) regarding complaint-handling shows that customers who experienced a bad complaint-handling, the threshold for dissatisfaction of service next time, will be even lower which means the next visit they will be dissatisfied even earlier. Other research shows there is positive relation between complaint-seeking and profit (Willott, n.d.) and losing customers. There are many factors that influences the decisions to complain: perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice derived from an error in the service actually have positive impact on the satisfaction of the customer (Kim & Boo, 2011). It seems clear that complaints are of good influence on the company. A Belgium company also had this thought, and sent out a 'complaint card' to all its customers (Looy et al., 2003).
However, demanding complaints too explicitly may provoke dissatisfaction which would not be there if there was not asked for (Looy et al., 2003). Asking too much for negative feedback should be avoided for one simple reason. If the customer is more or less pushed to complain about minor problems, it is also expected that every of these problems are resolved the next visit, which is impossible. If the outcome of the complaint is positive it causes satisfaction, but if the outcome is negative (minor problem not solved) it causes even more dissatisfaction. This phenomenon is also known as the frustration-effect.
It can be concluded that complaint handling should be encouraged. Customers often keep their complain a secret and share it with other except for the employees. Which is a pity, because handling complaints good results in more satisfaction for the guest. Besides that, complaints are free feedback, you find out what customers find really important and lose fewer customers.
Restaurant. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 20, 217-237.
Van Looy, B., Gemmel, P. & van Dierdonck, R. (2003). Services Management: An Integrated Approach.
Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited.


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"Your heart goes out:" Red Cross providing disaster relief in Cambria after fatal blast at mill
By Carl Deffenbaugh
Red Cross providing disaster relief
CAMBRIA -- The Columbia County Sheriff's Office opened a reception center at the First Presbyterian Church located at 121 W. Florence Street in Cambria following a deadly explosion at Didion Milling late Wednesday, May 31st.
The Red Cross has "Disaster Specialist" staff on site for people to talk to and receive assistance from. The church will be open until 10:00 p.m. Thursday and reopen at 9:00 a.m. Friday.
Explosion at Didion Milling in Columbia County
The blast at the Didion Milling Plant in Cambria left at least two people dead. Emergency workers were still searching for two employees as of Thursday afternoon. Around a dozen other employees were taken to area hospitals. None of the workers have been identified.
The cause of the blast remained unknown as of Thursday afternoon, Didion officials said.
Sixteen employees were working when the blast was reported around 11:00 p.m. Wednesday.
Two employees who were injured were treated and released. Eleven were taken to hospitals by ambulance, Med Flight and Flight for Life.
Cambria resident
FOX6 spoke with a number of Cambria residents who expressed shock.
"Sounded like thunder to us, but nah, it's too nice of weather and everything," said Lee Vaughan. "And then shortly after that, there were sirens going for probably the next 45 minutes to an hour, and the med flights coming in with the sirens -- we knew there was a lot of tragedy going on."
Barbara Behling
Residents of small village in Columbia County are now trying to find a way to rally around community members dealing with a tragedy.
"The worst thing that can happen to a parent is to bury your child, and now it's parents and a grandparent who's very close with her great-grandson. Had just had a little baby as well. Your heart just goes out to all these family members that are affected," Barbara Behling, chief communications officer, American Red Cross said.
Red Cross officials are providing everything from health services to counseling -- anything the families and residents need.
"Isolation can be very bad, so being able to talk about some feelings and being able to share human contact with others is very powerful in this time," Behling said.
The same goes for students at the school that borders the plant. The Cambria-Friesland School District was not holding classes on Thursday. School will be back in session Friday.
Explosion at mill in Cambria
Superintendent Timothy Raymond says early childhood through 12th grade is housed in one building about an eighth of a mile from the plant. He says the district decided to shut down Thursday as a precaution in case the fire wasn't completely extinguished.
Didion employs more than 200 people from around the area. Raymond said his district and surrounding districts plan to coordinate on supplying counselors if students need them on Friday.
"Whether it's a kindergartner or a senior in high school, they will have someone to be there for grief counseling, or just the opportunity to walk through and discuss the incredibly tragic events," said Raymond.
CLICK HERE if you'd like to make a donation to the American Red Cross to support their efforts.
First Presbyterian Church in Cambria
The Columbia County Sheriff's Office has shared information about a fund for the victims:
Old Mill Foundation has set up a fund specifically for this purpose at the National Exchange Bank of Cambria.
Anyone interested in making a donation to help please send your checks to:
Old Mill Foundation Didion Benefit Fund
National Exchange Bank
118 West Edgewater Street
Cambria, Wisconsin 53923
These funds will go directly to assisting those affected.
35th and Burnham crash; driver struck tree, 2 injured


text: Troi Irons refuses to be pigeonholed. Irons makes music that grabs, urgently, influences from all over the map—the pointed lyrics of Alanis Morrissette, the sinewy churn of The Dead Weather, and the in-your-face wail of Shirley Manson are just a few of the reference points that come to mind when listening to Turbulence, Irons' debut EP. Irons' lyrics speak frankly of defying boundaries—"Maybe I'm screws loose, maybe it's you/ Some say I'm too blue, so what if it's true," Irons spits over the sitar-led maelstrom of "Peculiar"—and tackling hard situations head-on. The electric blues of "Fool" are turbo-charged by Irons' wail recounting 2 a.m. arguments and a wavy guitar riff that sounds summoned from the world's depths. Growing up in a musical household in Nevada allowed Irons, who graduated high school at age 12, to be similarly prodigious in making music. "My parents got me a keyboard when I was nine," Irons recalls, "and my grandparents got me a guitar that I never played until we moved to L.A.—I had a lot of time before school started and was bored, so I picked that up and I started playing." Irons' attraction to the churning guitars and confrontational stances of rock was clandestine at first. "There was a little radio on top of a table," Irons recalls. "and I'd sit underneath it and listen to the radio. I would dial until I heard something that I liked, and just hang out by myself." Stumbling upon a radio station that played a mix of classic and modern rock—Journey alongside Green Day, what Irons calls "pre-teen angst music"—opened a door not only to music outside of the family's normal listening habits, but a glimpse at the up-close way artists interact with their fans. "I grew up going to Warped seeing Boys Like Girls and Panic! at the Disco," says Irons. "I was in those crowds, and they were talking to me. When someone mentions Brendon Urie, I'm like, 'Oh yeah. I kind of know that guy. I was 100 yards from him a few years ago.'" That reflexive memory doubles as a reminder to her that intimate environments can have a long-lasting effect, one that she hopes to pass along to listeners when they see her play out. Irons' raw voice, super-distorted riffs, and beats that have just enough of a robo-funk edge to get listeners' combat boots dancing are a heady combination; add to that the way Irons smashes to bits the ideas of who makes and listens to rock, and you have an immediate connection with listeners looking for a release valve. "I realized that it wasn't about me—I'm a very small portion of what's actually going on here," says Irons. "Once I was able to get outside myself, then I was able to focus on giving. I think when you give your world gets larger, cause it's like the universe recognizes, 'Oh great, there's someone I can funnel blessings to everyone else through.' Then, you get more than you need. Once I realized that, my goal was, 'How can I change things? How can I be more and help everyone who's around me?' That's when everything started getting super easy. "If you have real music, people will listen," Irons states emphatically. "It doesn't matter if they know who you are or not—these kids who look and live outside the norm need this, and the kids who dream when people tell them not to need this. They need to know that you can still be who you are and do what you want."


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Megamoera unimaki är en kräftdjursart som beskrevs av Jarrett och Edward Lloyd Bousfield 1996. Megamoera unimaki ingår i släktet Megamoera och familjen Melitidae. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Märlkräftor
unimaki


Every year there's always a few really ticklish patients that struggle to get through their ultrasounds. They squirm, they huff, they squeeze their eyes shut really tight and they tense up every muscle in their body. It's alarming to a tech doing an ultrasound. And its a difficult exam to complete. You worry about hurting your patient and their involuntary movements or laughter make it difficult to find clear windows for imaging.
Recently I learned two great tricks that make working with a ticklish patient much easier from a massage therapist friend. I liked them so much that I had to share.


Once in a lifetime a song is written that makes you sit back and think to yourself, "Man, this would make for a great ending song to my favorite movie/television show" because it just somehow meshes with an ending that's really sad, really poignant, or really happy. Thanks to comedy writer and film fanatic Peter Salomone, not only do we no longer have to pick one song for each movie ending ever created, but he's already found it for us: Dire Straits' "Walk Of Life" from 1985's best selling album Brothers In Arms.
Whether your favorite movie is The Graduate or the gritty, ultra-violent 80's flick Robocop, it's got one thing in common with every other movie ever made: the ending is even better when you add Dire Straits to the soundtrack.
No, really – it works, and here's why: "Walk Of Life" has a melody that's friendly enough to mold itself to any feeling in any context and still be appropriate – silly, sad, poignant or indifferent, the main character dies from cancer or remembering a particularly happy moment, you've got yourself an Oscar-winning ending.
It's also one you've heard thousands of times, even if you're not a Dire Straits fan or even a rock fan. "Walk Of Life" also isn't really about anything in particular, making it the perfect soundtrack to a moment; supporting it without overshadowing it with lyrics the viewer has to actually think about.
Still don't believe us? See for yourselves in the videos below!


The Tax Court had held in the Wandry case (TC Memo 2012-88) that a fixed-dollar gift of an LLC interest (as opposed to a fixed percentage) was valid for gift tax purposes. This would be very helpful for taxpayers making gifts of hard to value assets. The IRS issued a notice that it will not acquiesce in this decision. AOD appearing at 2012-46 IRB. Some commentators believe this means that Treasury may issue regulations against fixed-dollar gifts, or that they have a better case in the pipeline.


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Home » Blog » The Link Between Creativity and Eccentricity
The Link Between Creativity and Eccentricity
It's common knowledge that creatives can be eccentric. We've seen this throughout history. Even Plato and Aristotle observed odd behaviors among playwrights and poets, writes Harvard University researcher Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity and Innovation in Your Life, in the May/June 2011 issue of Scientific American.
She gave several examples of creatives' strange behaviors:
"Albert Einstein picked up cigarette butts off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other deceased luminaries from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London."
But what's most compelling is that research has corroborated the connection between creativity and eccentricity. And it starts, interestingly enough, with schizotypal personality, a milder version of schizotypal personality disorder.
According to Carson in the article:
"Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann's belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens's belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities — Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favored work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes's legendary distrust of others)."
Not everyone with schizotypal personality has a personality disorder, however. Many are bright and high-functioning.
Carson cited various studies that found that creative people tend to score higher on schizotypal surveys. For instance, her research has revealed that some creative students tend to report magical thinking and odd perceptual experiences.
"In my research at Harvard, done in part with my colleague Cynthia A. Meyersburg, I have found that study participants who score high in a measure of creative achievement in the arts are more likely to endorse magical thinking — such as belief in telepathic communication, dreams that portend the future, and memories of past lives. These participants are also more likely to attest to unusual perceptual experiences, such as having frequent déjà vu and hearing voices whispering in the wind."
Cognitive Disinhibition
It isn't that having schizotypal personality predisposes one to creativity, Carson clarifies in the article. It's more complex than that. Instead, a cognitive mechanism called cognitive disinhibition may underlie eccentricity.
Cognitive disinhibition occurs when we're unable to ignore irrelevant or extraneous information. Think of it this way: Every day, every minute, we're bombarded by data — lots of data. It's impossible to attend to all this information. Fortunately, we have mental filters that block this information from reaching our conscious awareness and take care of the behind-the-scenes processing, Carson writes.
One of these filters is called latent inhibition (LI). In a 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Carson and colleagues defined LI as: "the varying capacity of the brain to screen from current attentional focus stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant."
Everyone is different in how much information their brains filter out. Research has found that reduced LI is associated with increased vulnerability to schizophrenia and the full-blown disorder. In the Scientific American article, Carson theorizes why:
"Reduced LI appears to increase the amount of unfiltered stimuli reaching our conscious awareness and is associated with offbeat thoughts and hallucinations. It is easy to see that allowing unfiltered information into consciousness could lead to strange perceptual experiences, such as hearing voices or seeing imaginary people."
Cognitive disinhibition also provides some clues about why highly creative people turn inward and don't focus much on day-to-day tasks:
"Reduced cognitive filtering could explain the tendency of highly creative people to focus intensely on the content of their inner world at the expense of social or even self-care needs. (Beethoven, for example, had difficulty tending to his own cleanliness.) When conscious awareness is overpopulated with unusual and unfiltered stimuli, it is difficult not to focus attention on that inner universe."
Of course, we know that not everyone who's weird is creative. What's the missing link?
According to Carson's research with Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto, individuals who score high on creative scales also have high IQ and a high working-memory capacity. In the 2003 article, Carson, Peterson and Higgins write:
"In all of our studies and analyses, high IQ, when combined with low LI, was associated with increased creative achievement. These results are particularly stunning in the analysis of eminent achievers and high-functioning controls. High IQ clearly appeared to augment the tendency toward high creative achievement characteristic of low-LI individuals.
These results lend support to the theory that there may be qualitative (e.g., failure to filter out irrelevant stimuli) as well as quantitative (e.g., high IQ) differences in the processes underlying creative versus normal cognition."
(Here's a press release of the research.)
Brain Research & Cognitive Disinhibition
Electroencephalography (EEG) studies substantiate the idea of cognitive disinhibition. Specifically, this research has found that when creative people are doing creative tasks, they tend to have more alpha brain waves, Carson reports in the article.
Colin Martindale of the University of Maine and his colleagues, who first conducted the series of studies on creativity using EEG, attribute the increased alpha waves to "decreased cortical arousal and defocused attention," according to Carson. They believe that creative people attend to more information as they're creatively working.
Andreas Fink and researchers at the University of Graz in Austria replicated Martindale's research. But his team believes that the alpha waves indicate that highly creative people are more focused on internal stimuli (i.e., their inner worlds), which is a schizotypal trait.
Recently, Carson published her theory on the connection between creativity and eccentricity, the shared vulnerability model, in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. She posits that some of the biological vulnerabilities that predispose individuals to disorders like schizophrenia are shared by some highly creative individuals. These individuals are more open — thanks to latent inhibition, for instance — to novel, creative ideas than folks whose mental filters do suppress scores of irrelevant information. However, they're protected from psychopathology by traits such as high IQ and increased working memory capacity.
She and Peterson and Higgins touched on this in their 2003 article:
"…These results also support the theory that highly creative individuals and psychotic-prone individuals may possess neurobiological similarities, perhaps genetically determined, that present either as psychotic predisposition on the one hand or as unusual creative potential on the other on the basis of the presence of moderating cognitive factors such as high IQ (e.g., Berenbaum & Fujita, 1994; Dykes & McGhie, 1976; Eysenck, 1995). These moderating factors may allow an individual to override a "deficit" in early selective attentional processing with a high-functioning mechanism at a later, more controlled level of selective processing. The highly creative individual may be privileged to access a greater inventory of unfiltered stimuli during early processing, thereby increasing the odds of original recombinant ideation. Thus, a deficit that is generally associated with pathology may well impart a creative advantage in the presence of other cognitive strengths such as high IQ."
What are your thoughts on these research studies? What about creativity in general?
Do you think there's a link between creativity and eccentricity? What about creativity and psychopathology?
See here for an excerpt of the book, Your Creative Brain.
Tartakovsky, M. (2018). The Link Between Creativity and Eccentricity. Psych Central. Retrieved on January 18, 2020, from https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-link-between-creativity-and-eccentricity/
Last updated: 8 Jul 2018 (Originally: 21 May 2011)


Celebrity Cruises has announced their vessel, the Celebrity Silhouette, will be hosting the first Coachella-at-sea music festival later in the year.
The cruise line will offer two back-to-back voyages aboard the 3000-capacity Silhouette. The first of which will depart from Fort Lauderdale on 16 th December bound for Bahamas, and then again on the 19th December for a trip to Jamaica.
This will be the first time that Coachella has been hosted at a venue other than the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Acts confirmed for the festival's high-seas debut include Pulp, Girl Talk and Hot Chip and will perform on purpose-built stages on the main pool deck as well as in two inside venues.
The festival, which has existed in various guises since the late 1990s, is seen as a staple of the US live music calendar with the likes of Madonna, Eminem, and Paul McCartney all having performed in recent years.
Celebrity Cruises, who will rebrand the Silhouette the 'SS Coachella' for the voyages, believe the unlikely partnership will delight regular festival-goers, with their Vice President, Dondra Ritzenthaler stating "We're thrilled to be providing the setting for SS Coachella. Just as the Celebrity Cruises name is synonymous with modern style, service and cuisine, the Coachella name is synonymous with cutting-edge, of-the-moment music trends".
This is not the first time a cruise ship has been used to host such an event, with both Weezer and 70s rock legends Kiss organising similar musical cruise-weekends in the past 12 months.


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Meridian School is a school of choice. Students who attend are expected to be academically motivated and work toward the embodiment of the ten learner traits. Parents are to support the students in their endeavors both in terms of academics and character. There are 2 forms that parents are required to sign with the registrar as a part of the registration package. The first is the Parent Agreement stating your intent to support these policies with your student. The second indicates your commitment to model Meridian's values inherent in the IB Learner Traits to your student(s) at Meridian School through the Parent Commitment form.


Occasionally experiencing a poor night's sleep is troublesome, but rarely cause for concern. However, if you are consistently finding it difficult to sleep soundly, feel fatigued and sluggish during the day, or have been told you snore, you may be suffering from sleep apnea. While sleep apnea affects millions of patients each year, it goes undiagnosed in most cases, despite having significant long-term consequences to oral and overall health. Chronic sleep apnea disturbs the deep and regenerative sleep needed for the body to fully rest and recharge in order to function energetically throughout the day. Treating sleep apnea not only helps patients maintain better sleep at night, but reduces their risk for associated health concerns, including chronic fatigue and depression.
Our treatment for sleep apnea includes a minimally invasive home sleep study and custom oral appliance. We take a personalized approach to your treatment planning, ensuring treatment is tailored to your situation and produces the most beneficial long-term improvements to your sleep and health.
The most common form, obstructive sleep apnea, is characterized by routine and frequent cessations in breathing when the upper airway is blocked, oftentimes due to the lower jaw falling backward during a relaxed sleep state. A partially blocked airway induces snoring, while full obstruction can leave patients routinely waking throughout the night gasping for breath. Our treatment begins with a review of your sleep study or WatchPAT home sleep study to determine the severity of your sleep apnea. We use this information when discussing your goals and creating your personalized treatment. This minimally invasive solution is a beneficial alternative to patients who may be CPAP intolerant or have mild to moderate sleep apnea. Most of our patients benefit from custom oral appliances that keep the jaw in a forward position and the airways open, which helps reduce snoring and improve quality of sleep!
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