text:
CNBC 2018 Summer Intern Reflection
August 15, 2018 September 16, 2018 keazore
This summer I was a dual production intern at CNBC in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, splitting my time there between the Assignment Desk and one of the afternoon shows called Power Lunch. This was my first time ever covering business news, so the dual production internship was a great route to take. On the Assignment Desk I was able to pitch and write articles for the web, write scripts for our segments on NBC and MSNBC and attend planning meetings. Working on the desk really helped me see the interworking of the organization. I was added to what felt like a million different email groups, so I was able to receive everything from planning emails to stock ticker alerts and everything in between. Being privy to all that information and simply listening to what was happening around me, I was able to get a good sense of what's 'news' in the business world and learn more about the CNBC brand.
The desk also provided me with a lot of 'fieldtrips,' though I was a desk intern I was never really tied to the desk. Half of my time dedicated to the desk, I spent doing production at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), where we shoot a good chunk of our daily shows from.
Selfie from the NYSE set
Working at NYSE was amazing, not just because the building is simply beautiful, but you get to be right there in the center of the action. You get to see the crowds of people who come to see the bell ring and see the frenzy when stocks take an unexpected dip. It did however, expose to me a bit of the lack of diversity and exposure in business. The people who would come to ring the bell or take general tours rarely ever looked like me, so that served as a reminder that often times people of color don't know about certain opportunities. This summer wasn't my first time in New York and I never knew that there was an option to take tours of the NYSE. But, besides that it was great. I really enjoyed watching the NYSE crew work and seeing how in sync they were with the teams of producers back in Jersey.
The days I was assigned to the desk, but not at the NYSE were also always fun and eventful. I was either at the desk watching breaking news unfold or being sent out on a story. All the stories I covered were incredibly different and unique. My favorite was when I was assigned to do man on the street (MOS) interviews in the middle of Times Square about Amazon's Prime Day. The goal was to get reaction sound about the website's crash from locals, since people on vacation typically don't spend their vacation shopping online. It was difficult to say the least, partially because it's always difficult to get people to stop for a MOS but because I was in fast paced New York, where no one was interested in stopping. But also, because the current national sentiment towards the media didn't make it any easier. My wonderful photog that day got a good kick out of seeing my laid back Southern self try to spark up conversation with people on the street who were nearly running to get away from me. But eventually I got my groove and great sound and all the packages turned out great.
When I wasn't on the desk or in the city at the NYSE, I was the Production Intern on the phenomenal two-hour show, Power Lunch. Working for Power Lunch was great! I was able to work with a team of brilliant and passionate people who really knew what they were talking about. I enjoyed being able to watch a show come together from our morning planning meetings to when we went on air. I also had the opportunity to see how my work on the desk translated to the rest of the newsroom. On the desk, in the afternoon we would go over the list of available stories for the next day as well as have reporters and show producers pitch stories. Power Lunch allowed me to see how each show selected their segments from the available story list, and see other ideas go from pitches to aired packages. I enjoyed Power Lunch because I felt like the team was constantly pushing me to be a better journalist, always presenting me with new opportunities to gain and hone my new skills. I feel like they really made an effort to make me a part of the team, I never felt afraid to speak up. The team always listened to my ideas and story pitches, no matter how far-fetched, and that I appreciated.
My favorite part of working on Power Lunch was that my team encouraged me to be hands on. I got the opportunity to produce a segment, our senior producer supervised me, but really gave me the reins and allowed me to tackle it. I was able to do everything from selecting and ingesting the song used for the tease to booking the guest's car. It was really fun to be able to put together all the elements like that. What wasn't so great, was the segment got killed twice for breaking news. BUT, it finally did air, I was just away at NABJ when it did. I still was really proud of myself and thankful to my team for that opportunity.
What I really enjoyed most about CNBC, were the people. Being able to sit down and talk to people who remember when CNBC started was both amazing and mind-blowing. Just to pick their brains to see what was going through their minds when they decided to take a job a brand new network and the all possible uncertainty behind it. But to also sit down with people who created shows, that are still on air today to talk about that creative process was incredible.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at CNBC, the bonds I created, the skills I gained and the memories I made.
CNBC Summer Intern Class
Kyra Azore and NBC Sports Intern Adrienne Smith
Crying on my last day
NBCUniversal Photo Booth
Intern Lunch & Learn
Intern Appreciation Day Social
Kyra Azore in the CNBC Newsroom
Published by keazore
View all posts by keazore
Previous post#NABJ18
Next postFirst MMJ Experience


text:
Henry George Foundation of Canada
Earthsharing Economics Primer
You are here: Home, A Tax that Would Solve the Housing Crisis
A Tax that Would Solve the Housing Crisis
By Frank de Jong ~ Posted Mon, 2018-06-04 20:27
Eliminate all taxes but a levy on land, said Henry George. Here's why it would work.
By Patrick Condon Today | TheTyee.ca
Professor Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design Program.
https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing-Crisis/
Henry George: 'Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.' Illustration by Walter Russell, Public Domain.
But mostly overlooked in this debate is the real problem. It's not that houses cost a lot. They don't. Building a house in Vancouver costs roughly the same per square foot as in 100 Mile House.
It's the land under homes that cost a lot. And land, because they are not making any more of it, is particularly susceptible to speculative pressures.
This isn't the first time that the cost of urban land has spiralled beyond the reach of average wage earners. During the last "Gilded Age," between 1870 and the advent of the First World War, land prices also rose dramatically. A bold solution came out of that time, championed by a popular political economist.
His name was Henry George.
George and the Single Tax movement
Henry George was born in Philadelphia in 1839. He was the second of 10 children in a lower-middle-class family. George started off as a journalist, working mostly in California, but with a brief stint in Victoria during his 20s.
One day in 1887 on a horseback ride, he stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay. He met a teamster, and to make small talk, he asked how much land nearby was worth. The teamster didn't know how much exactly, but said there was a local who was willing to sell his property for a $1,000 an acre.
It was an epiphany for George.
"Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth," George later wrote. "With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege."
George would champion the Single Tax movement, which has renewed relevance today given how urban land values are pushing housing costs more and more out of reach. George argued for the elimination of income taxes, taxes on sales and taxes on productive capital like machinery or buildings.
There should only be one tax, George said, and that would be on land. To our modern ears this sounds irrational and our skepticism is largely a testament to how savagely his ideas were attacked at the time — an attack that endures to this day.
George's hypothesis was this: land, since it gains its value passively (just by sitting there without adding anything to production), should be very heavily taxed. This would reduce or eliminate the tax burden on the labour of wage earners, the profit of owners and the buildings and machinery that makes production possible.
Reader, if you have a bit of exposure to political economy, you might recognize something unique about this formulation. While Marx pitted workers against owners, Henry George united them. To George, workers and owners were on the same side. By working together, both made the world a better and richer place.
The real drag on culture, George argued, were people whose gains came passively by just sitting on a resource, doing nothing to it as its value rose.
What George found most outrageous was that the value of any piece of urban land didn't come from the effort of its owner; its value reflected past labour and enterprise performed on surrounding lands. Yet most of the gains from all this creative effort went to the land owner/speculator with very little to the people who actually created that value.
In the case of Vancouver, current land prices are high because of all the good work done and taxes paid by previous generations of citizens. But are these citizens or their children reaping any reward?
Most outrageously, land owners/speculators often gained the most by leaving their urban land empty and thus useless. Being useless, the land was often not taxed, even though its value steadily increased by the growth of the surrounding city.
George argued that taxes should be shifted to land and away from labour and productive capital. With land heavily taxed, it would be in the interests of land owners to find the most productive use for it. It would also mean that inflation of land prices would be mitigated, as land purchasers would know that heavy taxes came with owning land. Thus, the tax shift would both reduce taxes on productive activities and make land cheaper to put to productive use.
Reader, do you find George's plan reasonable?
If so, you would join the many millions who agreed with George during his lifetime. He became famous throughout the English-speaking world before his life was cut short at 58 by a stroke. His book Progress and Poverty sold millions of copies, even outselling the Bible during all of the 1890s.
Is land a commodity?
But what happened to George's ideas? Why didn't they take hold?
George was fiercely opposed by the landed gentry of his time, the very same people — the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers — who were gaining fantastic wealth through passive gains on land.
They responded to the Georgian surge by funding entire academic programs to crush the Single Tax movement's popularity, paying carefully selected academics to muddy George's case. One such program was the "Chicago school" at the University of Chicago, still a hugely influential source for conservative economic thought today (for example, Milton Friedman, former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, taught there).
The Chicago school and other "liberal" think tanks successfully removed George's qualitative distinction between land (in his view, inherently unproductive) and labour, enterprise, machinery and buildings (in George's view, productive contributors to society).
Now, classical economists treat land as a form of capital, equal in productive value to other capital goods — such as apartment buildings, factories or railroad rolling stock. These economists were successful because the rest of us can no longer see the distinction between "passive" land and productive labour and capital. Without this distinction, our thinking is too muddled to see how land, in the hands of speculators, impedes the development of an equitable and productive Vancouver.
582px version of USLandValueMap.jpg
Figure 1. Map of the U.S. showing counties indicating value of land therein. As one would expect, urban areas have the highest value per county. Similar images are not available for Canada but would indicate the same patterns. Max Galka, Metrocosm.
582px version of USLandValueMap2.jpg
Figure 2. Map of the U.S. showing the same information as in Figure 1, but with counties sized to conform with the total value of land in that county. The overwhelming value of urban lands is thus more clearly illustrated. Similar image for Canada not available but would show the same exaggerated pattern. Max Galka, Metrocosm.
No love for lazy land
Reader, if you're with me so far, you're ready for another word that has been exiled by classical economists: the rentier. The word rentier is also making a comeback, in line with the revival of Georgian thought. This is no surprise.
A rentier is one who gains wealth through passive actions. Land speculators, who add to their wealth by letting the value of land rise and/or collecting ever higher rents for the use of land, are rentiers.
The English landed gentry of yore were probably the most famous category of rentier. But the term applies to anyone who gains wealth passively. It's a useful distinction, and one that we hear more and more.
The wealthy are often called "job creators" on the assumption that those who gain wealth do so through their investment of entrepreneurial energy and money into business activities. In the process, job creators provide work and income for wage earners.
Henry George would agree. He applauded the "job creators."
But sadly, because of the work of classical economists, we lump active entrepreneurs together with passive rentiers. While it's fair to celebrate Elon Musk and Steve Jobs for their success as job creators, it's not so appealing to similarly celebrate those who passively use their wealth to acquire more wealth, a wealth that is typically taxed at a very low rate, if it is taxed at all.
In most countries, the largest tax burden falls onto the backs of wage earners in the form of income tax. Not very Georgian. Profits acquired through land sale are typically taxed at much lower capital gains rates, with advantageous real estate loopholes available to bring the tax burden on land sales to zero in many cases (for more see Trump, Donald J.).
Here in Vancouver, we see how land is increasingly forcing housing out of reach of wage earners and sapping the economic strength of the city. Productive, well-educated, creative wage earners can no longer afford to live here.
As they move away, the capacity of the city to generate new enterprise is also diminished. We are not just talking about high-tech startups, though they too are affected. We are talking about more mundane but crucial work in every field — from food services to teaching to law and medicine. The price of land has priced out every profession except real estate agents.
Vancouver is on track to become a place for the rich to park money and for the rest of us to visit as a tourist now and then — the Monaco of North America. A grim fate, but an avoidable one.
Henry George had it right.
For Vancouver to survive as anything other than a tourist resort we need to tax land to cut off fuel that feeds the fires of land speculation and use the proceeds to create secure housing for wage earners with ordinary incomes.
Agriculture Corporate Taxes economc rent Economic Rent Economics Henry George Housing LVT Land Value Taxation LVT poverty taxes Transit
Please fill in this form to receive our occasional electronic newsletter.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Now That the 2020 Presidential Election is Over, What Comes Next For Us?
By Logan Balsan
Image provided by the Herald
As Former Vice President Al Gore said when he conceded to then-Governor George W. Bush in the contested 2000 Presidential Election, "This has been an extraordinary election!" The 2020 Elections have truly been extraordinary. Trump will join the list of single-term Presidents, and historic popular vote levels have been reached, as Biden surpassed the 80,000,000 vote mark. However, after the January Georgia Senate Runoffs between Senators Kelly Loeffler (R) and David Perdue (R) versus Raphael Warnock (D) and Jon Ossoff (D) respectively, what's next for New Yorkers? Well, county and town elections aren't so far away.
In 2021, an off-year from normal federal and other gubernatorial-related positions, several Town of Hempstead and Nassau County positions are up, and several key races will be up for grabs for both political parties. Let's start with the Town of Hempstead.
In 2021, the positions of Town Supervisor, District Members 1 and 6 of the Town Council, and Town Clerk are up for election. A key race in this area is the Town Supervisor's Race, as incumbent Supervisor Donald X. Clavin, Jr. (R) narrowly defeated incumbent Supervisor Laura Gillen (D) in 2019 for the position. Throughout his first term, Clavin has been seen as a strong leader during the pandemic, although he did attend a controversial event at the Plattdeutsch that was feared to be a "super-spreader" event. He has also been seen battling Nassau County Executive Laura Curran (D) over certain aid funds during the pandemic. This will be a big race to watch next November.
Hempstead Town Clerk, Kate Murray, a former Town Supervisor, is up for re-election. She defeated incumbent Clerk Sylvia Cabana (D) in 2019 alongside Clavin's win for Supervisor. Murray won by a bigger margin than Clavin won in the Supervisor's election. Finally, District One member Dorothy Goosby, a Democrat, and District 6 member, Dennis Dunne, who had run a campaign in 2020 against incumbent State Senator Kevin Thomas, are also up for re-election. These are all races that may be close come election night 2021.
Onto the Nassau County elections in 2021. We have incumbent County Executive Laura Curran (D) is up for election. She is the first woman to serve in the position and the first Democrat since Tom Suozzi held the office in the late 2000s. Curran won in 2019 after incumbent County Executive Ed Mangano (R) was exposed, tried, and convicted for committing federal crimes during his ten years in office. This will be a heated election, as Republicans have traditionally held this position over the years. Lastly, the legislature is up. In contrast to Curran's affiliation with the Democratic Party, the Republican Party controls the legislature, which first flipped back in 2019. These elections have proven crucial for the County Executive's election, as it foreshadows a possible winner in the end.
While these Elections aren't until November of 2021, they are the ones to watch. The vast majority of North's current seniors will be 18 years old and eligible to vote in these elections which will likely be their first, if they get registered and decide to vote. These elections change a lot more than you might think about life here in New York and in Nassau County.


text:
Nketiah recalled by Arsenal as Leeds loan cut short
Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa confirmed Eddie Nketiah was returning to Arsenal this month.
Dejan Kalinic
Eddie Nketiah playing for Leeds United. - Getty Images
Eddie Nketiah's loan spell at Leeds United has been cut short, with the forward to return to Arsenal in January.
Nketiah, 20, joined Leeds on a season-long loan in August last year, but only made two Championship starts, with 15 appearances coming off the bench.
Leeds head coach Marcelo Bielsa confirmed on Wednesday that Nketiah would be returning to Arsenal this month.
"Arsenal have informed he will not continue with us and we are sorry for that," he said.
"Eddie arrived at Leeds when the Championship had started and had to spend time adapting to our style.
"He wasn't part of the 11 starting and it wasn't something easy for him because he deserved to be there, but was on the bench for [Patrick] Bamford.
"After he played against Fulham, he became one of the starting 11 players for Birmingham. We know that Bamford was injured in this match, but he was going to play anyway and today he played again because he played well against Birmingham and did a great physical effort.
"He didn't take this decision, but he's a great player, excellent professional and had very good behaviour – a gentleman in every sense.
"We are grateful with him, also to his family and his club. They developed Eddie with a very good education and for this reason it's a pity he leaves us because we were happy with him."
Nketiah's two Championship starts for Leeds came in his two most recent appearances. He scored three Championship goals and netted twice in the EFL Cup for the league leaders.
Solskjaer- Pogba ruled out for one month
Jesus is excellent, but Aguero irreplaceable, says Guardiola
Liverpool must not pretend everything is fine, warns Klopp
Records Messi and Ronaldo can break in 2020
Arsenal dominates Manchester United in first win for Arteta
Eddie Nketiah


Intergenerational programs are most effective when facilitators skillfully stage the environment to promote interaction. Successful programs carefully design the physical space, the program, and related policies to be flexible. When the environment has been carefully designed to optimize small-group interaction, it serves to guide children and adults to explore and interact within it, thereby increasing learning and socialization.
Intergenerational programs are most effective when adaptive equipment is used as appropriate. There is a chance that clients in an intergenerational program will need adaptive equipment. The primary reason to consider adaptive equipment is to remove barriers to participation. Examples of adaptive equipment include pencil holders for slip resistance, magnifying glasses or digital projectors for better viewing, and chair supports or lifts for improved positioning. This equipment is often essential to engagement in the activity and with an intergenerational partner.
Facilitators document and communicate experiences to build on in future activities. Documentation starts with careful observation, then evolves into a display of learning processes. Documentation has grown in popularity as a way to review children's work at various stages of completion. Photographs, work samples, transcripts of conversations, and comments accompany the display. This documentation is then shared with parents as well as discussed among teachers.
We tend to focus on the negative aspects of aging. Many of those are the exceptions, not the rule.
Stress comes in many forms. There are normal and predictable stressors, such as a new job, getting married, or moving.
Life expectancy has increased dramatically in the past 100 years: 1 in every 8 Americans is age 65 or older. For most, this means an increase in the number of healthy years. Chronological age differs from biological age. How will you age? What do you know about care options? Will you be responsible for others as they age?


Full limb replacement Gnome that's totally a shadowrunner, has definitely been a runner for a long time. He definitely knows what he's doing. At least he's pretending to be that.
Also he has 2 grapple hands which should get him into some interesting situations. He's in the Shadows because he feels like it's in his blood, and also to someday uncover the identity of the person or people who are responsible for his parent's death, and his disfigurement.
Brash: Noodle knows how to plan, but more often than not, he'd rather just do things directly. While his specialty is Breaking and Entering, he's not necessarily the sneak in and sneak out without anyone being the wiser type. He's more like the sneak in, do a bunch of damage and then leave without them finding out who did it kinda of guy.
Conniving: Despite being a blunt instrument himself, he has the ability to be quite devious when it amuses him.
Chip on his Shoulder: Noodle feels like he's made to be a runner, every other occupation is below him.
I've got This: Noodle will attempt anything that seems vaguely plausible if prompted, or if he just thinks it'll make him look cool.
Mother worked Corporate Security at Columbia Industries, a Horizon subsidiary that deals in simsense mods.
face is scarred and his eyes are milky.
and Dad would be gone. Mom would say that he just ran to the store, or that he was out with friends. It wasn't till after the accident that I found out what he was really up to.
My Dad was a badass. And by extention so was Mom. Oh wait I think I missed a step there... So as the story goes Mom and Dad met on a job. Dad was hitting Columbia Industries (a Horizon simsense subsidiary) that my Mom was working security, now I don't know the particulars of the event, but the story goes that somehow Mom got the drop on Dad and took him captive. Dad said he let her take him hostage, Mom laughed and comments on how she doesn't want to hurt his pride.
Dad would teach me the languages in the area, about art, and architecture. Just by being around Mom and Dad I picked up a lot about Law and Law enforcement. Not sure how they made it work, but they did. Right up till the accident.
Seemed like any other day. Don't they always? We're driving down the highway when all the sudden everything went black and all I could hear was ringing. The heat was intense and I could feel the sting of the shrapnel all over my body before I passed out. I didn't know what was going on for a couple of weeks. My vision was blurry and I couldn't hear drek. But worse was my body. Those were some long painful months. But after my first few cyber replacement surgeries it became pretty normal.
My parent's life insurance paid for some cyberlimbs to get me up and moving around, but because that money had to last for me to get upgrades as I aged they weren't so great. It wasn't till later that I found their hidden bank account information in the house. I think they set it up so that I could find it, because it seemed pretty obvious after I started looking. If only finding the bomber's name was so simple.
Along with the bank information there was a comm number for May Yun. Not a clue who he/she is, but they've been pretty helpful thus far. Best I can figure, they were either a part of my father's team, or just a close contact. They are how I found out that the only lead I've got is KE's best recreation of the bomb and some serial numbers that lead me to a shell corp linked to MCT, but what does KE know? I'm going to go into the Shadows to find out for myself. I've got enough training and enough knowledge and Cyber to get me the answers I am looking for.
Until I can find more infromation, I'll stick to the shadows and see what I can unearth. Make Mom and Dad proud.
Meat: Noodle's face is scarred from cuts and burns, his eyes are slightly milky and his hair is almost always a mess. He's got 4 obvious cyberlimbs and some chrome in his head.
Astral signature: Only relevant for mages or adepts able to cast spells.
Not 100% sure till I Play him a bit honestly.
"PRIME/STANDARD/STREET" is not in the list (Prime, Sum to 11, Standard, Scum) of allowed values for the "Chargen type" property.
"Is edit protected" is a predefined property provided by Semantic MediaWiki to indicate whether editing is protected or not.
This page was last modified on 4 April 2018, at 22:48.


HOUSTON — A bribery scandal that ensnared a Houston Community College trustee has led to the dismissal late Friday of city Public Works Director Karun Sreerama.
Sreerama, a well-known business icon whose company has won millions of dollars in contracts with HCC, worked with the federal government in its bribery case against college system Trustee Chris Oliver.
Sreerama on Friday also said he's never given a bribe. He did say that before working with the FBI he had provided Oliver $77,000 in loans with no expectation of favoritism in return.
Mayor Sylvester Turner placed Sreerama on leave two weeks ago soon after Sreerama's role providing money to Oliver became public in Oliver's guilty plea. Less than a day after The Texas Monitor published additional information about both Oliver's and Sreerama's actions surrounding the bribery scheme, the public works director was out.
Houston council member Greg Travis praised Turner's move.
"I agree and support this decision," Travis said on Twitter.
He lashed out at media coverage.
Court records name Sreerama as a "victim" of Oliver. Both Sreerama and his attorney have said the businessman fully cooperated with law enforcement.
When he paid $12,000 to Oliver between May 2015 and May 2016, he was working with the FBI, Sreerama said. Those payments to Oliver was money provided by the FBI and made largely in $2,500 increments and in cash.
See The Texas Monitor's report on year-long bribery scheme here.
Turner named Sreerama the director of the city's largest department — boasting a $2.1 billion budget — this past spring. Sreerama said that he was told at the time by law enforcement not to talk about the pending case against Oliver, he said.
"I am paying the price for a good deed," Sreerama said.
Some of Sreerama's statements Friday did not jibe with federal court records.
He said he never gave any unlawful payments to Oliver, but federal documents suggest that the $77,000 in loan money was an unlawful payment.
It was after those payments totaling $77,000 to Oliver that Sreerama was approached by the FBI and that he agreed to help the federal government in its case.
The loans were not repaid, Sreerama said.
Sreerama provided only hazy information about how and why he was approached by the FBI to begin with.
Asked why he did not report Oliver's initial solicitations to federal authorities, Sreerama said he expected the loans to be repaid.
Sreerama said Friday that the last time he got a contract from HCC was in 2010, but the Houston Chronicle noted that HCC records show that he signed at least one contract in 2011. "That agreement was for construction, maintenance and renovation on an as-needed basis," the paper reported.
He denied Friday giving money to other elected officials. He could not immediately recall campaign donations he made during the time in 2015 and 2016 that he was giving envelopes stuffed with cash to Oliver.
Sreerama was often forthcoming with campaign contributions. He walked in many governmental circles and was deft at closing deals. His company was ESPA Inc., an engineering firm that scooped up many government contracts, getting business from entities such as the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Houston Independent School District, and the city of Houston.
He also had done work previously for HCC.
Sreerama held ESPA in 2012.
The Houston Community College system's board of trustees censured Oliver earlier this month, removing him from his role as vice chair, and removing him from all committees.
Oliver continues to be an HCC trustee. Trustees cannot remove one of their own. Only a state district judge has the power to pry any trustee from the board, at least until Oliver is sentenced. A convicted felon, once sentenced, cannot hold the post.
The college system has hired former Harris County Commissioner Gene Locke and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Vidal Martinez to examine Houston Community College's procurement processes in the wake of Oliver's guilty plea.
See the Texas Monitor report that broke that news here.
Oliver's sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 13.
Trent Seibert can be reached at [email protected] or at 832-258-6119.
Trent is an award-winning editor and reporter, who has previously worked The Denver Post, The (Nashville) Tennessean, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Most recently, he was the investigative producer for Houston's KTRK-TV ABC-13. He was also the editor and founder of Texas Watchdog, a ground-breaking news group that paved the way for this project. Trent is a teacher of journalism skills, and has shown hundreds of reporters and citizen-journalists how to use public records, databases and journalism tools to keep a watchful eye on their own local government.
Signup to get the latest news and information from The Texas Monitor.


OPEN HOUSE SATURDAY & SUNDAY 1:00-2:30 ! 1800 sqft of finished living area with 5 bedrms & 2.5 Baths! Entering this home you are greeted by an spacious entrance & stair case that leads to the main living area. Living rm & dining have a wall of windows that flood the area with an abundance of sunshine. Newly remodelled kitchen is sure to impress. New cabinets with showcase glass, island features under mount sink, quartz counter tops, subway tile back splash, aunder task lighting & stainless steel appliances. Roomy master bedroom with 2 piece ensuite. Lower level has 9 foot ceilings & gives the Rec room a warm spacious feel with large windows & tons of natural light! You can enjoy the summers in the large fenced back yard (60x105) with sunroom & deck. Attached single car garage with newer insulated garage door. Mechanics of the home are all recent updates & windows are triple low E argon & 35 years shingle (2018). Call today to book your showing for this fine home!


text:
Efforts to Commercialize CCS Techs Accelerating in Japan
Society Jan 15, 2023 10:00 (JST)
Tokyo, Jan. 15 (Jiji Press)--Moves to commercialize carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technologies are accelerating in Japan.
CCS technologies capture carbon dioxide emitted from large facilities such as factories and power plants, and store the heat-trapping gas deep underground.
Japan's industry ministry is set to draw up as early as this month a road map including measures to help promote the use of CCS technologies, believing that they are essential for realizing the government's goal of reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions to effectively zero by 2050.
Public-private efforts to put CCS-related projects into practice by 2030 are expected to continue accelerating, with the ministry aiming to have relevant legislation enacted within fiscal 2023.
The International Energy Agency said in a report in 2021 that 7.6 billion tons of CO2 will need to be captured a year across the world to realize carbon neutrality in 2050. The industry ministry estimates that Japan needs to annually store up to 240 million tons of CO2, about a quarter of some 980 million tons emitted from fossil fuel combustion in the country in fiscal 2021.


text:
Kirk Christ Rushen, Isle of Man
Kirk Christ Rushen, a parish in the SW of the Isle of Man, 4 miles W by N of Castletown. It contains the villages of Port Erin and Port St Mary, each of which has a post office under Douglas, and it includes the island of Calf of Man. Acreage, 7456; population, 3415. Spanish Head (350 feet high) is in the S, opposite the Calf of Man; Mull Hills (537) are 1½ mile farther north; Brada Head (390) is on the W coast, 1½ mile still farther north; Brada Hill (758) is on the same coast, 1½ mile farther NNE; the Car-nanes Hill (900) are on the W sea-board, 2½ miles farther NNE; and Crunk-na-Iray-Lhaa (1445) is in the extreme N, immediately beyond the Camanes. The surface in other parts is much diversified, and the SW half of the parish is mainly a peninsula, between Poolvash Bay and the main Irish Sea. A meadow at the W end of the church was the scene of the murder of Reginald, king of Man, in 1248, and a tumulus, called Fairy Hill, in the immediate neighbourhood is traditionally but erroneously regarded as his grave. A tall Runic monumental cross is in a farmyard a short distance S of the church, two stone circles are in the SW, not far from Spanish Head, and two gigantic slabs about 10 feet high, called the Giant's Quoiting Stones, fabled to have been thrown by giants from the top of the Mull Hills, are on the coast near Port St Mary. Port St Mary is the principal seat of the herring trade, and has a large manufactory for fishing nets. A breakwater, called " The Alfred Pier," was constructed in 1882. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Sodor and Man; net value, £200 with residence. Patron, the Crown. The church has a bell-turret. At Port St Mary, Port Erin, and the village are three churches in a good state of preservation, under the charge of the vicar. The large schools are under the control of the school committee.
Kirk Christ Rushen


text:
Dialogue Health Technologies Inc.
Executive Management Carousel
Cherif Habib, Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Habib has been CEO at Dialogue since 2016. Before co-founding Dialogue, Mr. Habib was CEO at EMcision, a medical device company, until it was acquired by Boston Scientific. Previously, he spent 3 years as a senior management consultant at McKinsey & Co and led early-stage technology companies. Mr. Habib earned a Bachelor of Computer Science from Concordia University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montréal.
Anna Chif, Chief Product Officer
Ms. Chif has been Chief Product Officer of Dialogue since 2016. Ms. Chif was recognized on the 2019 Forbes list of "30 Under 30" for the healthcare industry. Before joining Dialogue, Ms. Chif was the Co-Founder and President of Anna Cuisine Inc. from 2014 to 2016 and a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company from 2012 to 2014. Ms. Chif earned a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.
Alexis Smirnov, Chief Technology Officer
Mr. Smirnov has been Chief Technology Officer of Dialogue since 2016. Before joining Dialogue, Mr. Smirnov was Chief Technology Officer of Nexalogy Evironics Inc. from 2015 to 2016, Senior Solutions Architect, Director of Design and Director of Research at Radialpoint Safecare Inc. from 2011 to 2015 and Senior Architect at Hopper Inc. from 2010 to 2011. Mr. Smirnov earned a Bachelor of Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Montréal
Navaid Mansuri, Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Mansuri has been Chief Financial Officer of Dialogue since 2019. Before joining Dialogue, Mr. Mansuri was Chief Financial Officer of Gestion Juste Pour Rire Inc. from 2017 to 2019 and Vice-President at Rogers Media Inc. from 2008 to 2015. Prior to that, Mr. Mansuri held roles at Bell Canada between 2000 and 2008 and Deloitte between 1995 and 2000. Mr. Mansuri earned a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University and is a Chartered Professional Accountant.
Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, Chief Operating Officer
Mr. Guillemette has been Chief Operating Officer of Dialogue since 2019. Before joining Dialogue, Mr. Guillemette was the General Manager for the Québec region of Uber Canada Inc. from 2013 to 2018, General Manager of ClickTouch America Inc. in 2013 and Chief Operating Officer of TransacXion Technologie Inc. from 2010 to 2013. Mr. Guillemette earned a Bachelor of Commerce from the HEC at the University of Montréal and an MBA from INSEAD.
investors@dialogue.co
At Dialogue Health Technologies Inc., we promise to treat your data with respect and will not share your information with any third party. You can unsubscribe to any of the investor alerts you are subscribed to by visiting the ?unsubscribe? section below. If you experience any issues with this process, please contact us for further assistance.
By providing your email address below, you are providing consent to Dialogue Health Technologies Inc. to send you the requested Investor Email Alert updates.
Pour vous abonner aux alertes par courriel destinées aux investisseurs, veuillez indiquer votre adresse courriel dans le champ ci-dessous et sélectionner au moins une option d'alerte. Une fois que vous aurez soumis votre demande, vous recevrez un courriel d'activation à l'adresse courriel indiquée. Vous devez cliquer sur le lien d'activation pour terminer votre abonnement. Vous pouvez vous abonner à d'autres options d'alertes en tout temps.
Chez Dialogue Technologies de la santé inc., nous promettons de traiter vos données avec respect et de ne pas divulguer vos renseignements à des tiers. Vous pouvez vous désabonner des alertes destinées aux investisseurs auxquelles vous êtes abonné(e) en vous rendant à la section < se désabonner > ci-dessous. Si vous éprouvez des difficultés, n'hésitez pas à communiquer avec vous pour obtenir de l'aide.
En indiquant votre adresse courriel ci-dessous, vous consentez à ce que Dialogue Technologies de la santé inc. vous envoie les alertes par courriel destinées aux investisseurs que vous avez demandées.
* Obligatoire
Dialogue ©


text:
in Culture, Societal Myths
Working 9 to 5: Why the daily grind isn't for everyone
by Izzy Arcoleo October 12, 2019, 4:08 am
Working 9 to 5. It offers stability, and the predictability can sound pretty appealing to people working jobs with irregular shifts.
But the reality for many is that 9 to 5 really means 8 to 6, possibly with an unpaid lunch hour in the middle. It means you're always at work or traveling to work.
And importantly for both employees and employers, it has a way of squashing and shrinking and shriveling your passion for what you do.
I spent the first half of my twenties working 9 to 5 jobs with just a little freelancing on the side.
When I was 26, I jumped in at the deep end and went full-time freelance — and although there are some really hard things about it, I won't go back.
Traditional employment simply isn't sustainable for me. I'll tell you more about that a bit later (it involves electrical malfunctions and a baby).
A growing number of young people are not striving to secure themselves a steady 9 to 5 job. A recent study by MetLife found that 57% of employed workers overall are interested in going freelance, while 77% of millennials are more drawn to freelancing than salaried employment.
The 2019 Freelancing in America (FIA) study, conducted by Edelman Intelligence (an independent research firm) and commissioned by the Freelancers Union and Upwork, found that more people than ever think of freelancing as a long term career path.
This is, in part, because a growing number of professionals at the peak of their industry are choosing to work for themselves—so there are role models to look up to.
Successful, knowledgeable, and respected people killing it in their careers without the backing of a company or salary.
But why are so many of us moving away from the 9 to 5? What is it about conventional employment that isn't working? And is freelancing the future — or could our old bosses win us back?
A brief history of working 9 to 5
The introduction of the eight-hour workday was at least partly an attempt to strike a work/life balance for everyone. But it was a damage control effort rather than a well thought out way to make working…well, work.
When the Industrial Revolution catalyzed huge changes in manufacturing processes in the US and Europe, starting in the late 1700s, produce became more important than people.
Factory workers were made to work up to 18 hours a day, often in terrible conditions, and campaigners fought against this exploitation of human labor.
A locomotive train beside a factory in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
A British socialist named Robert Owen argued that the best way to maintain productivity while protecting workers' wellbeing would be to split the day into three: eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.
It took years of fighting and a host of other campaigners, including Tom Mann and his "Eight Hour League", to implement the eight-hour workday. But finally, in 1937 it was standardized by the US government, and regulated under the Fair Labor Standards Act which still stands today.
It became the norm to work eight hours a day, to a total of 40 hours per week. And until recently, standards hadn't really moved on in terms of what was seen as an acceptable and respectable number of hours to work each week.
But we have to move on because we have moved on.
We know, now, that the number of hours worked doesn't tell us how much energy or effort was used during those hours. We know that the majority of human beings can't really focus on one task for more than 50 minutes without regular breaks or diversions.
And we know lots of other things; like that 46% of Americans say their job interferes with their family life, and work-family conflict makes employees less happy and less productive.
Productivity is, perhaps, the key to making more companies consider a new approach to work.
A growing body of evidence shows that an eight-hour workday doesn't support optimum output; with studies highlighting that anything from a four-day workweek to a six-hour workday could increase productivity, company health, and employee wellbeing.
It doesn't end at 5
A few years ago, you might have walked out of the office at 5 pm and not communicated with a colleague or client until you got back to the office the next day.
Not so anymore. With smartphones and tablets and watches that vibrate when we get an email, employees are increasingly expected to work after work.
A survey by CareerBuilder found that 45% of workers say they complete company work outside the office, and many professionals answer emails outside of business hours.
Employees don't charge overtime for this — they just feel like they have to do it.
Zoe, an employee of a major London-based IT firm, told me "if I don't respond to stuff after I've left the office it'll look like I'm not as dedicated as everyone else on the team. It's an unspoken thing, but everyone feels the pressure."
Zoe's experience is reflected in research by Bupa, which revealed that 75% of employees felt pressure to read and respond to work emails outside of their contracted hours. A third said they still check their emails even when they're on sick leave.
All of this I can relate to myself and the most frustrating thing is that it's really hard to call your employer out on it because they're (usually) not explicitly asking you to work more than they're paying you to.
The pressure comes from a broader culture of work; and within that, the knowledge that you'll be passed over for promotions, or just not liked very much by your team if you don't pick up that call or send that email at 10 pm.
Answering a few emails on your own time might not sound like much — and in the grand scheme of things, it isn't, for most of us. But never having any true downtime from work can have a serious impact on your personal life, your relationships, and your mental health.
A study published in the journal Industrial Health showed that psychological detachment from work is related to better mental health. In contrast, people who don't get to switch off from work regularly are more likely to experience fatigue, chronic stress, low mood, and burnout.
Why is freelancing becoming more popular?
With the Internet, infinite project-based job sites, and tech that lets us do things like track time on our laptops and receive payments from anywhere in the world, it's not surprising that more and more people are giving freelancing a go.
The 2019 FIA study found that freelance income in the US now amounts to nearly $1 trillion. That's more than the construction and transportation industries right now.
The average hourly rate for a freelancer providing a skilled service is $28, which is higher than 70% of workers in the US overall. And most freelancers are skilled professionals, with 45% working in IT, marketing, programming, and business consulting.
A Self Employment report by accounting service FreshBooks suggests that 27 million people could be ready to leave their companies and join the freelance market.
One of the main reasons is control: people want to be able to direct their daily lives and their own career paths and make changes that work for them.
Basically, going freelance is a solution to some of the most important problems with 9 to 5 employment at the moment. Rigid employment structures hold us back, as do limited opportunities to progress and gain more decision-making power.
On a day-to-day level, we're aware that fixed working hours aren't getting the best out of us; we get bored, get involved in workplace conflicts that don't really interest us, and spend hours dreaming of actually doing the job we want to do.
Freelancers, on the whole, spend much more time actually doing their job. We rely on clients to pay us and have to build our schedules around those clients (and spend lots of time finding new clients).
But if we're more productive in the evening than in the morning, that's fine — we can work in the evening. We don't have to sit staring listlessly at the computer screen for hours on end when we have to look like we're doing something but we know we're not going to get anything done.
We don't have to sit in meetings every day talking about nothing-really-at-all; and if a relationship with a client isn't working, we can end it without losing our jobs.
We can also fit working hours around the other things that matter to us — like family, friends, and things we like doing that don't earn us any money (yes; you're allowed to do things that aren't strictly "productive" in your free time, honest!).
46% of the freelancers surveyed in the FIA study say that freelancing gives them the flexibility they really need, because their personal circumstances make it difficult, or impossible, for them to work for a traditional employer. This is definitely true for me. Which leads us to…
The daily grind and I: my personal history with 9 to 5
Of all the reasons why working 9 to 5 didn't work for me, the biggest one was my health — the electrical malfunctions. I have epilepsy.
Specifically, I have "complex partial seizures" — different people experience this kind of seizure in different ways, but for me, it's a bit like time travel.
I feel a bit weird, the world goes a little wonky, and then suddenly some time has passed and I'm sitting or lying in a strange position on the floor.
For anyone who happens to be near me, it looks equally odd; my right arm shakes, my eyes blink very fast, and sometimes I say weird things or act as though the ground is opening up to eat me.
I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 19. I was at university at the time and holding down a job alongside my studies, with some difficulty.
Seizures became more frequent and things got more complicated. Medication has, so far, never completely stopped my seizures, so it's very hard for me to be reliable every day.
Sometimes a seizure is 30 seconds long and barely affects me at all — I snap right out of it and feel fine. But sometimes seizures last a few minutes, or I'll have up to five in one day. When that happens I'm exhausted, irritable, confused, and want to sit on my own in the dark and cry until all the feels start to lift.
Most of the employers I've had have done their best to accommodate me, and a couple of them have been completely amazing. But even with the most understanding bosses, it was really hard to be open about how often I felt like shit.
I didn't want to be the person who was always off sick and couldn't keep up with her workload. So I had a tendency to push through until I couldn't keep pushing anymore.
The reality for me was that my health condition didn't fit into the eight-hour day standard.
I needed to be able to sit in a dark room; needed to be able to get up and leave my desk for a few hours to give my brain a break. And for my mental health, I needed to not have seizures in front of my colleagues on a regular basis.
It's not that I can't manage a big workload. To my own surprise, I do more actual work as a freelance writer than I ever did working in an office.
If I work for five hours in a day, I'm genuinely working for all of those five hours. I produce more work and don't stare absently into space. The difference is that I can choose when those five hours are, and if I need to I can split them up into shorter blocks.
But I didn't take the leap and go full-time freelance until after I had a baby. She was the final push (pun intended) because my partner and I wanted to find a way of working and being present with her.
It wasn't until I was doing it that I realized my brain would've been better if I'd been working like this all along.
Freelancing isn't easy, though
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a freelance evangelist.
The 9 to 5 may not end at 5, but freelance life has no beginning and no end.
Especially in the early days of working for yourself, there is a constant underlying hum of anxiety — you might not get enough clients, or good clients might leave, or you might lose your hands in a kitchen accident and not be able to type anymore (I know—voice dictation, it'll be OK).
Stability builds little by little as the years go by and your reputation grows. But there's no certainty that you'll earn enough money to cover the bills next month.
There's no sick pay, and freelancers don't have the same rights and entitlements as employed people. For every benefit, there is a drawback.
On balance, it works better for my needs, circumstances, and my personality.
The challenges are all worth it for me. But being freelance might not work better than being employed for someone with different needs, different circumstances, or a different personality.
Could companies win us back?
Probably. I reckon lots of freelancers would rather have the security of a salaried job if they could work for a company that was able to give them the flexibility and fulfillment they need.
A growing number of businesses are taking note, and competing with the appeal of freelance life by offering other alternatives to working 9 to 5.
Many companies are embracing the freedom and productivity gains that come with remote working or working from home — with 68% of companies in a survey by letting employees work from home when they need to.
Gradually, traditional employers are opening up to the possibility that the eight-hour day might not be the only way.
It comes down to the simple fact that we're not all the same, and a one-size-fits-all approach to work doesn't include everyone.
We have different backgrounds; different physical needs; different mental health needs; family lives, commitments, aspirations, learning styles — and on and on.
We don't all fit into the same system in the same way; and as other options are more readily available than ever before (thank you Internet), a growing number of us are able to make different choices.
Whatever happens, nine to five is not the future. The more we learn about how humans work, the clearer this becomes.
Written by Izzy Arcoleo
Izzy Arcoleo is a writer and yoga teacher from London. Having grown up with a family of musicians, she has endless curiosity about creativity - and the practices which help us harness it.
More From: Culture
8 ways to practice the ancient Chinese principle "wu wei"
Pearl Nash
15 lessons learned from living in Thailand as an expat
How to escape society: a 12-step guide
Why is society so toxic? The top 13 reasons
117 mindfulness quotes (powerful, inspiring and real)
Are you an empath? 5 ways to avoid emotional burnout


text:
Russian Genealogy: A New Russian-American Digital Archive
by | Dec 30, 2015 | 01 What's New, Digital Archives, Immigration, Records & databases, Russian
A new digital archive sheds light on the little-known Russian-American immigrant experience.
If you're an American researching your Russian genealogy, you will be happy to know about a new digital archive. The Fort Ross Conservancy Digital Archive is a free online repository for digitized documents and photos relating to Russian immigrants to the U.S. and the Russian-American experience.
The core of the collection comes from the Fort Ross Conservancy, a state park cooperating agency in Sonoma County, California. The Conservancy has stewardship over important historical buildings, photographs and documents pertaining to Fort Ross, described in this news report as "the hub of the southernmost Russian settlements in North America in the 19th century. Together with Alaska, it was an important epicenter of 19th century Russian-American relations."
What the Archive Includes: The news release describes the collections to be digitized only as a "significant number of documents, photographs, letters and other evidence." The Fort Ross Conservancy website lists among its holdings "30 albums of archivally-preserved historic photographs and almost 3,000 titles in the reference and circulating library." Click on the Digital Archive itself and you'll see what's up already.
Major partners named in this effort are the Library of Congress and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Interestingly, however, the project does have some corporate sponsors, including U.S energy company Chevron; the Russian shipping company Sovcomflot and Transneft, a Russian oil pipeline company. A news report states that according to Transneft, "In the current atmosphere of tense relations between Moscow and Washington, the Fort Ross Dialogue remains one of the few platforms where the sides cooperate in a constructive and friendly manner."
Do you have relatives from the group known as "Germans from Russia?" Genealogy Gems Premium website members can now access Premium podcast episode 130, in which a special guest joins us to talk about this fascinating group of immigrants.
More Digital Archives You Just Might Love
Internet Archive for Genealogy
Canadiana: Digital Archive and Portal to the Past
New Pictorial Maps on David Rumsey Collection


text:
Home / messages.en / News / Economy/Tourism / Articulo
Economic Update November 12
Edited by Ivan Martínez
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Leads Delegation to Cuba
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is leading a delegation of U.S. government officials who traveled to Havana yesterday, November 11th- and will be here through Saturday, the 14th, marking the first official U.S. Department of Agriculture visit to Cuba since 1961.
Secretary Vilsack is accompanied by U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and U.S. Representatives Terri Sewell of Alabama, Suzan DelBene of Washington and Kurt Schrader of Oregon.
"This trip will be an opportunity to support the Administration's commitment to normalizing relations and empowering the Cuban people through bilateral agricultural engagement," Vilsack said. "Food and agricultural goods are the dominant U.S. exports to Cuba and agriculture can serve as a bridge to foster cooperation, understanding and the exchange of ideas. Expanding markets for American agriculture has been a priority for this Administration, and relationships like the one we aim to build with Cuba are crucial to continuing the momentum we have seen over the past 6 years."
The schedule includes meetings with Cuban government officials in agriculture, foreign affairs, and food purchasing as well as visiting port facilities, markets and cooperatives.
Cuban Vice President Receives Top French Official in Havana
The Cuban Vice-President of the Council of Ministers Ricardo Cabrisas received last Friday afternoon the Minister of State for Foreign Trade, the Promotion of Tourism and French Nationals Abroad, Matthias Fekl, who led a delegation of French entrepreneurs.
During the meeting, Cabrisas and Fekl ratified the importance both sides give to the strengthening and diversifying of economic and commercial bonds between the two countries, and spoke of their future development.
They also reviewed the main agreements reached during the visit to Cuba of French President François Hollande last May.
South Africa and Cuba Expect More of Bilateral Trade
South Africa and Cuba agreed in the need to increase bilateral trade and investment, according to reports during a meeting in Havana between the parties, SANews government website stated.
The note stated that South African Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Mzwandile Masina, and Cuban Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, Ileana Nuñez, talked in Havana after the opening ceremony of the African nation's pavilion at the 33rd Havana International Fair.
About 19 local companies exhibited their products in the Fair, attended by firms from more than 70 countries, the electronic site posted.
Nuñez highlighted the excellent political ties between South Africa and Cuba, and the strong need to work more to improve both economic relations and increasing bilateral trade; therefore, the Cuban deputy minister will visit South Africa leading a delegation in 2016.
Cuba Wants More Russian Business
Cuba wants Russian business to help in the economic development of the island, the vice-president of Cuba's Council of Ministers Ricardo Cabrisas recently told RIA Novosti.
"I see clear perspectives: there's a will and determination from the Russian side and Cuba is responding. We need Russia's participation in the economic development of Cuba," he said.
"We recently took the first steps in Russian participation in the very important areas such as energy and metallurgy, two fundamental areas for economic and social development of the country," added Cabrisas.
Last week, Cabrisas held a meeting with Deputy Russian Industry and Trade Minister Georgy Kalamanov and Russian First Deputy Minister of Economic Development Aleksey Likhachev on the sidelines of the Havana International Trade Fair, a commercial forum in Cuba and the Caribbean.
Moscow and Havana are currently cooperating in civil aviation and energy. Russia is also revamping Cuba's power plants. In October, the Kremlin ratified an agreement to provide generators at the Maximo Gomez and Este Habana power plants in Cuba.
According to the Russian government website, the Maximo Gomez power plant in Mariel municipality will be equipped with a 200 MW unit, while Este Habana in Santa Cruz del Norte municipality will have 3200 MW generators installed.
Greece Interested in First Trade Accord Cuba-USA
Most Greek media highlighted the news of the signing of the first commercial agreement between Cuba and the United States, carried out after the historic decision by both countries to restore relations, formalized on December 17th, 2014.
Newspapers and radio stations in Greece reported about the beginning of the Havana International Fair, FIHAV 2015, where the agreement between ETECSA (Cuban Telecommunications Company) and U.S. Sprint Communications Company was signed, to offer roaming services in both countries.
Ethnos newspaper stressed the fact that 600 companies from 70 countries meet to "promotes new business atmosphere in the country (Cuba), which is seeking for foreign capital" for which last year, "implemented a new law to reduce taxes on foreign investment."
The Greek daily noted that this new outlook is due to the new stage opened between the governments of Havana and Washington, even though "the U.S. blockade against Cuba has not yet been lifted."
All media collected the statements by Cuban Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, Rodrigo Malmierca, when he said "they are creating the conditions for the separation between the State and companies, and enhance the role in which the businesses of a Socialist state should be carried out, through more flexible procedures."
They also stated that Sprint Communications is one of about 30 U.S. companies that attended the event, along with other Cuba's strategic partners such as Venezuela, China, or Russia, while Spain is the country with the biggest presence in the Fair, with 150 firms.
Dom Rep Trade Delegation Travels to Cuba
An important Dominican trade mission composed by representatives of more than 20 companies traveled to Cuba to participate in the 33rd Havana International Fair, FIHAV 2015.
The multi-sector trade mission was led by the executive director of the Export and Investment Center (CEI-RD), Jean Alain Rodriguez, and Deputy Minister for Economic Affairs and Trade Negotiations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cesar Dargam.
According to Rodriguez, they participated in business rounds with their peers from the Chamber of Commerce of Cuba, because its aim is to strengthen trade exchange between the two countries.
The bilateral cooperation agreements, aimed at executing joint action plans for 2016, were also formalized with the Chamber of Commerce of Cuba and Pro Cuba.
He also said they will work on identifying sectors, product lines, and services with business opportunities that are of interest in both markets which were represented in the trade mission by Grupo Estrella, Marti PG Petroleum Group, Pawa Dominicana, Depositos Antillanos, Notions Dominicana, S.A. and Techcomm Wireless RD, among others.
The group of officials and businessmen organized meetings with the main export sectors at FIHAV 2015 that closed last Saturday Nov. 7th, at Havana's Expocuba exhibition site.
Economic Update September 03
Economic Update October 15
Economic Update June 18
Economic Update August 20


text:
Social Media and Jurisdiction under FRCP 4(k)(2
By Susan Ross (US) on September 21, 2021 Posted in Litigation
On August 27, 2021, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an international trademark dispute where U.S. jurisdiction hinged on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(2). Reversing the trial court, the Ninth Circuit ruled that personal jurisdiction existed over an Australian skin care product company, based in part on that company's actions on social media. (Ayla, LLC v. Alya Skin Pty. Ltd., No. 20-16214, — F.4th —- (Aug. 27, 2021) (2021 WL 3823624).)
The case involves two companies that sell skin care products. One, Ayla, LLC, is a California-based company that owned three registered U.S. trademarks for "AYLA" in connection with on-site beauty services, online retail beauty products and cosmetics services, and cosmetics. Ayla filed a federal trademark infringement case in federal court in California against the other company, Alya Skin Pty. Ltd, which is an Australian-based company that:
Has no retail stores, offices or branches,
Has no officers, directors, or employees,
Has no bank accounts, or real property in the United States.
Does not sell its products "in any retail store in the United States,"
Reports "less than 10% of its sales have been to the United States"
Reports "less than 2% of its sales have been to California"
Has contracted with "a third-party logistics company" in Hayden, Idaho named Dollar Fulfilment "to fulfill all of [Alya Skin's] shipments outside of Australia and New Zealand."
The federal trial court found that the plaintiff had not met the test for jurisdiction under F.R.C.P. 4(k)(2): "Personal jurisdiction is proper under Rule 4(k)(2) when (1) the action arises under federal law, (2) "the defendant is not subject to jurisdiction in any state's courts of general jurisdiction," and (3) the court's exercise of jurisdiction comports with due process." Everyone agreed that the federal trademark claim satisfied the first element.
As for the second element, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the trial court Alya Skin was not subject to the court's "general jurisdiction" because "neither Alya Skin's principal place of business nor its place of incorporation is in the United States, and Alya Skin cannot be considered 'at home' in the United States." The question then turned on whether plaintiff Ayla could show specific jurisdiction in this case:
Specific jurisdiction exists over nonresident Alya Skin (1) if the company "performed some act or consummated some transaction" by which it "purposefully directed its activit[ies]" toward the United States or "purposefully availed itself of the privilege of conducting business" in the United States, (2) if Ayla's Lanham Act and unfair competition claims "arise out of or result from" Alya Skin's "forum-related activities," and (3) if the exercise of jurisdiction is reasonable.
(Citation omitted). The plaintiff provided evidence that:
The Alya Skin website listed United States dollars as the default currency
The website advertises two- to four-day delivery to the United States, two- to five-day delivery to New Zealand and Australia, and five- to ten-day delivery outside of those countries.
Alya Skin posted advertisements for a "Black Friday" sale [an American tradition] on its social media page.
Alya Skin advertised in a social media post: "ATTENTION USA BABES WE NOW ACCEPT afterpay."
Alya Skin's website, which states that its products have been featured in American magazines
Alya Skin "appear[ed] to have hired social media influencers" who live in the United States.
The Ninth Circuit found that the "ATTENTION USA BABES" social media post was evidence that "Alya Skin targeted its promotional materials specifically towards the United States. This post was an intentional, explicit appeal to American consumers and no others." That court also found that the "Black Friday" advertisement "provides further support for the conclusion that Alya Skin's marketing targeted the United States."
The court also looked at sales through the company's social media sites
Alya Skin offers its products directly for sale to the United States on its website. Though some of its sales to the United States may have occurred through third-party [social media] websites, . . . Alya Skin operates those social media accounts.
The court ruled that Alya Skin's choice of a distribution center in Idaho demonstrated that Alya Skin
contemplated not only that performance would occur in the forum, but also that the location of the distributor could help Alya Skin better serve the American market and grow its American contacts. By contracting with a distribution center in the United States, Alya Skin could offer two- to four-day shipping within the United States, whereas delivery to most other parts of the world would take five to ten days.
Therefore, the Ninth Circuit held, because "the extent of Alya Skin's contacts with the United States is substantial," jurisdiction was appropriate.
Social media is a global medium, but its effects can be local. If you have a transactional website or transactional social media accounts, consider:
Do you use a default currency for pricing?
Do you use any advertising or social media that focuses on any particular country or location?
Do you advertise in any local media?
Have you contracted with any social media influencers? Where are they located?
The more of these elements you check off for the U.S., the more likely you may be subject to jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
Tags: jurisdiction, Trademark


Here are the final broadcast ratings for Friday, September 29, 2017.
Finals Update: Hell's Kitchen (0.9, +0.1) adjusted up.
The sole series premiere on premiere Friday was ABC's 'Inhumans' (0.9). It got off to a relatively decent start but didn't exactly blow the house down. 'Once Upon a Time' will take over the 8pm timeslot next week. The alphabet network capped off the night with a rotten '20/20' (0.6).
On CBS, it was a brutal return for 'MacGyver' (0.8). The drama merely matched its series low and couldn't hold a candle to its 1.7 series premiere. 'Hawaii Five-0' (1.0) and 'Blue Bloods' (1.1) posted better results but were still 29% and 15% below their year-ago openers respectively.
All hell broke loose on Fox as usually reliable 'Hell's Kitchen' (0.8) fell nearly 30% from last year. The series never went below a 1.0 last year, so this is a major disappointment. At 9, 'The Exorcist' (0.5) hit a new series low on premiere night and fell 50% from last year's respectable 1.0.
The CW had 2-hrs of 'Masters of Illusion' encores (0.2/0.2/0.2/0.2).


text:
Home/Preps/Waverly-Shell Rock volleyball coach Eavon Woodin announces retirement
PrepsSports
Waverly-Shell Rock volleyball coach Eavon Woodin announces retirement
Cole Bair Follow on Twitter Send an email Last Updated: January 25, 2023
The state's all-time winningest high school volleyball coach has announced her retirement.
Eavon Woodin, who has been the head volleyball coach at Waverly-Shell Rock since 1989, is retiring.
Woodin leaves with an impressive resume, including a state best 1,214 career wins. She was named the state's coach of the year three times and was the National Coach of the Year in 2008.
Woodin began her coaching career in 1978 at Pocahontas. At Waverly-Shell Rock she guided the Go-Hawks to 23 Northeast Iowa Conference titles and two state championships.
Cole Bair
Cole Bair is Program Director and hosts 'Cole & Company' from 5-6pm weekdays on 1650 - 102.3 The Fan. Follow him on Twitter @realcolebair.
1.24.23 - Metro boys & girls basketball matchups
1.24.23 - Waterloo Black Hawks Minute


Juan Reutter, Miguel Romero and Moshe Vardi.
Regular Queries on Graph Databases.
Egor V. Kostylev, Juan Reutter and Domagoj Vrgoč.
Static analysis of navigational XPath over graph databases.
Egor V. Kostylev and Juan Reutter.
Complexity of answering counting aggregate queries over DL-Lite.
Pablo Barcelo, Leonid Libkin and Juan Reutter.
Egor V. Kostylev, Juan Reutter and Andras Salamon.
Classification of Annotation Semirings over Containment of Conjunctive Queries.
Data exchange beyond complete data.
Marcelo Arenas, Jorge Perez, Juan Reutter and Cristian Riveros.
The Language of Plain SO-tgds: composition, inversion and structural properties.
Theoretical Computer Science 474: 21-45 (2013).
Rada Chirkova, Leonid Libkin and Juan Reutter.
Frontiers of Computer Science 6(3): 243-263 (2012).
Query Language based Inverses of Schema Mappings: Semantics, Computation, and Closure Properties.
The VLDB Journal 21(6): 823-842 (2012).
Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barcelo and Juan Reutter.
Theory of Computing Systems, 49(2): 489-564 (2011). (Selected paper from ICDT'09).
Composition and Inversion of Schema Mappings.
Felipe Pezoa, Juan Reutter, , Martin Ugarte and Domagoj Vrgoč.
Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web, April 2016, Montreal, Canada.
Juan Reutter, Adrian Soto and Domagoj Vrgoč.
Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference, October 2015, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA.
Egor V. Kostylev, Juan Reutter, Miguel Romero and Domagoj Vrgoč.
Egor V. Kostylev, Juan Reutter and Martin Ugarte.
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), March 2015, Brussels, Belgium.
Containment of Data Graph Queries .
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), March 2014, Athens, Greece.
Answering Counting Aggregate Queries over Ontologies of the DL-Lite Family.
Proceedings of the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13), July 2013, Bellevue, Washington, USA.
Domagoj Vrgoč, Leonid Libkin and Juan Reutter.
TriAL for RDF: Adapting Graph Query Languages for RDF Data.
Proceedings of the 32th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'13), June 2013, New York, USA, pages 201-212.
Pablo Barcelo, Jorge Perez and Juan Reutter.
Schema Mappings and Data Exchange for Graph Databases.
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), March 2013, Genoa, Italy, pages 189-200.
Classification of Annotation Semirings over Query Containment.
In Proceedings of the 31th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'12), Scottsdale, AZ, USA, pages 237-248, 2012.
IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2011) Mumbai, India, pages 351-362, 2011.
Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011), Glasgow, United Kingdom, pages 1629-1638, 2011.
In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'11), Athens, Greece, pages 199-210, 2011.
In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'11), Athens, Greece, pages 83-94, 2011.
In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS'10), Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, pages 227-238, 2010.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT'09), Saint-Petersburg, Russia, pages 73-83, 2009.
Inverting Schema Mappings: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice.
In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'09), Lyon, France, pages 1018-1029, 2009.
Graph Patterns: Structure, Query Answering and Applications in Schema Mappings and Formal Language Theory.
PhD. Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2013.
Datalog as a Query Language for Data Exchange Systems.
Am?lie Gheerbrant, Leonid Libkin and Juan Reutter.
Static Analysis and Query Answering for Incomplete Data Trees with Constraints.
In Search of Elegance in the Theory and Practice of Computation - Essays Dedicated to Peter Buneman. Springer 2013.
Juan Reutter, Martin Ugarte, Domagoj Vrgoč.
Satisfiability of JSON Schema and Instance Validation (not published).
9th Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, Lima, Peru, 2015.
Relative Expressiveness of Nested Regular Expressions.
6th Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, Ouro Preto, Brazil, 2012.
Juan Reutter, and Tony Tan.
A Formalism for Graph Databases and its Model of Computation.
5th Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, Santiago, Chile, 2011.
On incomplete XML documents with integrity constraints.
4th Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2010.


Visit the City of Regina Transit Service website for detailed route information.
Whenever possible a low floor bus will be used for the service. The bus will have "Special" on the front and side destination signs and additional signs on the front and side marked "Food Bank" or "Community Services Village" .
The bus stop is located where it can be viewed from the main door of the Food Bank. The bus will wait a minute or so at the stop to give clients time to walk from the Food Bank door to the bus.
Do you have a concern or complaint?
The Regina Food Bank is committed to ensuring quality service and support to our community. On occasion there may be concerns about our programs and services and we value your input. We would encourage you to take the time to provide feedback by accessing our Complaints Policy here.


text:
Q: What to do when Win 7 x64 installer doesn't recognize HD A friend of mine is having a huge problem with his new PC. He wants to install Windows 7 x64 but the installer doesn't find his Hard Discs. The discs are connected via SATA on a Asus P6T SE motherboard.
I think the problem is just that there is no driver available for the SATA-Controller and thus no discs are found. Yesterday we looked up the available downloads on the Asus Page and downloaded two drivers we thought that fix the problem. We put those drivers on a USB and told the installer to look there for additional drivers. But it didn't help.
I am not sure if it would work, but if he would have an internet-connection via LAN-cable would the installer be able to lookup additional drivers automatically or does he have to provide those manually?
Any help is appreciated.

A: This question should be moved to SuperUser...
Anyway, You have to do it manually, you're on the right way by using a USB Key to load driver.
Try these : http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/sata/IMSM_V8901023_Windows7.zip
Of course the files should be extracted from the setup file on your USB drive so that windows are able to read it...

A: have you tried to disable AHCI in the BIOS?
you can install Windows 7 in IDE mode and later change the settings to AHCI.
for more information see this thread.

A: We were able to solve the problem yesterday and I have to admit, without a lack of communication it would have been solved earlier :)
After my friend told me that the Vista-Installer was once able to find the disk I was thinking that the controller or the disk might be broken. To check this I booted his machine with a Linux Live-CD to see if this is able to find the disk or if it is broken. But Linux was able to see the disk and I was able to create files on it. For an additional check I started the Linux Partitioner (KDE) and there I could only see the disk (sda) but no partition (sda1). After creating a FAT partition and rebooting, the Win7 installer could find the disk. I deleted the FAT partition, created new NTFS ones and all went fine.
So obviously the problem was a broken partition table and not the driver :)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Harrogate Grammar School have experienced tremendous success at this year's Harrogate Competitive Festival for Music, Speech and Drama with winners in six categories.
The following Harrogate Grammar School students/ensembles won their classes; Jack Littlewood, Jacob Garrett, Victoria Alvarez, Megan Humphries and All Strung Out. Many more students took part entering individually and through other ensembles.


In recent years, leading U.S. credit card issuers have changed their focus from simply acquiring new customers to optimizing relationships with existing cardholders. A key element to the overall success of this strategy is the ability to motivate newly-acquired cardholders to start—and continue—to use the card. According to The Nilson Report, the average credit card activation rate (active accounts as a percentage of total accounts) for the top 50 Visa and Mastercard issuers was 57% in 2017. However, there is significant variation among issuers. For example, Citibank had a credit card activation rate of 68%, while Fifth Third's was just 49%. Low activation rates represent a lost opportunity in optimizing customer lifetime value, as well as a waste of marketing resources expended in cardholder acquisition.
Here are 10 key considerations for boosting credit card activation rates.
Benchmark current credit card activation performance. The starting point involves gaining a strong understanding of your current activation rate, how this rate has changed over time, and how it compares to competitors' rates. Also study previous and current activation rates to identify the primary factors contributing to the current rate.
Conduct customer research. Analyze customer data to size and profile the inactive cardholder base. Conduct additional primary research to identify key card activation triggers and barriers.
Develop a credit card activation plan. With input from all relevant stakeholders in the organization, develop an integrated credit card activation plan. Create a team dedicated to implementing the plan, and assign roles and responsibilities. Develop an integrated series of initiatives, and establish a timeline to roll out these initiatives and measure progress against plan objectives.
Create bonus offers. Most credit card bonus offers are based on acquisition and activation, with the cardholder receiving the bonus (points, miles, cashback) if they meet a certain spending threshold within a period following acquisition (typically 60-90 days). Higher-end cards (many of which carry annual fees) have larger bonus offers. Chase recently launched the Marriott Rewards Premier Plus Card, featuring 100,000 bonus points if the cardholder spends $5,000 within three months of account opening. A variation on the bonus offer is to have higher earn rates on specific spending categories for an initial period.
Develop pricing to drive activation. Set pricing levels (interest rates and fees) to encourage the cardholders to start using the card. One common approach is to have 0% introductory rates on balances transfers for transfers made within an initial period. For example, the new BBVA Compass Rewards Card has a 0% introductory rate for 13 months for balance transfers made with 60 days of account opening.
Focus on cardholder onboarding. Develop a communications plan to engage with new cardholders during the crucial initial 90-day period. These communications should welcome the cardholder, reinforce the card's key strengths and differentiating features, highlight incentives, and encourage card usage.
Adjust sales incentives. Consider tweaking incentive plans to reward front-line sales people for their customer activation efforts.
Leverage cardholder usage of different service channels. Many cardholders use multiple channels (desktop, mobile, branch, call center, social media) to engage with their financial services provider. Develop messaging across these channels to promote card benefits and highlight the need for activation.
Create financial education tools. Many financial firms are investing in financial education tools using multiple media to boost overall financial literacy and to enable consumers made smart decisions in using a variety of financial products and services, including credit cards. Developing and sharing content around managing a credit card effectively can both build affinity with your company and encourage the cardholder to use the card responsibly.
Review performance. Following the launch of your credit card activation initiatives, identify and address any issues in implementation, track performance relative to objectives, and incorporate learnings into ongoing card activation efforts.


text:
Crazy Dino Park FAQ
How to change national flag?
It is impossible to change the national flag manually, but we take the regional settings of your device and display the national flag according to that. It may vary depending on your operating system version, but as a general rule, on iOS, it's the region, and on Android, it's language selection.
© 2023 - PLAYER SUPPORT | All rights reserved


text:
Q: Get "at most" last n characters from string using PHP substr? Answer of this question:
How can I get the last 7 characters of a PHP string? - Stack Overflow
How can I get the last 7 characters of a PHP string?
shows this statement:
substr($s, -7)

However, if length of $s is smaller than 7, it will return empty string(tested on PHP 5.2.6), e.g.
substr("abcd", -4) returns "abcd"
substr("bcd", -4) returns nothing

Currently, my workaround is
trim(substr("   $s",-4)) // prepend 3 blanks

Is there another elegant way to write substr() so it can be more perfect?
====
EDIT: Sorry for the typo of return value of substr("bcd", -4) in my post. It  misguides people here. It  should return nothing. I already correct it. (@ 2016/1/29 17:03 GMT+8)

A: substr("abcd", -4) returns "abcd"
substr("bcd", -4) returns "bcd"

This is the correct behaviour of substr().
There was a bug in the substr() function in PHP versions 5.2.2-5.2.6 that made it return FALSE when its first argument (start) was negative and its absolute value was larger than the length of the string.
The behaviour is documented.
You should upgrade your PHP to a newer version (5.6 or 7.0). PHP 5.2 is dead and buried more than 5 years ago.
Or, at least, upgrade PHP 5.2 to its latest release (5.2.17)

An elegant solution to your request (assuming you are locked with a faulty PHP version):
function substr52($string, $start, $length)
{
    $l = strlen($string);
    // Clamp $start and $length to the range [-$l, $l]
    // to circumvent the faulty behaviour in PHP 5.2.2-5.2.6
    $start  = min(max($start, -$l), $l);
    $length = min(max($start, -$l), $l);

    return substr($string, $start, $length);
}

However, it doesn't handle the cases when $length is 0, FALSE, NULL or when it is omitted.

A: In my haste with first comment I missed a parameter - I think it should have been more like this.
$s = 'look at all the thingymajigs';
echo trim( substr( $s, ( strlen( $s ) >= 7 ? -7 : -strlen( $s ) ), strlen( $s ) ) );


Ebooks should transcend platforms. What you buy on the iBookstore or the Kindle should be readable on the Nook or Kobo and vice versa. Ebooks should be platform neutral and portable. As an author, in order to reach the widest audience possible, your books should be able to travel wherever your audience wants them to be. You've put in the hours and the hard work; why should something like software or technology get between your prose and the reader?
Saying traditional publishing is dead right now is like declaring yourself the winner in the sixth inning of a baseball game when you have 2 points and the other team has 8 just because you scored all your points this inning, and they haven't scored any since the first.
It's been a week since we launched Pandamian, and I've got a few quick notes on how we've fared.
There's this mantra in startup-land that applies to product launches: you know you've launched too late when you're not embarrassed by your product.
By that metric, I suspect that we've taken far too long to launch. Our early users are rather happy with what we've built, and (surprising – to me, at least) most of them are understanding that we don't yet have feature X or Y.
And I'm not complaining about that. Most of them have made it clear that they're expecting a host of new features, and every other day or so we get tweets or emails asking us about feature X, or bug Y, or how to do Z.
What's taken me most by surprise, however, are the number of requests for a directory of Pandamian books. We'd built Pandamian with the writer/publisher in mind, and so the idea of a browsing tool was a little … startling, to say the least.
And several of these features are non-trivial to implement. (Also: remember that a directory is itself a non-trivial thing to build, if we're to do it right). And so I think we should put up a crude, stop-gap solution to this, and come back to fix it up properly in the future. Probably better to focus on one thing at a time.
We've not publicized Pandamian as much as we could, and that's exactly the way I like it. Right now the really tricky thing is to build something people would use (or really: that writers would love to use), and we only need about a hundred users to source feedback from.
Which, by the way, we have.
I think it's important to take the time to get the software right, before scaling it up for people. Quantity is easy to scale; happiness is not. And so it's a better idea to maximize the latter at this stage, before thinking about sheer numbers.
I think it's worth revisiting why we're building Pandamian, just to put the hectic programming of the past week in perspective. I recently wrote about Amanda Hocking, this amazing 26 year old writer who's found success on the Amazon Kindle store. What people tend to forget is that she spent a hellish amount of time researching ebooks before publishing to Amazon, that she did all the book-covers herself, and she took a significant amount of time to study J.A. Konrath's publishing blog.
I'm encouraged by her story, but I also realize that for the majority of writers, there remains a rather formidable technical learning-curve to publish to the web. (I spoke about this challenge at the Internet Archive late last year). We've seen our fair share of writers struggling with blog engines, and web design, and site templates, here in the web fiction community, and it's never nice to have to stop writing to deal with tech.
My contention, however, is that it's necessary to make publishing easy and available to everyone, and it is the fastest, most efficient way to force publishers to change.
If we can make it possible for writers to publish without ever worrying about the underlying technology, and we can make it such that they really, truly own the distribution of their own books; then – I think – we would have accomplished something meaningful.


She has also provided support to countless think tanks, scientists, inventors, investment funds, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and family investments & causes in the U.S. and internationally.
She was previously the CEO & Chairman of Todobebe, Inc from 2001‐12 (sold to Entravision, Inc (EVC) 2012). Under her leadership, the company grew from the first global website for Spanish & Portuguese speaking parents to a multimedia family entertainment company and recognized pioneer in developing new 360 business models across Broadcast TV (over 250 episodes), Digital, Radio, Events, Marketing, Research, Mobile, and Licensing.
She received the 1st Pioneer Award for Changing Health Disparity among underserved populations by former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, and was nominated as a top CEO of Hispanic Media companies by Hispanic Ad (2010 & '11).
She also served for 8 years on the Board of Directors of Medcenter Solutions, the leading CRM Pharmaceutical marketing and Continuing Medical Education Company serving Latin America, and on the Advisory Board of the Pediatric Brain Injury Program, U of Miami School of Medicine / Miami Project. She also served on the Media & Technology Advisory Committee for Obama's first presidential campaign.
Previously she was the co‐Founder & first CEO of Wallaware, Inc, a next generation mobile software company with a platform to enable Telco's to securely control, manage, analyze, develop use cases, drive apps development, and monetize consumer and enterprise mobile data use.
The company was ranked as: a top-4 emerging technology company in Europe by Tornado Insider ('00); selected by IBM as its first "Blue Light" case study supporting emerging mobile tech companies ('01); and ranked top 10 by Wireless Internet Daily.


*Anniversary & Love Delivery Waukegan IL - Pope's Florist, Ltd.
Need anniversary gift ideas? Pope's Florist, Ltd. can help! We've got all types of flowers for an anniversary. Select classic roses, a modern bouquet or even a plant. Nothing says love and romance like surprising your loved one with a stunning bouquet on your special day! Pope's Florist, Ltd. delivers to Waukegan, IL and nationwide, for a real surprise they won't soon forget!


Thank you for your interest in Pulse Solutions. In order to assist us in serving you better, please take a moment to complete this form. A Pulse Solutions sales professional closest to your geographical location will contact you within 1 business day.


This year, in addition to all of that, our five 'Donate & Elevate' charity packages are designed to ensure that your donation is invested in several beneficial ways - increasing and multiplying your rewards.
Let us take you on a journey with our new and exciting Little Seeds program! Encourage your little ones to change the world!
MAA was the First NGO to launch a Permaculture educational project for treating Grey-Water to grow organic produce for Syrian Refugees in the Zaatari Refugee Camp. Once fully operational this project may be given the green light to be used throughout the entire camp to create a SMART Sustainable food source, inshaAllah.
Muslim Aid Australia has just signed an Memorandum of Understanding with Clothing4Dawah in Melbourne to assist with collecting and distributing clothing to needy.
Muslim Aid Australia is proud to announce that we have now partnered with The Garden Cemetery. This new partnership will allow us to provide a new slate of unique and valuable services to the Australian Community. Follow #TheGardenCemetery for further updates.
On Friday, 29th April, Muslim Aid Australia and Brothers In Need joined hands by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to work locally in New South Wales for the betterment of the community.
As part of MAA's focus on developing a healthy community, we've partnered with Sydney's latest fitness centre, Gallipolic Fitness 24/7!
Muslim Aid Australia is taking you on the ground with us as we deliver essential projects around the world. Join Us on a 360 degree VR tour of a water system we've built in Indonesia.
We look forward to seeing you on the ground with us!
Cyclone Winston created havoc on the Island of Fiji causing 12m high waves and forceful winds flattening whole villages and cutting communication across the small Island. Thousands displaced and left with no shelter as the death toll continues to rise.
Almost 42,000 people remaining in Madaya are at risk of further hunger and starvation. The UN has received credible reports of people dying from starvation and being killed while trying to leave. On 5 January 2016, a 53 year-old man reportedly died of starvation while his family of five continues to suffer from severe malnutrition.
Amaq Syukur, 80 years old, has been living with a light stroke for a few years. He lives with his children and grandchildren in a modest house, near Musholla Al Amin Dasan Reban Loyok Village.
The desalination plant in Gaza is helping thousands gain access to clean water.
The Sadaqah Jaariya borehole project in Somalia has recent been completed. Read about it here.
Daar Aisha's amazing Teen Deen girls fundraised to build Water Systems in Indonesia during Ramadan.
Muslim Aid Australia sent aid to the refugees of Rohingya by constructing a water well in Blang Ado Village, Kuta Makmur Sub-district, North Aceh.
On Saturday 15 November Muslim Aid Australia and Read Little Muslim co-hosted a unique event, Just Kidding Charity Playdate, for the children in our communities. With an impressive turnout of approximately 300 people, and stalls to cater for all ages including the adults, this event will be the first of many.
We've got the solution to help you reduce your taxable income whilst also helping the poor and needy.
We've just launched our NEW Integrated Website, IOS App (iPhones) and Android app! Download it from iTunes and the Playstore!
The team at Muslim Aid Australia would like to thank all of our supporters for helping us make a difference for 25 years.
On Sunday, 18 May, Muslim Aid Australia (MAA) and Muslim Charitable Foundations (MCF), together hosted the 25 Seeds of Goodness charity fundraiser at Michael's Oriental Restaurant, to raise funds for worldwide agricultural projects to eradicate poverty.
Thanks to your support we have completed a Sadaqah Jaariyah project to construct a borehole in Somalia which has given 8,000 people and their livestock access to clean water.
Muslim Aid Australia (MAA) and Muslim Charitable Foundation (MCF) will formally join hands by co-hosting a fundraising lunch at Michael's Oriental Restaurant in Eight Mile Plains.
Mr Riyaad Ally receives the keys for the new Muslim Aid Australia Queensland (MAAQ) offices donated for its use by Mr Suleman Sabdia.
2.5 million. That's the number of Syrians who have fled a revolution turned civil war.
Winter has arrived in Pakistan and in such circumstances the poor suffer immensely due to the inadequate resources available.