text:
Register Log In AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums Chat Area diann baby
diann baby #135764
CAPTAIN bigzeke OP
What does it mean when a woman is in your bed gasping for
breath and calling your name?
You didn't hold the pillow down long enough
Why do only 10% of women make it to heaven?
Because if they all went, it would be Hell.
Why do women like smart men?
Opposites attract.
PUBES
He says, "Come on, babe, let's go in the alleyway and get it on. I've got fifteen bucks."
She says, "FIFTEEN bucks? You're crazy. For fifteen bucks, I'll let you LOOK at it."
They go into the alleyway, she pulls down her pants, and he gets down on his knees. But he can't see anything, because it's too dark, so he gets out his lighter.
He lights his lighter, and he says, "My God, your pubic hair... it's so curly and thick... it's BEAUTIFUL."
She says, "Thank you."
He says, "You mind if I ask you a personal question?"
She says, "Go ahead."
He says, "Can you PEE through all that hair?"
She says, "Of course."
He says, "Well, you better start. You're on fire."
There is only one cure for baldness. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
Re: diann baby #135765
brrrland, CO
hey zekester... now i know where you been!! and why ya been in hiding...
A large, muscular guy meets a woman at a bar.
After a number of drinks, they agree to go
back to his place. As they are kissing in
the bedroom, he stands up and starts to undress.
After he takes his shirt off, he flexes his
muscular arms and says, "See that, baby? That's
1000 pounds of dynamite!" She smiles.
The man then drops his pants, strikes a bodybuilder's
pose, and says, referring to his bulging thighs,
"See those, baby? That's 1000 pounds of dynamite!"
Finally, he drops his boxers, and after a quick glance,
she grabs her handbag and runs screaming to the front door.
He catches her before she is able to leave and asks,
"Why are you in such a hurry to go?"
She replies, "With 2000 pounds of dynamite and such
a short fuse, I was afraid you were about to blow!"
oh, ha ha ha ha. i have known guys like that!!
Westminster, Colorado, USA
Over_40_Pirate
and all this time I thought you were "nice" girls.....
Corpus Christi, Texas USA
Nice girls .....HELL!!!
I vividly remember some college days.... And the word pencil comes to mind..... LOL Some idiot my Dad fixed me up with. Figures......
Well, then...let me introduce you to the 'Ole Pegleg!!! Guaranteed to please, or you'll walk the plank! (which happens to be mounted on the headboard)
Funny...I don't remember much about my college days.....must've had more fun than you!!!!
round hill va., usa
Punta Rebel Girl
Oh Debbie, you and I are one in the same. I remember college for the same reasons, I definitly got an education and I learned real quick, guys can't measure.
Anyways, like I said after the penis list, so many, so little time. It's a shame guys don't have to wear identification tags to show the goods, or at least referrences to show they know what to do with what they got. Just my opinion, not that anyone asked for it.
Debbie, the Punta Girl
college, yeah. for me, high school!
however, when you are a tiny girl like i was, nearly everyone is big. (DID YOU HEAR THAT, MEN??)
Bellaire, Tx. and the World
Denny Shane
Well guess I need to throw my 2 cents in here.... just remember people... it's not the size of the magician's wand but the magic in it!
http://notsonormalnews.blogspot.com/
Punta Girl...where the hell were you when I was 16???...and don't say in diapers, I'd expect that from Not_So_Under_40_Diann...
[This message has been edited by Over_40_Pirate (edited 04-24-2001).]


text:
Via Agate
The Challenges of Writing for White People
As a Columnist, Leonard Pitts Jr. Has Had a Lot of Practice
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.
When I was a child, I thought there were no white people in Los Angeles.
There's a story I sometimes tell to demonstrate how thoroughly my perspective was distorted by de facto segregation. It's from a day when I was not yet ten years old and a big yellow bus delivered me and a bunch of my classmates to the zoo on a field trip. We pulled into a lot jammed with other big yellow buses and I stepped down into a world I had never dreamed existed.
There were little white kids everywhere.
In memory, they are all blond, though, of course, that's highly unlikely. Wandering through the zoo, I remember being more fascinated by this odd species of human than by any of the apes, giraffes and elephants I had come to see. Having grown up in a Los Angeles where, outside of police officers and teachers, the only white people you ever saw lived in Mayberry or on the Ponderosa, I literally could not imagine where these children had come from. They were running eagerly all over the place and I remember being worried that when the day was over, their teachers would have trouble sorting and gathering the right kids for delivery to the right parents.
You see, they all looked alike to me.
One other thing I remember is that we were given box lunches of cold fried chicken and I didn't eat. Mind you, I loved fried chicken, but I had some vague sense that it was a food for which Negroes—we were still "Negroes" then—were reputed to have an unnatural lust. And I would give no one—no one white, at any rate—the satisfaction of seeing me tear hungrily into a drumstick. All around me, kids black and white were doing just that, but I made an excuse and left my lunch untouched.
Over 50 years later, I find it amazing—and a little sad—that I had such things in my head at that tender age. I have no idea where it came from. This was L.A., after all; I had never seen a Whites Only sign, had no idea who Martin Luther King was. But somehow, I knew the thing about fried chicken and people like me.
That day, for the first time, I became conscious of myself in a different way. That is to say, I began to realize that I was not just me, a spindly-legged little boy in glasses whose idea of entertainment was digging up ant nests in the backyard. No, I was a small piece of something called "Negro" and it, in turn, was a piece of a larger something called America and the two were ever at odds, bonded on the one side by an abiding hostility and on the other by a simmering resentment.
I joke sometimes that every white person who reads me thinks they're the only white person who reads me.
I was already thinking of myself as a writer then, most of my stories centering on the adventures of a spindly-legged little boy in glasses who was secretly a superhero. But though I couldn't know it and wouldn't know it for decades, I had found my muse that day, found the subject that would perplex and fascinate me all my writing life. Meaning the challenge of explaining to those with no frame of reference what it means—how it feels—to be a piece of a piece.
From the vantage point of over half a century later, it occurs to me that I've spent most of my writing life writing for white people about race.
Well, let me tweak that observation a bit. As a matter of intention, I almost never write "for" any group more specific than people who read. If you're a reader, reasonably versed in the English language, then you are my target audience.
But if that's the ideal, the practical reality is that, yes, I write for white people.
It makes sense, if you think about it. I've been a columnist for The Miami Herald since 1991, with national syndication since 1997. The demographics of the newspaper industry being what they are—which is to say, dominated by white Baby Boomers—my readership could hardly be expected to be other than what it is. Still, when I go out to do a speaking engagement or a signing for one of my novels, it is often the case that white people are taken aback to find themselves in an audience full of white people. Many have said as much outright
I joke sometimes that every white person who reads me thinks they're the only white person who reads me. Occasionally, I'll receive an email from one of them that says something like, "I'm pretty sure I'm not your average fan…"
Oh, I say, but you are.
I cannot imagine that I am an easy read for them. Race is not an easy subject and on it, I am not an easy writer.
The cliché, one I have indulged as much as anyone, goes that America needs to have "a conversation about race." But as President Obama noted in eulogizing the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed along with eight other members of his Charleston church when a white supremacist invaded their prayer meeting, "Every time something like this happens somebody says we have to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race."
He's right. It's not that we don't talk. It's that we talk superficially. We talk around. We talk without knowledge—indeed, sometimes denying knowledge—of the history that makes talking necessary. We talk in ways designed to protect our fortresses of identity and to spare us from excavating those places where guilt and hurt, bitterness and anger, lie not at all deeply buried.
This is true of us all but it is especially true, in my long experience, of white people—a term, by the way, that one of my white readers once chided me for using. "Divisive," she called it. She was not the first or the only "white" person to say that. The very fact that she finds that term problematic says a lot about why this subject is so often so difficult for people like her.
Race, as scientists on the Human Genome Project determined conclusively in 2000, is an idea with no scientific basis fact. It is entirely a social, cultural and political construct. Indeed, as Nell Irvin Painter explains in her book, The History of White People, our modern conception of race, i.e., the idea that you can judge a person's worth by judging her melanin content and hair texture, has existed only for the last few centuries. Prior to that, it was common (and just as scientifically coherent) to judge that person by geography or climate.
"Black" and "white"—the concept and machinery of race—became convenient tools as the competition to exploit the riches of the so-called "New World" heated up. "White" conferred a superior form of humanity. "Black" denied any humanity at all. Taken together, they justified a system of kidnap, purchase, exploitation and extermination, allowed good Christians from Europe to engage in acts of barbarous sadism without troubling conscience.
In other words, black and white were useful lies. The truth, however, was that the Europeans who raided the coast of West Africa for human chattel thought of themselves not as "white" men united in some vast common undertaking, but as Dutch men, French men, English men and Portuguese men in competition for the riches of the North American continent. Similarly, the human beings they stole did not think of themselves as "black," but rather, as Taureg, Mandinkan, Mende and Songhay, thrust together in the reeking hold of those European ships.
But if "white" and "black" are equally false, "black" quickly came to take on the markings of a real and common culture by simple dint of the fact that, their varied tribal identities notwithstanding, the people to whom that word was applied were all forced to share the same oppression and denigration, the same rapes and child-stealing, the same unheated hovels and meager plates, the same torchlight violence. These things brought them together and held them together—and hold them together still.
"White," on the other hand, has been held together only by the single condition of being not black. It has had little existence apart from that.
A simple thought experiment illustrates the point. If asked to define black literature, you would likely—and promptly—invoke Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison or some other dark-skinned giant of the written word. But what if you were asked to define "white" literature? The mind quails and resists, does it not?
Note that, if asked about English literature, you might mention Shakespeare or Dickens. French literature? Hugo or Flaubert. American literature? Twain or Melville.
But "white" literature? To whom would you be comfortable ascribing that categorization? What author would be comfortable accepting it? Would Stephen King agree to it? Would William Faulkner or Robert Frost? Would Jodi Picoult or F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Unlikely. They would realize, if only subliminally that the word carries accusations. And those accusations are no less potent for being unspoken.
That's one of the things—one of the many things—that makes writing about race so difficult to do. The very language of it conspires to defeat you.
And mind you, that's before you ever get down into the marrow of the thing, before, for example, you write word one about systems of oppression, what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva famously dubbed Racism Without Racists. It is before you talk about the phenomenon of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander explores in her book, The New Jim Crow. It is before you talk about housing and job discrimination, unequal access to health care, the educational achievement gap, barbecuing while black, affirmative action or reparations. It is before you invoke the name of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile or Tamir Rice, diving into the hot and sticky emotion of unarmed black boys and men killed because of what some white person mistaken, irrationally, believed.
I express an abiding belief that black and white . . . can ultimately find their own humanity reflected in one another if they can only muster the courage to look for it.
If the mere word "white" makes some people recoil, imagine the response you court when you cut down into that marrow. People will call names they would be embarrassed to let their children hear them speak. They will, putting it mildly, say things that do not reflect their best selves.
Or, as my assistant once wrote to me at the end of a long day of sifting through my emails: "I don't know why you don't hate white people."
I reminded her, as gently as I could, that she herself is white. And that hating people because of their paint job is the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
Besides, for all the rancor that boils out of some white people, other white people keep showing up for my lectures. They keep reading my columns and my novels. They keep listening to stories that are difficult to hear. They keep engaging.
I choose to believe that in the telling and the listening, they and I express an abiding belief that black and white—and all the other colors of the racial rainbow—can ultimately find their own humanity reflected in one another if they can only muster the courage to look for it, to see what is already there.
My four novels could not be more different from one another in settings and themes—from a love story unfolding in the aftermath of slavery to a political thriller set on the day of Barack Obama's election. But each has at least one moment that speaks to that hope, one moment where characters from different so-called races find themselves brought face to face with their own common humanity. It's not something I ever set out to do, not something I was even aware I was doing, but that moment recurs in every book.
In Freeman, it's as grandly dramatic as a love scene between a former slave and a white abolitionist, both shattered by the aftermath of civil war.
In my latest, The Last Thing You Surrender, it's as simple as a white man and a black woman sharing a segregated park bench at the end of World War Two.
Call it an act of faith. And yes, I am painfully aware of how often faith goes unrewarded in this life, how often we live down to the meanest and most wretched version of ourselves. But faith yet endures. Which is, I suppose, the thing that makes it faith.
More to the point, story telling is how we explain ourselves to ourselves—and how we explain ourselves to one another. We sift and curate the disparate fragments of our experiences, the flotsam of our lives, the things we have seen and know—and hope. We hammer it together on a scaffolding of narrative and we present it to somebody else as way saying, This is how I see the world. This is what I believe.
If you say that to people who come from the same place you do and have seen and felt the same things, you give them validation, let them know they are not alone, give voice to things they may not be equipped to express. And that matters; that is important.
But if you say it to people who don't know those things, whose passages have never intersected yours—if, in other words, you turn from the choir at your back and start preaching to the congregation in front of you—you challenge them, you upend their understanding of the world, you push them to see things they perhaps never thought to see before. You shatter paradigms.
It can be a tricky thing to do. I remember once, after a school shooting in a white San Diego suburb—one of a series of similar such shootings around the country—I wrote a column noting that in talking about these tragedies, we were missing the elephant in the room. Namely, that virtually all them involved white kids shooting other white kids in white rural or suburban areas. If a similar wave of violence broke out among black kids in the inner city, I argued, we would be sifting through the pathologies and challenges of their lives to determine what was going on. We would ask, What's wrong with black kids?
But it would never occur to white people to wonder—not even after the shootings in Littleton, Colorado in San Diego, in Eugene, Oregon, in West Paducah, Kentucky and on and on and on—what's wrong with white kids. Acutely conscious of who I was writing for, I made that observation as delicately as I could, even stopping at one point to say explicitly what should have been obvious: that I wasn't suggesting we ought not be concerned because the victims and perpetrators were white.
It felt silly having to say such an obvious thing. So I laughed out loud when I read an essay a writer named Tim Wise who made the same argument I'd made but, being white, felt no need to be delicate. "An awful lot of white folks need to pull our heads out of our collective ass," he said.
There is, needless to say, a certain freedom that comes in writing for white people about race and being white yourself.
Doing so while being black, on the other hand, is a constant negotiation between the need to tell the truth, to make it as plain as words allow—and the knowledge that too much truth might be toxic, that too much truth, from you especially, runs the risk of turning people away because it challenges too sharply what two celebrated African-American authors, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, have described as the fiction of white racial "innocence."
As Coates notes in his book, Between The World and Me, written as open letter to his son, "there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury."
Later, speculating about the possibility of his own death at the hands of police officers who would then be exonerated and returned to work, he writes that his demise would be framed not as "the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment."
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin offered an indictment that was, if anything, more pointed and less forgiving:
And this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
And if these are, indeed, painful truths, well, what other choice do you have as a black writer? You have the same choice Coates and Baldwin had, which is to say none. So you tell those truths. You try—or at least, I try—to do it in such a way that the people hearing you have room to consider themselves a potential part of the solution instead of an immutable and irredeemable part of the problem. But still, you must tell those truths fearlessly, forthrightly and clearly, because they demand no less.
You tell them and if you are lucky, people—"white" people—will keep trying to understand that which the whole weight of American mythmaking conspires to keep them from understanding. If you are lucky, they listen, maybe receptively, maybe with wariness, but they listen. If you are lucky, every once in a long while, one of them will sidle up to you, having read the column or the novels or having heard the speech and say something like, "I never thought about it that way" or, "You really changed my thinking." These things happen if you're lucky.
And I've been lucky.
Indeed, if telling and hearing stories about race constitute acts of faith, then moments like that constitute faith's redemption. They validate my stubborn and abiding conviction that if I can ever just explain the thing clearly enough, somebody who didn't live it will nevertheless get it. My humanity will touch theirs. And that will mean something, move something, make something different somehow.
That is, yes, what a writer always hopes.
But it's what a black writer writing about race for white people desperately needs to believe.
African AmericanBlack Lives MatterLeonard Pitts Jr.Los Angelesmass shootingsraceracismThe Last Thing You Surrenderwhite people
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Leonard Pitts, Jr. is the author of the novels The Last Thing You Surrender, Grant Park, Freeman, and Before I Forget, as well as two works of nonfiction. He is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in addition to many other awards. Born and raised in Southern California, Pitts lives in Maryland outside Washington, DC.
The Challenge of Book-Tour Travel as a Non-Binary Author
Beneath the Streets of Paris, in Search of the Cataphiles
About a year ago, at a dinner for a group of writers who'd received a fellowship, a man, an advisor to the program, happened...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Medford, Mass.—The Lesley University women's basketball team earned their first win on the season in an offensive explosion over Bay Path University, 86-18. The victory gave the Lynx their first NECC conference win and improve to 1-13 overall and 1-7 in conference play. The loss gives the Wildcats a 1-11 overall record, while still chasing their first conference win.
Bay Path put the first points on the board off a Samantha Drapinski jump shot in their first possession. Back to back three pointers from Karyn McEvoy and Theresa Pereira gave the Lynx a quick 6-2 lead.
Pereira sparked a 17-0 run at 6:05 sinking her first of three treys in the offensive surge to close out the first quarter 27-6.
Lesley tacked on 17 more points in the second quarter and limited the Wildcats to scoring just eight points to close out the half with a 44-14 lead and never let the Wildcats back in the game.
The Lynx would go on to outscore the visitors 44-4 in the second half to earn their first victory on the season.
Four Lynx starters registered double-digit scoring nights, and every player recorded a basket on the night. Pereira led the way with a double-double with 29 points (6, 3-pointers) and 11 rebounds, and also added 5 steals.
Dakota Jones extended her double-double streak with 24 points and 20 rebounds, and had 5 steals on defense. McEvoy added 15 points and dished 5 assists, while freshman Kacey Johnson added 12 points.
Lesley pounded the boards grabbing 55 rebounds to the Wildcats 23. Bay Path shot 66.7% from the free line while the Lynx shot 62.3%.
Lesley continues its conference slate on Thursday January 17th at NECC newcomber, New England College.


In nature, Tobacco plant (Nicotiana) is a flowering plant genus of the Solanaceae plant family (nightshade family) of the order Solanales order (polemoniales), with members containing nicotine and other biologically active biochemicals.
In nature, Nicotiana tabacum is a cultivated flowering plant species in the Nicotiana genus (tobacco plant) of the Solanaceae plant family (nightshade family) of the order Solanales order (polemoniales), with members containing nicotine and other biologically active biochemicals.
In nature, Nicotiana tabacum synthesize nicotine and related pyridine-type alkaloids to mount defensive responses to insect herbivores.
Into our body, some of the phytochemicals in Nicotiana tabacum are known to contain certain psychotropic substances (psychoactive substances).
In nature, Nicotiana rustica is a flowering plant species in the Nicotiana genus (tobacco plant) of the Solanaceae plant family (nightshade family) of the order Solanales order (polemoniales), with members containing nicotine and other biologically active biochemicals.
Into our body, some of the phytochemicals in Nicotiana rustica are known to contain certain psychotropic substances (psychoactive substances).


Chivalry tries really hard to revolutionize hack-and-slash first person combat, but it ultimately fails to make a lasting impression or even justify its price point.
Three Inches had the potential to be a good movie, but sloppy pacing and serious tonal inconsistencies run it into the ground.
CBS, unlike NBC, has a lineup of new shows; here's how I think each one will do.
Just in case you didn't get that the Gamilans are the bad guys, SBY 2199's eighth episode is here to clear up any confusion.
Zach Braff wants to make a movie, and he also wants you to know that he's totally hip to this whole internet thing.


SETTING: Hawassa Prison, Southern Region of Ethiopia.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the burden of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) using active case finding among prisoners.
DESIGN: In this cross-sectional study, prisoners were screened for TB using a symptom screen. Those with cough of 2 weeks had spot and morning sputum samples collected for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear microscopy and molecular diagnostic testing (Xpert® MTB/RIF).
RESULTS: Among 2068 prisoners, 372 (18%) had a positive cough screen. The median age of these 372 persons was 23 years, 97% were male and 63% were from urban areas. Among those with a positive symptom screen, 8 (2%) were AFB sputum smear-positive and 31 (8%) were Xpert-positive. The point prevalence of pulmonary TB at the prison was 1748 per 100 000 persons. In multivariate analysis, persons with cough >4 weeks were more likely to have TB (OR 3.34, 95%CI 1.54–7.23).
CONCLUSION: A high prevalence of TB was detected among inmates at a large Ethiopian prison. Active case finding using a cough symptom screen in combination with Xpert had high utility, and has the potential to interrupt transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in correctional facilities in low- and middle-income, high-burden countries.


text:
How Can Symphony Orchestras Attract Young Audiences?
May 2, 2014 January 6, 2016 / mramusicplace
Many have considered the problem of how to cause classical music to become more popular, especially with younger audiences. Data indicating a shrinking audience for live concerts, particularly among younger people, have worried arts organizations and educators for some time. It has also been noted that while attendance at live classical concerts has often decreased, sales of recorded classical music has fared better, indicating a shift in how people prefer to listen. With home theater technologies and digital recordings, the sonic quality of recorded music can rival that of a live concert; and with added convenience and the elimination of the threat of the dreaded and prolonged candy wrapper distraction, there are aspects of recorded music listening that are appealing.
Still, I'm a supporter and enjoyer of live music, and I want to see live classical music organizations and venues do well. This week, while in attendance at a Young People's concert with my fourth grade students, I observed something that I believe will shed some light on this issue of what will make classical music appealing to young listeners. The program included two works: Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and Elliott's The Remarkable Farkle & The Wolf. The latter is based on actor John Lithgow's book of the same title. Both works had a narrator, who told a story that each took the audience on a tour of the orchestra. But there was one important difference. For Peter and the Wolf, the narrator acted the story. Using props as puppets, he entertained the audience with a lady's purse with whiskers and a tail attached for the cat, a feather duster for the duck, a stick with a light scarf tied to it for the bird, a suitcase with ears and a tail and big teeth inside for wolf, and the narrator himself as Peter (donning a hat), grandpa (with a cane) and the hunters (carrying plungers for rifles). The students were spellbound by the acting, and they couldn't wait to see what prop would be used for the next character. Through it all, they still enjoyed the music, too. I know this because some of them were singing Peter's infectious tune on the way out (and in two cases during the concert) For Elliott's opus, the narrator spoke, but there was no acting. Though the music was excellent, the students were visibly disinterested while the orchestra was playing, but craned their necks to see the instrument families as they were introduced.
What can we learn from this? Those students wanted first to have something to see. They wanted to watch something that developed and changed, like a story or a new sound. Once the visual aspect of what was going on became familiar, they were no longer interested hearing the music. In order for classical music to be appealing to contemporary young people, I believe that what they have to look at must be more changeable than a lot of people sitting in one place on a stage. Music that changes timbres and direction often is interesting. Music that is accompanied by acting, or by video, as for example John Williams' hugely popular movie nights are, are much more likely to succeed than classical music that does not change visually, and presents an overall homogeneous blend of timbres. Lest those of you who tend toward purism object, may I remind you that Handel had his music played by orchestras floating on barges, Haydn's "Farewell" symphony featured players leaving the stage as the work went along, and Tchaikovsky wrote music that includes a part for live cannons. Surely if these masters could avail themselves of such showmanship, it is not beneath today's orchestras to take advantage of similar resourcefulness.
General Music, Instrumental Music, Music Education
classical music, live music, mramusicplace, music education, music teaching, peter and the wolf, Robert Adams, symphony orchestra, young audience, Young Peoples Concert
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3 thoughts on "How Can Symphony Orchestras Attract Young Audiences?"
7128788elf
Interesting. I was trained as a story teller, and sometimes used a recording of peter and the Wolf conducted and narrated by Leonard Bernstein as a story time. I told the story with Bernstein, had the children act it out, with me acting it, and them following, the children loved it, and often asked for it again and again. I attended a lot of Proms in London's Royal Albert Hall, and was quite surprised and interested to see how many young people there were in this incredibly well attended performances. These were possibly all music students, but I was pleased to see them all there and really enjoying themselves. Went to other London concerts as well, which also seemed full of young people, but perhaps this was awhile ago; through the 90's into the early 2000nds, and is no longer the case. Certainly out here in South Africa, at concerts, you see hardly any young people, the audiance all look to be well over 60.
mramusicplace
The audiences here in the U.S. are similarly aged. I think one of the issues is that those who are now young have lived entirely in a culture that is defined by electronic media, with short sound and video bytes that keeps them always anticipating and enjoying quick change. The generation that populates our concert halls grew up in a culture where books, movies and even the evening television news unfolded in a more calm and gradual manner. Older people are simply used to this "classic," slower, more literary if you will pace, and so are quite at home siting through extended musical works without much visual variety.
Yes I would agree, with that, I think classical music, has always had to look for younger audiences over the last century, hence the sterling work by people such as Bernstein, Schumann etc., and each generation, seems to have had its struggles, but perhaps now more than ever.


Tom Rowney first trained at the Budgeree Glass Factory in Adelaide before completing his Bachelor of Arts at the School of Art, Australian National University in 1995. He has been exhibiting for over twenty years and has been deeply involved in the development of the studio glass movement in Australia and particularly in Canberra. Currently, he is technical manager at the Canberra Glassworks, a position he has held since 2006. Tom's work is represented in such collections as the National Gallery of Australia and the Tacoma Museum of Glass (USA), and he is a highly regarded and sought-after teacher.


Can I convert the BT home hub equipment to be used with another service provider?
I previously subscribed to BT home hub broadband/wireless, but have canceled meanwhile. However, I still have their equipment and am now connected to a different broadband supply. Can the BT equipment be converted to pick up another wireless connection?
did you manage to convert your BT home hub equipment? If yes, how did you do it and was PsiDOC's suggestion helpful? Thank you for your feedback!
Oh and for the record: Bt GIVE you the home hub as a carrot to get you to sign up for a 12 month contract. What the don't tell you is they lock it so it's not good without modding when you leave. So what you do with it is up to you and not illegal in any way!
Another example of makeuseof advocating illegal activity.
First of all, this is a user question.
Secondly, if BT doesn't ask for the equipment to be returned after the contract ends or if they charge a fee in case it's not returned, nothing speaks against using the hardware further.
However, I didn't read the specific contract this user signed, so I wouldn't know for sure.
As a BT customer I will make this short and sweet for you, you're wrong. As you should know, a contract is written up (12 or 18 month) between you and BT for which (through that contracted months) you are renting the BThub until the end of the contract for which the BThub then becomes the property of the customer. There's no illegal activity as long as you either finish the contract or pay up the remaining contracted period. I'm just surprised that you have posted such a comment on a forum which is questioning a legal right of the customer to do whatever the wish with the BThub after that contract period. I will also point out that you are also treading (very dangerously) on legal grounds. I suggest you be better off going back to BT's legal advisors and take advise from them, you obviously don't know what you're talking about.


Yes we are serious when we say 95% of all losses are left wet enough to support microbial growth. While it's rampant with preferred vendor systems who are limited to 3 to 5 days of drying, it also happens more often than you think with some restorers. It's actually easy to do.
All you have to do to make a structure that is still wet look dry, is to use a non-penetrating moisture meter that only measures the first ½ inch of a 5½ inch standard interior framed wall. Walls dry from the outside in, so the trim will get dry first, followed by the drywall, followed much later by the wood framing. Within 3 to 5 days, the trim will be at dry standard. But since the non-penetrating meter only reads a half inch, when you use the meter it only reads the trim and excludes everything behind it.
This is the reason we use 3½ inch screws to test for moisture. These deep penetrating screws, when used with our DAMP (Deep Assembly Moisture Profiling) – reveals moisture hidden inside the wall structures that will, within 24 to 48 hours, begin to support microbial and bacterial amplification.
We know it's hard to believe that companies that are designed to first and foremost dry a structure and prevent mold, actually, almost every single time, create the environment to support it hidden behind the wall assemblies.
We feel consumers need to understand this. We are doing our very best to educate both the industry and the consumer about these practices and create transparency so you, the consumer, can get the work product you think you're currently getting but are not!
What's the 3 Day Drying Myth?
In the early 1990's to 2000's restoration drying science was in its infancy and it was thought that all materials in a structure could be dried in 3 days.
Two decades later with advancements in testing equipment and technology, it was discovered that earlier theories were incorrect and actually dangerous. Structures not dried properly can result in deterioration of building materials, and growth of toxic mold, which is extremely hazardous to human health.
In the professional water damage restoration industry, the old and outdated theory is now referred to as "The 3 Day Drying Myth".
Water damage restoration techniques are a far cry from the early days when carpet cleaners were responsible for extracting water after a flood.
When the toxicity of mold was discovered, the restoration industry worldwide went through many changes. New standards were developed, training and certification was required, and new government regulations were introduced.
Innovations in technology have led to better equipment, testing and science is now making it possible to determine if a structure is dry.
Your insurance carrier may suggest hiring a contractor from their "preferred vendor list".
Be cautious, insurance companies will often limit their preferred vendors to 3 – 5 days of drying to reduce claims costs.
Pulling drying equipment too early is the number one reason structures are being left wet.
Discovering a mold problem months after a claim is closed can result in expensive litigation.
One of the reasons NextGen has been so successful at drying structures is greatly due DAMP assessment – diep assembly moisture profilingAt NextGen, we use the latest technology and equipment to make sure structures are dry and safely restored.
Our advanced testing and monitoring are an important part of our restoration and remediation procedures.
With our advanced moisture tracking and analysis software we can remotely monitor the overall structure which is an extremely key factor when restoring to a dry standard.


While in recent years Microsoft has developed a reputation for having to play catch-up in many parts of its business, from mobile to search and even on the desktop, there's actually a healthy amount of blue-sky thinking about the future that goes on at the company.
Microsoft Research consists of a network of labs around the world employing around 1,000 researchers in total. At the company's Think Next event in Tel Aviv, Israel this week, I met Professor Shahram Izadi, who is based in the UK's hardware innovation capital, Cambridge. Izadi and his team work on interactive 3D technologies that look to build on the likes of Kinect and take them to another level.
When Izadi joined Microsoft, the buzz area was multitouch, back in the days before the iPhone brought that technology to the masses. "It was the first wave of natural human interfaces, it was an exciting way of directly interacting with computing content," he says. However, the advent of the Kinect has seen his work move into the field of full-body interaction.
Izadi clearly has a lot of fun with his work ("A lot of the time it feels like play," he admits). He is largely concerned with exploring what technology might be like in five or ten years' time rather than trying to develop the next hit piece of kit.
Izadi's team recently unveiled KinÊtre, a technology that lets humans 'possess' 3D models. You can take any 3D digital object and map it to your own body. So, you could set your legs to control the legs of a chair, for example. A Kinect camera then tracks your movement and allows you to make the chair 'walk' in a human-like way. The result is as entertaining as it is impressive, often giving objects a quality that resembles the dancing furniture in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
Building on earlier technology developed by Izadi's team, KinÊtre supports 3D objects created by scanning the shape of a real-life object with a Kinect camera.Pre-created 3D models can also imported. As the video below shows, two people can even team up to 'possess' a horse.
The latest research revealed by the Cambridge team is Digits, a more subtle, intimate take on the kind of gesture control offered by Kinect. It utilises a small camera worn on a wrist strap, similar to a Kinect camera but tracking 2D movement rather than 3D.
The camera picks up on finger movements that can be used to control software. Imagine an app that translates sign language into written text, for example, or if you could control the slides of a presentation using simple finger movements. There are more examples in this video.
With the likes of Google's Project Glass and Microsoft's Digits system promising to more intimately connect the physical world with the digital one, are we embarking on a path that will lead to the 'cyborgisation' of humans? "What we're doing is augmenting the senses of humans, whether it's your visual sense, tactile sense or audio sense," says Izadi.
"What we're trying to do is bring some sort of augmented reality to real-world life, and I think that's a vision that a lot of people have thought about for twenty-odd years and it's finally about to happen because of the technology advances that are around the corner, so it's an exciting time.
We may still be a long way off from computer body implants and cyborgs (which personally I think would be rather cool), but technology of the kind being developed by Izadi's team is pointing to an interesting future in the meantime.
You can listen to our conversation in the recording embedded below.
Microsoft paid for The Next Web's trip to Think Next but has no influence at all over anything we publish.


Since we inevitably keep talking about malware in the Android ecosystem, and since we have already told you a bunch of times that Android 4.2 comes with some enhanced anti-malware security features, it's time to look at Google's official explanation regarding one of the new Google Play security protections that has been built into the new OS version, app verification.
Even before Android 4.2 became official, we heard that Google may be looking to improve the security of its app ecosystem by introducing new security measures in Android 4.2 meant to better protect users against unwanted attacks.
Those features were confirmed once Android 4.2 was announced, and can be taken advantage of right away by any Android 4.2 device user, including the apps verification process.
As long as it's enabled – because it can be disabled by the user and it's not mandatory to be used – the new security feature will scan the apps you want to download against Google's database of apps. In case Google finds the apps to be harmful in any way, installing them will not be possible. Such a feature is especially useful if you plan to install lots of apps from other sources than Google's own Play Store.
Important: When you verify applications, Google receives log information, URLs related to the app, and general information about the device, such as the Device ID, version of the operating system, IP address, and one or more cookies.
Even though the feature is enabled by default on the device, it won't transmit any data until you expressly agree for it to do so. A dialog message will appear asking for permission the first time you install an app for an unknown source.
In order to manage apps verification, you can head to Settings > Security > Verify apps on your smartphone or tablet running Android 4.2.


The holidays are here, and the celebrations are in full swing in Phoenix, AZ, and surrounding communities! With the Holiday Season comes Office parties, corporate celebrations, and Church festivities to name a few.
The question is what to do with the mess after the party?
Since 2004 Compass Cleaning Solutions has been providing commercial event cleaning for any size get together. From small gatherings to large, depending on the type of holiday event we staff to the size and time constraints set by the client.
For Compass Cleaning Solutions, there is no event that is too small or complicated that we can't clean!
Ring in the New Year with Green Commercial Event Cleaning!
Specializing in the use of organic, sustainable cleaning products and janitorial cleaning practices in Phoenix, AZ, and surrounding areas, we take pride in utilizing a line of green cleaning products, proper equipment, recyclable products, and adequate disposal techniques all with environmentally safe standards. Our goal is to keep exposure to adverse elements at a minimum.
An environmentally conscious commercial cleaning company our green cleaning extends beyond the products that we use and our employees are certified in all proper processes required to ensure proper cleaning techniques.
Our credo as an environmentally friendly janitorial "green cleaning" company ensures that we use products to protect the environment.
From Corporate to public holiday celebrations and everything in between, Compass Cleaning Solutions has the cleanup part after the festivities covered, allowing you to sit back, relax and enjoy the holiday season.
Our experience includes cleaning parking lots, small stadiums, offices, public spaces and more.
It's simple, we come in and clean up all the food and drink that fell on the carpet, mop the floors and generally clean up all the excess debris so that your office or facility is ready for work the next business day.
Our services include but are not limited to Trash removal, Carpet cleaning, Floor maintenance, Tables & Furniture Set-Up, Restroom Cleaning includes restocking of supplies and Specialty requests.
At Compass Cleaning Solutions it doesn't matter what the celebration is, you can count on our janitorial cleaning services to clean up all the excess debris after the party so that your office or facility so that you can easily conduct business the next day without the remnants of the party left behind.
Holidays Parties including Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and more!
We have cleaned parking lots, small stadiums, offices, public spaces and more. Just ask us as we would love to talk to you about your holiday event to get started on planning the cleanup.
At Compass Cleaning Solutions your complete satisfaction is our highest priority. Offering customer Service 24 hour-a-day, Seven Days a Week, we guarantee you will be delighted with our event cleaning!
To learn more about our holiday event cleaning services in Phoenix, AZ and surrounding areas, contact Compass Cleaning Solutions for a free quote or call (877)221-1213 today!


text:
Q: emacs starting maximised I want a keyboard shortcut to open emacs in a maximised window. I tried emacs --fullscreen, but that is full screen rather than maximised window... That is, the emacs window covers ubuntu menu bars. emacs -fw gets a full width window and emacs -fh gets a full height window, but if you put both options, it only reads the second one. At the moment, I just have another keyboard shortcut for maximising a window. Is there a way to get emacs to start maximised?
Ubuntu 9.10, emacs 22, if that makes a difference.

A: I have this in my .emacs, which I then bind to a key:
(defun my-frame-toggle ()
  "Maximize/Restore Emacs frame using 'wmctrl'."
  (interactive)
  (shell-command "wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -btoggle,maximized_vert,maximized_horz"))

(global-set-key [(control f4)] 'my-frame-toggle)

You can then hit CtrlF4 and toggle between regular and full-screen (but not covering the Ubuntu menu bar and bar at the bottom of the screen whose name I'm blanking on at the moment).  To start up that way simply invoke it:
$ emacs -e "my-frame-toggle"

A: I had the same problem.
Found the answer in this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1619533
Basically from the command line start emacs with this parameters:

*

*emacs -fs //if you want emacs to cover all your screen (cover the ubuntu bar)

*emacs -mm //if you want emacs to start like you pressed the maximize button (shows ubuntu bar)

Of course you can bind those starting options to an icon and have emacs always start the way you want.

A: I have the following functions in my .emacs, which first defines the codes to send the window manager to maximize the frame on X.org and Win32 respectively, and then add this as a setup hook, if applicable:
(defun x-maximize-frame ()
    "Maximize the current frame (to full screen)"
    (interactive)
    (x-send-client-message nil 0 nil "_NET_WM_STATE" 32 '(2 "_NET_WM_STATE_MAXIMIZED_HORZ" 0))
    (x-send-client-message nil 0 nil "_NET_WM_STATE" 32 '(2 "_NET_WM_STATE_MAXIMIZED_VERT" 0)))

(defun w32-maximize-frame ()
  "Maximize the current frame (to full screen)"
  (interactive)
  (w32-send-sys-command 61488))

(defun maximize-frame ()
    (if (eq window-system 'w32)
            (w32-maximize-frame)
        (x-maximize-frame)))

(if window-system
    (add-hook 'window-setup-hook 'maximize-frame t))

A: This might be what you're looking for.  You could also hard-code the pixel width/height for your screen, and set that in your .emacs file (the author covers that here).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Alan, alias "Ultra Drakken", is a hotshot young hacker — or at least he thinks he is. But when he crosses paths with mysterious cyber-activist Theresa (aka "Vrrmn"), he enters a world of danger and deceit. Can Drakken and Vrrmn save the grid? Can they even keep from terminating each other?
Both of the central characters of this series are queer trans POC.
This series features Niko / Orbit, an asexual non-binary character.
Available through the creator's store.
Includes chapters 0 and 1 of the ongoing webcomic series.


Three local authorities which missed a recycling target last year are to avoid fines of more than £600,000.
Newport, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen all missed a target to recycle 58% of waste by 2015/16.
But the Welsh Government has now decided not to penalise them, saying it expects their performance to improve.
Opposition AMs criticised ministers, however, with one suggesting the credibility of the government's strategy has been "lost".
Ministers have set tough targets for the amount of waste authorities should recycle, reuse or compost, with the threat of fines to those councils that do not meet them.
In 2015/16 the target was set at 58%, which 19 of Wales' 22 councils met or exceeded, with Wales as a whole recycling 60.2% of waste.
But Newport and Torfaen both fell just short at 57% each, while Blaenau Gwent's performance was the lowest at 49%.
Based on a penalty of £200 per tonne that the target was missed by, Blaenau Gwent council said it would have been fined £573,000 while Torfaen council said its fine would have been £49,800.
Newport council could not provide a figure at this time.
The Welsh Government - which set the first statutory recycling targets in the UK - said "significant improvements" are expected for the authorities' recycling performance in 2016/17.
"As such, a decision was taken not to issue penalties on this occasion," a spokeswoman said, adding fines could still be imposed in future if local authorities continue to miss targets.
Recent provisional figures for the year to September 2016 showed Newport and Torfaen was now recycling 60% and 63% of waste respectively.
Blaenau Gwent indicated unverified figures showed this year's rate for the authority had risen to approximately 57%.
It is not the first time the Welsh Government has decided not to fine authorities for missing recycling targets.
In 2015, it waived penalties for Cardiff and Rhondda Cynon Taf.
In forthcoming years, the targets will get tougher to meet - with authorities expected to recycle 64% of waste in 2020 and 70% in 2025.
Rebecca Colley-Jones, director of consultancy Ynys Resources, said Blaenau Gwent had improved its performance over the last few years.
She said: "If the purpose of the fines is to get them to... achieve those targets, they are certainly doing the right thing, not doing the wrong thing."
But Simon Thomas, Plaid Cymru environment spokesman, said: "It seems to me that the credibility of what the Welsh Government is trying to achieve is clearly lost when you go through two cycles of target setting and two cycles of failure by certain authorities, and you just don't follow through on it."
UKIP local government spokesman Gareth Bennett, said the policy was "ill-conceived" and that the imposition of fines "would only serve to hit local authorities and council tax payers in the pocket".
"There must be an incentive for the underperforming councils to improve recycling rates," said Conservative environment spokesman David Melding, "and the Welsh Government is in danger of appearing to be all bark and no bite".
A Welsh Liberal Democrat spokesman said: "The Welsh Government cannot possibly hope to meet recycling targets if councils know they'll get away with missing their recycling targets by sweet talking the government."
Meanwhile, the Wales Green Party suggested that under-funding of councils had led to authorities not meeting targets.
In response, a Welsh Labour Government spokesman said: "Wales is leading the way on recycling and according to a recent report by Resource we are the third-best recycling nation in the world."
He added the administration is "well on course" to meet its 70% target for 2025.
Duncan Smith, Torfaen chief officer for neighbourhood services, said smaller wheelie bins meant the authority was seeing a "significant increase" in recycling and that it was "on target to achieve more than 63% recycling for 2016/17".
Newport council added it was grateful the Welsh Government had recognised "the considerable efforts that are going into reducing waste and increasing recycling" in the city.
p1 you are NOT alone.


text:
Legend Power Systems Inc LPSIF
Rating as of Jan 17, 2022
Quote Stock Analysis News Price vs Fair Value Sustainability Trailing Returns Financials Valuation Operating Performance Dividends Ownership Executive
Valuation Jan 18, 2022
Is it the right time to buy or sell?
Find out with Morningstar Premium
1-Star Price
Economic Moat
About Quantitative Ratings
There is no one analyst in which a Quantitative Star Rating and Fair Value Estimate is attributed to; however, Mr. Lee Davidson, Head of Quantitative Research for Morningstar, Inc., is responsible for overseeing the methodology that supports the quantitative fair value. As an employee of Morningstar, Inc., Mr. Davidson is guided by Morningstar, Inc.'s Code of Ethics and Personal Securities Trading Policy in carrying out his responsibilities. For information regarding Conflicts of Interests, click here .
Morningstar Quantitative ratings for equities (denoted on this page by) are generated using an algorithm that compares companies that are not under analyst coverage to peer companies that do receive analyst-driven ratings. Companies withratings are not formally covered by a Morningstar analyst, but are statistically matched to analyst-rated companies, allowing our models to calculate a quantitative moat, fair value, and uncertainty rating. Click here for more on how to use these ratings.
Legend Power Systems Inc together with its subsidiaries provides electrical energy conservation solutions to commercial and industrial customers in Canada. The firm develops, manufactures, and markets patented devices, the SmartGATE that saves electrical energy. Business operating segments are based on geographical location of sale and installation of the SmartGATE products: Legend Power Systems Canada and Legend Power Systems Corp - U.S. Geographically, it derives a majority of revenue from Canada and also has a presence in the United States.
1480 Frances Street
Vancouver, BC, V5L 1Y9, Canada
T +1 604 377-0403
www.legendpower.com
Sector Industrials
Industry Electrical Equipment & Parts
Most Recent Earnings Sep 30, 2021
Fiscal Year End Sep 30, 2022
Stock Type —


After the world recession that began in 2008, Scott Bunn - the founder of the Seneca Treehouse Project - began noticing that his network of friends were suffering in a number of ways. They began falling behind on their mortgage payments and they began losing access to healthy food.
The Seneca Treehouse project in South Carolina is a learning center teaching children, youth, and their families how to reduce their personal carbon footprint and live sustainably. They are currently developing three prototypes of low-impact housing that they can share with the local community. They're aiming to reach a net-zero energy production goal within the next two to three years.


text:
This Interview Is A Stub: Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Being Wrong
By Kathryn Schulz
After Google, Wikipedia might be the single most powerful new influence on how we as a culture organize, disseminate, and access information. For millions of Web-connected citizens, the online encyclopedia is the place of first resort for looking up everything from Shirley Sherrod to sickle-cell anemia . There's no question about its scope or popularity: It has 3.3 million articles in English alone (compare that to the roughly 120,000 articles in the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica ) and attracts nearly 78 million visitors each month. There's also no question that it's an astonishing triumph of open-source development: The entire colossus was built by a bunch of largely anonymous and entirely unpaid contributors.
There is, however, a great deal of argument — and consternation — about the accuracy of Wikipedia entries. (A headline in the Onion made the point nicely: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.") That's why I went looking for Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales, then quit the project over disputes about its governance and the quality and credibility of its content. Sanger is also a trained philosopher with a focus on epistemology — the study of knowledge — which made him an attractive person to talk to about how technology is changing what we know, what we think we know, and how we think we know it. After leaving Wikipedia, Sanger founded Citizendium , a rival online encyclopedia, and now spends most of his time on WatchKnow , a nonprofit organization that uses wiki principles to organize and rate nearly 20,000 educational videos for kids.
What got you interested in encyclopedias? Did you have some kind of longstanding fascination with them, or was it just an accident of history?
It was pure accident. I was circulating an idea for a Web site around different Internet acquaintances and one of them happened to be Jimmy Wales. He responded by saying, "Well, I'm trying to get this encyclopedia project going; would you be interested in coming to work on it?"
That was Nupedia — he had registered the domain name, but at that point it was just an idea — and I got hired for that job. And then I found that it was a fascinating problem to organize people online to create encyclopedias.
People have been trying to validate, organize, and disseminate information for a long time. Did you look back to other efforts in history to do so?
When I was first starting Nupedia and Wikipedia, everything was moving so fast that I didn't have time to go back and read Diderot and D'Alembert and all that, which would have been useful. I did read them later. I can't remember when I read The Professor and the Madman , but that made a big impression me.
That's pretty funny, considering that it's a book about the relationship between the editor of a major reference work and a certified lunatic.
It actually resonated very much with the experience I had trying to organize Wikipedia. It's very interesting to me that here you have the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary , and one of his most prolific contributors was in an insane asylum. A lot of the most prolific Wikipedians, or at least many of them, also seem to have a screw loose. But that doesn't mean their work is useless.
Do you have a theory about this? Is there something about the project of organizing knowledge that attracts slightly nutty people? Or that turns normal people nuts?
There are a lot of theories on that, actually. But I think the most important thing to say is that Wikipedia has very few practical constraints about people behaving according to normal rules of politeness and fair dealing. They've got a zillion rules, of course — that's part of the problem — but there is no easy way to rein in the bad actors. And unfortunately the bad tend to drive out the good. A lot of the more sane, sensible people out there are just can't take too much of it.
Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.
I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements. The first problem was what we were just talking about: reining in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.
The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism — it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that — but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.
Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?
Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject — that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.
Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.
There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers — although not all of them, of course — and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.
It seems to me that this conflict between amateurs and experts boils down to a conflict between egalitarianism and credibility. You gestured toward this conflict in an essay on the Edge.com , where you wrote, "It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth." Do you find that it really is a zero-sum game — that, as a practical matter, we need to choose between these two goods?
I doubt very much that it's a zero-sum game. I think it's absolutely a great thing that people regardless of their credentials can contribute to the shaping of knowledge. And I think we have to creatively design ways of recognizing both the value of amateur work, on the one hand, and the objective value of the knowledge of people who are experts in various fields.
And that's what you were calling for at Wikipedia, right? For human experts to exert at least some baseline control over the content?
Well, I suppose. But you know, I don't like the word "control," because I myself am pretty libertarian in my outlook on these things, quite frankly. It makes me nervous to think of handing the keys over to the experts. But one thing that Wikipedia could do that would not spoil the system — except in the sense that it would cause a huge ruckus among Wikipedians — is simply create a program in which articles are reviewed or rated by experts.
This idea is not new. It's something that we discussed before I even left. It's sort of a perennial idea on Wikipedia, in fact, but they've never done it.
What would qualify someone as an expert?
Well, I can tell you how we do it on Citizendium. Generally we say that to contribute as an editor in a professional field, you need to have the credentials to practice in that field. So if you want to be an editor in law, then you should have a law degree and a few years of experiences. For more academic fields, we generally require a Ph.D.
None of that is to say that we aren't open to other people, but they have to establish their expertise up to that level in some other way. So if someone has a master's degree or even a bachelor's degree in history but has written a bunch of well-respected books — if there's enough evidence for another history editor to recognize the person as legitimate — then we would bring such a person onboard.
Have you read some of the criticisms of expertise that have come out in the last several years — for instance, Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? or, more recently, David Freedman's new book, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When Not to Trust Them ?
No, I'm afraid I haven't looked at those books. I'd like to — they sound fascinating.
I suspect that most people who aren't involved in the making of Wikipedia, who interact with it as an end product, feel that it's basically good enough. They get that it's not perfect, but they have the impression that it's essentially pretty reliable. In your opinion, how right or wrong is that impression?
I think it's pretty dangerous to rely in an uncritical way on Wikipedia. Wikipedia frequently gets things wrong — or, more often, states things in a misleading or biased way. The problem isn't as bad in the hard sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences, certain views tend to come to the forefront, or the leading views on a subject are completely omitted or are left as a footnote. When it comes to subtly representing a dialectic, Wikipedia does a very bad job. But maybe people don't go to Wikipedia to try to master a debate.
What about factual matters? Are those reliable?
When it comes to just basic facts — statistics about geography or demographics, things like that — then as far I can tell, and as far as I've ever heard, those are fairly accurate. They are probably not much less reliable than any traditionally fact-checked source.
One of the ways we get things wrong is by belonging to a community that enforces, often tacitly, one set of beliefs while obscuring or rejecting another. Do you think Wikipedia constitutes a community in that sense, and if so, how would you describe its belief system?
If you're talking about political biases, I actually think that that's one of Wikipedia's least-worst problems. [Laughs] It's really not as bad as the people at, say, Conservapedia seem to think. I do think that there is a liberal bias on most topics where such a bias is possible, and I think that's probably a reflection of the fact that, again, the people who work the most on Wikipedia tend to be really comfortable with the most radically egalitarian views. And those people tend to be either liberals or libertarians.
I think the kind of biases that are in some ways more interesting and more pervasive have to do with individual biases not on political issues but on a host of very specific academic issues. An article can reflect the bias of a few people who just happen to be most motivated to work on it. This is a general problem with Wikipedia: What is praised as consensus decision-making or crowd-sourcing often just means that the person with the loudest voice or the most time on his or her hands is the one who's going to win.
Do you think that as information technology changes, the responsibility of getting it right is changing, too? Is the onus shifting away from the creator of information and toward the consumer?
I think the people who are putting the information out in front of an audience and presenting it as factual are the people who are responsible for it. Unless we're actually in there editing the articles, then it doesn't make sense to say that we have an obligation to make sure that the article reads the way it ought to read.
But maybe the question is, how ought we to read it? Should people use Wikipedia in the same way they would use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, or do we need to start thinking and acting differently?
What Wikipedians themselves would say — and I agree with them on this one — is that Wikipedia has finally awakened in people an understanding that even carefully edited resources can frequently be wrong and have to be treated with skepticism and that ultimately we are responsible for what we believe. That means constantly going back and checking what we thought was established or what we thought we knew. Wikipedians often say that you should never trust any one source, including Wikipedia.
That's not anything new; it's always been the case that you should check your source against another source. It's just that the way that the Internet has exposed the editorial process has, for more critical-minded people, made it absolutely plain just how much responsibility we ourselves bear to believe the right thing.
Which online resources do you yourself turn to most often when you're looking for information?
Which resources I turn to greatly depend on what sort of information I'm looking for. One of my favorite information resources is Google Maps and Bing Maps . I've often used Google Scholar for an essay I've been working on lately. When I'm looking for some quick fact, of the sort one finds from an almanac or other reference book, I generally search in Google and then pick a non-Wikipedia source. If there doesn't seem to be anything as efficient, I'll fall back on the Wikipedia source. If I'm doing serious research, I don't spend much time on Wikipedia at all, I'm afraid. I do look in on Citizendium's offerings from time to time, when I think it might have something on the topic. I also not infrequently grab various books from my bookshelves, the old-fashioned way.
When you started Citizendium, what kind of practical measures did you use to try to counteract the problems you'd seen at Wikipedia?
The main policies that distinguish Citizendium from Wikipedia are that we make use of real names [for contributors], we do make a low-key, guiding role for expert editors, and we started the project with some ground rules. I think we certainly did succeed in making a much more polite, collegial project. And the average contribution to Citizendium is of much higher quality than the average contribution to Wikipedia.
As measured by what? Caliber of the writing, caliber of the thought, accuracy of the content?
Everything. All of the above.
One of the objections over at Wikipedia to the idea of assigning a special role to experts was that it would slow growth by creating a bottleneck. Were they right to worry about that? You started Citizendium in 2007 and predicted explosive growth, but you currently have only about 14,000 articles to Wikipedia's 3 million-plus.
I don't think that the way editors participate in the project constitutes a bottleneck at all. If there's one bottleneck that has made it more difficult for us to grow than Wikipedia, it's the sign-up bottleneck. One of the things that allowed Wikipedia to grow explosively and with as little friction as possible is that it was not necessary to even create an account in order to participate. On Citizendium, you have to sign up for an account and get yourself approved with an e-mail address, so that adds some friction, that does constitute a bottleneck.
But beyond that, once you're into the system, if anything there's less friction than in Wikipedia. It's easier to work on articles, you'll experience less resistance on the part of the people who are at work on the wiki with you.
What have you yourself been most wrong about?
[laughs] Oh, boy. That's a hard one. I've been wrong about so many things. I don't know what the most important error is that I've ever made; it would require much more thought to figure that out. But I can tell you the one that bothers me more than any, because it's one that, off the cuff, does seem to have made the biggest difference. When I was getting Wikipedia started, I didn't realize just how deeply important matters of governance were going to be. I wasn't thinking about the problem we would face if we were truly successful. I think there's a lot of things I could have done in the first few months that would have allowed the project to take off the way it did and yet avoided some of the long-term governance issues.
Among other things, I could have established a charter that would allow important editorial decisions to be made through a representative body, as opposed to essentially mob rules — what they [Wikipedians] are pleased to call consensus but which of course really isn't.
What do you think kept you from doing that?
I was constantly thinking about how to manage the project, but most of that was about managing the day-to-day aspects rather than the long term development. I think I was really taken with the success of the project, and I was busy just trying to build it up and encouraging people to get involved. I didn't anticipate the potential downsides.
Whom do you wish you could hear interviewed about being wrong?
Hmm. This is one of those questions where as soon as I hang up I'm going to think of what I should have said. There's any number of people from the Bush administration. And I think it would be very interesting if you could interview Jimmy Wales.
Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .
This blog features Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .


text:
"21st Century Supersister" is a song by the British rock singer Toyah Willcox, released in 2011.

Background
The song was originally written by Toyah and her collaborator Simon Darlow for the 2008 album In the Court of the Crimson Queen, but did not make the final tracklist. It was subsequently re-worked with new lyrics and featured in the 2011 film The Power of Three, in which Willcox starred. The original version was included as the B-side of the digital single and was added to the album for its 2013 reissue.

"21st Century Supersister" and its parent album In the Court of the Crimson Queen are both references to King Crimson, the band formed by Willcox's husband Robert Fripp. King Crimson's most well-known track "21st Century Schizoid Man" appeared on the band's debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King.

Track listing
 Digital single
 "21st Century Supersister" – 3:40
 "21st Century Supersister" (Original Demo) – 3:36

Personnel
 Toyah Willcox – vocals
 Simon Darlow – all instruments, backing vocals, producing, mixing

References

External links
 Official audio stream at YouTube
 The official Toyah website

2008 songs
2011 singles
Toyah Willcox songs
Songs written by Toyah Willcox
Songs written by Simon Darlow

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