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Bill Gross
Idealab & eSolar
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Clip 2 of 9 from: A Devotion to New Ideas [Entire Talk]
Bill Gross, Idealab & eSolar
Motivation Through Equity and Risk-Taking
Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross articulates two organizational ways his company develops motivation. The first is to ensure employees working on a new spin-off venture each have a true equity stake in the startup company. The second is to encourage risk-taking at Idealab through the company's willingness to shut down unsuccessful projects with no negative impact to employees. According to Gross, "If you really want to have some breakthrough new thing, you can't have someone worrying about their job being on the line, for trying something bold and new."
Video Clip 3 minutes
Can You Objectively Compare Ideas?
Bill Gross, Idealab's founder and CEO, shares his thinking on how to objectively compare ideas. While admitting it can be a challenge to do so, in this clip, Gross describes some of the criteria used at Idealab to best consider and test the validity of various products and ideas.
Survive Until the Market is Ready
A number of companies born from Idealab were started way too soon, says Founder and CEO Bill Gross. However, a number of these firms went on to success, as Idealab fostered their development until the market was ready. In this clip, Gross explains why solid cash management is often the key tool in surviving until customer demand, or acquisition interest, adequately develops.
Weekend Warriors Discover the Pivot
Before Bill Gross founded Idealab, he started Knowledge Adventure, an early educational software company. In this clip, Gross shares how Knowledge Adventure discovered its major pivot through direct interaction with customers. In an effort initially meant to reach sales targets, employees served as a "weekend warriors" demonstrating products in retail outlets. This effort revealed the need to target their software products to specific ages, a key insight to the company's future success.
A Devotion to New Ideas [Entire Talk]
Bill Gross thrives on turning innovative ideas into pioneering companies. He serves as founder and CEO of Idealab, which started over 75 companies since 1996. In this stimulating lecture, he shares how Idealab continues to bring incredible ideas to market, and his personal insights on starting and running successful organizations. Gross also describes the work of eSolar, a spin-off company of Idealab that works to make solar energy cost-competitive in the global marketplace.
Complementary Skills for Management Teams
A Cogent Argument for Solar Energy
Moore's Law: A New Weapon in the Solar Arsenal
Judge on Impact Over ROI
2 Reasons Companies Can Fail
Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross offers lessons he has learned from company failures. According to Gross, company failures are often due to two common factors: team issues and running out of funding. He also shares his reasoning on why the most successful entrepreneurs are those with the best execution and the most persistence.
Idealab Founder Bill Gross lays out a clear and thoughtful explanation for solar energy being the best possible source for the planet's growing energy demands. He illuminates the reality of current energy usage, the socio-economic factors that will impact future needs, and the limitations of other non-fossil fuel energy options. Gross is chairman of eSolar, an Idealab spin-off that focuses on making solar energy cost-competitive in the global marketplace.
A Devotion to New Ideas
Podcast 57 minutes
Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross addresses a question regarding his company's willingness to hear ideas from outside the company and the competitive advantage that this may or may not provide. Gross says Idealab now spends more time hearing ideas from external sources than they did in the past. He also articulates Idealab's principle of trying to judge ideas more on their possible impact on society than on a projected return on investment.
Bill Gross, chairman of eSolar and founder of Idealab, discusses how Moore's Law provides a new weapon in the fight to make solar energy technologies more productive and cost-competitive. After examining current solar energy harnessing techniques, Gross focused his attention on applying Moore's Law to high-efficiency solar conversion systems. eSolar was founded to work on the development of these ideas. In this clip, Gross describes the technology behind eSolar's current solutions.
Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross offers an engaging way of examining the mix of personalities present on management teams, featuring the roles of the Entrepreneur (E), Producer (P), Administrator (A), and Integrator (I). According to Gross, each of us has a dominant type, and individuals of different types often will not see eye to eye. However, the best management teams consist of a strong mix of all four types, working together.


A plane which was carrying as many as 207 passengers has lost its wheels while landing inside an airport, sparking some panic.
It has been reported that no less than six people were injured after the wheels of a recently delivered Vietjet Airbus plane flew off as the aircraft made a rough landing.
Officials said the plane made a rough in central Vietnam on Friday, leaving some passengers injured.
According to Agence France Presse, AFP, the incident comes as Southeast Asia's booming aviation industry faces scrutiny following last month's deadly Lion Air crash in Indonesia blamed on technical problems with a near-new Boeing 737 that the airline failed to check.
Like Indonesia, Vietnam's airline industry has expanded rapidly in recent years with carriers such as budget airline Vietjet buying up planes and adding domestic and international routes.
On Thursday evening, a plane lost its nose wheels as it made a rough landing in Buon Ma Thuot from Ho Chi Minh City, according to the transport ministry.
The flight "encountered a serious incident during landing, during which two front wheels of the aircraft were lost," according to a report seen by AFP, written by the ministry for the Prime Minister.


What were some of the payment challenges you were facing?
Our company was founded in 2010 and we used PayPal to process our gelmix.com payments, but we outgrew them. We were experiencing a plethora of issues with PayPal, but our biggest problem was a lack of automation. We run our site with WooCommerce on WordPress, and I absolutely love it. With PayPal, the integration to WooCommerce was full of glitches. There were times when a PayPal payment would be charged to our customer, but we wouldn't get an update in WooCommerce indicating the order. It took a while for us to recognize that this was happening, and it led to manually reviewing our orders in Woo vs. our PayPal orders on a daily basis to double check that there were no missing orders. Since we're such a small company, this was incredibly time consuming, so I started to look for a new solution.
" We run our site with WooCommerce on WordPress, and I absolutely love it. With PayPal, the integration to WooCommerce was full of glitches.	"
Our products are incredibly time sensitive. If your newborn baby is struggling to eat, you want to make sure he or she is getting relief as quickly as possible. Any delay in product delivery was a major inconvenience for our customers. If an order ever went wrong we would fully refund the customer – but we ended up eating a lot of costs that were the result of PayPal's integration error. At the end of the day, I wasn't feeling valued as a customer. When I reported these issues to PayPal their customer support was not responsive.
I had Tweeted a lot of complaints at PayPal, and someone from BlueSnap's support team reached out to demo their solution. We liked what we saw and started exploring integration options. During the coding process we did hit an initial snag – but the BlueSnap team was on it right away and we were up and running. Our new integration was a much more seamless experience for our clients. We knew we had made a good decision when we saw our bounce rate drop overnight on the checkout page from 25% to less than 1%. Overnight! We were shocked!
The best thing so far about BlueSnap is I don't have to think about it. With PayPal, something was always wrong. When BlueSnap customer support called I thought maybe something was wrong, but they just wanted to do a case study.
We are using the WooCommerce plug-in with Client-Side Encryption. This helps minimize our PCI burden, but we still have the benefits of a branded checkout page. We no longer redirect our customers to a third party site to pay, which our web team believes is a big reason for the jump in conversions. The average infant will need a thickening agent for about 6 months and the product lasts anywhere from 2-3 weeks. To meet this customer need, we are talking now with BlueSnap about enabling subscriptions; I think this will be a really valuable addition for us.


We truly did not know they were waiting for us, the hundred-plus kids standing in front of the three school flagpoles, in the increasingly hot morning sun. Had we known that they would delay the flag ceremony until we arrived, we wouldn't have savored Peggy's homemade pecan rolls for so long. Had we known how difficult it was for them to remain still and keep their hands to themselves for so long, we would have slurped down our coffee more quickly, heartburn be damned.
But, on Friday morning in Ziway, Ethiopia, we were clearly late for a very important date.
Like circus clowns, the four of us – Jenny, Peggy, Gary and I – extracted ourselves from the Ifft's tiny motorized rickshaw, or bajaj, in local parlance, and rushed to the flagpoles. The American flag was already flying high, but the flag of Oromia and the national flag of Eithiopia were flapping patiently, each waiting for its turn to be raised by the two earnest and reverent students entrusted with their care.
Slowly, the flags ascended into the blue sky and the assembled students sang belted out the Ethiopian national anthem. The school principal, Solomon N., addressed the classes and spoke about the flag, nationalism and the constitution. At least that's what we think he said. It was entirely in Amharic.
Then, it was Jenny's turn.
With Solomon N. translating, Jenny implored the students to study hard, be good to each other and make their communities and country proud.
And, with that, we were off to Bochessa.
Bochessa is a small village on the shores of Lake Ziway, approximately 15 minutes by bajaj from the primary school. Most of the route follows dusty, bumpy roads that hug both the lake and the giant, industrial rose plantation operated by the Dutch company, Sher Flowers. Sher employs roughly 12,000 Ethiopians at this facility, and runs a health clinic on one end of the property. Despite these positives, there are increasing reports that the chemicals used to keep the flowers beautiful and pest-free are causing respiratory and reproductive health issues for the workers.
For years, reaching Bochessa from Ziway required either "going the long way 'round" or crossing the river that spills from Lake Ziway by small wooden boat. Not only were both routes inconvenient, the boat crossing was often dangerous. With pods of hippos living in the lake and river, the boat was sometimes tipped over by an emerging beast, resulting in drowning, or – as happens too often on the continent – the hippos actually trampled people.
Now, however, thanks to Gary and Peggy's efforts, there is a bridge over this river that has changed people's lives. On this day, the bridge allowed the blue bajaj, impossibly stuffed with the four of us, plus a friend of theirs who grew up in Bochessa, to cross over and make for a government-run school on the other side. When we arrived, we learned that while most of the kids showed up, but most of the teachers did not.
It was par for the course, apparently, at many government schools. Same goes for the woeful conditions.
We spent about 30 minutes at the school, speaking with the principal (who did show up for work that day), obliging the kids requests for photos, and watching the older students teach the younger ones the English alphabet.
From there, we sped off in the bajaj toward some land Gary and Peggy purchased on a small foothill nearby. We saw grazing cattle tended by little boys, cattle egrets and Egyptian ibis foraging for worms in the grass, and several other birds feeding in the swampy areas closer to the lake. Since we needed to cross through the swampy areas to reach our destination, we got good quite a good look at them. Until we got stuck.
The weight of five people on the three-wheeled bajaj was just too much for the patch of wetland we accidentally found. Fortunately, the bajaj itself is only slightly heavier than Snooki at her full fighting weight, so we managed to free it fairly quickly, but not before getting a bit muddy in the process.
Abandoning the trip to the Ifft's property, we retreated back towards Bochessa and Ziway. On the way, we came across a group of men winnowing tef (or teff) with just a pitchfork and two makeshift brooms. It was a fascinating process.
The tef grain is so small (the word tef reportedly comes from an early Ethio-Semitic word meaning "lost") that just a slight breeze can separate the grain from the chaff.
Spotting the ferenjis, a group of kids caring for kids wandered over to check out the new attraction. We played a quick game of net-less volleyball with the bundle of plastic bags and rags someone had sewn together as a ball before jumping back in the bajaj and driving to Ziway. It was time for the second part of Flag Day ceremonies at school.
We arrived just in time to watch a presentation of handmade flags representing the nine regions or states of Ethiopia, as well as a couple of familiar looking ones.
Jenny and I, and Gary and Peggy, received our very own American flags fashioned from yardsticks and construction paper. They even had all 50 stars.
After lunch, it was time for a macchiato. Make it a double.
Refueled and recharged, we returned to the primary school for yet another VIP appearance. This time, we were to shake hands with the members of Team Lucy (named for Ethiopia's most famous girl) and Team Baboons before their high stakes soccer match. Even though we were clearly seen to be impartial ambassadors, once we left the field supporters of both teams lobbied us to cheer for their side.
It was quite a lot for one day, but we were in for much, much more.
The plan for that evening was to attend a barbecue at the home of one of Gary and Peggy's friends. Many people were invited, and they would slaughter a sheep for the occasion. How could we refuse?
The highlight of the night, beyond the food, homebrewed tej and a selection of wines from the Castel Winery (the chief winemaker was among the guests), was the multilingualism. At any one point, there could be cross-conversations in English, Amharic, French, Spanish and Arabic. Fine food, fine wine and five languages. Quite a night.
The next day, Jenny and I each had separate tasks. While I worked on a digital template for displaying headshots of the school teachers and staff, Jenny joined Peggy and several women from the school kitchen in the preparation of an important Ethiopian spice called berbere.
After drying thousands of red chili peppers in the sun for several days, the women use giant mortar and pestles to crush the peppers, garlic, rosemary, ginger, black pepper and basil together. The paste is left to dry again before it is taken to a mill in town to be ground into the powdery spice used to flavor many traditional Ethiopian dishes. Making large batches of the spice enables the school to keep its feeding program costs exceptionally low.
On Sunday morning, we went to church. For a wedding.
One of the teachers at the Adami Tulu school was getting married and had invited several colleagues, including Gary and Peggy – and, by extension, us.
Upon arrival at the church in Adami Tulu, we immediately jumped into a throng of singing, dancing wedding guests, leading the bride and groom into the church.
It must have been especially difficult for her during parts of the ceremony where the choir and congregants burst into spirited song and dance. It was raucous at times. Almost as if the reception had started before the "I do's" were said.
We were especially lucky to witness such an event, as it offered yet a deeper look into part of the culture of Ethiopia.
With the newlyweds ensconced in their "Just Married" mobile, we left the party and set out for lunch at Lake Langano to the south. Relaxing.
Looking ahead to an early flight to Djibouti on Tuesday morning, combined with Gary and Peggy's need to do some business in Addis, we left early Monday morning for the city, where we checked into the Danish Guest House. Det er fint! Unfortunately, there were no real Danes staying there on whom to use my four words of Danish (not counting my usually hilarious pronunciation of rødgrøde med fløde).
It was the start of a largely "non-Ethiopian" day: Mexican for lunch, an afternoon movie (starring Antonio Banderas as an Arab Sultan), and Italian for dinner. The only quasi-Ethiopian moment, aside from the macchiato at Kaldi's, was the malfunction of the van key, locking us out of our vehicle in downtown Addis. Don't ask me why I qualified that event as "Ethiopian" – it just was.
And so ended, more or less, our first visit to Ethiopia. Our second visit would come after our djaunt to Djibouti, which we will djescribe (briefly) in the next post.
Until then, please have a look at the rest of the photos, and try to think of as many jokes involving the word Djibouti as possible.
As we strolled up Gabon Avenue to Bole Road (also known as Africa Avenue, because…well, why not?) and back to the Damu Hotel, we reconfirmed our plan to walk to the Djibouti Embassy early the next morning to apply for tourist visas. With only two short days booked on Djibouti's Moucha Island, and after our three-hour tour of the immigration queue at Bole International Airport, we wanted our arrival in Djibouti to be as smooth as possible.
I think I could have slept for 48 hours, actually. But we had a mission to accomplish.
And, of course, we left our passport-sized photos in the hotel room. So, I ran back up Bole to the hotel, returned to the embassy and tried again. "OK, tomorrow at 2:00," she said. We should have known.
Since we would be 100 kilometers (and several decades) away by tomorrow at 2:00, we decided to cancel the application and get our visas on arrival in Djibouti. Did we fall for the banana in the tailpipe? Reinhold be the judge.
We hoped not, but to make ourselves feel better, we went back to Lime Tree for breakfast and Macchiato #1.
From there, we hailed a Russian Blue (the word I just made up for the blue, Soviet-era taxis choking the streets of Addis) and bounced our way up to Addis Ababa University and the Ethiopian Ethnological Museum.
The Ethnological Museum, further in, is a magical mystery tour if I ever saw one. First off, it's in Emperor Haile Selassie's former palace. There's a staircase outside, built by the Italian occupiers, that has a step for each year of fascist rule and spirals up to nowhere. One of the exhibits is Haile Selassie's bedroom and bathroom (he had a less-than-opulent throne, shall we say). Still, the museum was quite nice. We especially enjoyed the exhibits of folktales and histories of the diverse peoples of Ethiopia. I think it helped us gain perspective and understanding that would be useful later in the trip.
Later, after a brief return to the Sheraton, we were off to yet another bathroom – this time at the Addisu Filwoha Hotel. The Addisu Filwoha is actually known more for its hot springs than its bed springs, and we, like several dozen Ethiopians that day, wished to bathe in them.
First, though, with the help of Birhanu, who just happened to be nearby, Jenny and I booked massages for the special "Foreigner Rate" of 125 birr ($7.23) each. When it was our turn, we were led into adjacent chambers separated by heavy curtains. For Phase One, we were each instructed to remove all our clothes and get into a massive, paint-chipped tub that was being filled with water from the hot springs. Phase Two involved a man (for me) and a woman (for Jenny) coming in and standing over the tub (where we lay naked) and using a high-pressure hose to massage our legs, feet, torso and arms. Though we couldn't see or hear each other, we each thought the massage ended there.
Phase Three was behind Curtain #2. Walking naked out of the tub, we were led to individual massage tables and told to lie face up. We are still separated, and therefore unable to give each other the silent "OMG" faces for which the situation desperately called.
Once appropriately covered, a more traditional, if somewhat hasty, massage ensued. In the wake of all that had stressed us thus far, it was nice to find some relaxation.
Later that night, we rejoined Birhanu for dinner. Pizza. With garlic chili sauce. Nice. And Macchiato #2? Not tonight. We had an early wake up call the next morning for our departure from Addis and drive down to Ziway.
On Wednesday morning, we made a discovery that was equal parts pleasing and frustrating: our hotel had free breakfast. All that angst the previous two mornings was unnecessary. There were eggs and pancakes and yogurt and orange juice every day. We kicked ourselves while sipping Macchiato #1.
Descending from approximately 8,000 feet in Addis, the landscape heading south out of the city was breathtaking. Expansive fields, incredible acacia trees, timeless rivers, ancient mountains and colorful people whooshed by for about two hours, until we rounded a corner and Lake Ziway came into view.
In Ziway, we went to the home of Gary and Peggy Ifft, an American couple from Bloomington, IL (Gary was Jenny's boss at State Farm Insurance) who have lived in Ethiopia for more than a decade. After lunch with them, and a strong cup of coffee (in place of Macchiato #2) brewed in a jebena, we toured a couple of the primary schools Gary & Peggy built and administer in Ziway. After introducing ourselves and hearing some songs, we could tell that the next few days would be really special.
Thursday: Injera, Obama, and Head! Head! Head! Head!
Thursday began with breakfast at the hotel, which included Macchiato #1. We would need the caffeine, as Gary was taking us to school.
At the primary school in Ziway, we met the kitchen staff, learned how they were feeding students breakfast and lunch for $0.25 per child per day, and watched Jenny try her hand at making injera on a mitad. Let's just say practice makes perfect.
Soon, it was time to introduce ourselves to the 2nd and 6th graders. As usual, Jenny was a star. Not only is she a professor, she's a lady professor. That's a big deal. And it was important for the students, particularly the young girls, to see what a woman can accomplish. The boys, however, did not seem to appreciate the fact that I quit my job to move for my wife's. So it goes.
During each introduction, Solomon N., the school principal and our translator, opened the floor for questions. One student, who we later learned was Solomon's own kid, tried to pin the professor down.
I whipped around to look at Jenny, her eyes big, her mind backpedaling into left field to catch the question and throw the answer back towards home plate before the runner tags.
"A person, place, or thing!" Jenny retorted, proudly. You just can't get one past her. Who do you think she is? Bill Buckner?
After successfully answering all questions, and amazing the kids with the fact that Jenny and I have met Barack and Michelle Obama, it was time for lunch and Macchiato #2. Like our man Prufrock, we were beginning to measure out our lives in coffee spoons.
We returned to the school, sated and refueled, just in time for "Question & Answer." This time, though, the students were on the spot. It was like a trivia/game show competition and there were only four contestants left. Final Jeopardy!
In the end, the winners received not only a gift-wrapped book, but a photograph with a couple of pasty ferenjis. What a prize!
Considerably more impressive is the magnitude of incredible work Gary and Peggy are doing in Ziway and neighboring Adami Tulu. In addition to multiple schools and feeding programs, they also established a small home for vulnerable children. Samuel's Home is just down the street from the Ifft's home, and we visited the kids who stay there just before bedtime. The highlight of the night was the multiple performances of "Parts of the Body" – apparently an exercise the kids learned at school.
It begins with a child leading the other children in a recitation of parts of the face, working down to the feet while pointing at each part along the way. Eyes. "Eyes!" Nose. "Nose!" Lips. "Lips!" Chin. "Chin!" One little boy really wanted to capitalize on the rote memory aspect, and got stuck on Head. "Head!" Head. "Head!" Head. "Head!" Head. "Head!" for a hilariously long time.
After nine-plus days in Addis Ababa and Ziway, Ethiopia, we are now off to Djibouti. That is, if they ever call our flight. We seem to be in the right place; Kenya Airways Flight 402 does not.
I hope we will eventually have the words and photos to bring our experiences to life.
In the meantime, I'd be happy with a Djibouti call.
So, our first full day in Addis Ababa began like this: cold showers at the Damu Hotel, late brunch, followed by an epic search for a functional ATM. As part of said search, we flagged a scraggly old taxi, only to find that there was already a passenger inside.
After a few minutes, several horn blasts, and a couple of near collisions, we reached his stop and he got out, apparently giving Jenny quite a show in the process.
The day only got crazier from there.
Full update coming just now (that's Africa time, btw).
Until then, ciao from Addis.


Note: While Amazon.com claims 1,526 reviews, we counted 1,660 available on their site.
Nov 2, 2015 1 of 1 found this helpful.
683 of the 1,660 reviewers have had at least one of their past reviews for another product deleted. This is an excessively large percentage of Take-Back Reviewers which may indicate unnatural reviews.
In total, we found that 539 reviews (or 32%) are within an overrepresented word count group. These reviews have rated this product an average of 4.7, while all other reviews have rated this product an average of 4.5. Based on our statistical modeling, the discrepancy in average rating between these two groups is significant enough to believe that the difference is not due to random chance, and may indicate that there are unnatural reviews.
We discovered a total of 61 deleted reviews for this product, with an average rating of 4.8. Even though deleted reviews don't affect the average rating, the fact that action was taken to delete reviews raises some red flags about the integrity of the reviews for the product as whole.
In total, we found that 1020 reviewers (or 61%) are within an overrepresented participation group. This is an excessively high number of reviewers in overrepresented participation groups.
We counted 1,660 reviews for this product over the span of 3,734 days, an average of 0.4 reviews per day. If these reviews were created randomly, there would be a 99.9% chance that we would see 4 or fewer reviews on any given day.
In total, we found that 58 reviews were created on just 11 days. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.
145 of the 1,660 total reviews for this product are unverified purchases. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.
20 of the 1,660 total reviews for this product use substantial repetitive phrases between them. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.
252 of the 1,660 reviewers have substantial overlapping product review history. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.
50 of the 1,660 reviewers have reviewed other products for this brand. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.
2 of the 1,660 total reviews for this product admitted to receiving a free or discounted product in exchange for a review. This is within an acceptable range and it does not appear to be significantly affecting the overall rating for this product.


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The Walking Dead Ending is the Most Exciting Thing About the Show Since It Began
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The Rotting Corpse
Shed of the Dead: A Zombie Film with a Killer Comedic Twist
Popular horror icons shine in Drew Cunningham's upcoming horror-comedy.
By Michelle Kaotic
April 14, 2019, 11:50 AM EDT
Shed of the Dead
A new zombie film titled Shed of the Dead is about to be released with some of horror's iconic faces. Kane Hodder (Friday the 13th, Hatchet), Bill Moseley (The Devil's Rejects, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), and Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes, Death House) join the cast in this English comedy about Trevor (Spencer Brown), an unemployed man who, to avoid his wife, hides out in his shed in the backyard. Trevor's neighbor, played by Hodder, confronts him about having him removed from his beloved shed, leaving one of them having to hide a body.
Coincidentally, this all happens as the zombie apocalypse sets upon them. With the return of the victim, it is just the start of what promises to be an amusing tale. As Trevor and his best friend fend off the resurrected dead, comedy ensues. Hodder posted a video on his Facebook this weekend to speak a little bit about the project. Give it a watch below!
Tagged as "an unlikely hero's tale of blood, sweat and, shear," the film also stars Emily Booth, Ewen MacIntosh and narrated by Brian Blessed.
This isn't the first time Hodder, Moseley, and Berryman starred alongside each other in a horror-comedy. In 2016, they played themselves in John Schneider's film, Smothered. Ditching a horror convention to go haunt a trailer park, the group of horror legends risk becoming victims themselves. The film also starred R.A. Mihailoff, Malcolm Danare, and Don Shanks.
Shed of the Dead will premiere at the SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival on May 18th, with a digital release to follow on May 20th. You can watch the official trailer for the film below.
Be sure to follow Shed of the Dead on Facebook and Twitter for behind the scenes looks, release information, and more. Be sure to stay tuned to Dead Entertainment for all the latest as well.
Connect with Dead Entertainment:
Michelle Kaotic
Growing up in Northern Ontario, Canada, I still remember that first time watching The Exorcist as a kid. While others looked away, I took in every pea green puke and head-spinning moment that I could. Since then, horror and music have become passionate hobbies in my life. Although new to the convention scene, I've been collecting both horror and music items for over two decades. Two moments that make these hobbies worthwhile were coming face to face with Freddy Krueger himself, the legendary Robert Englund, and shaking hands with guitar icon Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. I started Kaotic Notes back in 2015 to house the numerous reviews, interviews, photos, and videos that I had done, and continue to do so to this day. It's only rock and roll with a touch of blood and gore. What can go wrong?!
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Cascadian Beer Podcast: Luppolo Brewing
In this episode, Aaron visits Luppolo Brewing in Vancouver, BC.
Back in 2016 a new brewery opened up in Vancouver with something a bit different to offer.
Luppolo Brewing in Vancouver, BC
Located in the neighbourhood of East Vancouver, also known in the craft beer community as "Yeast Van" is Luppolo Brewing. Vancouver's East Side has a long historical connection with Italian culture: restaurants and cafés, delis, gelaterias, pizzerias, and — thanks to this brewery — craft beer!
Luppolo (pronounced loop-o-lo) is Italian for "hops," one of the core ingredients in beer. The brewery chose this name to reflect the Italian heritage of two of its owners and to embrace the concepts of craftsmanship, community and family, values they feel are closely associated with Italian culture. The brewery's branding is both elegant and playful, and the tasting room's decor is attractive and welcoming.
The brewery's own kitchen offers a variety of Italian aperitivo (appetizers), including a selection of Italian cured meats and cheeses, antipasti, salads and focaccia. Luppolo has also partnered with Mordimi, an authentic Italian pizzeria that now operates at the brewery, so you can get fantastic pizza there, too.
A patio was added during the pandemic, allowing for patrons to be served outside. Luppolo is also a partner in BeerVan, a collective of small family-owned Vancouver craft breweries and beverage producers working together to deliver their products locally. You can also do take out – walk in, call in, or order online (pizza and beer).
Head Brewer Ryan of Luppolo Brewing. Photo Credit Luppolo.
Aaron sat down with brewer and co-owner Ryan Parfitt.
Cascadian Beer Podcast: Cannery Brewing and Bad Tattoo Brewing
In this episode, Aaron visits Cannery Brewing and Bad Tattoo Brewing in Penticton, BC. "In the Okanagan Valley is the small British Columbia town of Penticton. In recent years, this town has seen a boom in local breweries opening their doors. So much so that Lonely Planet named Penticton Canada's "craft beer capital" for the … Continued
Cascadian Beer Podcast: House of Funk Brewing
In this episode, Aaron visits House of Funk Brewing in North Vancouver, BC. There is a spot in the Lower Mainland that has seen a major shift to an entertainment district in recent years, and that place is located in North Vancouver, located on the traditional unceded territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh. House of … Continued
Cascadian Beer Podcast: Slackwater Brewing
In this episode, Aaron visits Slackwater Brewing in Penticton, BC. A few months ago in the Spring, I was in Penticton attending and part of the judges panel for Okanagan Fest of Ale. While there I stopped in to say "Hi" to some friends of the podcast who were in the process of opening their … Continued
20 Great Brewery
Patios Around BC
BC Celebrities Give
Us Their Beer Crushes


text:
Home Latest News Consultation for plans goes to the next stage
Consultation for plans goes to the next stage
By Natalie Copeland -
A public consultation into plans to revamp Downham Market's Jubilee Community Centre was held this week.
Sixty-three people turned up to see proposals for a £750,000 project unveiled for the first time on Monday.
Plans drawn up by Norwich-based architects Chaplin Farrant Ltd were on display at Downham Market Town Hall's Assembly Rooms.
Deputy town clerk Richard Davidson said: "We were delighted with how it went and thought the number of people who attended was great considering it was miserable weather.
"The consultants will now take the feedback to analyse but I think everyone was for it and excited that something in the town could be delivered."
Mr Davidson said the consultation was not only held for the town council to inform the community about the proposals, but also to demonstrate public support for the planning application, which will be submitted to West Norfolk Council within an estimated three weeks.
"I think people acknowledge the town's facilities have not kept pace with how the town has developed," said Mr Davidson.
The town council has said the 1960s community centre was no longer fit for purpose.
If the plans get the go-ahead and a funding application to the Big Lottery is successful, the venue in Howdale Road could double in size and have a bar and changing facilities.
Previous articleHolocaust event in King's Lynn
Next articleBreathing new life into old books in Downham
Natalie Copeland
New unit aims to cut prolonged stays in hospital
Hobbycraft to open in Lynn


text:
Share this Story: Change legislation to save Windsor airport's control tower, Masse urges
Change legislation to save Windsor airport's control tower, Masse urges
Windsor West MP Brian Masse believes he has an idea that could save the control tower at Windsor International Airport: Changing legislation to empower federal transport minister Marc Garneau to veto Nav Canada.
Dalson Chen • Windsor Star
The control tower at Windsor International Airport, photographed Dec. 1, 2020. Photo by Nick Brancaccio /Windsor Star
Windsor West MP Brian Masse believes he has found a way to prevent the city's airport from losing its control tower — but it will only work with political will behind it.
"The solution is to amend the legislation," Masse said on Friday about the ongoing issue between Windsor International Airport and Nav Canada.
Change legislation to save Windsor airport's control tower, Masse urges Back to video
Masse said he is having a parliamentary legal team research the subject, and he believes that changing Section 4.91 of the Aeronautics Act, or changing Section 14 of the Civil Air Navigation Service Commercialization Act, would empower federal Minister of Transport Marc Garneau to "preemptively veto" Nav Canada's review of Windsor's airport.
"What does this mean, specifically, in practical terms? If the government today is seriously interested in preserving the (services) at the airport … we can quickly bring into effect laws to allow the minister to have that capability," Masse said.
Windsor officials first learned in November that Nav Canada — the privatized national provider of civil air navigation services — has listed Windsor International Airport among several airports to be studied for potential replacement of its air control staff with "airport advisory services."
Long-term air traffic levels and cost savings have been cited as reasons for the review.
This is a clear path forward — if the government wants it
Garneau has said the decision rests with Nav Canada and that Transport Canada can only intervene on safety matters. As well, Transport Canada disagreeing with Nav Canada's decision could take years to make a difference.
"The response from the government is, basically, 'We can't do anything about this. We can't stop the process. That's the way it is,'" Masse lamented on Friday.
Municipal leaders and regional elected representatives have publicly expressed concern and disapproval of the possibility of Windsor International Airport being without a control tower.
Masse, a New Democratic Party member, said he is open to working with other parties on his idea. He estimated that drafts of the necessary amendments could be ready by the end of January.
"From there, it's a matter of how quickly we get interest in it," Masse said.
Masse acknowledged that changing the legislation would impact not only the review of Windsor's airport but also the reviews of airports in other regions. He said crafting of the amendments is still in the early stages.
Nevertheless, Masse believes his proposal will answer questions about Transport Canada's position on the issue.
"This is a clear path forward — if the government wants it," Masse said. "It's a legislative approach to doing things."
'Grave concern' that Windsor Airport could lose air traffic control
Loss of Windsor air traffic control would hobble ambitious cargo transportation plan, port authority says
Local leaders join forces to stop removal of Windsor's air traffic control
Pilots, local leaders call on feds not to allow Windsor Airport to lose air-traffic control
Conflicting messages fly over review of Windsor's air traffic control tower
Opinion: Control tower at Windsor airport a necessity given proximity to border
Dante Albano, a commercial pilot who organized a petition to save Windsor International Airport's control tower, said he's in full agreement with Masse's idea.
"This would give (the minister) the power. After that, there wouldn't really be any more excuses to go by," Albano said. "I want to see the study to go away. I want to see our tower stay. And so does everyone else."
dchen@postmedia.com
Local funeral homes feel the pressure coping with surging COVID deaths
People are grieving.


1) Experimentation (Simulation of a sensor-based system):(a) Users (as visitor avatars) can walk around in a virtual poster session and experience their position as calculated by the system. (b) The user (as developer avatar) can modify the sensor positions and thereby improve the accuracy of the system.
2) Conversation (Instant Messaging with automatically generated gestures, gaze, and emotional expression): Two users can interact by using the IM system.
3) Content Creation (Multimodal dialogues automatically generated from text): The user can select a piece of text, which will be transformed into a dialogue and "played out" by two Second Life "bots".
We introduce a system that automatically adds different types of behavior to a given dialogue script between two virtual embodied agents. It allows us to transform a dialogue in text format into an agent behavior script enriched by eye gaze and conversational gesture behavior. The agents・gaze behavior is informed by theories of human face-to-face gaze behavior. Gestures are generated based on the analysis of linguistic and contextual information of the input text. The resulting annotated dialogue script is then transformed into the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language for 3D agents (MPML3D), which controls the multi-modal behavior of animated life-like agents, including facial 1 and body animation and synthetic speech. Using our system makes it very easy to add appropriate non-verbal behavior to a given dialogue text, a task that would otherwise be very cumbersome and time consuming.
In our research, we address the tasks of recognition and interpretation of affect communicated through text messaging in virtual communication environments, specifically, in Instant Messaging (IM), where people tend to use an informal style of writing. In order to facilitate sensitive and expressive communication in such environments, we introduced a novel syntactical rule-based approach to affect recognition from text. The developed Affect Analysis Model was designed to handle not only grammatically and syntactically correct textual input, but also informal messages written in abbreviated or expressive manner. The proposed rule-based approach processes each sentence in sequential stages, including symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing, and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. The evaluation of the Affect Analysis Model algorithm showed promising results regarding its capability to recognize affective information in text from an existing corpus of informal online conversations. In order to enrich the user's experience in online communication, make it enjoyable, exciting and fun, we realized a web-based IM application, AffectIM, and endowed it with the emotional intelligence by integrating with the developed Affect Analysis Model.
We are developing authoring tools and technologies that allow anyone to become a professional content creator. The system generates attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two 3D graphical agents automatically, by simply providing textual information (e.g. from the web) as input. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to decompose text into segments and identify rhetorical discourse relations between them, which are then transformed to an equivalent RST tree in Question-Answer form, the so-called DialogueNet. After appropriate role assignment (expert, layman), the resulting dialogue is "acted out" by 3D life-like character agents, whereby the laymen asks the questions, and the expert provides the answers. In this way, any kind of information (health, news, science) can conveyed in a form that is intuitive, engaging, and easy to understand by anyone.
Although today's search engines are capable of returning query results containing many thousands of items, the size of the result prevents most users from viewing more than a very limited number of top-ranked items. For this reason, recent attention has been given to the problem of dynamically clustering the results of queries so as to allow users to better understand the distribution of items within the result. We have developed tools for query-result clustering based on the RSC model, which assesses the quality of cluster candidates, the degree of association between pairs of cluster candidates, and the degree of association between clusters and data items, all according to the statistical significance of a form of correlation among the neighborhoods of their constituent members.
We present a novel query processing framework that brings together model checking approaches and query processing techniques for pervasive computing. In addition to its expressiveness, our system provides sound mechanisms available to pervasive systems for building their data management-oriented tasks.
604 Teleportation of composite systems for communication and quantum information processing.
Efficient data transfer through a higher dimensional bus.
We make use of a higher dimensional bus to effect the teleportation of composite quantum systems. This enables us on the one hand to increase the efficiency of data transfer between different regions of a quantum information processor and on the other hand to realize a form of teleportation based quantum computation. The transmission of two qubit and two qutrit systems is investigated in detail and we provide generalizations to higher dimensional systems. We also describe how a continuous variable bus can implement such a data transfer.
Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is expected to be one of the promising switching methods for the next-generation Internet. One of the challenges for network design is how to provide fair bandwidth allocation (FBA) in OBS networks. We propose the rate fairness preemption (RFP) scheme in this research to achieve approximately max-min fair bandwidth allocation in OBS networks. The major advantages of our proposed scheme are no degradation of network utilization and no per-flow state operations in core networks. Analysis and simulation results show that the RFP scheme effectively provides FBA in OBS networks.
Scilab is an open source platform for numerical calculation and simulation. The Scilab software is, since May 2003, produced by a consortium, hosted by INRIA*, which, to date, has 25 industrial companies, European research centres and prestigious higher education institutes as members.More than 35,000 remote downloads of the Scilab software are carried out each month from the official site of the Consortium to the profit of companies, universities and research centres, European as well as foreign. The number of members of the Scilab Consortium is in constant growth.* French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control.


This handsome building on Marsh Road, which is now occupied by Morfa Clwyd Business Centre and The Register Office, was designed by architect William John Bowen for Mr Thomas Cliffe ("the stamp man").
Mr Cliffe started his business in 1920 and by the 1930's his name was associated with Colwyn Bay by up to 5 million stamp collectors across Britain. From his office on Princes Drive, Colwyn Bay, stamps were packed and sold through many and various outlets including Woolworths. The stamp packets were also placed in some cigarette packets. With business thriving, he had about fifty employees, Cliffe asked Mr Bowen to design for him a purpose built factory. After problems acquiring planning permission in Colwyn Bay, Cliffe looked further afield and he bought the land on Marsh Road, Rhyl. Building began in 1937. Mr Bowen designed a central block for the hub of the work and two smaller dormitory buildings at each end to house the workers.
As it turned out, most of the ladies preferred to travel daily and the dormitory building on the right became a canteen and caretaker's home – it is now the Register Office. Thomas Cliffe was very loyal to, and appreciative of, his Colwyn Bay workforce and provided a bus in which to transport his workers backwards and forwards to Rhyl, free of charge.
The work included handling and selling stamps by the ton, making stamp albums, stamp hinges and philatelic accessories.
Postal services have been issuing stamps from around the world since 1840 and by the 1860's thousands of stamp collectors and stamp dealers were appearing as this new interest and hobby spread worldwide.
The "Stamp Finder" booklet pictured above contains not only a stamp collectors' index but also features such as "Know the World through your Stamp Collection", "How to start a Stamp Collection" and "How to organise a Stamp Club".
"Rhyl and Rhuddlan Days of the Past", Harry Thomas, 1985.


Having dyslexia can be tough, but the breadth of innovative tools available to help with literacy tasks makes dyslexia a lot easier to manage than it used to be.
Below is a limited list of high-tech assistive technology (AT) to help dyslexics with literacy tasks. But first, an important consideration: Be aware that simply choosing a great tool and giving a student access is not going to solve any problems. Adults must carefully consider the parameters of the task the student struggles with as well as the setting. Speech-to-text software is great, but if the student doesn't have a quiet place to go when it's time to dictate his ideas, it's not going to be a successful tool. Similarly, an app that reads text to a student won't help if she's too embarrassed to be the only one in the class using headphones.
After selecting the right AT, parents and educators must realize that even today's tech-savvy youth need lots of training. Would-be users have to understand all the ins and outs of the tool they're given, including what its capabilities are (and aren't) and when and how to use it. Plenty of kids have given up on technology that would have been extraordinarily helpful because they couldn't understand how it could work within their specific academic requirements.
The AT suggestions we're sharing below are great for students, but even individuals with dyslexia in the professional world may benefit from them.
Snap&Read is an excellent text-to-speech program. A small sampling of the many sites it reads aloud include Google docs, Moodle, Bookshare, Evernote, The New York Times, and even social media sites like Facebook and Instagram (which is a great way to get reticent kids to start experimenting). Snap&Read also reads screenshots and PDFs. This software has some other capabilities beyond its reading services. For example, the Simplify tool provides definitions for difficult words. With the Capture tool, users can enter notes on what they read (either by typing them or copying and pasting from the text), which is useful for writing papers. Snap&Read also words in other languages.
With a letter certifying that a person needs their services, both Learning Ally and Bookshare provide users with audio versions of texts. Their libraries include more basic selections, like audio versions of novels, and hard-to-find texts, like periodicals and textbooks that students can listen to. Though on the surface Learning Ally and Bookshare are similar, there are some important differences. There is a yearly fee associated with Learning Ally, for example, while Bookshare is free. Texts on Learning Ally are read by people, whereas Bookshare uses computerized voices; this sounds like a negative aspect, but some learners find that they like the computerized voices better because it is easier to modulate their speed and pitch.
Cost: Bookshare is free, and Learning Ally costs $119 a year.
C-Pen is a small device about the size of a highlighter that users can use to scan text, either a single word or whole sentences. The pen will read the scanned section aloud (it has a headphone jack for use in classrooms) in a computerized voice that users describe as natural. The pen can also provide definitions of words. Importantly, the pen accommodates both left- and right-handed users. Scanning takes a bit of practice, and the pen is best suited for reading a word here and there rather than large blocks of text.
This app, which works only on iPhones, is a combination scanner and reader (unlike other apps that only scan but require a separate app for reading). It can read almost anything, and its portability is a huge boon. Users can scan passages they need for school, like worksheets and sections of books, but it's a handy tool for reading tasks in the "real world," too, and can be used for menus, maps, signs, time tables….
What really sets Grammarly, apart, though, is the detailed explanations it provides about mistakes, so users can learn as they're editing. It can also generate weekly progress reports, which can be motivating for students. Other neat features are genre-specific style monitors and a plagiarism detector.
Cost: Grammarly offers a basic version, which includes only basic checking and does not give access to explanations, for free. The premium version, with all the bells and whistles, costs $139.95 a year.
Whether students use Dragon software, Google Read&Write, or simply dictate into their phones, there's more to text-to-speech than you may think. Here is a useful guide to training students to use speech-to-text software successfully; it takes some time to get it right, but the results are worth it!
Probably the biggest advantage to using Google Read&Write is that users don't need to use multiple forms of AT. GRW is the total package, offering both text-to-speech and speech-to-text. It works with documents, web pages and common file types in Google Drive (including: Google Docs, PDF, ePub & Kes). Like many good text-to-speech programs, GRW highlights each word as it's read, making both following along and editing much easier. The dictionary is quite handy. For typists, the word prediction feature takes some of the heavy work out of spelling. And distractible users will be grateful that GRW simplifies and summarizes text on web pages to remove ads and other copy.
Cost: For an individual license, GRW is $145 a year, though many school districts provide it as a free accommodation to students with IEPs.
This listserv for people who are interested in AT in education is free to join (and we recommend that you do!). Contributors include assistive technology specialists, students in higher education, educators, vendors, and parents. Send out any questions you have to the group —none are "silly!"—and brace yourself for a flood of knowledgeable responses. (You can adjust your email preferences at any time if it gets to be too much.) The group requests that users be mindful that every email sent goes to 4,000+ users, so it's a good idea to respond with private messages when appropriate. There are lots of good resources on their website, too.
Look for one more Dyslexia Awareness Month post next week! We'll explore the emotional toll dyslexia can take and offer suggestions to parents and educators.


Brazil - Brazilian singing brothers Diego & Diogo have recently filmed their debut DVD at the Nestle Auditorium in São José do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, using nearly 150 different Robe fixtures – including the brand new Pointe - with lighting services provided by São Paulo-based Showdesign.
Lighting designer Leonardo Oliveira and Director of Photography Rogério Fernandez, both of Showdesign, were in charge of creating and supervising lighting to achieve great results for both live audience and the cameras that registered on all 17 songs for the soon-to-be-released DVD.
In total, 59 Pointes, 60 LEDWash 600s and 24 LEDBeam 100s, all from Robe's ROBIN series, set the mood for this Brazilian 'sertanejo' music show.
Showdesign worked for several weeks to create all the custom structures needed for the DVD record, including building the set and scenic elements and choosing the lighting fixtures.
After seeing the new Pointe's performance in the Barretos Festival in August, they decided to specify this as the main moving head in the set up. "We knew the Pointe was Robe's latest technology and when we saw it in action, we really liked the dynamics and quality of light that it can offer," Oliveira comments.
The stage was built in sections around different groups of lights. In the middle, there were three sections each containing nine Pointes and nine LEDWash 600s. On both sides of the stage were more blocks of the set, each lit with 16 Pointes, together with 12 LEDBeam 100s per side, located on the floor. The rest of the LEDWash 600s were used on the side walls and as front lighting.
Oliveira was in charge of designing, programming and operating the show using a grandMA 2 lighting console plus a wing running OnPC software.
He adds: "I really liked the scope and variety of the Pointe because it can act as a wash, a beam and a spot fixture. The zoom it has is much better than other units in its class ... plus it's lightweight and fast.
"The show has very distinctive sections. I'm using a lot of gobos thanks to the two really nice wheels available in the Pointe, together with the prism, frost, a varied colour wheel... I'm making good use of all the resources the Pointe offers."
On the camera side, Fernandez states: "The director wanted to do something different, so we chose to use a very high colour temperature of 6200ºK with the help of the LED technology. In fact, all the lights in the set are LED based. That's why the LEDWash 600 was a great choice - it enabled us to program the right colour temperature for every part of the show. Robe is a great brand - I love it!"
Diego & Diogo are two young brothers born in the Mato Grosso state who presented their first album in 2003. Now, after launching this DVD, they will tour Brazil delighting crowds with their newest and most popular songs.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


New Year's day is nothing but another usual day for many of us. Resolutions are ridiculous momentary fantasies that wears off in few days,as an old pun that says, "Same spouse,same salary,same goals, there is nothing to be excited about a New Year. By now, our resolutions would just remain insoluble inked in our journal.
But,Give it a break! Is not a new year, another productive time given for us to achieve another milestone in life?
Once my sister returning from a conference shared an interesting stuff to me, she said, the guest speaker in the conference compared "a year with a pack of cards". He compared the 52 cards for 52 weeks. A player is given their set of cards to play. Each one of them gets a chance clockwise, based on which choices and changes has to be made on their own, for every round, until the end of the play. The Wins are determined by how you play with what you get?. You may draw the trump card, an Ace, a Joker or just get a 2 or 3.
Sometimes, you draw a series of 2 and you win! .While at times you lose, even if you have king, queens by your side.
Just like a game of cards, a year takes one full round trip around the sun. It gives you chances (both fortunes and misfortunes), choices to make, changes to alter the game.
You cannot place your trust on your expectations, you cannot trust your fortunes, you cannot expect life to play fair with you, since it is your fellow player. By the time, we learn the rules of life, we will be too old to play the game. Apparently,changing your behaviour and attitude will take 8 months to 1 year.Effort is required, doing what is right is important than doing what is easy. But you surely can have the conviction to adjust your sail. A conviction to play, have fun, feel brave and test, a conviction to change, make a good choice, organize, deal and focus and go with the flow. To know more about this, read on; How to maintain discipline in life? . Above all, a conviction without trust and promise is not more than a failure. Yes, its 'Trust' that makes you stay resolute.
Promise to yourself and have the conviction to TRUST and renew these four promises of Trust, before you start a trip every year around sun.
(Love takes a disposition and it's God, God is love himself, Always make way for love).
(You are what you constantly think).
Trust Nature, Have new hopes and new horizons.
(Putting your trust in others either gives you 'a person for life' or 'a lesson for life').
More than anything, successful people value their convictions and tweak themselves accordingly. That is why they are able to make decisions,solve problems,deal with changes successfully.
Wake Joy and Stay Happy!! See you in my next blog!
Thanks for stoppin-by to read n comment and one more for Follow. Much obliged.


text:
Do the Settlements From Litigation Need to Be Disclosed in the Financial Statements?
By Tyler Lacoma
A Bank Statement Explained
What Is a Descriptive Withdrawal on a Bank Statement?
Differences Between an Annual Report & a 10K
Does a Prior Period Adjustment Affect the Statement of Cash Flow?
Guide to Making Footnotes for Financial Statements
Litigation is a court process that, ideally, ends up with a resolution for a lawsuit. A settlement resulting from the litigation is money that is paid to the party bringing the suit in return for damages and based on the decisions of the court. However, for the business that receives the settlement, the money counts as income and needs to be added to business financial statements in some way.
Financial Statement Components
Financial statements are designed to show basic information on a company's financial state that can be easily accessed by anyone. To this end, generally accepted accounting principles have strict standards on what information makes up the primary financial statements, like the income statement, budget sheet and state of cash flows. This includes the entries the statements show and the order they come in, which can leave little room for adding information like a litigation settlement.
Statement Notes
Revenue received from a litigation settlement will show up in financial statements, but it will also be hidden within other asset and revenue accounts. However, financial statements also have note sections in which litigation can be disclosed, and the United States does have regulations that require companies to disclose any litigation that they went through, especially if it resulted in a change in income.
There are several reasons for disclosing litigation settlements. One of the primary reasons is that litigation is a serious legal matter and investors, as owners of the business, have a right to know about the litigation and its results. Also, litigation revenue needs to be taxed and investors may want to understand the reason for higher taxes and higher revenue so that, when the next period comes along, the drop in both will not be unexpected.
False and Misleading Statements
In general, the United States has strict regulations requiring financial statements to be truthful and accurate, including no false or misleading information, which can lead to serious legal difficulties. When in doubt, a company should properly record litigation revenue and explain its presence clearly in financial statement notes in response to these guidelines, if for no further reason.
IAS Plus: Presentation of Financial Statements
PCAOB: AU Section 560
Journal of Accountancy: Handling of Litigation Contingency Disclosure Facing Greater SEC Scrutiny
Tyler Lacoma has worked as a writer and editor for several years after graduating from George Fox University with a degree in business management and writing/literature. He works on business and technology topics for clients such as Obsessable, EBSCO, Drop.io, The TAC Group, Anaxos, Dynamic Page Solutions and others, specializing in ecology, marketing and modern trends.
The Difference Between IFRS and GAAP Balance Sheet Footnote Requirements
How to Update Files in Google Docs
How to Report Product Sales Revenue & Service Revenue on an Income Statement
The Legal Effect of a Contract Venue Provision
How to Determine a Company's Total Revenue
How to Add Footnotes in Powerpoint
How to Write Business Minutes
Why It Is Mandatory for Companies to Abide by GAAP?
How to Delete Notes in PowerPoint
1 The Difference Between IFRS and GAAP Balance Sheet Footnote Requirements
2 How to Update Files in Google Docs
3 How to Report Product Sales Revenue & Service Revenue on an Income Statement
4 The Legal Effect of a Contract Venue Provision


Due to parked cars Green Collections on Lyne Avenue - Simmondley have not been completed - Crew will re-attempt on Thurs 25th April.
Due to parked cars Black Collections on Collier Street have not been completed. Crews will return to reattempt collections on the 19th April. - These have now been completed.
Due to parked cars Brown Bins on Laneside Close, Chapel en le Frith have not been completed. Crews will reattempt collections Thursday 18th April. These have now been completed.
Areas of Bamford have been affected due to unforeseen circumstances, Black Bin collections will be caught up on the Thursday 18th April. These have now been completed.
All collections have been completed as normal.
If you have additional recycling please leave it next to your brown bin in a cardboard box or untied carrier bags so we can clearly see the material is recycling. Black sacks or tied bags will not be taken.
If the lid of your bin is frozen shut or the contents of your bin are frozen inside and don't tip out we will not come back to try again. There is no need to contact us. Please take your bin in and present it again on your next scheduled collection day.


text:
Q: How can a union member have a pointer to an instance of the union? I might be overcomplicating this..
I'm trying to make a fairly reusable hierarchical menu system for an embedded app, in C on Arduino. I have structures to represent the different types of menu item, including those that are submenus, and a union of these to be a generic menu entry. An array of menu entries is one level of the menu. A submenu entry has a pointer to another array of menu entries.
Problem is, the submenu entry is a member of the union, so it needs to be defined before the union. But it has a pointer to an array of instances of this union, which causes a compile error because the union's not defined yet.
Is there a typesafe way of dealing with this, or does my pointer in the submenu entry have to be a void*?
Code:
typedef enum {UI_STATE_HOME, UI_STATE_MENU, UI_STATE_DIALOG} te_UIState;
typedef enum {UI_ENTRY_SUBMENU, UI_ENTRY_NUMERIC_INT, UI_ENTRY_NUMERIC_FLOAT, UI_ENTRY_BOOL, UI_ENTRY_DISCRETE} te_UIEntryType;

/* Typedefs for the different types of entry
 *
 */

typedef struct {
  char* entryName; // pointer to one of our string entries, eg MNU_Light
  te_UIEntryType entryType;
} tsEntry;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  te_UIEntryType entryType;
  int (* finalIntHandler)(int selectedValue); //The function that should be called when a number has been selected
  int (* initialIntValue) (); //The function that should be called to obtain the starting value for the selector
} ts_EntryInt;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  te_UIEntryType entryType;
  int (* finalIntHandler)(float selectedValue);
  float (* initialSingleValue) ();
} ts_EntrySingle;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  te_UIEntryType entryType;
  int (* finalIntHandler)(bool selectedValue);
  bool (* initialBoolValue) ();
} ts_EntryBool;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  te_UIEntryType entryType;
  int (* handler)();
  char* (* optionalEntryNamePtrFunction)(); //If this points to a function, it'll be called to determine what text to display as the entry name.
  // This is for things like enable/disable where the text changes depending on the present state.
} ts_EntryDiscrete;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  const te_UIEntryType entryType = UI_ENTRY_SUBMENU;
  void *entries[];
} ts_EntrySubmenu;

typedef union
{
  tsEntry entry;
  ts_EntryInt entryInt;
  ts_EntrySingle entrySingle;
  ts_EntryBool entryBool;
  ts_EntryDiscrete entryDiscrete;
  ts_EntrySubmenu entrySubmenu;
} tuEntry;

A: You need to forward declare tuEntry so that you can use it in ts_EntrySubmenu.  You'll need to give a tag name to that union so it can be  referenced later.
Also, you can't initialize a field of a struct or union as a default when it is defined in C.  You need to set that field in each relevant instance.
typedef union tuEntry tuEntry;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  const te_UIEntryType entryType;   // no default value
  tuEntry *entries[];
} ts_EntrySubmenu;

union tuEntry
{
  tsEntry entry;
  ts_EntryInt entryInt;
  ts_EntrySingle entrySingle;
  ts_EntryBool entryBool;
  ts_EntryDiscrete entryDiscrete;
  ts_EntrySubmenu entrySubmenu;
};

A: Declaring a pointer to some T only requires that T be declared, not necessarily defined. So just do this:
union Entry;

typedef struct {
  char* entryName;
  const te_UIEntryType entryType = UI_ENTRY_SUBMENU;
  union Entry *entries[];
} ts_EntrySubmenu;

typedef union Entry {
  /* as before */
} tsEntry;

A:
Problem is, the submenu entry is a member of the union, so it needs to
  be defined before the union.

Yes.

But it has a pointer to an array of
  instances of this union, which causes a compile error because the
  union's not defined yet.

The union does not need to have been defined for you to declare a pointer to that type.  It only needs to have been declared.  The definition can come later.

Is there a typesafe way of dealing with this, or does my pointer in
  the submenu entry have to be a void*?

Yes.  Forward-declare the union before the structure definition, and put the union definition later.  This does require you to provide a tag for your union type, else the forward declaration and later definition would not refer to the same type.
Example:
typedef union entry tuEntry;

typedef struct {
  // ...
  tuEntry *entries[];
} ts_EntrySubmenu;

union entry
{
  // ...
  ts_EntrySubmenu entrySubmenu;
};

Additionally, I cannot help noticing that your original code completely avoids declaring any structure or union tags.  I want to make sure you understand that that's a style choice, and especially that the typedef keyword is not about defining types, but rather about declaring aliases for type names.  Your style is not inherently wrong, but it does not support what you want to do.  You need to use structure and union types with tags to link multiple declarations of the same type in the same scope.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


In case you missed it, Houston is one of the places to visit this year, and there are many reasons why it is a fascinating city. It has top notch performing and visual arts. Restaurants are second to none with menus ranging from seafood to bar-b-que to ethnic of all kinds. There are wonderful museums, a remarkable zoo, Space Center Houston and if you are a beach person, Galveston is only an hour down the road.
Then there are the things you find on your own like this graffiti covered abandoned warehouse we discovered recently when we were out and about.
I was fascinated by what had been created on metal doors.
Each was intricate and told a story of its own.
As I studied the work, I couldn't help but think of Basquiat whose graffiti rewarded him with great fame.
It was here that I met Pero who interrupted his painting to tell me about this place. All of the work is by Hispanic artists who have gotten permission to use an allotted space. Some have gotten commissions as a result of their creation being spotted, and that can open a door that leads to hoped for success.
I noticed Pero's bag was filled with spray paint, the medium, he explained used for most of the work. I was amazed that such precision could be achieved with spray.
Feeling that I had taken enough of Pero's time, I left him to get back to his work and with the knowledge that this warehouse is being refurbished and will be a showcase for Latino art.
Driving away, I noticed this message and thought about its truth.
Yes, Houston is full of surprise if one takes the time to explore.
I visited Houston many years ago, I should return! The artwork is incredible and with spray paint it is unbelievable!
Intriguing artwork! What a treat to be able to engage one of the artists!!!!!!!!
Yes, had Pero not been there I would have been left wondering how the graffiti happened.
Miami and Fort Lauderdale both have an area very similar and hold an art walk one evening a month.
Art walks seem to have gotten very popular. This work deserves to be seen but is a little out of the way for the art walk.
Will you please reveal where in Houston this visual art can be seen?! I can't believe we've missed it!!! We did a Graffiti walking tour in Buenos Aires and this definitely rivals theirs!!!
The warehouse is on Harrisburg close to Lockwood and next to the big coffee processing plant.


text:
In the Cryosphere
Jenny Turner
Better than Beyoncé
Ian Penman
The Family Biden
Christian Lorentzen
'Agent Sonya'
Malcolm Gaskill
Did I invade? Do you exist?
James Meek
At the National Gallery: Dürer's Journeys
Mary Wellesley
England under Siege
Jessie Childs
On Giving Up
At the Swiss Institute: Rosemary Mayer
Francesca Wade
Gentlemanly Bullets
Silences for Sebald
Story: 'Four Talks'
Christ comes to Stockholm
Patricia Lockwood
Short Cuts: Nigerian Oil
Adewale Maja-Pearce
Republican Conspiracism
Colin Kidd
Wiltshire's Multitudes
Jonathan Meades
At the Gay Bar
Andrew Durbin
Fragonard's Abdications
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Katie Kitamura
Nicole Flattery
Diary: Selling my hair on eBay
V.G. Kiernan on the high price of poisonV.G. Kiernan
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Vol. 10 No. 12 · 23 June 1988
V.G. Kiernan on the high price of poison
Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on WhatsAppEmailPrint 3371 words
The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848
by Robin Blackburn.
Verso, 560 pp., £27.95, April 1988, 0 86091 188 8Show More
Pro-Slavery: A History of the Defence of Slavery in America, 1701-1840
by Larry Tise.
Georgia, 501 pp., $40, March 1988, 0 8203 0927 3Show More
Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean
by Alfred Hunt.
Louisiana State, 196 pp., £23.75, March 1988, 9780807113288Show More
by A.J. Ayer.
Secker, 195 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 436 02820 4Show More
Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection
by David Wilson.
McGill-Queen's University Press, 218 pp., $27.95, April 1988, 0 7735 1013 3Show More
Slavery has been ubiquitous in history, with innumerable forms and functions: something of the truth of human nature is revealed by this fact. Horace saw nothing wrong in it, though himself the son of a freed-man and sensitive about his origins. Debt-bondage has been very widespread in Asia; some Red Indian tribes kept slaves, and were glad to add negroes to their stock. Peer Gynt as slave-dealer was a representative money-making European of the 19th century. White men acquired slaves wherever they went, in India, South Africa, Java: but the Americas were the real New World of slavery, the new Dark Continent. This was servitude geared to the capitalism that was bringing European economies under its sway from the 18th century. A sugar plantation with its mill, and its businesslike organisation and rhythms of work, bore, as Robin Blackburn points out, a clear resemblance to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was 'more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history'. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three commodities Europe extracted from its plantations by such atrocious methods – cotton, tobacco, sugar – two have turned out to be semi-poisons. And now the Third World is revenging itself by flooding the West with drugs.
Blackburn's massive, thoroughly researched, highly intelligent and well-written book is a substantial contribution to Marxist historical literature. It offers 'a Marxist narrative' of how abolition was coming about, down to 1848, and an enquiry region by region into how far the motivation of its white supporters rose above the level of bourgeois liberalism. It does not offer any simple unilinear interpretation, as some others have done. So long-lived and widely ramifying an institution could not but generate multiple relations and reactions within societies increasingly complex: Blackburn understands this, and his account is a sophisticated, carefully balanced one, always seeking to identify both material and moral pressures, and rich in insights into their intricate interactions. He pays tribute to Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, but finds its baldly economic reasoning in the end 'mechanical and unsatisfactory'.
In this story the central event is the French Revolution, one of many reasons why its bicentenary next year deserves to be taken due note of. Directly or indirectly it gave rise to immense dislocations and upheaval in the Americas. Before 1789 the biggest change came with the stormy birth of the United States. Slavery was not a prime issue in that revolution, even if patriots might like to indulge in 'anti-slavery gestures', but it did lead to renunciation of further imports from Africa. Jefferson the Virginian slave-holder quite approved of this, realising that farmers and artisans in the Northern States where blacks were few did not want any more to be brought in to compete with them: but he helped to give slavery a wider diffusion in the new nation. In 1776 there were fewer than half a million slaves in North America; by 1790, in spite of the war, there were 700,000.
Another investigator, Larry Tise in Pro-Slavery: A History of the Defence of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, shows how deeply men's thinking, all over the country, came to be tainted by this vicious survival. Ministers of religion, the most vocal élite in society, 'wrote almost half of all defences of slavery published in America'; and nearly all its later apologists 'characterised slavery as a missionary institution'. Modern America's propensity to humbug and double-think must have deep roots in this long-drawn-out education in whitewashing: the original dichotomy between North and South has continued into the present-day amalgam in the shape of American enthusiasm for human rights and right-wing dictators.
In Spanish America, as Blackburn emphasises, slavery and plantations were not fundamental to the economy. Hence negroes could be treated more humanely, and the codes regulating their condition, even if not always enforced, compared very favourably with anything the French or British had to show in the West Indies. Spaniards and Portuguese were readier than white men further north to employ black or coloured men as soldiers, even against other whites – a thing not to be thought of by the time of the Boer War, after another century of imperialism and racialist indoctrination. It may be added that white men everywhere were remarkably free from any dislike of black concubines, but many of them lived under the shadow of fear of black retaliation in kind. It was an added trauma of the plantation world that, as Blackburn observes, there was often a heavy surplus of young males in the servile population – in 19th-century Cuba, for instance, where proprietors always suspected their slaves of wanting to murder them and seize their women.
For many reasons Britain is the country that matters most in the record, and it is rightly given fullest coverage. Feeling there against the slave trade gathered gradually. Scots economists – like Adam Smith in 1776 – agreed with French Physiocrats in arguing that slave labour was unproductive. Quakers, as Blackburn says, and as can be said of Dissenters in general, being debarred from politics could devote time and energy to better things, like the cause of abolition. Radicals and Nonconformists were all the more zealous because 'West Indian interests were close to the heart of "Old Corruption",' the jiggery-pokery that kept the oligarchy in power. So were the 'Nabobs' home from India: empire has always had a corrupting effect, obvious or devious, on the metropolis. Condemnation of the slave trade, and calls for Parliamentary reform, reinforced each other.
After its costly failure in North America, the ruling class was driven to consider reforms as a sop to radicalism, and things looked propitious both for abolition of the trade and for constitutional change, until the French Revolution threw the rulers into panic. Their decision to go to war with France in 1793, in alliance with the Continental despots, must have been in good part an escape from reforms that might now lead perilously far. Allowance must be made for an even more discreditable motive. Blackburn cites Wilberforce's later belief that England would not have gone to war if Pitt had not given way to a temptation dangled before him by his minister Dundas, in charge of Indian and colonial affairs: the prospect of a quick and easy acquisition of the French West Indian islands, to add to Britain's tropical revenues and furbish its government's popularity.
Planter string-pulling was as powerful in Paris as in London, so far as the colonies were concerned, and the Revolution opened with a display of only very timid reformism. An early issue was that of mulatto rights, and the ministry sank into 'craven capitulation to colonial interests'. It was setting a precedent for times nearer our own, and the many surrenders of French and British ministers to settler intransigence in Indo-China or Algeria, Malaya, Kenya or Rhodesia. But the shufflers in Paris were soon being elbowed aside by the more resolute Jacobin party. Estate-owners began demanding autonomy, with the backing of many of the petits blancs. Like the French émigrés in Europe, these patriots were looking for aid to the enemies of their country, Britain and Spain.
A situation of extraordinary complexity was building up in the biggest colony, St Domingue (now Haiti). While the Creoles revolted against France, slaves were breaking into revolt against them, and also against the curiously numerous mulatto owners of estates: between black and half-black a furious conflict of race and class raged. In 1794, France, in a truly revolutionary move, declared complete abolition of slavery throughout the empire. It was thus outflanking its white opponents, and was quite prepared to mobilise black forces against them, including those led by the most remarkable of the black chiefs, Toussaint L'Ouverture. Britain stepped in as upholder of slavery all over the West Indies, where 'the slave order of the whole region faced a desperately serious threat.' In much the same way, after 1945 Britain was to be found backing the attempts of the French to restore their power in Indo-China, and the Dutch in Indonesia, besides restoring its own in Malaya. It would have been no more than retribution if Napoleon had succeeded in crossing the Channel. As it was, Toryism made a vicarious atonement by a mass sacrifice of British soldiers and sailors, at least 40,000 of whom perished, mostly from disease, between 1796 and 1800 in the Lesser Antilles alone. Another item in the high cost of cheap sugar.
In summer 1798 the British had to agree to withdraw from St Domingue. Toussaint was moving little by little towards throwing off French rule as well. This erstwhile trusty coachman on a slave estate was now driving the lurching cart of a new republic. Toussaint's removal to France and death in a dungeon there were followed by Napoleon's attempt at reconquest. His troops practised 'wholesale massacre' on a scale that 'foreshadowed the colonial wars of a later epoch': Cromwell had recovered Ireland by similar means, but St Domingue was too far away. French ferocity compelled blacks and mulattos to join hands, and ended in the first and best-deserved defeat of the Corsican bandit, as he was called, sometimes deservedly, by Englishmen. It was also the first successful insurrection of a coloured people against Europe: the next efforts, in Ceylon, Java, and then, in 1857, India, were all failures. It was the combination of slave revolt and French republicanism that 'changed the history of New World slavery'. Free Haiti was to be 'a thorn in the flesh of the slave order throughout the western hemisphere'. Alfred Hunt makes it clear, in Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, that the prowess of Toussaint and his successors 'did not go unnoticed by American slaves in the South'. In Louisiana, Haitian elements were potent in the black culture: drums and dances 'conjured up nightmares of slave frenzy and potential rebellion'.
In 1807 Parliament consented to suppress the slave trade. Pitt's disastrous adventure in the West Indies had weakened the reactionaries; and, as Blackburn says, the Tory war in Europe was increasingly unpopular, and concessions were wanted to sweeten the pill. For progressives, abolition was now the line of least resistance. It need not involve any great sacrifice on the part of the planters: like the Virginians, they saw that stopping the traffic could be a means of preventing competitors from gaining supplies. It would be part of a grand design to halt the trade, and Britain during the war was mistress of the seas. A standstill would perpetuate her superiority in slave-ownership in the West Indies.
After the war agitation revived, in favour now of abolition of slavery itself in British colonies. A point of interest here is the way the abolition movement learned to organise and secure publicity, which must have supplied ideas for later movements as well. Another is that women were prominent among those arguing for immediate instead of gradual emancipation: they may have been thinking of their own chains, besides those of the blacks. On the plantations unrest was always smouldering, and from time to time flaring up into risings that were put down with merciless brutality. Blackburn has no doubt that Nonconformist chapels, even if missionaries were obliged to exhort their hearers to work hard for their masters, in the long run tended to undermine the system: one may compare this judgment with the arguments about Methodism and the Industrial Revolution. Chapel deacons were to the fore in the Demerara revolt in 1823; after the Jamaica rising of 1831 numerous chapels were burned down by furious whites. In 1831 the 'Captain Swing' disorders in rural England 'strangely paralleled the uprisings in the West Indies'; and during the loud hubbub of 1830-32 abolition was a theme second only to Parliamentary reform. Blackburn unravels their interplay with his customary skill. Success came to them together. In the granting of freedom, and the over-generous compensation allowed to planters, a similarity may be observable to the buying-out of Irish landlords at the end of the century.
Leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence were for the most part willing to contemplate emancipation as something to be achieved by stages in a not too far away future: the hero Bolivar, at one point in his fortunes, was not above applying for help to President Petion of Haiti. But in Spain's chief remaining possession, Cuba, a big expansion of plantation slavery took place in the 19th century, and new slaves were wanted in large numbers: they were smuggled in in defiance of treaties. There was an avid market also in Brazil, or its coffee-plantation areas, and the three colonies of Portuguese Africa existed mainly to satisfy it. One piece of information in a book rich in facts and figures as well as in ideas is that the value of their export of slaves came to be 'considerably in excess of the Portuguese national budget'. Other countries might want colonies to settle their people in, Portugal wanted them in order to remove people.
In France the restored monarchy was under pressure to restore France's colonial greatness. Slave-trading only ended after the revolution of 1830; slavery ended with the revolution of 1848, and with insurrection about to break out in the West Indies. Napoleon III lost no time in taking measures to restore labour discipline on behalf of the planters. He must have recollected his uncle's debacle in Haiti, and wanted to get in a return blow. Use of a poll tax to compel blacks to work was a device which was often to be adopted in colonial Africa.
A striking letter by Tomas Mosquera, President of Colombia in 1830, is quoted. He had opposed abolition, but when it came he felt, he told a friend, that a heavy burden had been lifted from him, and he gave away or sold cheap to his ex-slaves their dwellings and tools. One must wonder how many others experienced a similar liberation, and how many of our own more squalid capitalists – arms-dealers, City sharpers, privatisers – will feel that they have been set free from their baser selves when they are relieved of their ill-gotten gains.
Theoretical conclusions are scattered through the work, and brought together in a final chapter. One is that abolitionism seems to have had a special appeal for societies moving from earlier, more primitive forms of protest into modern industrial capitalism. It provided restless discontents, that is, with a visible, tangible target. There were no abolitionist movements, we are reminded, in Spain, Holland, Denmark, where industrialism was retarded. Anti-slavery might harmonise with some strands of capitalist thinking, but 'it appealed to an idealistic minority rather than to the mass of capitalists.' A good example of an idealist is Victor Schloecher, son of a rich porcelain manufacturer, whom we hear of in the later stages of France's move towards emancipation. Capitalism could make use of, or could do without, 'colonialism, monarchism, racism and slavery itself': a far-reaching proposition, suggesting that Marxists must allow for a great deal of flexibility or indeterminacy in the superstructure of their modes of production. Slavery came to an end, not because economically unviable, 'but where it became politically untenable'.
There was a time when a historian after 550 careful pages on any subject might feel that, for a comfortable length of time, he had said the last word. Blackburn is realistic as well as modest in submitting his ideas as only 'partial and tentative', because research is advancing so rapidly. And whereas most scholars would be content to rest on their oars, he is already planning a sequel.
Blackburn's book is concerned with physical bondage, though this always carried with it fetters of the mind as well: Professor Ayer's is concerned very much with mental fetters, and some of mankind's attempts to shake them off, but his subject brings him, too, in contact with the history of slavery. He cites a late writing of Paine, denouncing Louisiana's wish to be allowed to import slaves, and asking whether its citizens wanted to see the horrors of the Haiti conflict repeated on their soil. Of the small handful of mourners at Paine's funeral, two are said to have been black men.
Paine has been voluminously written about. Ayer feels that he has something novel to add, with a combined survey of Paine's life and study of his ideas. In a time when too much professional philosophy seems – to the vulgar eye at least – to have run to seed in scholastic hair-splitting, it is heartening to see a leading exponent applying his mind to real and serious problems of man's social existence. Ayer does not fall into the error of supposing that history has been made by philosophy, though he may be said to overstate at times the importance of individuals in moulding it. The course of the French Revolution was determined by class conflict, not by the personal shortcomings, the 'legalistic' outlook and 'inflexibility', of Robespierre and his faction. Ayer is interested in the present as well as the past, and has some eminently sensible comments to make on it. Britain's electoral system he finds 'so ridiculous that the deplorable Conservative government maintains itself in power with less than one third of the electorate voting for its candidates'. He notes that under what Mrs Thatcher calls her regime, 'the power of the police "has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished",' and he is 'unmoved by the rubbish that politicians talk about national security'.
Paine emigrated to America in 1774, with radical views ready-made, in time to give a vigorous push to public opinion in favour of revolution and independence with his pamphlet 'Common Sense', which had a huge success. Ayer might have noticed as a curious illustration of how notions of state and citizen in those days differed from ours, that when in 1791 Paine was invited to England, where he wrote the second part of The Rights of Man, nothing was said about his treasonable conduct in the American struggle, and his vituperation of King George, though English law did not recognise, in principle, a subject's right to divest himself of his allegiance. When he had to make a hasty getaway to France it was because Part One of The Rights was deemed subversive. In Revolutionary France his activities got him into prison, and it may have been only the fall of Robespierre and the Terror that saved him from something worse.
Ayer is in agreement with others in considering him a journalist with a very effective style rather than a thinker with original ideas. He devotes his second chapter to a review of political theorists in the background – Hobbes, Locke (a Royal Africa Company shareholder), Hume, Rousseau – and has interesting things to say about them all. How far their doctrines are really relevant to Paine is queried in another recent book, by David Wilson, and it may be safer to look to the general tradition of English radicalism and dissent stemming from the 17th century: one writer drawn on by Paine is Milton. Paine had scientific interests, and took great pride in his design for an iron bridge: he might be called a bridge-builder between his epoch and ours, which have so many problems in common.
In youth he ran away to sea and served a year in a privateer: in later years he was a firm opponent of war, on grounds both practical and moral. His 'deepest illusion', Ayer thinks, was a belief that humanity was on the threshold of an era of peace: an explanation is implied in the remark that he was oddly oblivious of the motives that capitalism might have for provoking wars. Where he was well ahead of most contemporary radicalism was in his awareness that political reform or republicanism was not enough: he wanted social welfare as well, beginning with grants to all young people starting life, and old-age pensions at 50. It seems strange that he showed no appreciation of the pioneer socialist and socialist martyr of the French Revolution, Babeuf. Ayer ends by reflecting that nearly everybody today professes to believe in democracy, but that it is scarcely anywhere put in practice. It has indeed become, what Christianity used to be, the religion or ideology of capitalism.
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V.G. Kiernan
V.G. Kiernan, who died in February 2009, was an emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh University and the author of The Duel in European History and Tobacco: A History.
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