"Seriously, no stupid people allowed beyond this point!" This was the warning that Phil and I encountered when we arrived for our interview with Liam O'Neil. It looked like we might have to conduct the interview on the front lawn, but fortunately Liam and his mother Ailsa were gracious enough to let us inside.
What we found when we entered was a celebration of art which covered every inch of the space. Cheerfully coloured canvases, bedazzled mannequins and two bright, friendly smiles lit up the suburban home which houses Liam's studio. At the time of our visit, Liam was working on a portrait of a woman holding a camera in graphic yellow and purples. As Phil and Ailsa discussed the best location for our photo shoot, I chatted with Liam about his favourite shows such as Doctor Who and Thomas the Tank Engine.
Liam first started drawing in February 2015, with his mum's help. Ailsa, who describes herself as "arty farty", also has a studio and encouraged Liam to take up the brush. "One day Liam asked me, 'can I paint a canvas?'" Ailsa says. "I gave him one that was lying around and I was watching him, thinking 'oh my god, he's really good'." Art is good therapy, as Ailsa observes, and the proof is in Liam's outstanding pieces of art.
"Painting makes me feel relaxed and confident that I can do things myself," says Liam. With his mother's help, painting quickly became a weekly activity for Liam. Ailsa was so excited to share his work that they created a Facebook page called Liam's Art Geelong, which has almost 2,000 followers. Liam started to draw using a projector like his mother, but now he draws freehand. During our visit, we were lucky to be able to watch Liam as he worked, sketching a painting of birds. His focus and steady hand as he perfected the lines was remarkable. This was Liam's first attempt at drawing birds, and Liam tells me that he would like to draw pictures of other birds, including a cockatoo, an ostrich or a penguin. Liam particularly likes penguins because they get married to other penguins and raise their offspring together.
Liam is a dedicated ambassador for Autism Awareness and has spoken at many events to raise awareness. In May 2015, Liam donated a canvas to the All Stars Charity Event, which raised $2,000 for Autism Walk Geelong. The money went towards establishing a Life Skills House in Geelong. Liam likes creating paintings for other people, including the Give Where You Live Expo, Karingal and Gen U.
One of Liam's artworks will be donated for a silent auction at the Humans in Geelong Expo on 7 October. The proceeds from the auction will go to Headspace.
"When I draw, I have a thought in my head of pictures I like," Liam tells me. Liam's favourite artistic subject is women, "because I think they're beautiful." Liam also likes drawing pictures of animals such as elephants and giraffes, and his favourite animal is a hippo. His work features many bright, happy colours such as blue and purple. Liam is currently working on a dog-themed collection of paintings for an upcoming exhibit in May at the Boom Gallery. I was lucky enough to be treated to a preview of the collection. Liam's pictures of the dogs are lively and vibrant, as if they are ready to jump off the canvas and give you a big slobbery kiss.
Don't forget to come to the Humans in Geelong Expo on October 7th at Deakin Waterfront from 10-3pm for the chance to bid for Liam's 'Who needs a Hug?' canvas and to see him create some of his fantastic artwork. He loves to have a chat.


text:
var should = require('should');
var request = require('request');
var actionheroPrototype = require(__dirname + '/../../actionhero.js').actionheroPrototype;
var actionhero = new actionheroPrototype();
var api;
var url;

describe('Core: Static File', function(){

  before(function(done){
    actionhero.start(function(err, a){
      api = a;
      url = 'http://localhost:' + api.config.servers.web.port+'/'+api.config.servers.web.urlPathForFiles;
      done();
    })
  });

  after(function(done){
    actionhero.stop(function(){
      done();
    });
  });

  it('file: an HTML file', function(done){
    api.specHelper.getStaticFile('simple.html', function(response){
      response.mime.should.equal('text/html');
      response.content.should.equal('
ActionHero
\\nI am a flat file being served to you via the API from ./public/simple.html
');
      done();
    });
  });

  it('file: 404 pages', function(done){
    api.specHelper.getStaticFile('someRandomFile', function(response){
      response.error.should.equal( api.config.errors.fileNotFound() );
      should.not.exist(response.content);
      done();
    });
  });

  it('I should not see files outside of the public dir', function(done){
    api.specHelper.getStaticFile('../config/config.json', function(response){
      response.error.should.equal( api.config.errors.fileNotFound() );
      should.not.exist(response.content);
      done();
    });
  });

  it('file: sub paths should work', function(done){
    api.specHelper.getStaticFile('logo/actionhero.png', function(response){
      response.mime.should.equal('image/png');
      response.length.should.equal(142141);
      response.content.length.should.be.within(136836, 137500); // wacky per-OS encoding issues I guess
      done();
    });
  });

  it('should send back the last modified time', function (done) {
    request.get(url+'/simple.html', function (err, response, body) {
      response.statusCode.should.eql(200);
      response.headers['last-modified'].should.be.ok;
      done();
    });
  });

  it('should send back a 304 if the header "if-modified-since" is present and condition matches', function (done) {
    request.get(url+'/simple.html', function (err, response, body) {
      response.statusCode.should.eql(200);
      request({url:url+'/simple.html',headers:{'If-Modified-Since':new Date(Date.now())}}, function (errBis, responseBis, body) {
        responseBis.statusCode.should.eql(304);
        done();
      });
    });
  });

  it('should send back the file if the header "if-modified-since" is present but condition does not match', function (done) {
    request.get(url+'/simple.html', function (err, response, body) {
      response.statusCode.should.eql(200);
      var lastModified=new Date(response.headers['last-modified']);
      request({url:url+'/simple.html',headers:{'If-Modified-Since':new Date(lastModified.getTime()-24*1000*3600)}}, function (errBis, responseBis, body) {
        responseBis.statusCode.should.eql(200);
        done();
      });
    });
  });

});

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


In certain industries, the hands are at a high risk of experiencing impact injuries. Impact-resistant gloves are a indispensable part of the PPE of mechanics, oil rig workers and construction professionals.
Featuring a high-visibility design, the Black Mamba Impact Protection Gloves PR-IPT are perfectly suited to work in harsh industrial environments. Offering full back of hand impact protection, these gloves also provide defence against abrasion and hand fatigue, with a flexible polyester liner.
The Black Mamba Impact Protection Gloves are available in three different sizes. Please measure the width of your hand through measuring our palm from one end to the other excluding the thumb and fingers. The best point to do so is above the thumb region but below the fingers.


text:
Tarkan, egentligen Tarkan Tevetoğlu, född 17 oktober 1972 i Alzey i Västtyskland, är en turkisk musiker.

Tarkan är en av de mest kända musikerna i Turkiet. Hans skivor säljer i flera miljoner exemplar. Han är också känd i övriga Europa och USA, speciellt för låten Şımarık, vilken Holly Valance gjorde cover på efter att Sezen Aksu sålde rättigheterna till den.

Tidigt liv

Tarkan är ett av tre barn till Ali och Neşe Tevetoğlu. Hans föräldrar var en del av generationen av turkiska invandrare som kom till Västtyskland under landets ekonomiska boom. År 1986 bestämde fadern att familjen skulle flytta tillbaka till Turkiet. Modern gifte senare om sig med en arkitekt. Tarkan talar, förutom tyska och turkiska, även engelska.

Diskografi

Album
 1991 - Yine Sensiz (Igen utan dig)
 1994 - A-Acayipsin (Du är något annat)
 1997 - Ölürüm Sana (Jag dör för dig)
 1998 - Tarkan
 2001 - Karma
 2003 - Dudu (Kvinna)
 2006 - Come Closer (Kom närmare)
 2008 - Metamorfoz (Förändring)
 2010 Adımı Kalbine Yaz
 2016 Ahde Vefa
 2017 10

Singlar
 1999 - Simarik (Bortskämd)
 1999 - Sikidim (Shake it)
 1999 - Bu Gece (Inatt)
 2001 - Kuzu Kuzu (Krypandes..) fritt översatt
 2001 - Hüp Remix 8 (Whoop)

Externa länkar

 Tarkan - Officiell webbplats
 Tarkan - Metamorfoz CD Lyrics
 Tarkan Tevetoğlu (Tarkan Fan Club)

Födda 1972
Turkiska popsångare
Levande personer
Män
Personer från Rheinland-Pfalz

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


You must recognize that fashion styles tend to go in loops if you want to be measured as a fashionista. It means that things which were in style thirty or fifty years back will come back in the present fashion year. Therefore, if you need joining this category, it is extremely significant that you know about the different types of fashion since anyone of them could be back in fashion. Here are the two kinds of fashion just to help you out.
In the fashion business, vintage means any clothing style after 1920's to 1980's. However, many perfectionists consider anything as retro after 60's. But it doesn't mean that any outfit which is in the cabinet of your grandmother will be eligible as vintage outfit. Vintage can signify wearing one signature pieces or two of that time; and take note that anything that was measured as unpleasant in that time is still unpleasant now. Designer outfit products from the 20's to 30's are somewhat you will want to have in the cabinet of yours and to find them you can shop vintage outfit stores. Surely, if your mother or grandmother was a fashionista of their time, you can look at their cabinet to find one or two piece.
This clothing design refers to the hippie time of 60's and 70's. Of course, this fashion is not for your workplace and some other formal meetings. It is ideal for the date with ladies or using moment with your love ones on a music festival for the night. Actually, bohemian trend is never out of style. One or more fashion of the time is always noticeable on stars in red carpet. Also, the outfits bring the Gypsy culture's influence and also traditions from a selection of other areas such as African, Indian and Native American. Chucky jewels and oversized bags complete a bohemian appearance.


If we talking about people born under Libra sign, they are a representative of justice itself as the symbol of their sign which is a scale. Although they always search and in the pursuit of justice, they also care well about their own selves. Libra pretty much avoid all of conflict around them and go to a safe place because they don't want getting involved on it.
These feeling towards justice that Libra had seems to make him love socialize with people. More over, he barely can refuse everyone that ask them for help which sometimes stress them out. That contradiction thing is what make Libra hard to understand. To learn more whats other thing, here are reasons Libras are hard to understand.
A Libra is often doing everything they could so they wouldn't caught up in a mess. That is why sometimes we don't know their truly intention. They always keep that invisible so it is what makes them hard to understand.
One of the reasons Libras are hard to understand is because they really good at hiding their feeling. Sometimes, they would easily smile at people even though deep in their heart they are mad or even sad.
Some people might not understand about why a Libra is remains silent. It is actually because they are very careful about what they are going to say which for ones hard to understand.
You want to know reasons Libras are hard to understand? That is because they are never doing thing directly. They aren't such a straight-forward person so they would not tell you if there is something wrong. They said that you were good in that dress, just hold on a sec and re-look yourself, maybe you weren't that good and a Libra said that just to avoid a confrontation.
Don't just believe what a Libra said. As we all know that Libras are not a straight-forward person, they must be good at pretending too. It is going to be a frustration situation when a Libra said they are fine–because they are definitely not! You need to figure it out by yourself because they would remain say nothing.
People ask frequently about reasons Libra are hard to understand. One of them is a Libra tend to always keep their dignity. They love themselves so much and they don't want others to pity them out. That is why they always keep their chin up and make everyone hard to understand them.
Libra often leave people behind while wondering what happen with them. That is one of reasons Libra are hard to understand. Libra is too lazy to explain about the situation they were in–so they just left it behind.
It is normal if you find a Libra that really hard to understand. They don't want a drama in their life that bad because it is such a troublesome. They would avoid drama that can lead to certain mess up thing consciously–or even unconsciously–as soon as they find it.
Reasons Libras are hard to understand is maybe because they rarely use emotional thought in everything. People will tell to others about what they were going through yesterday use couple emotions within it. However, it is just not a Libra. They would just tell you "everything was fine".
Remember that Libra doesn't want to be involved in a mess. Reasons Libras are hard to understand probably because they love the situation and thing as it is. They try to avoid make a scene that can lead to hard drama they couldn't handle.
Now you already know reasons Libras are hard to understand. However, those are probably not enough to make you understand very well about a Libra. So, here are more Libra's traits you should know.
If there is a conflict between your friends, you will definitely need a Libra at that time. Libra is good at not letting their feeling on within a problem so they would remain neutral and make a great mediator.
Libra has cooperative traits. They will work better within a team and everything that needs a lot of team work.
Don't underestimate Libra kindness because they are one of a kind.
Maybe there are reasons Libras are hard to understand. However, they are still a lovable person because they care for their surrounding.
Because they care for their surrounding, Libra is such a generous person. They will never count what they've been given to their close friend.
Libra can go out and party all night with their squad. However, you wouldn't know if they would accept your invitation to the next weekend party. It is because Libra is in between laziness and love to socialize.
You don't want to ask a Libra about some decision you will make because they are not really good at making decision. They are so fickle and indecisive especially when they need to choose it fast.
One thing you have to learn about Libra is they wouldn't forget what makes they hurt. Within Libra case, they will carry a resentment and won't forgive you easily. So, you better not hurt a Libra!
Libra basically loves everyone and accept them with all their flaws. However, they don't compromise with some big talker. A Libra will just leave them out without a single notice!


Until the widespread adoption of NAND flash, persistent storage was generally based on mechanical devices.
We had punched tape and cards (both of which have pretty much disappeared), then tape and spinning disk media, including hard drives and optical. All of these devices have physical characteristics that affect the performance of how data reads and writes.
But, as server virtualisation abstracts the virtual machine's (VM) logical disks from the underlying physical storage, an issue that starts to arise is that of misaligned or unaligned input/output (I/O).
Unaligned I/O results in I/O performance degradation and is a result of misalignment of the logical blocks in the multiple layers of abstraction between the virtual machine's storage and the external presentation of the storage from a shared storage array.
To see why this problem has arisen we need to look at how storage is mapped to virtual machine guests from the external array.
Typically, storage area network (SAN) or network file system (NFS)-based storage will internally read and write data in fixed blocks or chunks, from sizes of 4K upwards.
On top of this we create, for example, VMFS (VMware vSphere) and VHD (Microsoft Hyper-V) file layouts.
Both of these file systems operate slightly differently – Hyper-V uses the New Technology File System (NTFS) – but for the benefits of our example the relevant characteristics are the same. With VMFS-5 the allocation size is 1MB, with the size of I/O based on the guest itself.
Above that we have the VM guest and the file system within the operating system (OS), for example Microsoft Windows and NTFS which have a fixed, predefined cluster size. This arrangement is represented in Figure 1, which shows each layer aligned on LBA (logical block address) boundaries (starting from LBA=0). An I/O read or write to any block of VM guest data results in only one I/O at the storage layer.
Now look at the scenario where we have misalignment of I/O at the VM guest level in Figure 2. Writing to block O/S 2 results in two I/Os to the VMFS (but in this case only one to the underlying storage), while I/O to O/S 4 results in two to the hypervisor and two to the underlying storage.
Similar problems would also be seen if the VMFS was also misaligned.
At first glance, the alignment problem may not seem like a lot of overhead for the storage. After all, if a file is written in large blocks then one additional I/O among tens or hundreds may not be a problem.
But, with server virtualisation, the distribution of data across the VMFS results in highly random I/O, so the extra overhead of I/Os to manage the misaligned data could be quite significant. Part of the reason for this is in the way the storage is written to the external storage array.
That's because a partial update to a block of data on the SAN could generate multiple additional reads to get data from physical disk, make the partial updates and write the data back to disk again, compared with simply updating the entire block because the whole block is changing.
Why does unaligned I/O matter?
So what are the effects of misaligned I/O?
The most obvious is on storage performance. Although the impact will be variable – and dependent on the storage platform, the number of guests and the amount of misalignment – the additional I/O load could be an additional 10-20%. In latency-dependent environments – such as with hard disk drive (HDD)-based arrays – this impact could be noticeable to VM guests, especially where there are lots of small-sized I/O requests.
The second possible area of impact is that of space optimisation on the storage array, both from a thin provisioning and data deduplication perspective.
Where the VM OS and storage are misaligned, data allocations at the guest layer could cause additional storage to be physically reserved for the guest, as the logical allocation runs into the next logical allocation block in the unit size allocated to thin provisioning. This overhead is likely to be small, however.
The other area that could have an issue is in data deduplication.
If multiple operating systems are out of alignment, and if the deduplication process is based on fixed size blocks, the potential savings from deduplication of similar data as seen by the storage array may not be fully realised. Simply shifting the LBA start point by one byte will defeat deduplication algorithms that expect data to have boundaries consistent with the underlying storage platform.
Thankfully, today's modern operating systems have largely fixed the alignment issue at the guest level.
Windows 2008 onwards, for example, aligns to a 1MB boundary for the boot drive, rather than the previous offset of 63 sectors (of 512 bytes) or 31.5kB, which was done to match physical disk geometry.
Most, if not all of the Linux-based operating systems, also align correctly. Remember that these changes apply to new installations, but upgrades in place may not necessarily correct the problem.
At the hypervisor level, VMware's ESXi 5.0 onwards allocates to a 1MB boundary for both VMFS3 and VMFS5 partitions. But, any partitions created with earlier releases of VMFS/ESXi will still be aligned to 64KB, even if they are subsequently upgraded to VMFS5. These data stores (and their partitions) will need to be deleted and recreated to fix the alignment problem.
To see whether the problem exists, there are tools that can look at the host, hypervisor and the storage.
NetApp's Data Ontap, for example, detects and reports on the amount of misaligned I/O detected on each logical unit number (LUN). Windows alignment can be checked with multiple tools, including Diskpart, Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line (WMIC) and fsutil. Linux systems can be checked with the fdisk utility.
For the hypervisor, VMware's vSphere provides the partedutil command that can be run from the ESXi command line. For Microsoft Hyper-V, alignment will be dependent on the underlying NTFS partition configuration that can be checked with standard Windows commands.
One final thought. The problems described in this article are manifested more with latency sensitive storage systems. As we move to flash systems and server-based caching, the overhead of misalignment may be much less noticeable and so not worth going back to correct.


text:
Our Fellow Americans
Why calling Puerto Ricans "Americans" will not save them.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner ▪ January 10, 2018
Flags in the wreckage of Hurricane Maria, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 18 (Lorie Shaull / Flickr)
Nearly four months after Hurricane Maria obliterated the entire electrical grid, destroyed or damaged 472,000 homes, and killed at least sixty-four people in Puerto Rico, half of households remain in the dark, 250,000 people have left, and the estimated death toll has soared above 1,000. The darkness, however, has clarified what over a century of legal euphemisms have tried to obscure: that living as non-voting American citizens on an unincorporated territory that "belongs to, but is not part of" the United States not only spells disaster. It can also spell death.
While Puerto Ricans have met this realization with a mixture of outrage, resignation, and indifference, some Americans have responded with a historically rare gesture: rhetorical incorporation. As the hurricane approached, mainstream media outlets started to describe Puerto Ricans as "3.4 million American citizens living in Puerto Rico." After the storm devastated the island and the federal government failed to fully assist, journalists and other public figures started to drop the distinction altogether. Perhaps echoing governor Ricardo Rosselló's mournful address to "my fellow Americans" on the eve of Maria's landfall, they started to simply call Puerto Ricans "Americans" and, even more unexpectedly, "our fellow Americans."
One of the first outlets to do so was the Weather Channel, whose anchors and reporters, especially Paul Goodloe, repeatedly mentioned that Puerto Ricans were Americans. CBS correspondent David Begnaud, who emerged as the most compelling and dedicated journalist of the post-Maria predicament, routinely did the same. Reporting about island conditions on October 5, for example, he stressed with exasperation: "these are Americans sitting in line, sleeping in their cars, desperately trying to get fuel."
MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow was at times still more emphatic. Discussing the infamous "spa day" story where a U.S. doctor quit after seeing medical personnel turn a hospital triage into a manicure station, Maddow remarked in an alarmed tone: "You have people starting to die, Americans starting to die, in Puerto Rico because of treatable bacterial infections . . . This storm is no longer killing Americans—the federal government's response to the storm is now killing Americans."
For U.S. journalists, this was a way to keep people watching and maintain pressure on the federal government to step up support. Yet it often went further. In the New York Times, two writers made the case that what Puerto Ricans were called was a question not just of semantics but also of survival. Commenting on a Morning Consult poll about U.S. perceptions of Puerto Ricans shortly after the hurricane struck, they noted that Americans in general—including Trump supporters—were more comfortable with the idea of providing aid to Puerto Ricans if aware that they were U.S. citizens. The finding was reported as both a conclusion and a plea: "Our sympathies for other people depend in part on whether we see them as fellow members of our tribe. Without more coverage, it may be easy to forget that the people suffering are our fellow Americans."
Nor were journalists alone in adopting this strategy: corporate America also got in on the act. Perhaps the most striking example was a public service announcement by the megastore Walmart, which began running on primetime television on October 9. Called "United," the PSA was not Walmart's first on a hurricane-related theme. The company had released another one a month earlier to raise funds for victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas. The 30-second Texas spot began with a photograph of Houston partly underwater and ended with a written message: "To the Lone Star State, you are not alone." According to adland.com, this message helped to raise over $25 million.
The Puerto Rico version was of similar length and style, suggesting that in the eyes of Walmart, the island was equal to any state. It opened with images of the hurricane's impact under an instrumental arrangement of Ben King's classic "Stand By Me." While the lyrics are not part of the PSA, the song was likely chosen to allude to the destruction of the power grid and ensuing darkness: "When the night has come/And the land is dark/And the moon is the only light we'll see/No, I won't be afraid/Oh, I won't be afraid/Just as long as you stand, stand by me." In the English rendition, the PSA's male voiceover, heard during most of the spot's duration, declares: "To our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico, we may be separated by an ocean, but we are united."
Politicians eventually joined in too. In an October 16 address to the legislature after a visit to Puerto Rico, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson repeated the phrases "our fellow Americans" or "fellow citizens" six times, ending with: "Our fellow Americans are dying, and they desperately need our help. . . . I'm here to urge this Congress and the administration that we have to act." While Puerto Ricans used it less often, New York Congress member José Serrano similarly pressed his House colleagues the following week: "[The people of Puerto Rico] are our fellow Americans; they've served in our wars, they do pay taxes, and they should be treated equally."
The rhetorical explosion of "our fellow Americans" raises the question of why the sudden adoption of this phrase, and why now. Part of the answer lies in the shifting meaning of the term "American," as a product of constant struggles over who can claim full national belonging and access the benefits of U.S. citizenship. This is evident in Puerto Rico's case. Although rarely invoked until the aftermath of Maria, the phrase has been applied to island residents for over a century to emphasize political inequality and injustice. A 1900 Washington Times article offers a succinct, and still current, example: "the crime against our suffering fellow-Americans in Puerto Rico, and against the Constitution of the United States, is complete."
Another clue lies in the idiom's relationship to presidential rhetoric. It emerged from "my fellow-citizens," in use since the republic's early period and employed by the nation's first president, George Washington. The present turn of phrase was taken up in the twentieth century by various presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1933 was the first to employ it in an inaugural speech. Yet the expression's contemporary resonance can perhaps best be credited to Lyndon B. Johnson, who included it in opening every State of the Union and other key speeches on divisive subjects in which American lives were at stake. Among these were Johnson's last two addresses to the nation: "Good evening, my fellow Americans," he began, before announcing that he would first limit, then halt bombing in Vietnam, and not seek reelection.
The phrase's association with presidential addresses and their effect of rhetorically constituting the "American people" in times of crisis partly explains its surge after Maria. The repetition aims to affirm that given the failure of both the president and Congress to act, Americans themselves have the power to incorporate Puerto Rico as part of the national body politic and dictate that Puerto Ricans are deserving of care as U.S. citizens. To the extent that President Trump has explicitly claimed the category of "American" for whites, "our fellow Americans" also seeks to refuse the president's racist rhetoric by taking over presidential speech. The phrase, then, is a declaration of democratic inclusion—the chosen version is, after all, "our" and not "my" fellow Americans—and a form of protest against the nation's head of government.
This strategy has had some tangible effects. Brigades of nurses, pilots, cooks, celebrities and even The Simpsons' cartoon bartender Moe have sent money and supplies to Puerto Rico or donated their time. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that a month after Maria hit, 62 percent of Americans agreed that Puerto Ricans were not getting the help they needed. More notably still, according to a Fox News poll, the percentage of Americans who support admitting Puerto Rico as a state of the union jumped, from 30 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in the month after Maria. If the numbers are reliable, this is a remarkable outcome, as it is now widely known that the island is experiencing a massive debt crisis hinging on $120 billion in bond and pension obligations, that it will require additional billions to recover, and that nearly half the population lives below the poverty line.
At the same time, the embrace of "our fellow Americans" is more vexed than it appears. A good example is Walmart's PSA. While the company may have intended to raise money for relief, many Puerto Ricans saw the ad as hypocritical PR given Walmart's impact on the island. The reason is simple: Walmart is Puerto Rico's largest private employer and its highest-grossing retailer, with upwards of $2.75 billion in annual revenue and more stores per square mile than anywhere else on earth. Accordingly, in the last two decades, Walmart has destroyed the vast majority of local competition, including independent pharmacies, and has been a factor in over 800 small business bankruptcies. Its near monopoly of the market has likewise driven up unemployment: for every new job that Walmart creates, the economy loses an average of 2.3. Equally significant, the types of jobs that Walmart has generated are mostly part-time, minimum-wage ones, without benefits or the right to organize.
This rhetorical gesture also overlooks that while recognition as Americans may translate into greater attention, the strategy is problematic for what it exacts and omits. Philosopher Nelson Maldonado Torres was among those to object to the "American" appeal by pointing out that Puerto Ricans should "receive help because they are people, not because they are [American] citizens"; citizenship status alone has never guaranteed rights for racialized people, who are not seen as fully human to begin with. Eduardo Bhatia, former president of the Senate of Puerto Rico, argued that while it was legally accurate to say that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, calling them Americans was another matter. From this perspective, "our fellow Americans" erases Puerto Rican national identity and their long history of struggles against U.S. colonialism.
Yet under the current circumstances, the most revealing limitation of the attempt to rhetorically make Americans out of Puerto Ricans is its failure to end the suffering on the ground—highlighting that Puerto Rico's colonial subjection is thoroughly systemic. Usual responses to disasters in the United States, such as expanding the food stamp program for families in need, were not followed because unlike in the fifty states, there is a cap to the amount of funds the island can receive, even in times of emergency. For still disputed reasons, the mutual aid typically provided by states when catastrophe hits also did not kick in. States like New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts were quick to send personnel, equipment, and other assistance to Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria but not to Puerto Rico. To further clarify the island's low status, four weeks after the hurricane, no less than sixty-nine House Republicans voted against additional aid for Puerto Rico, and the approved package was ultimately offered in the form of loans, although state agencies were granted direct relief in the same bills.
In other words, the appeal of "our fellow Americans," particularly in the absence of political mobilization, is no match against a racist, colonial logic designed to keep resources away from "minorities" deemed to be undeserving. Trump underlined this when he defended his administration's negligent response by invoking old stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as lazy, responsible for their own financial woes, and unreasonable in their expectations of the U.S. government. In contrast to his September 1 speech on Texas after Harvey, when he stated, "We will support you today, tomorrow and the day after. . . . We help our fellow Americans every single time," Trump's October 12 tweet to Puerto Ricans claimed that: "We can't keep FEMA, the Military & First Responders . . . in P.R. Forever." Not surprisingly, this assertion is inconsistent with FEMA's record; the agency sometimes stays engaged in disaster areas for more than a decade after a storm. In fiscal year 2017 alone, FEMA was slated to provide $440 million in relief to Gulf Coast states for damages resulting from 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and $1.4 billion to New York and New Jersey for Sandy.
Moreover, while press coverage to date has done much to shift some attitudes, the quantity and quality of journalistic interest itself often replicates existing power dynamics. While reporting about Puerto Rico spiked after Maria, compared to prior coverage on the debt crisis, it has been considerably less than that of hurricane damage in Texas and Florida. The equally devastated U.S. Virgin Islands—where three-quarters of the population is black—received nearly no coverage at all. Attention to Puerto Rico only picked up after Trump visited the island and has faded since. In addition, whereas media on the mainland United States focuses on the needs of residents and the hurricane's impact on families, Puerto Rico's is largely related to partisan politics, debt, taxes, and the death toll, underscoring that media interest is often a proxy for anti-Trump or anti-Republican sentiment rather than an actual commitment to resolving urgent problems or ending U.S. colonialism.
But even if the federal government were handling Puerto Rico's crisis like one in any other U.S. state, the island would not be spared another, harsher American response: disaster capitalism. Well-connected companies receive no bid multimillion-dollar contracts to rebuild at an exorbitant cost; recovery gives way to land grabs, privatization, and more debt. Repeating what happened after Katrina to majority-black New Orleans, whose citizens had a full Congressional representation, the interests of most Puerto Ricans are being sold out with impunity. Yet, as befits colonial governance, a provision of the Republican tax bill passed by Congress in December takes this profiteering to new heights. Though the final bill didn't include a threatened 20 percent excise tax on goods imported to the mainland—which could have cut as much as one-third of the local government's revenues—a separate 12.5 percent tax on income from intellectual property could gut Puerto Rican pharmaceutical manufacturing, one of the largest and best-paid sectors of the island's economy.
Ultimately, in this unnatural disaster made by the intersection of climate change, modern colonialism, and Trumpism, it is not hard to see why an appeal to "our fellow Americans" has not saved Puerto Ricans. For too many, including those who currently control the nation's resources, the phrase still fundamentally refers to privileged whites. The irony is that the longer the U.S. government deliberately fails in Puerto Rico, the more fleeing Puerto Ricans will technically turn into Americans anyway.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Her latest book is the edited collection Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America (2017).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


A week ago today, my beloved Markus celebrated his 33rd birthday. I really can't believe that he's in his 30s. The boy really does look young. Once someone said to him, "Mark, I think that you drank from the Fountain of Youth." I really think he worked some kind of hoodoo because he does not look 33. Since Markus entered his 30s, he's preferred to have low key celebrations. Now that I'm also approaching my 30s I do too. Last year, Markus didn't get to do anything he wanted for his birthday, so I was determined to make all of his birthday wishes come true this year.
Our first stop for Mark's Posh Birthday was the amazing Posh Nosh. Usually, I do all the research and look for restaurants, but this time, Markus found the place. When we walked in, I was so impressed. I think of all the restaurants we've been to, this is by far the classiest. I loved Posh Nosh and everything about it was great. The decor was really modern and artsy. The food was absolutely delicious, a little pricey, but worth it. We ate the Gorgonzola Pizza and Seared Tuna Salad. We've had Gorgonzola Pizza before and it's been average. We were both worried it would be mediocre, but it wasn't at all. It was really good and it only proves that quality means everything. Even though it's a simple pizza, the flavors of the cheese were strong. My favorite part of the meal was the drinks. I ordered a Lychee Martini and Markus ordered a Mojito. I usually hate martini's but this one was so good. It was sweet and had the subtle taste of lychees. Honestly, I would go back to Posh Nosh, just for the drinks.
After we ate dinner, I gave Markus his personalized birthday card. As I've said before, we try to give each other personalized presents. Nothing too big, just something that the other person will like. This year, I started watching One Piece, as you probably noticed. Markus loves two characters, Sogeking or Usopp and Brooke. Each character on One Piece has signature sayings or jokes. So for Sogeking and Brooke, I used them for his birthday card. I think he really enjoyed it and I was so excited to make it for him, especially because I also watch the show.
Ace, I see you hottie.
After our delicious dinner at Posh Nosh, we headed to Sirohige, a bar that we saw a few weeks ago. As we walked the streets of Seomyeon, Markus immediately saw a bar that was decorated with One Piece figurines. We made a mental note and decided to come back for his birthday. Sirohige is a Japanese yakitori-style pub. Yakitori is basically a Japanese style of food where everything is put on sticks and grilled. We ordered our food and drinks and checked out all the One Piece figurines. We even played a game of naming all the characters. I know it sounds really juvenile and doesn't fit in with the definition of posh, but it was really fun. I love that Markus and I can do simple things but manage to always have fun. I think that's why I love being married to him. It really is the little things.
We decided to save dessert for home. Markus was surprised at school by four of his students. They gave him heaps of presents, a poster with letters and this personalized birthday cake of his face. When he told me they got him a cake, I thought it was just one from the store, not one of his face. I couldn't believe it. I only made him a card, but these girls completely upstaged me. Despite being completely outdone by four elementary girls, I was really happy for Markus. I think that he always gets overlooked for his birthday and this year, it was really special. I just hope that he knows how important he is to me and even to his students!


In this article, you'll learn how Rise Vision works, how to create content, and how to set up a Display. If you've recently signed up for Rise Vision, this is where you'll start.
There are two simple steps to creating professional and engaging digital signage with Rise Vision. You don't have to be artistic or even creative to create digital signage; many users instead choose from the 100+ professionally designed templates in Rise Vision to get started quickly.
The first step is creating what you will show. We call the content that you want to show on your tv or monitor a Presentation and it is typically made up of text, images, and videos. Dynamic content lets you engage your audience with the latest news, alerts, and even live streaming videos.
Learn more about how to create your content.
Next, you need to decide where your Presentation will go. For this step, you need a tv or monitor that is connected to a computer (what we call a Media Player) typically with an HDMI cable, and installed on the Media Player is our Rise Player software. We call these three parts; the monitor, the Media Player and the Rise Player software, collectively a Display, and every Display has its own unique Display ID.
Learn more about how to setup your display.
What is a Media Player and how do I choose one?
What are some of the best practices for creating content?
Where do I go to create my account?


In the third edition of 'Punjab-Half Marathon-2018', as many as 2,000 people will run for the cause of 'Child Friendly-Chandigarh' on February 11 (Sunday). The event will witness the participation of international, national runners and people from all walks of life. Besides, groups of regular runners including Chandigarh Distance Runners, Weekend Runners and Amritsar Runners will mark the event. The mega event is being hosted by Thrill Zone Trust which has been working towards establishing running as a serious sport by conducting marathons and extensive training.
Former Chandigarh mayor Harjinder Kaur, and chairperson of the Chandigarh Commission for Protection of Child Rights (CCPCR), drew attention toward making the city beautiful child friendly. B K Goel, Member of State Commission for protection of child rights, Haryana highlighted that every six minute, a child gets stolen and two children gets sexually abused per six hours in the country. He pressed up on the need to spread awareness on children's rights on every possible platform.
While addressing the media persons here today, Founder of Thrill Zone Trust, P C Kushwaha said, "Our main objective is to motivate a maximum number of people to run and adopt a healthier lifestyle. This will be our 34th event in the country. Punjab Half marathon is divided into three categories covering the distance of 21 km 10 km and 5 km in which people of 18 to 75 years will take part. The marathon will commence from Chandigarh club at 6 am which will cross Rock Garden, Sukhna Lake, Kishangarh, and IT Park and will end at the club only".
75 years old international level runner Amar Singh Chauhan who has participated in 38 marathons held in USA, Canada and India is all set to take part in the upcoming Sunday's half marathon. Chauhan who has been winner many times appealed to the citizens to maintain good health and taking part in running events.
The trust has also come up with a collection sportswear and has decided to put up a stall. The money to be raised by the sale of these sports items will be donated to support blind youngsters who want to pursue sports.
On the occasion Mohinder Kataria, a motivational speaker also stressed upon the need to build the child friendly community where rights of children are protected.


text:
Q: Unable to access local Git repo after quitting during a rebase My virtual machine shutdown during a git rebase and now the project directory has no sight of the Git repository at all. When I do a git status I get the following:
vagrant@localhost /var/www/crmpicco $ git status
fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

I tried re-initialising the repo, but that had no effect:
vagrant@localhost /var/www/crmpicco $ git init
Reinitialized existing Git repository in /var/www/releases/20141013104615/.git/
vagrant@localhost /var/www/crmpicco $ git status
fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Inside my .git directory I have the following:
vagrant@localhost /var/www/crmpicco/.git $ ls -all
total 92
drwxr-xr-x+   9 vagrant vagrant 4096 Jul  8 09:26 .
drwxr-xr-x+  18 vagrant vagrant 4096 Jul  7 18:00 ..
drwxr-xr-x+   2 vagrant vagrant    6 Oct 13  2014 branches
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant  293 May  6 16:45 COMMIT_EDITMSG
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant  637 Jul  8 09:26 config
-rw-r--r--+   1 vagrant vagrant   73 Oct 13  2014 description
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant 4157 Jul  7 17:56 FETCH_HEAD
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant    0 Jul  7 18:00 HEAD
drwxr-xr-x+   2 vagrant vagrant 4096 Oct 13  2014 hooks
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant    0 Jul  7 18:00 index
drwxr-xr-x+   2 vagrant vagrant   20 Oct 13  2014 info
drwxr-xr-x+   3 vagrant vagrant   28 Oct 13  2014 logs
drwxr-xr-x+ 259 vagrant vagrant 8192 Apr 29 09:31 objects
-rw-rw-r--+   1 vagrant vagrant   41 Jul  7 17:56 ORIG_HEAD
-rw-r--r--+   1 vagrant vagrant 3442 Oct 13  2014 packed-refs
drwxrwxr-x+   2 vagrant vagrant 4096 Jul  7 18:00 rebase-apply
drwxr-xr-x+   5 vagrant vagrant   55 Jul  7 16:22 refs

I have a handful of files in the git stash that i'd like to keep.
How can I recover the repo and those files?

A: Look in the HEAD file, and see if it' a pointer to e.g. ref: refs/heads/master or a SHA hash.
If it's a pointer then look in refs/heads/master and see if that's got a hash. If it has, try running git log on the hash to see if you can recover things. If you can, git reset --hard HASH should do the right thing.
You can also run git fsck which will do consistency checking on the files and perhaps give you further indication as to what the problem is. You should also check that the config file looks sensible (read; isn't corrupted).

A: I believe I had corrupted Git files (caused by my virtual machine going down during a git rebase) as the solution to this problem was to do delete my local files and do a fresh checkout of the code.
I tried rebuilding the Git index, however that had no effect.
If you don't have files that you need to commit then this would probably work for you and is likely to be a quicker route to get back up and running that any other suggestion.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


It was dark out, the kind of night that you gaze upon and realize just how black the night sky can be. My husband (at the time) and I pulled into our assigned parking spot at the apartment complex that we lived in. It was around 11:30 at night, we had just spent many hours after a long day at work enjoying a meal and some beverages together. We did not have a lot of excess funds so it always felt like a treat to eat a meal out. We had been out much longer than anticipated for a work night, but it was worth it.
I stumbled backwards a bit, I heard the words but they were scrambled in my head. I was not processing them, surely I had misheard. But then I heard them again, much clearer this time. My house had caught on fire and burned up. I began to run toward it, my legs not carrying me near fast enough. My only concern was my pets, I had a very large (just over 6ft) iguana and my cat. I could hear my neighbor trying to talk to me to tell me the details and I just could simply not focus on her.
I burst into the pitch black apartment and it smelt and felt awful. It was burnt and dank from the water, much of the place still intact but I knew my belongings would never be the same. My neighbor caught up to me and became silent after I looked into her face, tears streaming down mine. She simply hugged me and whispered that my iguana (Tiny) and my cat (Koda) were doing fine. Knowing that they were safe, I broke down and began to sob more.
She told me that Tiny had been exceptionally smart and apparently the firefighters found him in the bathtub. My cat, Koda, had hidden under the bed in the furthest room away from the fire, but the smoke had gotten to her and the firemen had to revive her. Tiny's cage had burnt in the fire so he had to stay in the bathroom for the evening. It was late and I was emotionally drained. My neighbor guided me downstairs and said I could stay with her for the night and that Koda was already resting in the room she had prepared for us.
The next day, as I awoke the realization wafted over me, this was not a dream. In a daze, I called work and told them of the fire. I then found my way to trudge back upstairs and survey the damage in the light of day. No insurance meant that I had to try to salvage as much as I could, but upon entering I had the compulsion to just trash everything.
Of all the things that I lost in that fire, which was most every possession I had ever acquired, the thing that still stands out the MOST to me was how it had impacted my faith in goodness of people. You see the rally of support from those that I knew and many that I didn't, was one of the most miraculous events that I had ever had the privilege of witnessing. When people ban together to give to a cause from the loving compassion in their hearts, it can literally move mountains.
I was flooded with furniture, clothes, food, most anything you can think of that you might need to start over. There was even quite a hefty collection of cash to get me back on my feet. Frankly, I needed every bit of what was extended to me but there was an immense feeling of love and gratitude that I was able to experience from something that was so tragic.
Grimes, Angie. "What I Gained After Losing Everything" Hope Is Now, Dec/Jan 18: 8-11. Print.


I created this graphic after going through session five of the bible study Sip, Savor, and Drink Deeply by Deb Burma. You can purchase the study a few different places if you are interested.
Now that I am finished with it I would recommend it to anyone, even if you do not drink coffee. It includes recipes, craft ideas, tidbits about coffee drinks, and a great many other things about God's Word. Lucky for me I was able to walk through it with a group of other ladies but it could easily be done on your own!
Now back to that graphic and why I created it for myself. I wanted to have easy access for a reminder from areas of the Bible. Some of the relationships in my life are stagnet, not comfortable, flourishing, open, comfortable, or have just gone by the wayside. But today I'd like to talk about one of the most important relationships I have in my life.
The one with my spouse, my husband of 14 years.
When I walked out of the Monday night bible study the night we did this session I saw things differently. One thing I realized is that it's a duty as a Christian to have those difficult conversations with others. Am I scared? Yep. Will I pray on it? Yep. Have I strayed from my faith before? Yep. Do I still struggle with things today? Yep. Have I repented? Yep. Am I forgiven? Yep.
Psst….. you can too. Jesus loves you.
Now, feel free to save the graphic or print it off for personal use. I plan too.


The regular opening times of Asda Lammascote Road in Stafford are Monday to Friday 7AM-12PM, on Saturday 0AM-10PM, on Sunday 10AM-4PM. View the actual opening times of Asda Lammascote Road in Stafford in our branch locator.
For more information about opening times on Sunday or late night shopping make sure to view the information in the designated blocks. If this Asda isn't nearby your location you can use the 'Map & Directions' tab to find the fastest route to Lammascote Road in Stafford. This location's coordinates are specifically 52.8057 latitude, -2.10836 longitude. To contact this Supermarket by phone you can dial 01785782000 during business hours.


Recent advancements in synthetic biology have enabled the creation of genetically modified microorganism with over-express activities for the synthesis of specific PHAs in high-yields.19–22 Since then, a number of industrial plants for the production of PHAs have been commissioned in the USA, Italy, Brazil, and China.7,14,23,24 However, the production cost of PHAs is nearly four times larger than its petroleum-based counterparts (c.a. PHAs25 and Polypropylene26 prices are 5-6 and 1-2 $/Kg, respectively). This is due to high raw materials costs, complex purification of the fermentation broth, large amounts of biomass waste generated (c.a. 5 kg of raw material per 1 kg of product), and low conversion rates.27 Catalytic chemical conversion routes of biomass-derived feedstocks to short a-hydroxy acids (e.g. lactic acid) have shown higher productivities and atom-efficiency at industrially relevant operating conditions,28–31 but their application have not been widely used for the production of medium- and long-chain a-hydroxy acids and a,b-dihydroxy acids.
Ethanol production from renewable resources accounts for more than 94% of the world's biofuel production.32 However, ethanol has some disadvantages when used as a fuel in internal combustion engine, such as its lower energy density (30%) than gasoline, corrosiveness, low flame luminosity and hygroscopicity.33 Furthermore, limited compatibility with the existing infrastructure, and acceptable low level blends (< 15% ethanol) limit the growth of ethanol as a transportation fuel. Hence, research has mainly focused in the last years on the utilization of bioethanol as a commodity chemical.34–36 In this contribution, we report for the first time the feasibility of a process for the conversion of bioethanol into mono- and dihydroxy acid monomers of medium- and long- chain, via a heterogeneous catalytic route for the production of PHAs and other valuable monomers. To accomplish this, we have employed a catalytic cascade process involving: oxidative dehydrogenation, aldol-condensation, selective oxidation, Sharpless epoxidation,37 and hydrogenation (see Scheme 1).
In this total reaction network, the most important steps are the aerial oxidation (c), epoxidation (d), and hydrolysis (e); while dehydrogenation of the ethanol to acetaldehyde (a), aldol-condensation (b), and hydrogenation reaction (f) can be accomplished easily with existing technology. The most crucial part is to develop efficient catalysts for optimal conversion in reactions b, c and d. Achieving high selectivity in these conversion steps is a major issue as over-oxidation and hydrolysis can lead to CO2 and other cracking products and decreasing the overall product yield and, in turn, process economics.
Scheme 1: Sequential reaction steps for the production of unsaturated and mono- and di-hydroxy acids from bioethanol.
To this end, the conversion of ethanol to crotonaldehyde has been further investigated in previous studies of our group.38,39 In order to demonstrate the achievability of the overall ethanol to PHA precursors process, a series set of experiments will be performed employing heterogeneous catalysts for the most crucial step: oxidation of crotonaldehyde to crotonic acid. This process will be studied using a metal-supported catalyst based on Au and Pd alloys.
(1) Plastics Europe. Plastic – the Facts 2016; 2016.
(2) Iwata, T. Angewandte Chemie – International Edition. 2015, pp 3210–3215.
(3) Rujnić-Sokele, M.; Pilipović, A. Waste Manag. Res. 2017, 35 (2), 132.
(4) BritishPlasticsFederation "Oil consumption". http://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx.
(5) Hopewell, J.; Dvorak, R.; Kosior, E. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 2009, 364 (1526), 2115.
(6) Jambeck, J. R.; Geyer, R.; Wilcox, C.; Siegler, T. R.; Perryman, M.; Andrady, A.; Narayan, R.; Law, K. L. Science (80-. ). 2015, 347 (6223), 768.
(7) Dietrich, K.; Dumont, M. J.; Del Rio, L. F.; Orsat, V. Sustain. Prod. Consum. 2017, 9, 58.
(8) Lambert, S.; Wagner, M. Chem. Soc. Rev. 2017, 46 (August), 6855.
(9) Lemoigne, M. Helv. Chim. Acta 1946, 29 (5), 1303.
(10) Doudoroff, M.; Stanier, R. Y. Nature 1959, 183 (4673), 1440.
(11) Williamson, D. H.; Wilkinson, J. F. J. Gen. Microbiol. 1958, 19 (1958), 198.
(12) Macrae, R. M.; Wilkinson, J. F. J. Gen. Microbiol. 1958, 19 (1958), 210.
(13) Pollet, E.; Avérous, L. In Biopolymers – New Materials for Sustainable Films and Coatings; Plackett, D., Ed.; John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, 2011; pp 65–86.
(14) DiGregorio, B. E. Chem. Biol. 2009, 16 (1), 1.
(15) Steinbüchel, A.; Füchtenbusch, B. Trends in Biotechnology. 1998, pp 419–427.
(16) Sudesh, K.; Abe, H.; Doi, Y. Prog. Polym. Sci. 2000, 25 (10), 1503.
(17) Avérous, L. Handbook of Biopolymers and Biodegradable Plastics; 2013.
(18) Lee, S. Y. Trends in Biotechnology. 1996, pp 431–438.
(19) Byrom, D. In Plastic from Microbes: Microbial Synthesis of Polymers and Polymer Precursors; Mobley, D. P., Ed.; Hanser: Munich, 1994; pp 5–33.
(20) A. Steinbuchel. In Biomaterials, Novel Materials from Biological Sources; Byrom, D., Ed.; Stockton: New York, 1991; pp 124–131.
(21) Katoh, T., Yuguchi, D., Yoshii Haruki, S., & H. Shimizu, K. Journal of chemical technology and biotechnology. 1999, p 113.
(22) Lambert, S.; Wagner, M. Chem. Soc. Rev. 2017, No. August.
(23) Chen, G.-Q. In Plastics from Bacteria: Natural Functions and Applications; Chen, G. G.-Q., Ed.; Springer Berlin Heidelberg: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010; pp 121–132.
(24) Chen, G.-Q. Chem. Soc. Rev. 2009, 38 (8), 2434.
(25) Wolf, O.; Crank, M.; Patel, M.; Marscheider-Weideman, F.; Schleich, J.; Husing, B.; Angerer, G. Techno-economic feasibility of large-scale production of bio-based polymers in Europe; Spain, 2005.
(26) ICIS. Indicative Chemical Prices A-Z https://www.icis.com/chemicals/propylene/ (accessed Jan 25, 2018).
(27) Kootstra, M.; Elissen, H.; Huurman, S. PHA's (Polyhydroxyalkanoates): General information on structure and raw materials for their production; Wageningen, 2017.
(28) Wang, Y.; Deng, W.; Wang, B.; Zhang, Q.; Wan, X.; Tang, Z.; Wang, Y.; Zhu, C.; Cao, Z.; Wang, G.; Wan, H. Nat. Commun. 2013, 4 (Ii), 1.
(29) Cho, H. J.; Chang, C.-C.; Fan, W. Green Chem. 2014, 16 (7), 3428.
(30) Sharninghausen, L. S.; Campos, J.; Manas, M. G.; Crabtree, R. H. Nat. Commun. 2014, 5, 1.
(31) Chen, L.; Ren, S.; Ye, X. P. Fuel Process. Technol. 2014, 120, 40.
(32) Demirbas, A. R. Soc. os Chem. 2011, 5 (4), 29.
(33) MacLean, H. L.; Lave, L. B. Prog. Energy Combust. Sci. 2003, 29 (1), 1.
(34) Pham, T. N.; Zhang, L.; Shi, D.; Komarneni, M. R.; Ruiz, M. P.; Resasco, D. E.; Faria, J. ChemCatChem 2016, 8 (23).
(35) Wang, Y.; Sun, J. ACS Catal. 2014, 4, 1078.
(36) Falletta, E.; Rossi, M.; Teles, J. H.; Della Pina, C. Molecules 2016, 21 (3).
(37) Hollingsworth, R. I. US 5292939 A. Process for the preparation of 3,4-dihydroxybutanoic acid and salts thereof, 1994.
(38) Zhang, L.; Pham, T. N.; Faria, J.; Resasco, D. E. Appl. Catal. A Gen. 2015, 504, 119.
(39) Zhang, L.; Pham, T. N.; Faria, J.; Santhanaraj, D.; Sooknoi, T.; Tan, Q.; Zhao, Z.; Resasco, D. E. ChemSusChem 2016, 9 (7).


text:
from django import forms
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from .models import Item, Options
from .utils import import_wordpress

class XMLImportForm(forms.ModelForm):
    wordpress_xml = forms.FileField(
        label=_('WordPress XML file'),
        help_text=_('Select XML file with posts exported from WP.')
    )

    class Meta:
        model = Item
        fields = []

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return import_wordpress(self.cleaned_data['wordpress_xml'])

class CMSImportForm(forms.Form):
    options = forms.ModelChoiceField(
        label=_('Options'),
        queryset=Options.objects.order_by('name'),
    )


text:
Review: 'Doom Eternal' raises bar on shooter…
Review: 'Doom Eternal' raises bar on shooter genre — and leaps over it
Sequel to 'Doom' (2016) emphasize traversal and puzzle solving while refining an excellent formula
The Baron of Hell is a tough foe and players need to run and gun to defeat it. (Bethesda Softworks)
Marauders are one of the most difficult foes in "Doom Eternal" and require players to be in a middle distance to defeat it. (Bethesda Softworks)
Cacodemons in "Doom Eteranal" can be defeated with a well-placed grenade. (Bethesda Softworks)
The Doom Hunter is one of the new enemies that players will face in "Doom Eternal." (Bethesda Softworks)
The pain elemental in "Doom Eteranl" can be defeated with the rocket launcher. (Bethesda Softworks)
Players need to destroy the rifle on Arachnotron's back to weaken it before going in for the kill in "Doom Eternal." The follow-up to the 2017 reboot was my No. 9 game of the year. (Bethesda Softworks)
The Doom Slayer will face of against Khan Maykr in "Doom Eternal." (Bethesda Softworks)
Players will need to defeat fodder enemies to replenish their resources in "Doom Eternal."
The Baron of Hell can be a tough foe in "Doom Eternal." (Bethesda Softworks)
The Cyber Mancubus is one of the enemies players will face in "Doom Eternal." (Bethesda Softworks)
"Doom Eternal" has some epic vistas that tell a story about hell's invasion of earth. (Bethesda Softworks)
By Gieson Cacho | gcacho@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: March 27, 2020 at 2:51 p.m. | UPDATED: March 29, 2020 at 5:44 a.m.
A lobotomy works miracles when fighting demons. Slicing them in half does the trick, too. To be honest, pretty much any action in "Doom Eternal" is effective at terminating the minions from hell.
The sequel to the "Doom" reboot in 2016 doesn't try to reinvent the franchise, but it does a lot to refine the formula that made the previous effort so great. The reboot worked because it focused on aggressive combat. In an age of cover-based shooters, "Doom" (2016) rewarded players who ran around and blasted demons in a ballet of violence.
Activision's CEO Is looking at $375 million payday in Microsoft sale
Why Microsoft spends $69 billion for video games
Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard in $69 billion game deal
Activision fires more employees over sexual misconduct, WSJ says
'Pokemon Go': Spheal Community Day will be worthwhile for PvP players
"Doom Eternal" raises the bar by incorporating a slew of new moves to the equation. Continuing the ballet analogy, if the previous game let players pirouette then this sequel lets them plie, assemble and tour en l'air. It adds moves such as wall-climb and a dash. It lets the Doom Slayer swing off monkey bars to reach higher ground.
All of this adds more depth to the gameplay and introduces more puzzle-solving elements. "Doom Eternal" flexes its muscles in regards to its difficulty but that challenge comes from a different angle. Instead of testing their quick-twitch abilities firing at imps and prowlers, players must be observant and recognize a route to advance or a secret path to a power-up. The game is filled with subtle level design elements that reward players who explore and use their traversal abilities.
Although "Doom Eternal" gets plenty right, the introduction is jarring at first. The campaign follows the protagonist as his Fortress of Doom orbits Earth. The ship is the hub that connects players to most of the 13 levels. The developers at id Software throw a ton at players initially as the team explores lore that seemingly comes out of nowhere. It deals with Sentinels, Maykrs and hell priests, subjects that weren't fully explored in the reboot.
It's a lot to process but as players advance id Software returns to the heart and soul of the franchise — the Doom Slayer. It delves into his past and sheds light on his supernatural toughness and strength. That's when the campaign picks up and discovering the origins of the protagonist and unleashing his full potential becomes a major incentive in collecting and finding all the knickknacks in the campaign.
That pushes players to search for Praetor Suit Points, Sentinel Crystals, Runes, weapon mods, Slayer Gates and Secret Encounters. These hidden power-ups and secrets are optional, but they're worth the side trips. They make "Doom Eternal" much more manageable as it helps with the Doom Slayer's character progression.
Marauders are one of the most difficult foes in "Doom Eternal" and require players to be in a middle distance to defeat it. (Bethesda Softworks)
The mods open up the power of weapons and give players options in how to deal with threats. In "Doom Eternal," demons have weak points which players have to exploit to efficiently kill them. They can toss grenades in the mouth of a cacodemon or shoot out the arm cannons on a mancubus. Furthermore, suit points, crystals and runes boost the abilities of the Doom Slayer, making him faster after Glory Kill or boosting his health, armor and ammo.
Slayer Gates open up challenge rooms that players will need to finish to unlock the Unmaykr, one of the strongest weapons in the game. Meanwhile, Secret Encounters force players to defeat a set amount of foes within a time limit and that grants players access to weapon points to improve mods. These upgrades aren't as vital as the other ones but they're worth the effort.
Venturing through the levels to find these secrets is one of the more enjoyable aspects of "Doom Eternal" and it shows off the care the team put in the level design. The developers carefully crafted each level to give players a change of pace between each confrontation and puzzles. Sometimes they combine the two in frenetic moments.
Everything comes together and becomes more difficult toward the end, especially with the introduction of the Marauder, a defensive enemy that's tough to kill, and the Arch-vile, a foe that boosts demons in a room. These adversaries are must-kills and can be burdensome, especially toward the latter end of the campaign when enemies fly left and right. It will test players' run-and-gun skills as movement becomes essential to the fight. They'll need to not only aggressively kill adversaries, but they must do it in smart way, using chainsaw kills to replenish ammo and fire belcher attacks to regenerate armor. In the game, resource management and survival is built into the concept of attacking.
When "Doom Eternal" feels great, the game has a flow. Players end up in the zone of moving around, shooting enemies and dodging to safety. When players can string these moves together, the gameplay has the vibe of a "Tony Hawk" or "skate" title. They perform jaw-dropping combos while switching weapons and leaping across platforms, and everything seems natural. If players weren't decapitating demons in the most violent way possible, it would be serene.
The way id Software manages to bring those polar opposite emotions into a fine point — relaxation amid the chaos — is when "Doom Eternal" is at its best and the sequel capitalizes on its distinct take on the first-person shooter.
'Doom Eternal'
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Stadia, Nintendo Switch (TBA)
Gieson Cacho | News desk/video games columnist
Gieson Cacho is the video game columnist for the Bay Area News Group. He lives in Berkeley, roasts his own coffee and drinks craft beer.
gcacho@bayareanewsgroup.com
Follow Gieson Cacho	BayAreaNewsGroup.GiesonCacho.VideoGame Follow Gieson Cacho	@gcacho
7 awesome Bay Area things to do this weekend, Jan. 21-23
'Getting straight A's at Stanford' kept Rob Lowe's son in denial about addiction
Here's one show 'Hamilton' fans definitely shouldn't miss
Bay Area jazz star accompanied by NY Yankee great in concert


Who will win: In the past twenty years, this award has gone to a Best Picture nominee all but four times. The past two years, the Best Picture frontrunner has eclipsed another film that initially appeared to be the leader to sweep the award. This category is friendly to comedies, rewarding "Juno," "Little Miss Sunshine," and others in the past decade. "Margin Call" is a smart selection, but its nomination is its prize. "A Separation" is going to win the Best Foreign Film award, so I doubt it'll triumph here. "Talk To Her" did win in 2002, so this category doesn't hate international cinema. That leaves three comedies vying for the win. "Bridesmaids" would be a fun, memorable choice, but I don't see it going the distance. "The Artist" could sweep this, and though its screenplay isn't its most notable (or audible) element, it's definitely brilliant. That leaves Woody Allen, who has been nominated fourteen times before in this category, and won twice, in 1977 and 1986. I think he'll earn his third win in what's pretty much guaranteed to be the only Oscar "Midnight in Paris" is going to win.


North Meols Tennis Club, which is situated in Mill Lane Crescent, Churchtown, in Southport , is hosting an Open Day this Sunday, (July 3), from 2pm until 4pm.
Everyone is welcome, from those who have never played tennis before to experienced club players – and of course any budding Andy Murrays. The event is run in conjunction with the Lawn Tennis Association and offers fun for all the family – including those who fancy trying the game for the first time.
The club coach, Rob McNulty, will be on hand with coaching, advice and tips, as well as organising fun competitions with some great prizes. Tennis rackets will be available to borrow and refreshments will be available throughout the afternoon.
The Open Day is open to everyone, whatever your level of experience or ability.
Brian Duckett, Club Secretary, said: "Every year Wimbledon inspires thousands of people to take up the game for the first time.
North Meols is one of the area's leading tennis clubs, with eight all-weather courts, floodlighting and a new purpose-built clubhouse. Social and competitive tennis is played all year round and there is a lively social programme for players and non-players alike.
The 2016 Wimbledon tournament takes place between June 27 and July 10.


Today David rode his new bike with the kids and I got plenty of photos and video.
He then made his birthday brownie/cake. Now let me explain what the cake is… There is a game called Minecraft that David and the kids play all the time. In this game they build homes and cities and it all has to be done from scratch. Like if you need a pick axe to dig with you have to have first have wood then you build planks from the wood and sticks from the planks then you combine the sticks and planks to build a pick axe. It's all very creatively complicated and somewhat educational. They really enjoy it, David says its like a virtual sandbox.
Anyway David's cake is designed after this game. He drew the design out in the game then printed a pattern out to follow for the actual cake. We were concerned that regular cake would be too heavy to build with because there are 9 layers one on top of the other to create the 3D cake. So Dad (Gary) decided that maybe brownies would be easier to stack and build with. So that's what David did, although now he thinks a heavy cake would still be better because the brownies are too thin. He'll try again in November for Katie's birthday because she's requested a Minecraft cake too.
My sweetheart is a little crazy and had some very unique ideas but he is definitely very creative and I'm proud of him.
Pretty creative. I'd recommend pound cake--that stuff is so dense (and delicious) it would probably do great.


12501 West Markham, Little Rock, AR 72211.
2802 Tuttle, Longview, TX 75605.
1815 Roseland Boulevard, Tyler, TX 75701.
5040 West Park Boulevard, Plano, TX 75093.
300 West Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080.
13455 Midway Road, Dallas, TX 75244.
3301 Gus Thomasson, Mesquite, TX 75150.
6221 East Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, TX 75214.
Searching for fast food or pizza restaurants in Franklin County that deliver? Use our website to find the Luby's Menu in Franklin County, OH. If you are trying to locate the Luby's that is closest to Franklin County, use our website. We have all the info you need, including Store Hours and Location for Luby's and Instant Coupons.


text:
Q: Postgresql select where array overlaps using like Is it possible to determine if an ARRAY column contains overlapping values from another array with the LIKE clause?
The && operator works but the strings have to be exact matches
 q = """select * from articles where keywords && '{"mortgage brokers"}';""" // Exact match

Is it possible to filter the keywords where rows contain values with substring, not the full string? Something like:
 q = """select * from articles where keywords && LIKE '{"mortgage"}';""" // HOW TO FILTER keywords containing value with substring

A: LIKE operates on strings. To check whether two arrays overlap, you can use &&.
From the Array Functions and Operators documentation:

&& : overlap (have elements in common)

SELECT ARRAY[1,4,3] && ARRAY[2,1] arrays_overlap;

| arrays_overlap |
| -------------- |
| true           |

To see if there are values in an array that are LIKE those from another array, one solution would be to unnest both arrays and compare the results with LIKE:
SELECT EXISTS (
  SELECT 1
    FROM
    unnest(ARRAY['abc', 'def' ]) my_array(x)
    INNER JOIN unnest (ARRAY['a', 'z' ]) my_keywords(x)
        ON my_array.x LIKE '%' || my_keywords.x || '%'
 ) arrays_have_similar_elements;

| arrays_have_similar_elements |
| ---------------------------- |
| true                         |

SELECT EXISTS (
  SELECT 1
    FROM
    unnest(ARRAY['abc', 'def' ]) my_array(x)
    INNER JOIN unnest (ARRAY['y', 'z' ]) my_keywords(x)
        ON my_array.x LIKE '%' || my_keywords.x || '%'
 ) arrays_have_similar_elements;

| arrays_have_similar_elements |
| ---------------------------- |
| false                        |

Demo on DB Fiddle

A: Thanks to @GMB for the guidance. I was able to solve the problem using the query below.
      SELECT * from articles, unnest(keywords) my_array(x)
            INNER JOIN unnest(ARRAY['broker']) my_keywords(x)
            ON my_array.x LIKE '%' || my_keywords.x || '%';


text:
Philip Paul Bliss (Clearfield megye, Pennsylvania, 1838. július 9. – Ashtabula, Ohio közelében, 1876. december 29.) amerikai metodista énekes hittérítő, dalszövegíró és zeneszerző. Számos, Amerikában jól ismert vallásos ének szerzője.

Bliss a 19. századi ébredésben ugyanolyan nagy szerepet játszott, mint egy évszázaddal korábban az énekköltő prédikátor Charles Wesley. Népszerű énekeit Ira David Sankey, az ugyancsak metodista énekszerző, és D. L. Moody evangélizátor közös európai és amerikai missziós útjaikon terjesztették. Egy tragikus vasúti balesetben halt meg 1876-ban, 38 évesen.

Híres éneke: Föl barátim, drága Jézus zászlaja alatt…

Források

Metodista egyházi személyek
1838-ban született személyek
1876-ban elhunyt személyek
Amerikai zeneszerzők
Keresztény zene
Vasúti balesetben elhunyt személyek


text:
Shirley Kurata (born ) is an American wardrobe stylist and costume designer based in Los Angeles, California. In 2023, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, for her work on the indie film Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Kurata has won numerous awards including the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film.

Early life and education
Born in Los Angeles, Kurata grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, the youngest of four children. Her parents owned a laundromat.  She is Japanese American, and has said that she was influenced by the "quirky and daring" fashions she saw in Japanese magazines.

Kurata bought her first pair of "fashion glasses" from L.A. Eyeworks when she was 18, and continues to wear their large round frames. At age 19, she left California to study fashion in Paris at Studio Berçot.

Career
Early in her career, Kurata styled fashion shoots for photographer Autumn de Wilde, who went on to direct the 2020 feature film Emma.

Kurata's clients have included celebrities such as Billie Eilish, Lena Dunham, Pharrell Williams, Zooey Deschanel, Beck, Mindy Kaling, and Tierra Whack. She has styled collections for the Rodarte label by Americans Kate and Laura Mulleavy every year since its debut in 2006, and also styled collections for Danish-born, UK-based designer Peter Jensen, who called her the "muse" who inspired his 2016 spring collection.

In addition, Kurata has styled advertising campaigns for Kenzo and Oliver Peoples, and worked on short films for Prada and Miu Miu.   In 2015, she opened Virgil Normal, a streetwear boutique in East Hollywood featuring gender-neutral clothing, with Charlie Staunton. In 2022, L.A. Eyeworks selected Kurata to model its new sunglasses collection, its first in a decade.

Kurata has characterized her own aesthetic as "futuristic folky".

Everything Everywhere All at Once
For Everything Everywhere All at Once, Kurata designed multiple looks for actors including Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and Jamie Lee Curtis, as their characters traveled from the "main" universe to other parts of the multiverse. For the film, Kurata was tasked with designing an extremely large number of costumes on a limited budget. Kurata has said that co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert encouraged her to "Just go crazy, get creative", and that they aimed to create costumes that viewers would wear on Halloween.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kurata "subverted and reclaimed Asian-centric tropes" in styling the "outrageously outfitted personas" of Hsu's character, villain Jobu Tupaki, to whom Kurata has said she relates. Jobu Tupaki's many looks in the film include "Golfer Jobu" who wears a pink argyle vest and socks, exemplifying "the perfect Asian daughter who excels at sports and everything else in her life" according to Kurata. "Elvis Jobu", on the other hand, wearing an Elvis costume with pink hair and a cigarette, signals that she is antagonizing her mother. Another is "Goth Jobu", who wears an "all-black and a vinyl A-line miniskirt over a sheer tulle petticoat", which The Hollywood Reporter notes is "a twist on anime cosplay's Victorian doll-inspired Elegant Gothic Lolita." Yet another look is "Jobu K-Pop Star", influenced by K-pop and Harajuku street style.

CBS News said the film's "gravitas" would not have been possible "without the creative vision behind the film's amazing (and often universe-defying) costumes – Shirley Kurata". Insider observed that the film's costumes were "more than just clothes", since they convey "different iterations of each character" and "[place] the viewer in the numerous multiverses traversed throughout the film."

Filmography

Awards

Notes

References

External links
 Shirley Kurata, Wardrobe Stylist (Official website)
 Scene at the Academy: Everything Everywhere All at Once (Oscars on YouTube)
 Costumes and props from Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24 Films)

Living people
American costume designers
American fashion designers
American people of Japanese descent
American pop artists


Quick session tonight – September 20th. I focused on making a little video guide on the overclocking of the Non-K core i56500 along with the ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus VIII Gene and the Intel XTU benchmark.
There are a couple of things that you really need to understand about doing non-K overclocking for XTU. In a nutshell, we've started off with a base score of 984 marks and we managed then to climb progressively through the increase of mainly the base-clock to find our maximum.
At the end of the session we've managed to reach a score of 1085 marks. That's quite a decent increase if you are looking back at our stock score – about 100 points. So this is with only the changing of a couple of basics, nothing more.
So we've started out, maximised our XTU score with a non-K processor and this way you too might get some decent help out of the session for today. So yeah, if you don't have an unlocked CPU – everything isn't totally lost as you can see!
I will be back next week for sure on Thursday with this time some K overclocking (yes because its just more fun). It will be on Air again, so we will be benching on the edge with the thermal limit and you will see that there are some quite interesting things that will start to happen!
This entry was posted in Overclocking Worklog and tagged asus, hyperx, xtu. Bookmark the permalink.


Spelling. Are you looking for genus Carpalimus or genus Hapalixus?
What does Genus Harpalixus mean as a name of something?
Genus Harpalixus is a genus of Curculionidae, described by Winkler in 1932.
Go to the wordplay of genus Harpalixus for some fun with words!


PARTEDMAGIC doesn't run for file not found.
When booting fdubcd via grub4dos, fdubcd is not found.
UBCD 5.0.3 - Contained Avira hangs when pressing "Update"
Often freezes at "idle: going resident fdapm adv:max"
Darik's boot on USB - cleans the USB disk as well?


text:
Asian cultural influence
> Bioteam > Asia > My Asia
Asia's Global Influence: How Is It Exercised? What Does It Mean? A report from the 2010 Asia Policy Assembly As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the international landscape reflects the global influence of an empowered and developing Asia-Pacific. In the decades ahead, many of our country's most critical overseas interests will be in Asia, entailing both challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, America must be better prepared to understand developments in the region, as they are crucial to our country's economic vitality, national security, and environmental well-being, as well as our continued efforts to promote human liberty. Asia requires greater attention in the policy community, and stronger bridges are necessary between the policy world and academe. The field of contemporary Asia Studies needs enhanced attention, both to boost its strength and to assemble its most capable minds to work on policy-relevant issues.
The inaugural Asia Policy Assembly convened June 17–18, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Sincerely, Robert M. Richard J. U.S. Governing for the Future: How to Bring the Long-Term Into Short-Term Political Focus. THE GLOBAL FUTURE OF SOCIAL POLICY final.pdf. Acharya-Can Asia Lead.pdf. Globalization with Few Discontents? Pew Research Center June 3, 2003 For more than a decade, globalization has been a deeply divisive topic among social activists, intellectuals, business leaders, policy makers and politicians. But the global public is less divided on the subject. To varying degrees, people almost everywhere like globalization.
The 38,000 people surveyed in 44 countries by the Pew Global Attitudes Project report that globalization is now a routine fact of their everyday lives. They experience it in many ways - through trade, finance, travel, communication and culture. In countries that are prominent cultural exporters - such as the United States and France - people are somewhat less likely to see increased availability of cultural exports from other parts of the world. Communications: Perception vs. Similarly, most people around the world believe international communication and travel are on the rise. Three Views of a Connected World Connected World: Impact on Countries Foreign Culture's Personal Impact. Economy and Culture : Looking for Public Regulation Issues. PlanetagoraJuly 2003 What is at stake in culture cannot be merely reduced to identity expressions (national, geographical, religious, communities).
Economic dimension of culture has more and more to be taken in consideration if one wish to understand arguments and debates developed at national and international level on this topic. Today, issues related to culture are often dealt with in relation with cultural diversity, a concept that has only recently replaced the notion of "cultural exception", which itself surfaced during the Uruguay Round in 1993. The shift from one term to another is not merely semantic. It reflects the emergence of a broadened concept of cultural stakes in the context of globalization. A country's desire to protect the specificity of its cultural industries is not new. Issues at stakes are not only about identity. This high degree of concentration stems from a growing cultural industrialization that entails its own limits. Specific economic dynamics Conclusion. Converting the Masses: Starbucks in China. Far Eastern Economic Review July 17, 2003 How's this for people-watching?
On bustling Nanjing Lu, Shanghai's main shopping strip, Kevin Lin and a posse of researchers monitor the passers-by outside a potential Starbucks store site with hand-held counting devices, tallying likely customers. A trendy 20-something couple walk past. "They're definitely a click," says Lin. Next, an unlikely prospect--a woman in her 50s wearing comfortable slacks strolls by. The researchers aren't revealing how many clicks it takes to justify a Chinese Starbucks. As Starbucks launches an aggressive expansion in China, a coffee frontier steeped in nearly 5,000 years of tea, its location-scouting skills and marketing savvy will be put to the test. That means people like Charles Lo. Though Starbucks is still hardly known in China, with 69 stores, it's taking a big bet. The China push may be the ultimate test of the brand's lifestyle-oriented marketing approach. Yet Starbucks faces an uphill battle. MTV Goes to Asia.
Yale Global August 12, 2003 MTV is American? Think Again. As MTV invades Southeast Asia, the faces of MTV are no longer just Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake but also Indonesia's Padi and Singapore's Stefanie Sun. These names may not sound familiar to the average American, but their looks and voices have reshaped MTV's global image. MTV's tenure in Asia has been an exercise in evolution. MTV first entered Asia in 1992, when it launched MTV Japan, but didn't grab the attention of Southeast Asia until 1995 with the introduction of the regional MTV Asia. To satisfy Asian audiences' cravings for international programming, MTV Asia incorporates American/European music and shows like I Bet You Will, Road Rules, MTV Becoming, Punk'd from the US, and Singled Out from Europe.
Soon after MTV Asia's establishment, it became clear that distinct cultural tastes across the region would require MTV Asia to be more than a simple carbon copy of its Western divisions. To be honest, that rocks. Indian Companies Are Adding Western Flavor. New York Times August 19, 2003 Arun Kumar had never shaken hands with a foreigner nor needed to wear a necktie. He vaguely thought that raising a toast had something to do with eating bread. If it was dark outside, he greeted people with a "good night. " But Mr. Kumar, 27, and six other engineers graduating from the local university with master's degrees in computer applications, were recently recruited by the Hyderabad offices of Sierra Atlantic, a software company based in Fremont, Calif. And before they came face to face with one of Sierra's 200 or so American customers, the new employees went through a grueling four-week training session aimed at providing them with global-employee skills like learning how to speak on a conference call, how to address colleagues (as Mr. or Ms.) and how to sip wine properly.
Though he and his peers are technologically adept and fluent in English, most lack the sophistication needed to flourish in a global business setting. War of Words. GuardianSeptember 9, 2003 The use of English terms by German speakers is of increasing concern to linguistic purists in Europe's biggest country, writes Ben Aris.
Fed up with the language of Goethe being corrupted with additions such as "die Kiddies" and "der Call Centre", Germany's politicians are proposing to ban civil servants from using "Denglish" - German mixed with English - in the workplace. Over the last decade Denglish has become widely used by schoolchildren, advertisers and businesses, and traditionalists are starting to fight back. The trend is being pushed by globalisation, the Germans' love of holidays and the internet, where Germans have adopted the hi-tech jargon wholesale. Even perfectly good German words such as "die Rechenanlage" have been abandoned in favour of the more international sounding "der Computer".
Abroad, the German language is in trouble, with the number of students choosing to study it falling every year. Is France Ready for Starbucks? Associated PressSeptember 26, 2003 Could French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre have found inspiration sipping from a paper cup of steaming Starbucks java? After much thought, the U.S. coffee empire said Thursday it will open its first store in France, a country where family-run cafes are the standard hang out for everyone from truck drivers to philosophers. "It is with the utmost respect and admiration for the cafe society in France that we announce our entry into the market," Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said in a statement. Authors, philosophers and artists have made French coffeehouse culture distinctive, he said, adding that he believed Starbucks "will fit well into the French cafe tradition. " The first French Starbucks is to open early next year, most likely in a high-tourist area of central Paris near the Opera Garnier, the company said.
But would the late thinker, a frequent cafe-goer, have enjoyed the experience if he weren't able to light up his trademark pipe? Localizing Cultures. Korea HeraldJanuary 13, 2004 Although the word globalization suggests a comprehensive and self-evident process, it is an incomplete term. It does not indicate precisely what is being globalized: the assumption is that it means the emergence of a single worldwide economy, into which all economies must integrate themselves, or more accurately, be integrated in the passive voice.
But globalization does not obligingly halt at some ill-defined frontier between economics, society and culture. Indeed, it has its own set of cultural attendants, which exercise a profound influence on the life of peoples everywhere. By definition, globalization makes all other cultures local. But to billions of people all over the world, their culture is not local. Globalization is a declaration of war upon all other cultures. One U.S. academic describes it as a confrontation between global civilization and local cultures. There are two aspects to resistance. In 2,000 Years, Will the World. Christian Science MonitorJanuary 15, 2004 Down in the mall, between the fast-food joint and the bagel shop, a group of young people huddles in a flurry of baggy combat pants, skateboards, and slang.
They size up a woman teetering past wearing DKNY, carrying Time magazine in one hand and a latte in the other. She brushes past a guy in a Yankees' baseball cap who is talking on his Motorola cellphone about the Martin Scorsese film he saw last night. It's a standard American scene - only this isn't America, it's Britain. US culture is so pervasive, the scene could be played out in any one of dozens of cities. Budapest or Berlin, if not Bogota or Bordeaux. As the unrivaled global superpower, America exports its culture on an unprecedented scale. Cricket or basketball? Stick a pin in a map and there you'll find an example of US influence. America's preeminence is hardly surprising. First, local industries are truly at risk of extinction because of US oligopolies, such as Hollywood.
All Cultures Are Not Equal. New York TimesAugust 10, 2005 Let's say you are an 18-year-old kid with a really big brain. You're trying to figure out which field of study you should devote your life to, so you can understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come. Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them. This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful. But none of this helps explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation. If you look just around the United States you find amazing cultural segmentation.
UN Body Endorses Cultural Protection. Washington PostOctober 21, 2005 In a vote cast as a battle of global conformity vs. cultural diversity, delegates to a U.N. agency turned aside strong U.S. objections Thursday and overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty designed to protect movies, music and other cultural treasures from foreign competition. The 148 to 2 vote at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization emerged as a referendum on the world's love-hate relationship with Hollywood, Big Macs and Coca-Cola. "The American delegate doesn't like to hear the word 'protection,' " Joseph Yai Olabiyi Babalola, clad in the ornate gold robes of his tiny country, Benin, told UNESCO delegates. "Not all countries are equal -- some need to be protected. " U.S. officials say the measure could be used to unfairly obstruct the flow of ideas, goods and services across borders. Films and music are among the United States' largest exports -- the foreign box-office take for American movies was $16 billion in 2004.
Manifold Ways That Societies Express Themselves. Le Monde DiplomatiqueNovember 2005 A large majority of countries last month approved a Unesco motion that seeks to counter the commercial treatment of cultural goods as promoted by the World Trade Organisation. Now the motion must be ratified by at least 30 countries - and implemented. A convention on the protection of the diversity of cultural contents and artistic expressions was approved by member states at the Unesco general conference last month. It intends to provide a legal framework for the universal declaration on cultural diversity, unanimously adopted soon after 11 September 2001. By making cultural diversity part of humanity's common heritage the declaration opposes "inward-looking fundamentalism" and proposes "the prospect of a more open, creative and democratic world" (1). In 2001 all the governments, without exception, were keen to uphold lofty principles, lauding the plurality of difference "capable of humanising globalisation".
To finalise the text Guiding principles. From Cultural Revolution. Inter Press ServiceJuly 28, 2006 While the world is getting used to China's ballooning global trade surplus, Chinese mandarins fret over the one area that the country has been posting a continuous deficit in -- culture. China may be now the world's fourth largest economy, wielding increasing influence in everything from global trade talks to currency rates but it lacks the success stories of "Harry Potter" and "The Da Vinci Code", which would transform it into a cultural heavyweight producing works of universal appeal.
As far as culture is concerned, "we still have very bad deficit to resolve," Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the state council information office said in May this year. "It runs counter to China's fast growing economy which has been expanding by an average of 10 percent since 1979. " "To go global, China must perfect its cultural policy and rebuild the image of Chinese culture," noted an editorial in the People's Daily, the Communist Party's flagship, in the fall last year. Across Latin America, Mandarin Is in the Air. Washington PostSeptember 22, 2006 Elizabeth Zamora is a busy mother and executive. Still, for three hours every Saturday, she slides into a battered wooden desk at Bogota's National University and follows along as Yuan Juhua, a language instructor sent here by China's government, teaches the intricacies of Mandarin.
Zamora already speaks German and English, but she struggles to learn written Chinese characters and mimic tones unknown in Spanish. She persists for a simple reason: China is voraciously scouring Latin America for everything from oil to lumber, and there is money to be made. "It's fundamental to communicate in their language when you go there or they come here," said Zamora, 40, a sales executive for the German drugmaker Bayer, which is growing dramatically in China. Latin America, with its vast farmlands and ample oil reserves and mineral deposits, has become a prime destination for investors and others from China, whose economy has been growing at 9 percent annually. Dumpling.pdf. India Attracts Universities from the US. Wi-Fi Buses Drive Rural Web Use.
Korea at Margin of World Culture? Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity - Google Books. Japanese Cultural Influence Grows in India. Eight ways China is changing your world. Cross-Cultural Leadership: How Will China Influence The World? Cultall.pdf. The Useless Tree: On Global Cultural Influence in Modern/Post-Modern Times. The Buddhist World: Spread of Buddhism to the West. Chinese Culture Broadens Its World Influence. China's culture once influenced the world, and it can again - People's Daily Online. Understanding the Chinese Mind | Confucius' impact on Chinese society. How Korean culture stormed the world. Influence Of Asian Culture (India, China, Japan, Pak Etc.) On The West | UDCIE Content Writing & IT Services.
Huang Youyi: expanding Asia's cultural influence. The new nuance in Chinese diplomacy. Private not state firms are China's growth engine. Asiaphoria or Asiaphobia? What's new about policy making in the Asian century? Asiancentury. Asia: dawn of a new century. Why cultural values cannot be ignored in international relations. The Asian Century: more than economics and security. New dynamism in cultural, intellectual influences in the Asian century.
Gangnam Style and Asia's rising cultural influence.
Related: Foresight articles - Foresight reports - foresight - Future of Toilets - Methods + SW - Education - Enterprise