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https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Trains-canceled-as-region-recovers-from-hectic-3709523.php
Trains canceled as region recovers from hectic storm
Updated 11:57 pm EDT, Monday, July 16, 2012
Parts of southwestern Connecticut were still feeling the effects Monday of a storm that tore through the state Sunday, causing extensive flooding, tearing down trees and wires, snarling traffic and interrupting train service.
Stretches of Interstate 95 and Interstate 84 that were closed Sunday were fully reopened Monday morning, but the first two trains Monday morning on Metro-North's New Canaan Line were canceled and replaced by bus service.
Metro-North said the 5:33 a.m. and 6:22 a.m. trains from New Canaan to Stamford were canceled because of a downed tree and wires near the Talmadge Hill station. Train service, which had been out since just before 7 p.m. Sunday, resumed later in the morning.
The traffic signal at a busy intersection in Milford was back on Monday morning after being out during the storm Sunday.
Stop signs had been placed on Anderson and Merwin avenues, and while they remained in place Monday morning, the signal was working normally at 5:30 a.m.
Interstate 95 in Norwalk, Conn. was closed the afternoon of Sunday, July 15, 2012 after a storm brought on severe flooding.
Photo: Contributed Photo
United Illuminating Co. spokesman Ed Crowder said about 1,500 people were affected by a non-weather-related power outage in Milford that occurred in the early evening and lasted two hours. The utility reported that two residential customers were without power in Easton at 6:30 a.m. Monday, and one in Bridgeport.
In Milford, a utility pole caught fire on Anderson Avenue around 5:30 p.m. A bird's nest was located on top of the pole and two baby birds were killed as their mother circled above the nest. Firefighters were unable to put water on the fire because of a risk of being electrocuted. Witnesses told WTNH News 8, "The mother circled and a small crowd watched in horror as the flames finally overcame the babies and they fell to the ground dead."
With the storm now gone, the region now has to cope with yet another round of sweltering heat.
Monday's high temperature at Sikorsky Memorial Airport hit 89 degrees. Tuesday's and Wednesday's forecasts call for highs in the mid-90s, with a chance of thunderstorms on Wednesday.
The weather is expected to become more seasonable on Thursday, with highs in the low 80s through the weekend and no rain in the forecast.


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Aviva Press, the e-press service in entertainment news, fashion, film festivals, music festivals, festival awards, television news, technology news, and celebrity photos.
Home >> Blogs >> Aviva Press's blog >> 49th Annual 2011 New York Film Festival Opens with Roman Polanski's CARNAGE
49th Annual 2011 New York Film Festival Opens with Roman Polanski's CARNAGE
By Maria Esteves – September 27, 2011
The 49th Annual 2011 New York Film Festival (NYFF2011) commence Friday, September 30 - Sunday, October 16, 2011 at Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater, New York. Presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, NYFF annually showcase the best in international, classic, and cutting-edge independent cinema. This year's Opening, Centerpiece, and Closing Night films are North American Premiere of CARNAGE, directed by Roman Polanski, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, directed by Simon Curtisand, and THE DESCENDANT, directed by Alexander Payne. For more information, please visit http://www.filmlinc.com.
27.09.2011 | Aviva Press's blog
Cat. : 2011 New York Film Festival 49th New York Film Festival Alexander Payne Alexander Payne Alice Tully Hall Award-winning actor Award-winning filmmaker CARNAGE Carnage CDATA Cinema of France Cinema of Poland Cinema of the United States closing night Contact Details director Film Film Society of Lincoln Center Films George Clooney http://www.filmlinc.com Lincoln My Week with Marilyn New York New York Film Festival NYFF2011 Opening Night roman polanski Roman Polanski Roman Polanski Simon Curtisand THE DESCENDANT the Film Society of Lincoln Center Fest. circuit FESTIVALS
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Traditions about the sequence of processes as well as using parentheses ensure that every expression is unambiguous. Reading an expression with comprehension includes evaluation of its inherent structure. For instance, 0.05p can be interpreted as the inclusion of a 5% tax to a cost p.
The word "algebra" is a distorted shape of the Arabic name of a treatise by Al Khwarizmi about algebraic systems. In modern use, algebra has several meanings.
This area of math is usually referred as abstract algebra when there is the chance of uncertainty.
The word "algebra" may also refer to the "school algebra" usually educated in American middle and high schools. This contains the solution of polynomial equations in one or more variants and fundamental properties of graphs and functions.
Eventually, the word is used in a third way that much less a subject area however as a special kind of algebraic structure.
The Computational Algebra section was introduced to expand the range of the services to provide a suitable newsgroup for contributions which make use of computer computations.
Results obtained by computer computations to be acceptable for publication must represent a major improvement of math. It is insufficient to expand preceding computations by means of higher computer power. Instead, the contribution has to demonstrate mathematical consequences as well as new processes to be accepted.
— Categorizations of particular algebraic constructions which are not easily obtained and are useful to the algebraic community.
— Description and results of to put forward new conjectures, to support present conjectures, experiments, or to give counter examples to present conjectures.
— Papers highlighting the constructive part of algebra including description and evaluation of new algorithms, developments and extensions of existing algorithms, description of computational processes that are not algorithms in the rigorous sense.
— Interactions between algebra and computer science such as word problems, automatic arrangements and other decision problems in groups and semi-groups, however with an emphasis on practicality, executions, and operation of the associated algorithms.
— Contributions are welcome from every area of algebra including algebraic number theory or algebraic geometry, if the emphasis is on the algebraic aspects.
Contributions describe uses of strategies or algebraic consequences in coding theory, cryptography or the algebraic theory of differential equations.
This article is intended as a fundamental content for a one year course in algebra in the graduate degree or as a helpful reference for professionals and mathematicians using higher-level algebra. Our algebra assignment help have all the fundamental ideas of algebra. For the new edition, the writer made numerous corrections to the text and has added exercises.
On our algebra assignment help, we provide assignments for algebra for various topics that include expressions, equations and graphing functions.
We help the students in order to comprehend the fundamental concepts associated with algebra. Moreover, our algebra assignment help covers a number of the key issues that students might encounter in algebra units.
Algebra is a lot more fascinating when things are somewhat more definite. Solving linear equations is a lot more interesting than a two pan balance. At our assignmentinc.com, the experts of algebra are available to help students in order to comprehend various algebra issues. In addition, there is nothing like a set of co-ordinate axes.
Algebra is a branch of mathematics dealing with the rules as well as symbols for controlling those symbols. In simple algebra, those symbols represent numebrs without fixed values known as variables. As sentences describe associations between particular words, in algebra, equations describe associations between variables.
It is a popular belief that such issues were devised to torment students, and this may not be far from the reality. Algebra is essential to a lot of improvements in science, technology, and culture as a whole.


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Guest Post: Book Review of Serendipity Doo-Dah
I'm pleased to present this guest post by Lance Liddle.
You know how it works, or rather how it used to work back in the day when the GASbook ruled the airwaves—or do you?
The songwriter, usually a Jewish or a Russian immigrant, writes a catchy melody, adds a lyric (or else knows a guy who has a way with words to form a team) and starts pestering all the music publishers in Tin Pan Alley. Eventually, he succeeds in getting his masterpiece published and before you know it, he's moved from Skid Row to Park Avenue and married an heiress.
The first thing our young tunesmith discovers is that 9 times out of 10, the moguls who make these decisions don't know a crotchet from a hatcheck girl!
So how does his/her song get published and become a smash hit?
Luck, fate, happy accident, maybe someone up there had sympathy with our composer.
Edward Allan Faine thinks so, and he makes a strong case for 43 of some of the world's most loved songs from 1918–1989 (and don't forget this is just book one!) that fate took a hand in guiding them to their destiny.
I'm not going to post any spoilers save to say that they range from Richard Whiting and Richard Egan's 1918 song "Till We Meet Again" (the discarded manuscript was rescued from a waste basket by a secretary) to Tom Petty and Full Moon Fever that, in 1989, almost didn't make it owing to a . . . read the book and find out for yourself!
Faine's style is humorous and perceptive. There's many a chuckle and a "Well I never!" that only those whose heart has never stood still will fail to utter. I'm already on to my second reading and picking up on other gems.
A cross section of artists and composers are in there. Jazzers, popsters, rockers who all had hits, often with unlikely items in even more unlikely circumstances.
There's also a lot of quotes from songwriters who go along with the theme of divine inspiration—melodies or lyrics that arrive out of the blue and decree that you are the one to introduce them to the world.
Like Faine's previous books* reviewed on this site, it's highly recommended and well worth reading—again and again.
Serendipity Doo-Dah by Edward Allan Faine
*Bebop Babies
*The Best Gig in Town: Jazz Artists at the White House, 1969–1974
LANCE LIDDLE is the author of the jazz blog Bebop Spoken Here, currently number 24 in the Top 50 Jazz Blogs and Websites.
You can also follow him here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lance.liddle
Twitter: @bebopspokenhere


The Philippine Embassy in Lisbon recently issued a warning regarding the online scams offering employment in Portugal.
The Embassy has recently noted an upsurge in the number of Filipinos who have been victimized or have received emails from alleged companies or law firms in Portugal who offer jobs and/or promise to process entry/visa permits for employment through payment of exorbitant fees by money transfer.
In some cases, unscrupulous individuals have misrepresented real and even reputable companies in Portugal by using information on their websites but replacing their contact information. These individuals require payment of fees for "Entry-Clearance Certificates," "International /Overseas Employment Certificates-(I/OEC)" and "Affidavits of Guarantee Fund," all of which are not required by Portuguese authorities. The IOEC that these individuals are asking payment for, is not the OEC legitimately issued by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).


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WILLIAM H. TOTMAN & another [Note 1] vs. JOHN G. MALLOY & another [Note 2]
Present: MARSHALL, C.J., ABRAMS, LYNCH, GREANEY, IRELAND, SPINA, & COWIN, JJ.
This court declined to recognize a presumption or inference, for purposes of defeating a claim of title by adverse possession, of permissive use among "close" family members, and stated that the better approach is to examine whether the use of the land is actual, open, and exclusive for a period of twenty years, in light of the circumstances of each particular set of claimants. [146-148]
CIVIL ACTION commenced in the Land Court Department on May 5, 1995.
The case was heard by Mark V Green, J.
Donald J. Kaiser for the plaintiffs.
William F M. Hicks for the defendants.
IRELAND, J. The plaintiffs brought an action to claim title to disputed land by adverse possession. A Land Court judge, applying a presumption of permissive use among family members, held that the plaintiffs had failed to establish the necessary elements of adverse possession. The plaintiffs appealed and we transferred the case to this court on our own motion. We conclude that the Land Court should not have applied such a presumption. We therefore vacate the judgment and remand the case for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
We accept the judge's findings of fact unless they are clearly erroneous. See Mass. R. Civ. P. 52 (a), as amended, 423 Mass. 1402 (1996); Kendall v. Selvaggio, 413 Mass. 619, 620 (1992);
Secretary of Envtl. Affairs v. Massachusetts Port Auth., 366 Mass. 755, 774 (1975). In 1952, Caroline G. Totman (Caroline) conveyed one of the two parcels of land at issue to the plaintiffs, her son and daughter-in-law, William and Mary Totman. Caroline continued to live in her home on the other parcel (lot A) until 1989, when she conveyed substantially all of it to Patrick M. Totman, the plaintiffs' son. See Appendix. In 1992, Patrick and his wife Joann conveyed the parcel to the defendants, John and Patricia Malloy.
The two parcels of land, located in Stoughton, abut each other, and the plaintiffs' property (Totman parcel) is north and east of the defendants' property (Malloy parcel). See Appendix. The disputed land consists of a beach area next to a pond located west of the Totman parcel, and a strip of land with a stream along the southern boundary of the Totman parcel. At the time of the 1989 conveyance to Patrick and Joann Totman, the ownership of the stream or beach area was not discussed.
Between 1952 and 1989, William Totman performed maintenance on the stream, including work on the stream bed and banks, and mowing the grass on both sides of the stream. He also built a dam across a portion of the stream, and a footbridge across the stream to allow his children to walk across to Caroline's house. He cleaned the beach along the easterly side of the pond, refreshed the sand from time to time, maintained and improved a dock that served the beach, and placed a trailer alongside the beach that he and his family used to host beach parties.
During the spring of 1993, shortly after acquiring their land, the defendants engaged a surveyor to stake its boundaries and insert concrete comer bounds [Note 3]. The plaintiffs prevented the installation of the concrete bounds within the disputed area, and on May 5, 1995, brought this action to claim title to the land by adverse possession and to establish a prescriptive, easement to use the pond and beach area.
The Land Court judge, ruling in favor of the defendants, stated that "[n]one of the acts performed by plaintiffs on the disputed area was sufficiently hostile to overcome the inference of permissive use grounded in the close family relationship." The judge relied primarily on one portion of 2 C.J.S. Adverse
Possession s. 128 (1972), which states that, "[a]s between parties sustaining parental and filial relations, the possession of the land of the one by the other is presumptively permissive or amicable, and to make such a possession adverse, there must be some open assertion of hostile title." On appeal, the plaintiffs argue that the Land Court judge erred in applying a presumption of permissive use among family members.
A party claiming title to land through adverse possession must establish actual, open, exclusive, and non-permissive use for a continuous period of twenty years. See Mendonca v. Cities Serv. Oil Co. of Pa., 354 Mass. 323, 326 (1968); Ryan v. Stavros, 348 Mass. 251, 262 (1964); Duff v. Leary, 146 Mass. 533, 540 (1888). The guiding principle behind the elements of adverse possession is not to ascertain the intent or state of mind of the adverse claimant, but rather to provide notice to the true owner, allowing for the legal vindication of property rights. See Kendall v. Selvaggio, supra at 623-624; Ottavia v. Savarese, 338 Mass. 330, 333 (1959). The only element of adverse possession that the Land Court addressed was that of nonpermissive use, which has been referred to interchangeably in the case law as "hostile ... .. adverse," or "under a claim of right." The essence of nonpermissive use is lack of consent from the true owner. See Ottavia v. Savarese, supra at 333-334.
Whether a use is nonpermissive depends on many circum stances, including the character of the land, who benefited from the use of the land, the way the land was held and maintained, and the nature of the individual relationship between the parties claiming ownership. See, e.g., Kendall v. Selvaggio, supra at 624; LaChance v. First Nat'l Bank & Trust Co., 301 Mass. 488, 490 (1938). Historically, the existence of a familial relationship between claimants has been a factor in determining whether possession of land is adverse, see Duff v. Leary, supra at 541 542 (occupation of house by niece permissive where uncle paid for repairs and insurance and maintained house for benefit of other relatives); Silva v. Wimpenney, 136 Mass. 253 (1884) (possession of land by minor children held to be permissive and not acquired by adverse possession when father was at sea and land used for benefit of children); Hunt v. Hunt, 3 Met. 175, 186 (1841) (where son lived on and managed farm on land owned by father, the court noted parent-child relationship in holding that son had not acquired title by adverse possession), but we have never applied a presumption or inference of permissive
use arising from a familial relationship. See Boutin v. Perreault, 343 Mass. 329, 330 (1961) (period for adverse possession by son began to run against father); Nickerson v. Nickerson, 235 Mass. 348 (1920) (family members acquired property by adverse possession).
In light of our case law and the purposes behind the requirements for establishing adverse possession, we decline to create a presumption or inference of permissive use among "close" family members. Were we to recognize such a presumption, related claimants would be required to provide additional proof beyond that needed for similarly situated unrelated parties. Such a presumption would encourage related claimants to provide evidence of family strife, rewarding those who do by making it more likely that they be granted title by adverse possession. Moreover, such inquiry into "hostile" relationships within a family would necessarily require courts to evaluate a claimant's state of mind, an evaluation that has been eliminated from the elements of adverse possession. We have long held that the state of mind of a claimant is not relevant to a determination whether the possession of land is nonpermissive. See Ottavia v. Savarese, supra at 334. As we have stated, "mental attitude is irrelevant where acts import an adverse character to the use of the land. . . . [T]he possessor's actions and not his intent provide notice of nonpermissive use to the true owner." Kendall v. Selvaggio, supra at 624.
Further, such a presumption would be at odds with the principle expressed in both adverse possession and prescriptive easement cases that, where the use of the land is actual, open, and exclusive for a period of twenty years, the nonpermissiveness of the use may be inferred [Note 4]. Finally, were we to create such a presumption, we would then have to determine what
constitutes a "close" family relationship. Rather than apply such a presumption or inference, the better approach, which we adopt today, is to examine the aforementioned factors in light of the circumstances of each particular set of claimants.
The defendants, citing Tallent v. Barrett, 598 S.W.2d 602, 606 (Mo. Ct. App. 1980), urge us to follow other jurisdictions that have recognized this presumption [Note 5]. The facts of Tallent v. Barrett, supra, however, are significantly different from this case. There the court held that three sons who lived with their mother in her household until her death could not claim the land owned by their mother by adverse possession. The Missouri Court of Appeals explained that a "rightful owner cannot be deprived of title by possession of another if he is also in possession with the adverse claimant as joint possession is not adverse." Id. at 606, citing Fiorella v. Jones, 259 S.W. 782, 785
(Mo. 1923). Additionally, many of the cases from other States recognizing such a presumption involve cotenants or minor children living with their parents for part or all of the required time period. The case before us, however, involves a parent and an adult son and daughter-in-law to whom title had been conveyed. They were not living as cotenants but rather as neighbors on abutting parcels. While evidence of a familial relationship may sometimes assist the fact finder in determining the individual nature of the relationship between the claimants or to whose benefit the land was used, standing alone a familial relationship neither puts an end to the inquiry regarding permissive use nor shifts the burden of proof.
For all the reasons stated above, we remand the case to the Land Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
[Note 1] Mary J. Tolman.
[Note 2] Patricia H. Malloy.
[Note 3] The parties do not dispute that, until the defendants acquired their parcel and had the land surveyed, the land in dispute was believed to be part of the Totman parcel and assumed to be bounded by the stream.
[Note 4] See Flynn v. Korsack, 343 Mass. 15, 18 (1961) ("the physical facts of entry and continued possession may themselves evidence an intent to occupy and to hold as of right sufficient in law to support the acquisition of rights by prescription"); Ottavia v. Savarese, 338 Mass. 330, 333 (1959), quoting 3 American Law of Property s. 15.4, at 776-777 (A.J. Casner ed. 1952) ("The great majority of the cases establish convincingly that the ... requirements of claim of title and of hostility of possession mean only that the possessor must use and enjoy the property continuously for the required period as the average owner would use it, without the consent of the true owner . . "); Tucker v. Poch, 321 Mass. 321, 324 (1947) (applying rebuttable presumption regarding prescriptive easement); LaChance v. First Nat'l Bank & Trust Co., 301 Mass. 488, 491 (1938) (noting that the "nature of [the] improvements [to the land], their location upon the land, and the length of the period during which [the improvements] were being made ... were sufficient to warrant the inference that they were performed under a claim of right," in awarding title to claimants by adverse possession); Truc v. Field, 269 Mass. 524, 528529 (1930) ("wherever there has been the use of an easement for twenty years unexplained, it will be presumed to be under a claim of right and adverse, and will be sufficient to establish title by prescription").
[Note 5] See Bellamy v. Shryock, 211 Ark. 116, 122-123 (1947) (stronger evidence of hostility required to rebut presumption of permissive use where parent child relationship between adverse claimants and true owner); Kelly v. Mullin, 159 Colo. 573, 577-578 (1966) ("strong proof" of hostility required where true owner is relative of claimants). See also Matter of the Estate of Qualteri, 757 P.2d 1093, 1095 (Colo. Ct. App. 1988) (court declines to adopt presumption of permissive use among family members, but holds that "strong proof" of hostility is required); Mullan v. Bank of Pasco County, 101 Fla. 1097, 1107 (1931) (possession by parent of child's land usually presumed permissive "subject to certain general exceptions" where family lived together as "homestead"); Parker v. Beckwith, 251 Mich. 434, 437 (1930) (father could not acquire title by adverse possession against daughter living in household with him during a portion of the time required to establish claim); Tyler v. Wright, 164 Mich. 606, 608 (1911) (close relationship of parent and child may raise presumption of permissive use, but relationship alone not conclusive where no evidence of their friendly relationship); O'Boyle v. McHugh, 66 Minn. 390, 391 (1896) (possession and cultivation of land by mother not enough to rebut presumption of permissive use vested in relationship with children); Chase v. Lavelle, 105 Neb. 796, 801 (1921) (use of land by child presumptively permissive); Demmitt v. McMillan, 16 Ohio App. 3d 138, 141 (1984) (family relationship between parties imposes higher burden of proof on adverse claimant); Fehl v. Horst, 256 On 518, 522 (1970) (possession of land presumed permissive where mother shared a household with daughter and son-in-law); Harlow v. Miller, 147 Vt. 480, 482 (1986) (presumption that use is permissive and amicable within family relationship "second ground" to support lower court's finding that possession not adverse).


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Call for Applications for NEH Summer Institute in Italy on Leonardo da Vinci
January 31, 2012 — The National Endowment for the Humanities invites college and university faculty, graduate and postdoctoral students to apply to participate in a collaborative, three-week institute in Florence, Italy, focused on the works of Leonardo da Vinci.
The program – "Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science," jointly sponsored by the
University of Virginia and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max Planck Institute – is designed to encompass multiple disciplinary perspectives, including art and architectural history, Renaissance studies, the history of science, literature, philosophy and religious studies.
Participants will explore dynamic relations between early modern art and science, engaging in a multifaceted analysis of daVinci's many paintings, drawings and writings.
With this integrated approach, the institute has two main aims, said Francesca Fiorani. associate professor of Italian Renaissance Art in the College of Arts & Sciences, who will direct the institute, to be held June 25 through July 13.
First, the institute will focus on a deep understanding of the interrelated activities of the artist, examining how Leonardo connected scientific investigation of the world with his activity as a painter, the interaction between word and image in his writings, and the significance of his unique legacy today.
More broadly, the institute will investigate the status of images in the construction and transmission of knowledge, the boundaries of observation and representation, and the articulation of these issues in 16th-century philosophy and art theory. A faculty of internationally renowned scholars will introduce the main topics of the institute
The deadline for applications is March 1. See the website for further details. Address inquiries to Fiorani at: McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400130, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4130, or email them to ff6f@virginia.edu.


Snap Trade Pro is the all-in-one application for heavy equipment sales teams to communicate sales activity, consistently, at scale—in or out of the office, instantly on their devices.
Leverage mobile and web technology developed by people with over 28 years in heavy equipment sales.
Each industry has unique types of equipment.
Snap Trade Pro is built to handle those by allowing you to have multiple custom templates for each equipment type.
Each Template is constructed of unique Categories which include common fields used to describe and display the specifications, or condition of the Units.
Todays devices are connected to the digital cloud.
Snap Trade Pro uses those connections to push up and pull down your information from one secure location.
Your data is available across your team through a web browser or native applications.
Dealers are expanding the number of locations they manage. Manufacturers and Finance Co.s inventory Units across North America.
Keep everyone that is selling your equipment up to date .
It's like you are able to put everyone in the same room, even when you're not.
No longer wait until everyone is back in the office to start working a deal!
Enter details once and start the deal moving.
Available on iPhone and iPad. these apps connect you to your organization's units.
Create and update trade appraisals. Access inventory. Need support? Got requests? Contact us with in app messaging.
Use the power of the mobile browser to get in depth with your deals.
Review past, current and potential inventory. Manage appraisals & inspections.
"When I'm out selling I need to know what's available now, what's on order and what we may be taking in trade or is coming in off lease.
Customers expect me to know what we can sell them."
"Trade valuations should be in the hands of our Sales Reps within 24 hours of a proper request.
We have a number of people in the decision process. Getting the info to everyone across multiple locations is delaying the sale"
"On any given day we have potential trades, lease returns and outside packages that I want to put values on.
So much of my time is taken up chasing information and organizing data from emails.
There has to be a better way!"
"As a new sales rep the internal process is quite confusing. So many forms, tasks to get done and people to involve.
I'm constantly having to check with others"
"We shouldn't rely on having to ask for inventory commitments.
We could use a central report to view potential trades and inventory on order.
That would help us manage our wholesale funding"
"We have multiple locations and any number of desks or briefcases where that info could be found.
I know it needs to be available across the team but I need it to help someone right now!"
Manufacturers & Finance Companies can solve similar problems for Factory Inventory, Lease Returns and Repossessions.
Connect Snap Trade Pro with your dealers to manage the process of getting inventory assessed, reconditioned and sold.


Freedom Bike Rentals has surely been fab! In most cases, the hostels have been the best ones in area for 50 miles. Strangly, we have found the internet speed to be faster than most of the places we've stayed in Canada, and even some parts of the US.
Despite averaging 200KMs days, I've just not been peppy enough to muster the gumption to write in real time. Adding to the delay, we have been averaging a ridiculous number of pics (100--140) per day! So, it looks like each day report will require multiple posts.
We depart Quito at thee height of rush hour, which after living in Washington DC nothing should scare us. While lane splitting is legal, we don't partake today.
Soon enough we drop out of town, and Ecuador is ready to share her spoils. It seems there will be no lack of vistas in the days to come.
Occasionally, we stop pic taking and go for a ride. A few hours into the ride the team settles into a nice leap frog rotation. As we are riding mountain passes, there is little concern of missing an intersection turn; there are none.
Many may not realize that the Galapagos Islands are also Ecuador. As such, there is amazing bio diversity all which needs water. Lots and lots of water. And with the steep terrain, it often falls on you or rushes madly down a rock river.


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Pasquarelli: Saban brings SEC to Miami's defense
16yLen Pasquarelli
1hJake Trotter
McCarthy at ease on status: 'I know how to win'
46mTodd Archer
10hMarc Raimondi and Carlos Contreras Legaspi
From Nelly Korda and Lydia Ko to big money, everything you need to know for 2022 on the LPGA Tour
11hCharlotte Gibson
A quick break from day jobs could lead a player at the Latin American Amateur Championship to the Masters
10hPaolo Uggetti
Old man and the NFC: Tom Brady is older than coaches he could face to reach the Super Bowl
NFL betting market watch: Lines move toward underdog Bills, favored Packers
1hDavid Purdum
Breakout USA hockey star Abby Roque hopes to inspire other Indigenous players
11hEmily Kaplan
McLaren boss 'won't be shocked' if Lewis leaves
Mercedes to launch car on Feb. 18
Trio of former SEC youngsters expected to start in '06
Len Pasquarelli
DAVIE, Fla. -- During a break in his first mandatory minicamp a year ago, while questions were being asked about a potentially lackluster Miami Dolphins' offense, head coach Nick Saban wondered whether the collective age of his defense would allow it to remain a premier unit for at least another year.
Saban emphasized that he anticipated the Dolphins defense would still be solid but also noted that most of its best players -- ends Jason Taylor and Vonnie Holliday, tackle Keith Traylor, linebackers Zach Thomas and Junior Seau and cornerback Sam Madison -- were all 30 years of age or more. And he declared that, over the ensuing few years, he would have to begin phasing in younger defenders through the draft.
A year later, let it be duly reported that the greening of the defense has definitely begun, and with Saban's favorite kind of players: Instinctive, active, multi-talented players from SEC programs.
"There's a toughness to being an SEC guy and we're getting that here."
LB Channing Crowder
"I don't think it's surprising that (Saban) likes SEC players," said the teams' 2006 first-round draft pick, Jason Allen of Tennessee, who will start at free safety. "It's what he knows best. He recruited most of us. His teams (at LSU) played against us. Some of us even beat him somewhere along the way. No matter what you do in life, you feel most comfortable being around people that you know pretty well. And Coach Saban, well, he still knows the SEC."
Both of the first-round selections the Dolphins have made since Saban arrived last spring, Allen and former Auburn tailback Ronnie Brown in 2005, are onetime SEC stars. Of the dozen draft picks Miami has exercised in Saban's two years on the job (excluding last year's supplemental draft), five played in what many pundits regard as the nation's premier football conference. Saban had keen insights into two other picks because he had tried to recruit them to LSU.
Another kind of SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, would frown on the kind of insider trading Saban has conducted. But the Dolphins' coach knows there is a statute of limitations on the first-hand data he possesses on players from the SEC -- in another year or two his connections with players that he once recruited and coaches he once hired will expire -- and he's taking advantage of it while he can.
Particularly on the defensive side.
Even in the era of free agency, it is impossible to refurbish an entire unit quickly, and so the remaking of the Miami defense is very much a work in progress. But whatever progress is achieved in 2006 probably will be, in part, because of the SEC flavor that Allen and other players from the conference have infused into the defense. Besides Allen, two youngsters from the 2005 draft with SEC affiliations, weak-side linebacker Channing Crowder of Florida and left cornerback Travis Daniels from LSU, will start.
Crowder and Daniels, the latter of whom knows the Saban defensive package so well there were times in 2005 he would have to explain some of the intricacies to veteran players, proved that youth will be served as the Dolphins revamp the unit. More important, they demonstrated that youth can be serviceable, too.
The two actually combined for 27 starts as rookies and played well. Daniels registered 60 tackles, one interception, 14 passes defensed and one fumble recovery. Crowder, whom the Dolphins staff believes has a chance to be a truly special player, rang up 85 tackles, one forced fumble and recovered two fumbles. The kind of diversely talented athlete Saban covets, Crowder can play all five linebacker positions defined in the Dolphins' defensive terminology.
And he plays them all with great energy.
"There is so much you can learn from guys like Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas, and I think all of the young guys take advantage of that," Crowder said. "But I think what we can bring to them, the younger guys here, is enthusiasm. This is still new to us young guys. We haven't been around it so long that maybe it's old hat to us. It's still exciting for us and you can see that in the way we play."
The way the Miami defense played in 2005 was acceptable on some fronts, but there definitely is room for improvement. In Saban's first season, and with Richard Smith as coordinator, the Dolphins surrendered 37 fewer points than in 2004. But the unit allowed two more touchdowns and its statistical ranking, 18th in the league, was the franchise's lowest since 1997, when Miami was No. 26.
From that 2005 unit, there has been a good deal of offseason attrition, with Seau, Madison and safety Tebucky Jones released, and safety Lance Schulters allowed to test the free agent market, where he remains unsigned. The projected starting lineup for 2006 still has five defenders who are 30 or older and two others who are 28. So the youth movement, as is usually the case in the NFL, is a gradual one.
But it should also be an effective one.
"You'd always like to bring in younger (defensive linemen), but sometimes you can't do it," Saban said last weekend, during a full-squad minicamp. "But we got a little younger in the secondary, signing (cornerback) Will Allen in free agency, and drafting Jason Allen. And we feel like we've got some younger players who are ready to step up in other places."
The excitable Crowder, a steal in the third round of the 2005 lottery after concerns about his knees dropped his stock on many franchises' draft boards, is clearly the emerging star of the bunch. As good as he was as a rookie, Crowder should be even better in 2006, not just because he has a season of experience, but also because new coordinator Dom Capers will create more ways to get him around the ball. And the Dolphins expect Jason Allen, who played cornerback and safety at Tennessee, and will be used in the interior of the secondary, to be very good.
Saban noted that Allen's progress might be a bit more incremental because, aligning at free safety means the rookie will have substantially more responsibilities than if the Dolphins played him at cornerback, and because the mental aspects of the position are more sophisticated. But Allen, who chose Tennessee over LSU in the recruiting tug-o'-war for his services because of rumors Saban would leave Baton Rouge, La., for the NFL before he graduated, seems ready for the challenge.
Just watching Allen in minicamp practices, it is obvious how gifted an athlete he is, and how naturally he flows to the action. And to this point, at least, he's been able to keep from being overwhelmed by the size and scope of the Dolphins' defensive playbook.
"You dig into that (playbook) or just listen to (Saban) talk about the defense," said Allen, who seems to be fully recovered from the hip injury that all but scuttled his senior season in 2005, "and you understand what a genius the guy really is. It's like, you're sitting there studying everything in there and you can't help but think, 'Man, does this guy have a life? Does he just eat and sleep football?' He told me when they drafted me that he would make me an elite player in this league. Heck, he told me that when he was recruiting me out of high school. And I believe him, man, I believe him. I can just feel it."
What Crowder can feel, he said, is an SEC mentality taking over on the Miami defense in 2006. There is, said Crowder, who was also recruited by Saban in high school, a merit badge of sorts from having played in the SEC.
"There's a toughness to being an SEC guy," Crowder said, "and we're getting that here."
Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. To check out Len's chat archive, click here .


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REVIEW: Banana Fish (Episode 7)
Episode 7: The Rich Boy | リッチ・ボーイ
Welcome to California! Not only has the game board expanded, so have the number of players. The most important introduction is the titular "Rich Boy", but a few more side characters popping in to say hello make this a relatively chill episode. The cogs are definitely moving in the background, but first thing's first: detective work and gay jokes.
Ah, going to California. Rookie mistake.
The party – for those who can't keep up, that's Ash Lynx, Eiji Okumura, Shorter Wong, Max Lobo, and Shunichi Ibe – make a pit stop at the house where Max's young son Michael and his ex-wife Jessica live. I usually hate these familial tangents in action stories because they feel so lazy, and predictably the wife and kid(s) are going to get kidnapped, threatened, or die brutal deaths at some point down the line for some cheap angst. That's almost definitely what's happening here, but Jessica evidently works as a content creator in the gay porn/nude male modeling industry, which basically makes her a fujoshi and I will mourn and salute her passing if/when she dies. Anime children are usually even worse than anime wives, for their forced cuteness fakery, but Michael manages to be sweet and sour without being over the top either way. So basically, Max's ex-family is all right in my book. Well done, Banana Fish.
We don't do much of note at the ex-Max household besides give Michael a birthday present and glaze on Max's paternal propensity, before we are off again to our original destination of the Dawson mansion to search for Banana Fish clues. (In)conveniently enough, the moment we roll in, a maid screams, and we stumble upon a group of baddies trying to kidnap Dawson's adolescent son. Ash makes quick work of that, but here's another twist: the kid of uber-white Abraham Dawson is Chinese.
16-year-old Yau-Si Dawson was evidently adopted into the wealthy Dawson family because he's so goddamn smart. Yau-si admits his father has been missing for the past six months, and gives the party free reign to poke around the mansion for clues. Ash is as skeptical of him as I am, and tells Shorter – who, reminder (and this is important) is also Chinese – to investigate him. Then Ash proceeds to hack into Abraham's old computer, as you do.
Well, you never seriously doubted Ash was also a computer hacker, did you? I guarantee Ash has every possible skill in his arsenal that isn't pole-vaulting or having faith in the power of love. Thanks to The Computer(TM), Ash and friends learn that Banana Fish is a drug, not a person. Well, us viewers already knew that, so whatever.
Scene change to Shorter's investigation, where things start to get fun. Shorter, who is technically still a part of the Chinese mafia on account of being Chinese, meets with some local mobsters to uncover information about Yau-si. It doesn't go well. The city's head honcho, Hua-Lung Lee, who is the brother of Wang-Lung Lee back in New York City (who last episode agreed to assist Papa Dino), demands Shorter stop dicking around and work for them like he is ethnically obligated to, and charges him with spying on Ash Lynx. Putting the pieces together, Shorter confronts our teenage host and discovers that Yau-si Dawson is actually Yut-Lung Lee, the mysterious seventh son of the Lee family whose name means "moon" in order to destine him to preside over the dark and bloody underbelly of his family's mafia politics. Fucking fabulous. Anyway, Shorter is Yut-Lung's bitch or Yut-Lung will have his sister murdered (whom I correctly identified as a Female Human of Potential Significance in an earlier review), so there's that.
Shunichi makes visa arrangements for the return to Japan, and he and Max deliberate about how to convince Eiji to go home with him. Ash, in another display of badassery, does the dirty deed for them by telling Eiji outright that he is only going to get in the way. When gentle and perfect Eiji blames himself for causing Ash so much trouble, Ash switches gears and confesses that he considers Eiji the only person who has helped him without ulterior motives – but they live in different worlds, and it needs to stay that way.
After breaking Eiji's heart, Ash leaves it to the grown-ups to put the pieces back together. But the real damage can't be undone – that is, a peeping Yut-Lung witnesses the purity of their gayness. Is he going to use that against Ash? Absolutely. Yut-Lung commands Shorter kidnap Eiji in order to entrap Ash, and though Shorter flips out at him at the prospect of betraying Ash, he's probably gonna do it.
But first, remember Max's ex-wife Jessica and son Michael who we met a few minutes ago? They are about to get abducted or murdered by mafia intruders. Called it!
I OWE SHORTER WONG A (SLIGHT) APOLOGY
I wasn't very nice to him in last week's episode review. In all fairness, I was right about pegging him a traitor, he just wasn't a traitor yet.
I had figured there was something seedy about the guy. He is a connection to Ash's past with the mafia, and his purpose on this journey is somewhat tenuous, since he is a criminal and a killer and doesn't share Ash's vested interest in taking down Dino Golzine. That meant he either existed to verify how badass Ash is, or else represent a threat from the mafia we have been road-tripping away from, or both. But I hadn't given Shorter the benefit of the doubt and humored the possibility that Banana Fish might actually be taking him seriously as a character.
Especially with his goofy appearance – I riffed that Shorter was the kind of asshole that wears sunglasses at night, but it ended up being a pretty interesting and deliberate aesthetic. Shorter's sunglasses suggest some ambiguity about what kind of guy he is, which works if he's playing a game of maybe-bro, maybe-traitor. But on a literal level, they physically obscure his Chinese identity. It isn't that he's ever hid it, but it can't be total coincidence that the first real time we see his eyes is when he's baring himself on a deeper level in the face of having his identity used against him as a weapon of control.
If Ash feels no loyalty at all to Dino Golzine, Shorter is pulled between ingratiation toward and independence from his own syndicate. It isn't that Shorter's a good guy. He's already been contrasted to Ash for his quicker willingness to slice throats and drop bodies, whereas Ash doesn't seem to kill outside of a fight (unless, of course, they really deserve it). But Shorter doesn't want to compromise his friends, either, and he has people he cares about.
But the better aesthetic contrast is obviously between the punk, unrefined, and unabashedly Americanized Shorter, and the beautifully elegant and traditional Yut-Lung.
YUT-LUNG LEE, PRINCE OF DARKNESS AND PURVEYOR OF DOOM
Yut-Lung Lee hasn't really put out his claws yet, even though we are promised he's one nasty sonuvabitch. He trapezes around the episode, first pretending to be a privileged but sweet-faced teenager before purring a few threats toward Shorter when his identity is unveiled. The demon is certainly lurking behind his blasé and cool demeanor, evidenced by a few sharper visual cues. Of particular vicious charm was Yut-Lung wiping tears from his face, but the tears belonged to Shorter and not himself.
Even so, for all of the flowery speech, it remains to be seen how ferocious Yut-Lung can be. It's certain that the introductory "kidnapping" attempt was all a show to lure in Ash, but it isn't completely clear why the production was necessary. Yut-Lung knows Ash suspects him so hesitates to move against him directly, leading to another potential kidnapping drama with Eiji. But the explanation as to why Yut-Lung can't call all his goons to overwhelm Ash by force or otherwise pop some Ambien in his tea might just be that Ash Lynx is badass and we, the audience, have just got to accept that.
Then again, as mentioned last time, Ash's fatal flaw is immediately surrendering in any given hostage situation, so why not capitalize on that, I guess?
ANOTHER QUICK NOTE ABOUT DADS
After last episode, it's pretty clear that paternal relationships – whether by blood or not – are important to the story Banana Fish is trying to tell.
As before, Shunichi Ibe continues to take paternal responsibility for Eiji's emotional and physical well-being. By contrast, Max – whose dadness is emphasized this episode through the introduction of his own little son – is jumping in to fill the bloody and infected gap that is Ash's own turbulent mess of parental issues.
Max feels responsibility for Ash because Ash is his friend Griffin's little brother, and also, he shot Griffin in the legs and permanently disabled him, so he kind of owes him one. Mid-episode, Max tells Ash he needs to stop fucking aggravating powerful and murder-happy gangsters or Max will send him to his room and ground him, dammit. End episode, Max has a change of heart, and says if Ash is committed to taking down Dino Golzine and stopping the threat of the Banana Fish drug, then Max is with him to the end. They plan to return to the battlefield of New York.
But remember, Max is an actual dad with an actual kid to watch out for. When the episode ends with said kid about to get killed or abducted by gangsters, it's easy to guess there could be a major wedge in Max's own loyalties.
DON'T WORRY, NOW I'M GETTING TO ASH AND EIJI
Ash and Eiji don't share too many moments this episode, but the rooftop confrontation is an important and poignant shift in the drama. In the last episode, Ash was teaching Eiji how to shoot a gun and mocking Shunichi for babying him, and this episode, Ash is forced to backtrack: he takes responsibility for the implications of involving an innocent civilian in gang wars by telling Eiji he will only get in the way, and that he envies him for not having to use guns at all to survive.
Ash doesn't lay it on thick. No pretending to dislike Eiji, no attacks to manipulate Eiji into disliking him, either. He's remarkably earnest for having "the conversation", which shows he is only being truthful. Eiji breaks down after Ash tells him their worlds are too different and questions why he ever came along at all.
But the other shift is that Yut-Lung observes the heart-to-heart, which concretes Eiji's status as a liability. For someone who desperately wants to ascend to a purpose in Ash's life beyond simply getting in his way, things are looking pretty dire for Eiji. Eiji may be forced to grow up after all – but the jury's still out on what exactly that means.
WHERE TO WATCH IT (LEGALLY): Amazon Prime
Next: Episode 8
Previous: Episode 6
Posted on August 17, 2018 September 9, 2018 Author EllisCategories Anime, BL, ReviewTags Anime, Banana Fish, BL, Review
5 thoughts on "REVIEW: Banana Fish (Episode 7)"
Pingback: REVIEW: Banana Fish (Episode 6) – Gay Anime Symposium
I really liked how Shorter's character was presented in this episode. Like you I was pretty sure he was up to something and finding out he genuinely was just along to help Ash and now he's being compromised was actually quite a shock and I also found myself genuinely feeling sorry for the position Shorter has found himself in.
Yeah, I agree! I liked Shorter a lot in this episode. I'm a sucker for morally gray/criminal characters who genuinely care about their friends. Poor dude, with his sister's life threatened I can't imagine things are going to go well for him.
He really doesn't get a good choice in this. I'm just hoping he doesn't end up dead.
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After Four
A regular teenage section in the Toronto Telegram spawned this half-hour Saturday afternoon series. Its regular hosts were Carole Taylor (later to be one of the first hosts of Canada AM, and later still the Chairman of the CBC) and Johnny F. Bassett, one of three sons of television and then newspaper magnate John F. Bassett. Johnny was responsible for the Telegram features, and successfully brought many elements from the newspaper to the small screen.
Oriented to the teenage market, the show featured Gordon Lightfoot as a frequent guest, and introduced Joni Mitchell in one of her earliest TV appearances. Groups such as The Bells and The Carnival (later to be used successfully to provide all the music for CTV's fall program launch in 1968) were also seen on the show. After Four began as a local show on CFTO Toronto in 1964, but had a two-year run on the Network on Saturday afternoons at 4:00pm (when else?) from September 1966 to September 1968.


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Tag: Unites States Embassy of Amman
Behind the Book: The Guard
August 27th, 2017 — 6:02am
In early 2011, my family and I lived near the US embassy compound in Amman, Jordan—so near, in fact, that our apartment was inside the outer guard ring. I was very happy about this situation. Two weeks after my three-year-old daughter and I arrived, my husband was sent to Italy indefinitely to help with a NATO mission. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring was taking root and there were protests outside of the Syrian embassy, protests outside of the American embassy, protests in the rural areas outside of Amman over the high costs of cooking oil and bread, and protestors in Amman demanding political reforms. Then Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces in Pakistan, which was seen by many as another US invasion of a country's sovereign territory. Prime-time news was filled with burning American flags.
So you can imagine how much I loved seeing the US embassy guards standing at the gates.
Everyone stationed at the embassy had to attend a Regional Security Brief within a few days of arrival. We were told to change up our driving routines in order to make it hard for us to be followed, to look under our vehicles for explosive devices, to not drive beyond Amman city limits after sunset, and to always let a fellow American know when we went on a trip.
We had also been warned about our Western ways, with a special emphasis on how American women needed to be sensitive to this culture quite different from our own. It was recommended our clothing cover us from wrist to ankle. That we be aware conservative Muslim men would feel uncomfortable shaking the hands of women not related to them. How it was verboten to sit in the front seat of a taxi, the front seat being reserved for the wife of the taxi driver and our presence there could be misconstrued as a sexual advance. How we should try to not touch the hand of a male cashier at a grocery store when he was handing over change, lest he view this as suggestive.
But the embassy guards, well, we did not need to worry about them; they had been thoroughly vetted, many had worked with Western companies in the past, some had even lived in America. Their English was better than the average Jordanian, and they were accustomed to our strange cultural differences, like American women wearing shorts and tank tops to the embassy gym (otherwise we were advised to never wear shorts and tank tops in Jordan).
There was the guard who showed me video of his son's gymnastic competitions. The guard who handed candy to my daughter, his pockets crammed with single-wrapped mints. The guard who meowed because he'd seen us feed stray cats. I brought them cookies, bottles of water, chocolate bars. I would have my daughter present the treats, and the guards would direct their thanks at her, press their hands to their hearts, say "Alhamdillah," or "Praise God," pinch her cheek or ruffle her blond hair.
The guard who worked the gate closest to my house spoke very little English, and while I spoke very little Arabic we exchanged pleasantries almost every day. He was in his forties, clean-shaven, wore glasses, and would throw open his arms when he saw us. Most Jordanians said "You are welcome!" This guard would shout, "A million, million welcomes!" Then one of us would inevitably say something the other would not understand, we'd pantomime merrily for a few incoherent minutes, and I'd wave good-bye.
About a month after my husband left, my daughter and I came to this particular gate and found him on duty with another guard, a young man with beautiful green eyes whose English was better than most. The older guard reached into his back pocket as I drew close, produced a carefully folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. I hesitated, knowing this was out of the ordinary.
I opened the letter and began to read, the words in capital letters, the writing painstakingly exact:
You are beautiful. Your smile is the sun—
I looked up, startled, feeling a blush warm my neck. The guard was watching me, nodding. I glanced down to read more just as the younger guard tore the paper out of my hand. He began to yell at the older man in rapid, angry Arabic, pointing at the high embassy wall behind us, then stabbing his finger in the direction of my apartment. I froze, trying to keep a smile on my face and ignore whatever was going on.
The young man crumpled the paper in his fist. He stared with those green eyes into mine.
"He does not understand," he said. There was something combative about his face, his words. I nodded, chastened, as if I did understand. I took my daughter's hand and walked toward the embassy. Later, I exited the embassy by another gate, sneaking around to my apartment building without having to pass those guards.
He does not understand.
What could those words possibly mean? And how could I ever find out? He didn't understand I was married? He didn't understand it was odd for a near-stranger to tell a woman she was beautiful?
Or he didn't understand that I smiled and chatted with everyone, that it wasn't a declaration of affection on my part?
They relocated those guards.
I'd occasionally see the older guard at one of the farther gates. He always welcomed me but he did not put his arms out in the joyful way he had before; he did not say "A million, million welcomes!"
And he never wrote me a letter again.
How I wish I had held on to it, read it in its entirety, studied the intentions and misspellings. It could have been nothing more than a show of friendship, Jordanians often being more effusive than Westerners. I had strangers tell me I was like a daughter to them. Once, I spent a few hours with a woman and she yelled as I drove away, "I love you! I love you! I love you!"
So I started writing a short story about Jordan as a way to figure it out.
That story became a three-hundred-page book, The Confusion of Languages, and could have been much longer. All those endless opportunities for miscommunication.
I lived in Jordan for a year. While I never wore a tank top or sat in the front seat of a taxi, I'm still not sure exactly what I understand—not just about the Middle East, but about men and women. About people. About the ways we get one another wrong every day, about the moments that seem small but for some reason linger.
About all the fragile messages we want so desperately to share with another human being, only to find the distance is just too far, and it's too easy to lose the words before we ever get the chance to read them.
For more of Siobhan's essays, fiction, photos of Jordan, or to order copies of her new novel, The Confusion of Languages, please see her website: www.siobhanfallon.com


There's this really fancy palm tree in Santa Barbara and next to a lovely house on Del La Vida Street. Steve and I were puzzled after taking numerous pictures and we finally determined after our "great knowledge in botany" that it belonged to the Palmae Family. It may just be morphed, I don't know, but I'm asking. What is this tree? I can't find it online or in my garden books. It wasn't my idea to take pictures. Steve saw it and told me that there was this freaky tree with a big pole coming right out-of-it. He wanted me to bring the camera the next time we visited my mother when she was up in Santa Barbara Hospital. He really wanted to climb out of the car and take pictures. Steve did it and now his enthusiasm has rubbed-off on me. Mystery tree!
The two distinguishing palm characteristics is that the "fronds" start from a long pole that shoots-up from the tree and the leaves open from the frond. The pole is so straight it looks like a flag pole. The other characteristic is that the bark, is a palm tree. Now, which palm tree is this tree?
It is an evergreen because we first noticed this strange tree the first part of February. It has lots of small leaves that open out from the tall pole. We did see one other just like it. Well, it was just me. I saw one just before the Kimball off-ramp in Ventura. Honestly, we go the freeway and not the back-roads just looking for this tree. Steve and I don't want to own one, we just want to know what this palm tree is exactly... and where's it from?
I love palm Trees. I love the trees on my son's street near the beach. I love the beautiful silhouettes against the ocean's view anytime of the day. Fillmore, our neighboring city, has always had beautiful palms lining their main street, called Central Avenue. Then, for some reason there were pines trees that lined downtown main thoroughfare called Central. Weird, but the pines were removed again and the palms returned. The Northridge Earthquake almost took-out Fillmore and lots and lots of the palms downtown had to be replaced, so they were changed again with a bunch of generic trees. Southern California is the perfect spot for palm trees. A trip south and west to Bardsdale is also lined with beautiful and very tall palms. They are different than the ones near the high school and I always thought those were date trees.
I remember that as little kids we used to throw rocks up in the trees to see if any dates would fall down. Bad idea...rocks come down. We were at the bottom of the trees and because the trees were planted near Central Avenue, rocks went in the street. I promise, I never hit a car, but I think a rock hit me on the shoulder. That activity should be labeled under "really dumb childhood ideas." If there was an "East Wind Day" my trip home from elementary school, was the long way .... and always included a trip to see if any of the dates had fallen off the tree. Just for those who wonder about how they taste, I remember that I never quit tasting them, either they were yummy, or I was just waiting for them to be ripe. A little like biting into a green plum. Take a bit and throw it on the ground. I never quit trying. I think I ate olives from the olive trees around Fillmore and Santa Paula. Oh yes, they are nasty.
The Bardsdale palms are those kind of palms that one thinks of, when you ponder Hawaii. Tall, with a pom-pom on top. Every single time we drive there, I want to pull over and pick a little one, they grow all by themselves like acorns grow Oak Trees, here. Actually, I don't need to do that because birds in our neighborhood drop the palm seeds and they spout all over our property. Always, and I can't emphasize this enough, the palms are pulled-out and destroyed. Reason: Rats love them and nest in the trees. Perfect place for rats. The trees for them are high off the ground and away from pest control, owls, cats, and every single predator except maybe another rat that eats babies. Yes, they eat their own. The other pest is "rat-bird" pigeons. Where do you think they nest? Has anyone ever seen a baby pigeon in the wild? There's this somewhat new deterrent to keep, at least, the rats from using the trees at rat habitats. There's this project going on with flaps of metal that go around the middle of the trees. They look like chrome, but it has to be a shiny metal that never corrodes, so the rats don't eventually scratch their way up to the top of the palms.
Now that I've written all this in my blog, I want a palm tree. I asked Steve and he said, "What about the stinkin'-mite-infested and parasite-ridden pigeons and rats that live in them?" I said, "Steve?" "Can I have a monkey?"
And, what is this tree? All yellow and beautiful, but not so long-lasting.
I think there should be a book about all the interesting trees, imported and natural in Santa Paula and Fillmore. I would love to learn all about them.
Just to make this even more fun. What is this cactus? It was wild at Matililja Canyon Dam.


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The dataset is an integral part of an ML engineer's toolkit. We recently compiled useful information about a range of these well known datasets. It's all in one place, and hopefully useful to others as well.
There are plenty of established machine learning frameworks out there, and new frameworks are popping up frequently to address specific niches. We were interested in examining if one of these frameworks fits in our workflow. I surveyed the most popular frameworks, and aim to provide a helpful comparative analysis.
SVHN is relatively new and popular dataset, a natural next step to MNIST and complement to other popular computer vision datasets. This is an overview of the common preprocessing techniques used and the best performance benchmarks, as well as a look at the state-of-the-art neural network architectures used.
Releasing a set of tools for converting the Street View House Numbers (SVHN) dataset into images with additional preprocessing options such as grayscaling.


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Garcia, Eagles make the most of second chances
By BOB LENTZ, Associated Press
Jeff Garcia saw his NFL career winding down and few choices when he went job hunting during the offseason.
Still, the three-time Pro Bowl quarterback wanted his next _ and possibly last _ career stop to meet at least one criteria: To be something special.
His short stint with the Philadelphia Eagles this season has been all of that, and more.
The 36-year-old, well-traveled Garcia, playing in place of injured star and team leader Donovan McNabb, has the Eagles qualified for the playoffs and within a victory of the NFC East division title. Another product of Garcia's stellar play is the knowledge his employment prospects for next season have improved, too.
"I did realize that I'm coming to the end of my career and that's why it was a major factor for me to get with a team that could compete on a weekly basis, to hopefully be part of something special," Garcia said on Wednesday as the Eagles prepared for their regular-season finale against the Atlanta Falcons.
"This is a special time in my life, in my career, where I want to make the most of every single opportunity that I have."
Signed as a backup, the plan was to have Garcia carry a clipboard and help young players during his time with the Eagles. Instead, he was thrust into the starting lineup when McNabb went down with a season-ending knee injury in mid-November.
In a strange twist, Garcia's career and the Eagles' playoff hopes were reborn together.
In the weeks since McNabb's injury, Garcia has been masterful, completing 62 percent of his passes (115-for-185) for 1,280 yards with just two interceptions. And, most important, he has led the Eagles to four straight wins, a 9-6 record and an unlikely playoff berth.
"This team has gone through somewhat of a roller-coaster ride throughout the season," he said. "I think we are hitting a high point just at the right time, being able to finish off strong like we have over the past four weeks with wins, putting us in the position where we can compete for a division title.
"It's just a great transformation by this team, great dedication by the team to overcome the obstacle that was presented in front of us. Now we are in the position where we can control anything and everything within ourselves. "
The finest years of Garcia's career came with the San Francisco 49ers from 1999-2003. He completed 63.3 percent of his passes (355-for-561) for 4,278 yards, 31 touchdowns and just 10 interceptions in 2000. He averaged 3,720 yards and 28 touchdowns from 2000-02.
But his production dropped sharply after leaving the 49ers for forgettable one-year stints on the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions. He threw for 1,731 yards and 10 touchdowns in 10 starts for the Browns in 2004, and had 937 yards passing and three TDs in five starts for the Lions last year.
Through it all, Garcia's confidence never wavered. In fact, the hard times have made the good times all that more enjoyable.
"I think whenever you've gone through the experiences like I have playing the game of football, you really value the positive times," he said.
Predictably, Garcia's success coming on the heels of McNabb's struggles has some fans talking about a quarterback controversy. But Garcia, who becomes a free agent after the season, will have none of it.
Like a dutiful backup, he defers to McNabb's hold on the spot.
"He's not necessarily threatened by his position, but more so looking at the accomplishments of the team," Garcia said of McNabb. "This is his position; I have a temporary hold on it."
Eagles coach Andy Reid agrees.
"Donovan is one of Jeff's biggest fans," Reid said. "He's in here every day, encouraging people and being Donovan. He's pulling for the team. I don't think he is going to worry about the other thing. He knows he is going to work like crazy and get himself back and ready to go."
Garcia says he's not preoccupied with either a return to the Eagles as a backup to McNabb or seeking a starting spot with another team.
"It's not something that I'm too concerned with," he said. "I feel that I will have employment somewhere next year and I hope that it is here in Philadelphia."


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« New words show how our world is changing
Did you know that Swedish and Norwegian have word melodies similar to Chinese? »
The brave new world of emoji: Why and how has emoji taken the world by storm?
By James McKellar, on July 15th, 2016
Blog post written by Cambridge author Vyvyan Evans.
An emoji is a glyph encoded in fonts, like other characters, for use in electronic communication. It's especially prevalent in digital messaging and social media. An emoji, or 'picture character', is a visual representation of a feeling, idea, entity, status or event. From a historical perspective, the first emojis were developed in the late 1990s in Japan for use in the world's first mobile phone internet system. There were originally 176, very crude by today's standards.
Early emoji faces
In 2009, the California-based Unicode Consortium, which specifies the international standard for the representation of text across modern digital computing and communication platforms, sanctioned 722 emojis. The Unicode approved emojis became available to software developers by 2010, and a global phenomenon was born. Today, there are a little over 1,200 emojis available.
The new universal 'language'?
While emoji is not, strictly speaking, a language, in the way that say, English, French or Japanese are languages, it is certainly a powerful system of communication. English is often said to be the world's global language, so a comparison is instructive.
English has 335 million native speakers, with a further 505 million speakers who use it as a second language. It's the primary or official language in 101 countries, from Canada to Cameroon, and from Malta to Malawi – far outstripping any other language. It has been transplanted far from its point of origin – a small country, on a small island – spreading far beyond English shores. But more than the range, English has steadily gained ground in almost all areas of international communication: from commerce, to diplomacy, from aviation to academic publishing, serving as a global Lingua Franca.
But in comparison, emoji dwarfs even the reach of English. The driver for the staggering adoption of emoji has been the advent of mobile computing, especially the smartphone. Emoji was introduced as an international keyboard in Apple's operating system (iOS) in October 2011. And by July 2013 it had been introduced across most Android operating platforms.
There are different measures for assessing the stratospheric rise of emoji. One factor has been the rapid adoption of smartphones. Today one quarter of the world's global population owns a smartphone; and based on a survey of mobile computing habits in 41 countries it is estimated that today there are over 2 billion smartphone users with 31% of the global population accessing the internet by smartphone. In terms of specific countries, China exceeded 500 million smartphones during the course of 2014, and it is estimated that India will have over 200 million smartphone users this year, and in the USA the same figure will be achieved by 2017, when 65% of the population of the United States will own a smartphone.[i] In terms of smartphones alone, some 41.5 billion text messages are sent globally every day, using around 6 billion emojis—figures that are mindboggling.[ii]
Emoji all around us
Today emoji is seemingly everywhere, having spread far beyond the messaging systems it was developed for. The New York Subway has now introduced a system, using emoji, to advise passengers of the status of particular subway lines: whether trains are running normally or not. As the NY City website explains: "We're trying to estimate agony on the NYC subway by monitoring time between trains and adding unhappy points for stations typically crowded at rush hour." [iii] Here's an example:
Reprinted from the WNYC website
Even an institution as august as the BBC is not immune. Each Friday, the Newsbeat page on the BBC website—associated with BBC Radio 1 and aimed at younger listeners—publishes the news in emoji. Radio listeners are invited to guess what the headline means. See whether you can figure out which headline this emoji 'sentence' relates to:
Four climbers find what they think is a Dodo chick egg. But it's not. The bird has been extinct for 450 years.
One in four people don't know the Dodo is extinct, a poll finds.
Four children win a science competition to genetically recreate the Dodo.
(The correct answer is 2).
Moreover, the literary canon is not excluded: a visual designer with a passion for emoji has translated Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a book of 27,500 or so words, into a pictorial narrative, consisting of around 25,000 emoji.[iv] Some example emoji 'sentences' are below:
Frivolous or the future?
A common question that people ask is whether anyone—you or I—can simply create their own emojis? The short answer is yes. For instance, Finland, on behalf of the Finnish people, has created its own set of national emojis that express Finnish identity. These include emojis of people in saunas, of a Nokia phone and of a headbanger.
These are a computer generated emojis made available by Finland's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday Nov. 4, 2015. Finland is launching a series of 'national emojis' that include people sweating in saunas, classic Nokia phones and heavy metal head-bangers. Petra Theman from the Finnish Foreign Ministry says the emojis will be released as a way to promote the country's image abroad and are based on themes associated with Finland. (Finnish Foreign Ministry via AP)
Finnish national emojis
But while Finland was the first country in the world to embrace its national identity through emojis, you or I won't be able to text one another the headbanger emoji anytime soon. And that's because the Finnish emojis have not been officially sanctioned by the Unicode Consortium—and Finland has no plans to submit them for consideration.
A new emoji has to meet various criteria to become a candidate emoji. And only after a lengthy vetting process, taking around 18 months, does a successful candidate emoji pass muster. Even then, it can take still longer for a newly sanctioned emoji to make it onto our digital keyboards – once approved, emojis can take several operating system – updates, and sometimes several years, to make it onto a smartphone or tablet computer near you. So, for now, at least, Finland's bespoke emojis are classed as 'stickers': bespoke images that have to be downloaded as part of an app, in order to be inserted them into text messages.
On January 25th 2016, a Chinese – American businesswoman, YiYing Lu, from San Francisco, succeeded where Finland had declined to tread. Supported by a publically-funded kickstarter campaign, Lu succeeded in having a dumpling achieve official emoji candidate status. And if successful, the proposed dumpling is set to become a bona fide emoji by the end of 2017. In so doing, it would join a growing catalogue of food emojis, including pizza, hamburger, doughnuts and even a taco glyph.
The proposed dumpling emoji. From The Dumpling Project.
The entire emoji vetting process is controlled by a handful of American multinational corporations, based in California. And there are strict qualifying criteria for new emojis: they may not depict persons living or dead, nor deities, for instance. This is why there is no Buddha, or Elvis emojis. Moreover, a candidate emoji must be deemed to have widespread appeal. On this score, the proposal for a dumpling emoji looks to be a strong candidate. A dumpling – a dough filled food parcel – is popular around the world, with exemplars ranging from Italian ravioli to Russian pelmeni, to Japanese gyoza. In Argentina there is empanadas, Jewish cuisine has kreplach, in Korea there is madoo and China has popstickers. But when Lu, an aficionado of Chinese dumplings, attempted to text a friend about the dish, she noticed there wasn't an emoji she could use.
In early 2016, the fact that the dumpling had officially achieved candidate emoji status in California hit the headlines around the world, from New York, to London, to Beijing; even the broadcast media got in on the act. I was invited onto BBC Radio to discuss the success of the Dumpling Kickstarter project, headlining with Lu herself. The Kickstarter campaign – to raise the necessary funds to prepare the proposal – had been a self-evident success, achieving over $12,000 and reaching its target within a few hours of going live. But the headlines beg the very question: why all the fuss about dumplings? Isn't this simply frivolity gone mad, an expensive bit of silliness?
On the contrary: emoji matters. The Dumpling Project stands for far more than a simplistic bid to have the favourite food of a Bay area business woman become sanctioned as an emoji. It is an instance of internet democracy at work: indeed, the slogan of the project was 'emoji for the people, by the people'.
One reason why emoji matters is the following; love it or loathe it, emoji is today the world's global form of communication. A quarter of the world's population owns a smartphone, and over 80% of adult smartphone users regularly use emoji, with figures likely to be far higher for under 18s. In short, most of the world's mobile computing users use emoji much of the time. And yet, the catalogue of emojis that show up on our smartphones and tablet computers – the vocabulary that connects 2 billion people – is controlled by a handful of American multinationals – eight of the eleven full members of the Unicode Consortium are American: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Moreover, the committee reps of these tech companies are overwhelmingly white, male, and computer engineers – hardly representative of the diversity exhibited by the global users of emojis. Indeed, as of 2015, the majority of food emojis were associated with North American culture, with some throwbacks to the Japanese origins of emoji (such as a sushi emoji).
Hence, one motivation for the Dumpling Project was to ensure better representation. Of course, on its own, a campaign and proposal for a new food emoji cannot do much. But as an appeal to global cultural and culinary diversity, and as call for better representation of this diversity, the dumpling is a powerful emblem. Emoji began as a bizarre little known North Asian phenomenon; since, control has come to rest in the hands of American corporate giants. Dumplings, on the other hand, in their various shapes and guises are truly international and get at the global nature of emoji.
Perhaps more than anything, the Dumpling Project is fun; and in terms of emoji, a sense of fun is the watchword. While these colourful glyphs add a dollop of personality to our digital messaging, the Dumpling Project makes a powerful point without resorting to burning either bras or effigies. It avoids gender, religion or politics in conveying a simple message about inclusiveness in the world's most widely used form of communication. And in the process, it provides us with an object lesson in the unifying and non – threatening nature of emoji. Perhaps the world can, indeed, be united for the better by this new, quasi-universal form of communication.
Communication and emotional intelligence
Setting aside dumplings, one of the serious questions surrounding the rise and rise of emoji is this: Why has the uptake of emoji grown exponentially: why is a truly global system of communication? Some see emoji as little more than an adolescent grunt, taking us back to the dark ages of illiteracy. But this prejudice fundamentally misunderstands the nature of communication. And in so doing it radically underestimates the potentially powerful and beneficial role of emoji in the digital age as a communication and educational tool.
All too often we think of language as the mover and the shaker in our everyday world of meaning. But, in actual fact, most of the meaning we convey and glean in our everyday social encounters, comes from nonverbal cues. In the spoken medium, gesture, facial expression, body language and speech intonation provide a means of qualifying and adjusting the message conveyed by the words. A facial wink or smile nuances the language, providing a crucial contextualisation cue, aiding our understanding of the spoken word. And intonation not only 'punctuates' our spoken language—there are no white spaces and full – stops in speech that help us identify where words begin and sentences end—intonation even provides 'missing' information not otherwise conveyed by the words.
Much of our communication is nonverbal. Take gesture: our gestures are minutely choreographed to co-occur with our spoken words. And we seem unable to suppress them. Watch someone on the telephone; they'll be gesticulating away, despite their gestures being unseen by the person on the other end of the line. Indeed, if gestures are suppressed, in lab settings say, then our speech actually becomes less fluent. We need to gesture to be able to speak properly. And, by some accounts, gesture may have even been the route that language took in its evolutionary emergence.
Eye contact is another powerful signal we use in our everyday encounters. We use it to manage our spoken interactions with others. Speakers avert their gaze from an addressee when talking, but establish eye contact to signal the end of their utterance. We gaze at our addressee to solicit feedback, but avert our gaze when we disapprove of what they are saying. We also glance at our addressee to emphasise a point we're making.
Eye gaze, gesture, facial expression, and speech prosody are powerful nonverbal cues that convey meaning; they enable us to express our emotional selves, as well as providing an effective and dynamic means of managing our interactions on a moment by moment time – scale. Face – to – face interaction is multimodal, with meaning conveyed in multiple, overlapping and complementary ways. This provides a rich communicative environment, with multiple cues for coordinating and managing our spoken interactions.
Digital communication increasingly provides us with an important channel of communication in our increasingly connected 21st century social and professional lives. But the rich, communicative context available in face-to-face encounters is largely absent. Digital text alone is impoverished and emotionally arid. Digital communication, seemingly, possesses the power to strip all forms of nuanced expression even from the best of us. But here emoji can help: it fulfils a similar function in digital communication to gesture, body language and intonation, in spoken communication. Emoji, in text messaging and other forms of digital communication, enables us to better express tone and provide emotional cues to better manage the ongoing flow of information, and to interpret what the words are meant to convey.
It is no fluke, therefore, that I have found, in my research on emoji usage in the UK, commissioned by TalkTalk Mobile, that 72% of British 18-25 year olds believe that emoji make them better at expressing their feelings. Far from leading to a drop in standards, emoji are making people – especially the young – better communicators in their digital lives.
[i] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694#sthash.p0P9KU38.dpuf
[ii] Swyftkey April 2015
[iii] http://www.wnyc.org/story/your-subway-agony/ (accessed 8th July 2015 7.30pm BST).
[iv] http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster
Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism & Multilingualism, Historical Linguistics, Language and Cognition, Sociolinguistics, Speech and Language therapy, The Evolution of Language emoji, linguistics


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Home Breaking Medical data of Israeli officials leaked online after insurance firm refuses to...
Medical data of Israeli officials leaked online after insurance firm refuses to pay 1mn ransom to cyberhackers reports
RTNEWS
The medical records of Israeli officials are among data reportedly leaked online after an insurance firm was hacked, but refused to cede to the cyber-attackers' demands to hand over nearly $1 million ransom in Bitcoin.
Israeli insurer Shirbit, which was hacked on Tuesday, rejected requests from the Black Shadow group, which threatened to sell the firm's data online unless it received a payment of 50 bitcoin ($950,000) within 24 hours.
Newly released hacked data on Friday reportedly included the medical records of Shirbit customers, including Israeli officials, as well as scans of ID cards and drivers' licenses.
A Telegram message from Black Shadow on Friday said that Shirbit had refused to pay the ransom. The company also confirmed its rejection of the demand, saying it would "not give in" to threats. According to Israeli media, Black Shadow warned that it still had tens of terabytes of information to leak, and also released screenshots purporting to show that it had been negotiating with a member of staff at Shirbit.
An investigation into the cyber-attack has been launched by Israel's National Cyber Directorate and the Capital Market Authority, while the company said it is working with the "best cyber experts" and government officials over the hack.
"Shirbit is working, and will continue to work, to reach the best solution with minimum damage to its customers," the company said in a statement about the hack.
The insurer also said the security experts it consulted had concluded that the attack was the work of ideologically motivated "hactivists," who were more interested in creating "cyber-terror" than in the potential financial gain of ransoms or selling stolen data.
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Italy's bestselling children's authors
A SERIES FOR ADVENTURE-SEEKERS! SMALL IN SIZE, BIG ON ADVENTURE!
An original series of adventure books curated by Pierdomenico Baccalario and written by Italy's bestselling children's authors.
Incredible, epic stories, spanning all of history, and ranging over the entire globe, bringing excitement, suspense and mystery, with a healthy dose of laughs!
* A sophisticated editorial product with exquisite cover artwork, old-style maps, comparative chronological tables and short profiles of the historical figures mentioned.
* A return to the tradition of Salgari's adventure stories for children, in an appealing, contemporary style.
FIRST PUBLISHER: SOLFERINO (ITALY), 2018
RIGHTS SOLD IN GREECE: METAIXMIO
12 TITLES PUBLISHED: 1. HERE COME THE HOOD BROTHERS, GUIDO SGARDOLI / 2. BLACK POWDER, MIRIAM DUBINI / 3. THE TERRIBLE TESTAMENT OF JEREMY HOPPERTON, DAVIDE MOROSINOTTO / 4. THE RETURN OF THE TSAR, PIERDOMENICO BACCALARIO / 5. THE MYSTERIOUS VIKING, SABRINA COLLOREDO / 6. THE PIRATE QUEEN, EDUARDO JÁUREGUI /7. THE ROUTE OF THE ANDES, CHRISTIAN HILL / 8. HIRO OF THE MONKEYS, GIUSEPPE FESTA / 9. BATTLE NAME MADGA, ANDREA PAU / 10. RICO THE BRAVE, LUISA MATTIA / 11. THE WITCH OF LOCH LIATH, SILVIA RONCAGLIA / 12. JOURNEY TO THE FORBIDDEN CITYMORE, ELISA PURICELLI GUERRA – MORE TITLES COMING SOON
Guido has always cultivated a passion for drawing, animation and writing. He has published more than eighty books with the major Italian publishers and his books have been translated into several languages. He is one of the most interesting Italian writers for children. He has thrice been awarded the Italian Andersen Prize: in 2009, 2015 and 2018. In 2019 he is a finalist for the Strega Children's Prize.
Pierdomenico Baccalario
Pierdomenico grew up in an old house with a library containing over 20,000 volumes. A writer and journalist, his books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into over 30 languages. Today he is considered one of the greatest Italian children's authors.
Davide Morosinotto
Davide is not only a sci-fi and children's author, but also a journalist and videogame translator. He has written over thirty titles. In 2017 he won the Italian Andersen Award with The Pocket Watch Gang, the adventure he dreams of having lived as a child. The Pocket Watch Gang was a finalist in 2018 at Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in Germany and in 2019 is shortlisted in France at Prix Livrentête, Prix des lectures du Mans et dela Sarthe, Prix du Salon du livre jeunesse du Giennois. In 2018, Two Red Stars, another of his books with international success, won In Other Words – Booktrust's Book in Translation Award in London.
"A book is a like a bicycle, it can take you anywhere, along imaginary roads. And take your breath away." Miriam wrote. She also said, when presenting her new novel Black Dust, "Adventure is essential for life, like food and water." Miriam passed away this summer, aged 41, in a road accident.
She had a degree in semiotics, with a dissertation on narration in fairy tales. She wrote for and performed in children's theatre and the circus. Then, she wrote novels and comic strips for Disney, Mattel, Edizioni BD, Battello a Vapore, Giunti, Mondadori and Bonelli, and designed and created games using recycled materials for Art Attack.
Sabrina Colloredo
Sabina fell in love with writing from childhood, and wrote her first book in primary school. It is now jealously guarded in the top right-hand drawer of her desk. The former creative director of several of Milan's leading advertising agencies, she started to write children's books when her own children were born. Her novels have been widely translated. Altogether she has produced around a hundred stories, historical and mythological fiction, female biographies and poetry.
Eduardo Jáuregui
Eduardo a university professor and one of the world's leading experts on the topics of laughter, play and sense of humour: (http://humorpositivo.com/eduardojauregui_eng/) His consultancy Serious Fun Training specializes in the application of positive emotions in the workplace. He is the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books published in over 15 languages.
M.A.1.A. – The Night of the Biplanes
IP Development
Spartacus the Rebel Dog
Artistic Design
Learn to Read with Pip
Innovate UK Success Stories – Ella's Kitchen
Piriton Preroll
Digital Wizardry
Piccolo Coro Antoniano
Tiny Invaders
Living with a Dragon
Willy & Nilly
Team Extreme