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Category: complexity
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How would science be different if humans were different?
How would science be different if humans were different — if we had different physiological limits? Obviously, if our senses were finer, we wouldn't need the same amount of manufactured instrumentation to reach the same conclusions. But there are deeper implications. If our senses were packed denser, and if we could faithfully process and perceive all of the information they collect, we would probably have much more sensitive time perception, or one way or another a much refined awareness of causal relations in the world. This would have the result that raw observation would be a much more fruitful methodology within the practice of natural science, perhaps so much so that we would have much less need for things like laboratory experiments (which are currently very important).
Of course, a big part of the practice of science is the practice of communication, and that becomes clear as soon as we change language. Language is sort of a funny way to have to get things out of one head and into another. It is slow, awkward, and very imperfect. If "language" was perfect — if we could transfer our perfect memories of subjective experience directly to each other's heads with the fidelity of ESP — there would be almost no need for reproducibility, one of the most important parts of science-as-we-know-it. Perfect communication would also supersede the paratactic writeups that scientific writing currently relies on to make research reproducible. It may be that in some fields there would be no articles or tables or figures. Maybe there would still be abstracts. And if we had unlimited memories, it's possible that we wouldn't need statistics, randomized experiments, or citations either.
The reduction in memory limits would probably also lead to changes in the culture of science. Science would move faster, and it would be easier to practice without specialized training. The practice of science would probably no longer be restricted to universities, and the idea of specialized degrees like Ph.D.s would probably be very different. T.H. Huxley characterized science as "organized common sense." This "organization" is little more than a collection of crutches for our own cognitive limits, without which the line between science and common sense would disappear entirely.
That's interesting enough. But, for me, the bigger implication of this exercise is that science as we know it is not a Big Thing In The Sky that exists without us. Science is fundamentally human. I know people who find that idea distasteful, but chucking human peculiarities into good scientific practice is just like breaking in a pair of brand-new gloves. Having been engineered around some fictional ideal, your gloves aren't most useful until you've stretched them here and there, even if you've also nicked them up a bit. It's silly to judge gloves on their fit to the template. In practice, you judge them on their fit to you.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2015 and is filed under complexity, nescience, science, systems of culture.
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Sailing west down the Panama Canal will get you into which ocean?
The Atlantic.
And when you get to the Pacific, and sail up to L.A., you can drive west toward Reno. WHile we're at it, there is also a sliver of the world where the timezones go backward. Thank you geopolitics.
Photo from Wikipedia.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2014 and is filed under complexity, life and words.
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Don't let Airbnb, Uber, or Peers redefine sharing
When thought leaders are VC-funded you have to be careful. Market cheerleaders Peers and SOCAP associated themselves with alternative economics by holding a conference about sharing economies. The message seems to be that market exchange can be called sharing when it happens between web users. It reads to me like pressure to paint orthodox concepts with the glow of the exciting discourse around alternative economic models. Fortunately, conference participants wasted no time critiquing their magnanimous hosts. But even the most well-developed criticisms seem to be buying into the reframing that sharing is a satisfactory word for what happens on sites like Airbnb.
It sounds like one purpose of the Share Conference was to raise a question, What is sharing really? The implication is that these inspiring revolutionaries are pushing the idea in new directions, and that it needs to be revised to accommodate their bigness. That's bunk. The word share is fine meaning precisely what it means, to divide ownership of a resource. The word exchange means something different, to give a resource in return for another of equal value, and a thesaurus isn't a dictionary. People who want to read market exchange as sharing are up to something, some combination of
Selling a product
Associating themselves with freshness
Assuring themselves that they are Good People doing Good Things
Don't get me wrong, markets are great, and they are capable of doing a great job of distributing resources in uncertain environments. But they aren't new, and as inventiveness goes, opening new resources to market distribution is a relatively unimaginative application of the web. These entrepreneurs are following an old, distinguished formula, and there are lots of great words for that, but 'revolutionary' isn't one of them. I use Airbnb, and I've been impressed by Uber, but if you want me to believe that these contributions are new, then I'm bored. For me, there is only one interesting question in this space: Why do the developers of these market institutions want to think of themselves as facilitators of a fluffy value like sharing? There is some branding in there, but I think there's something more. I think that expressions like the Share Conference are the sound of successful entrepreneurs trying to drown out their own quiet doubts about market ideology.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2014 and is filed under complexity.
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What polished bronze can teach us about crowdsourcing
Crowds can take tasks that would be too costly for any individual, and perform them effortless for years — even centuries.
You can't tell the crowd what it wants to do or how it wants to do it.
More polished parts
Also common: noses, hands, and feet.
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 22nd, 2013 and is filed under complexity, science, systems of culture.
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The market distribution of the ball, a thought experiment.
The market is a magical thing. Among other things, it has been entrusted with much of the production and distribution the world's limited resources. But markets-as-social-institutions are hard to understand because they are tied up with so many other ideas: capitalism, freedom, inequality, rationality, the idea of the corporation, and consumer society. It is only natural that the value we place on these abstractions will influence how we think about the social mechanism called the market. To remove these distractions, it will help to take the market out of its familiar context and put it to a completely different kind of challenge.
Basketball markets
What would basketball look like if it was possible to play it entirely with markets, if the game was redesigned so that players within a team were "privatized" during the game and made free of the central planner, their stately coach: free to buy and sell favors from each other in real time and leave teamwork to an invisible hand? I'm going to take my best shot, and in the process I'll demonstrate how much of our faith in markets is faith, how much of our market habit is habit.
We don't always know why one player passes to another on the court. Sometimes the ball goes to the closest or farthest player, or to the player with the best position or opening in the momentary circumstances of the court. Sometimes all players are following the script for this or that play. Softer factors may also figure in, like friendship or even the feeling of reciprocity. It is probably a mix of all of these things. But the market is remarkable for how it integrates diverse sources of information. It does so quickly, adapting almost magically, even in environments that have been crafted to break markets.
So what if market institutions were used to bring a basketball team to victory? For that to work, we'd have to suspend a lot of disbelief, and make a lot of things true that aren't. The process of making those assumptions explicit is the process of seeing the distance of markets from the bulk of real world social situations.
The most straightforward privatization of basketball could class behavior into two categories, production (moving the ball up court) and trade (passing and shooting). In this system, the coach has already arranged to pay players only for the points they have earned in the game. At each instant, players within a team are haggling with the player in possession, offering money to get the ball passed to them. Every player has a standing bid for the ball, based on their probability of making a successful shot. The player in possession has perfect knowledge of what to produce, of where to go to have either the highest chances of making a shot or of getting the best price for the ball from another teammate.
If the player calculates a 50% chance of successfully receiving the pass and making a 3-point shot, then that pass is worth 1.5 points to him. At that instant, 1.5 will be that player's minimum bid for the ball, which the player in possession is constantly evaluating against all other bids. If, having already produced the best set of bids, any bid is greater then that possessing player's own estimated utility from attempting the shot, then he passes (and therefore sells) to the player with the best offer. The player in possession shoots when the probability of success exceeds any of the standing bids and any of the (perfectly predicted) benefits of moving.
A lot is already happening, so it will help to slow down. The motivating question is how would reality have to change for this scheme to lead to good baskeball? Most obviously, the pace of market transactions would have to speed up dramatically, so that making, selecting, and completing transactions happened instantaneously, and unnoticably. Either time would have to freeze at each instant or the transaction costs of managing the auction institution would have to be reduced to an infinitesimal. Similarly, each player's complex and inarticulable process of calculating their subjective shot probabilities would have to be instantaneous as well.
Players would have to be more than fast at calculating values and probabilities, they would also have to be accurate. If players were poor at calcuating their subjective shot probabilities, and at somehow converting those into cash values, they would not be able to translate their moment's strategic advantage into the market's language. And it would be better that players' bids reflect only the probability of making a shot, and not any other factors. If players' bids incorporate non-cash values, like the value of being regarded well by others, or the value of not being in pain, then passes may be over- or under-valued. To prevent players from incorporating non-cash types of value the coach has to pay enough per point to drown out the value of these other considerations. Unline other parts of this thought experiment, that is probably already happening.
It would not be enough for players to accurately calculate their own values and probabilities, but those of every other player, at every moment. Markets are vulnerable to assymmetries in information. This means that if these estimates weren't common knowledge, players could take advantage of each other artificially inflating prices and reducing the efficiency of the team (possibly in both the technical and colloquial senses). Players that fail to properly value or anticipate future costs and benefits will pass prematurely and trap their team in suboptimal states, local maxima. To prevent that kind of short-sightedness, exactly the kind of shortsightedness that teamwork and coaching are designed to prevent, it would be necessary for players to be able to divine not only perfect trading, but perfect production. Perfect production would mean knowing where and when on the court a pass or a shot will bring the highest expected payoff, factoring in the probability of getting to that location at that time.
I will be perfectly content to be proven wrong, but I believe that players who could instantaneously and accurately put a tradable cash value on their current and future state — and on the states of every other player on the court — could use market transactions to create perfectly coherent teams. In such a basketball, the selfish pursuit of private value could be manuevered by the market institution to guarantee the good of the team.
With perfect (instantaneous and accurate) judgement and foresight a within-team system of live ball-trading could produce good basketball. But with those things, a central planner could also produce good basketball. Even an anarchist system of shared norms and mutual respect could do so. In fact, as long as those in charge all share the goal of winning, the outputs of all forms governance will become indistinguishable as transaction costs, judgement errors, and prediction errors fall to zero. With no constraints it doesn't really matter what mechanisms you use to coordinate individual behavior to produce optimal group behavior.
So the process of making markets workable on the court is the process of redeeming any other conceivable form of government. Suddenly it's trivial that markets are a perfect coordination mechanism in a perfect world. The real question is which of these mechanisms is the closest to its perfect form in this the real world. Markets are not. In some cases, planned economies like board-driven corporations and coach-driven teams probably are.
What undermines bosshood, what undermines a system of mutual norms, and what undermines markets? Which assumptions are important to each?
A coach can prescribe behavior from a library of taught plays and habits. If the "thing that is the best to do" changes at a pace that a coach can meaningfully engage with, and if the coached behavior can be executed by players on this time scale, than a coach can prescribe the best behavior and bring the team close to perfect coherence.
If players have a common understanding of what kinds of coordinated behavior is the best for what kinds of situations, and they reliably
and independently come to the same evaluation of the court, than consensual social norms can model perfect coherence satisfactorily.
And if every instant on the court is different, and players have a perfect ability to evaluate the state of the court and their own abilities, then an institution that organizes self-interest for the common good will be the one that brings it closest to perfect coherence
Each has problems, each is based on unrealistic assumptions, each makes compromises, and each has its place. But even now the story is still too simple. What if all of those things are true at different points over the course of a game? If the answer is "all of the above," players should listen to their coach, but also follow the norms established by their teammates, and also pursue their own self-interest. From here, it is easy to see that I am describing the status quo. The complexity of our social institutions must match the complexity of the problems they were designed for. Where that complexity is beyond the bounds that an individual can comprehend, the institutional design should guide them in the right direction. Where that complexity is beyond the bounds of an institution, it should be allowed to evolve beyond the ideological or conceptual boxes we've imposed on it.
Relative to the resource systems we see every day, a sport is a very simple world. The rules are known, agreed upon by both teams, and enforced closely. The range of possible actions is carefully prescribed and circumscribed, and the skills necessary to thrive are largely established and agreed upon. The people are occupying each position are world-class professionals. So if even basketball is too complicated for any but an impossible braid of coordination mechanisms, why should the real world be any more manageable? And what reasonable person would believe that markets alone are up to the challenge of distributing the world's limited resources?
It took a year and a half to write this. Thanks to Keith Taylor and Devin McIntire for input.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 4th, 2013 and is filed under complexity, science, self-published abstracts, systems of culture.
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The birthplace of Western civilization was killed during the birth of Western civilization.
Deforestation from Classical Period (~1000BCE and on) mettallurgy in the Holy Land dramatically amplified the effects of an otherwise small regional trend towards a warmer and drier climate. Before 10,000 years ago, we were in a different geological and human era and you can't say too much about civilization. But starting at 10,000 until 2,000 years ago that part of the fertile crescent is known to have been fertile. And from 2,000 years to the present, it has been a desert. On learning about metal, locals supported their furnaces by making the region one that is no longer covered in forests. The authors of the paper below showed that semi-arid climates are particularly vulnerable to the kinds of changes caused by humans. "Water availability" is the important variable for life on the ground. In semi-arid climates, a large change in rainfall actually has little effect on water availability. However, a large change in ground cover (trees) has a huge effect. Trees hold water, in and on themselves, but their biggest role is keeping soil in place. A tablespoon of healthy soil has the surface area of a football field, making soil one of the best ways to keep water in an ecosystem.
This is all from a very academic, but really fascinating interdisciplinary book "Water, Life, and Civilisation." A bunch of people out of U. of Reading in the UK had a multi-year project to reconstruct ancient climate and habits. They went across disciplines (meteorology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, biology, sociology, geography) and therefore methods (lit reviews and metaanalyses, digging (taking biological samples, cultural samples, building samples, rock samples, water samples, cave samples, and other fieldwork), qualitative fieldwork, policy analysis, computer simulation, model fitting, GIS, carbon dating, isotope dating, and agricultural experiments. They even invented some new methods under the heading of archaeobotany). With these methods you gain amazing insight into the past. The authors can show how bad floods got, that wells dried up, that agriculture was adapted for dry vs. wet climates, and that populations swelled or dwindled.
Focusing on one site, Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan, they show high absorption of water by soil ("infiltration"), less runoff, and less evidence of floods during the early and middle Holocene (12—5 thousand years before present). "This hydrological regime would have provided an ideal niche for the development of early agriculture, providing a predictable, reliable, and perennial groundwater supply, augmented by gentle winter overbank flooding." By contrast, "During the late Holocene (4, 2 ka BP), the hydrology of the Wadi Faynan was similar to that of today, a consequence of reduced infiltration caused by industrial-scale deforestation to support metallurgical activity."
They add,
A review of regional and local vegetation histories suggests that major landscape changes have occurred during the Holocene. There appears to be consensus that the early Holocene in the Levant was far more wooded than the present day (Rossignol-Strick, 1999; Roberts, 2002; Hunt et al., 2007), as a consequence of small human populations and prevailing warm, wet climates. Since mid-Holocene times, the combined trends of increasing aridity and human impact upon the landscape have combined to cause deforestation and erosion of soils. In Wadi Faynen, there is clear evidence that Classical period industrial activity would have played a significant role in this process. We propose that these changes would have greatly reduced infiltration rates in Wadi Faynan since the middle Holocene.
This chapter stood out for looking at how humans influenced climate, where all of the others focused on the equally important subject of how climate affected humans. But this was just one fascinating chapter of a fascinating book. A lot of the meteorology and geology was over my head, but using computer simulations calibrated on today and other knowns, and managing their unknowns cleverly, they got a computer model of ancient climate at the regional scale. Using that they got various local models of ancient precipitation. They complimented that guesswork with fieldwork in which they used the sizes of surviving cisterns, dams, gutters, roofs, and other ancient evidence of water management to estimate the amount of rainfall, the extent of floods, the existence of this or that type of sophisticated irrigation, and other details at the intersection of hydrology, archaeology, and technology. They learned about how resource limits constrained human settlements by examining regional patterns in their placement: early and high settlements tended to be near springs while later on they tend to be on the roads to larger cities. They used extra clever carbon and nitrogen dating to learn what the livestock were fed, what the humans were eating, and if a given area had mostly desert or lush plants. They can prove using differences in the bone composition of pigs and goats from the same period that they were raised on different diets. And with almost no evidence from surviving plants or surviving fields they were still able to infer what plants were being cultivated, and by what kind of sophisticated agriculture. Every plant makes microscopic sand crystals and in arid environments, these crystals are the same for plants grown yesterday and plants grown thousands of years ago. Because different plants grow crystals of different shapes, they were able to identify date palms at 1000 years before date palms were thought to have been domesticated. The crystals also shed light on ancient irrigation technology. By growing some grain crops with different kinds of technology and examining the resulting crystals, they showed that the clumpy crystals they were finding in ancient sites could only have come from grain fields with sophisticated irrigation systems.
Altogether, I'm impressed by how much we can know about ancient life and climate when we combine the strengths of different disciplines. I'm also afraid. For me, the natural place to go from here is to Jared Diamond's Collapse for more examples of how civilisations have followed the resources around the world and then burned them down, and for what we might be able to do about it.
The book was Water, Life, and Civilisation; Climate, Environment, and Society in the Jordan Valley (Steven Mithen and Emily Black Eds.) Cambridge Universiity Press International Hydrology Series. The chapter I focused on was number fifteen:
Sean Smith, Andrew Wade, Emily Black, David Brayshaw, Claire Rambeau, and Steven Mithen (2011) "From global climate change to local impact in Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan: ten millenia or human settlement in its hydrological context."
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2013 and is filed under books, complexity, science, systems of culture.
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Ouroboros and the failures of complex systems
This is a little intense, it should be enough to just watch enough of the initial seconds to satisfy yourself that Ouroboros exists. I'd post a photo, but the photo I saw seemed photoshopped. That's how I found the video.
A complex system has failed to integrate the proper information into its decision. I'd guess that the cause is a badly designed environment (what looks like a zoo enclosure) presenting an otherwise well-designed snake with exactly the wrong pattern of information. That said, the mere fact of the Ouroboros myth makes it conceivable that this can happen in the wild.
Was this a failure of information diffusion in a distributed local-information system? Or was it a failure of a properly informed top-down system suppressing the right information and amplifying the wrong information? We don't know, we don't really have the language to articulate that question in a manner that it can be answered. In that respect this is not just a failure of a complex system, but a failure of complex systems, the field.
The "Ant well" is less ambiguously a failure of a decentralized system. It happens in the wild, when the head of a column of army ants short circuits. Millions of ants start marching in circles until too many have died to close the circuit. And here is a magically functional decentralized system. What does decentralized mean here? Does it mean the same thing in all three examples? How is it different from bottom-up, feedback, distributed, local, networked, hierarchical, modular, or any other concept? We're still working on that. At least there's more video than vocabulary out there.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 and is filed under complexity, science, videos.
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In PLOS ONE: Cyclic dynamics driven by iterated reasoning
This paper, published with my advisor Rob Goldstone, reports a major result of my dissertation, that people can flock not only physically, but also in their depth of iterated reasoning through each other's motives. It is interesting because of the many economists who hoped that type of reasoning would prevent flocking. Ha!
* Here is the paper: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056416
which follows the preprint
* One-minute video of this emergent cyclical behavior: http://vimeo.com/50459678
* Three-minute video explaining it in terms of the movie The Princess Bride: http://posterhall.org/igert2012/posters/218
* And here is a press release draft to give you a sense of it:
Rock-Paper-Scissors reveals herd behavior in logical reasoning
"Poor Bart, always picks Rock." In these telling words from Lisa Simpson, we see Rock-Paper-Scissors as a game of mind reading. Scientists have already used Rock-Paper-Scissors to study how we cooperate, to show that we are bad randomizers, and to build AIs that can beat us at our own game. But this simple game has many more tricks up its sleeve. Rock-Paper-Scissors gives us the ideal case study for herd behavior in higher-level reasoning: specifically, thoughts about the thoughts of others. You would like to think that your thoughts are your own, but recent work from the Indiana University Cognitive Science program shows that people playing Rock-Paper-Scissors subtly influence each other, converging on similar ways of reasoning over time. The natural analogy is to a flock of birds veering in concert.
In work appearing in PLoS ONE (XXX), Seth Frey and Robert L. Goldstone introduce a version of Rock-Paper-Scissors called the Mod Game. In each round, they gave IU psychology undergraduates a choice between the numbers 1 through 24. Participants earned money for picking a number exactly one greater than someone else, but the choices wrapped around in a circle so that 1 beat 24 (just as Ace beats King in card games). Participants just had to anticipate what others were going to pick, and pick the next number up — keeping in mind that everyone else was thinking the same thing. In this game of one-upmanship, the best performers aren't the ones who think the most steps ahead, but the ones who think just the right number of steps ahead — about two, as it turned out in the experiment.
Many economists predict that with enough experience, people should be able to think infinite steps ahead, or at least that their number of steps should increase dramatically over time. But this isn't what happened in the Mod Game. Instead, when participants were shown each previous round's results, they tended to cluster in one part of the circle of choices and start bounding around it in synch. Groups produced a compelling periodic orbit around the choices, reminiscent of the cultural pendulum swinging back and forth, bringing, say, moustaches in and out of fashion. Interestingly, the cycling behavior consistently got faster with time. This means that people did learn to think further ahead with time — the economic prediction was partly correct — but the increase was much less dramatic than it ought to have been: after 200 rounds of the Mod Game, the average number of thinking steps increased by only half a step, from 2 to 2.5. Moreover, herding in this game benefited everyone; a tighter grouping of choices means a higher density of money to be earned in each round.
What does all this mean for society? Typical treatments of higher-level reasoning look to it as preventing herd behavior, but we can now see it as a source. Anticipation may be the motor that keeps fads running in circles. It could be a source of the violent swings that we see in financial markets. And if you've ever been in a bidding war on Ebay, you may have been caught in this dynamic yourself. If every bidder is tweaking their increasing bids based on the tweaks of others, then the whole group may converge in price and in how those prices rise. The process isn't governed by the intrinsic value of that mint Star Wars lunch box you're fighting for, but on the collective dynamics of people trying to reason through each other's thoughts. Whether looking at benign social habits or mass panics, social theorists have always treated human herd behavior as though it resulted from mindlessness. But this simple lesson from Rock-Paper-Scissors suggests that even the most sophisticated reasoning processes may be drawn about by the subtle influence of social interaction.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 and is filed under complexity, science, updates.
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Political use of the rhetoric of complex systems
I'm excited about the field called "complex systems" because it reflects of best of science's inherent humility: everything affects everything, and we oughtn't pretend that we know what we're doing. I think of that as a responsible perspective, and I think it protects science from being abused (or being an abuser) in the sociopolitical sphere. So imagine my surprise to discover that the "everything affects everything" rhetoric of complex systems, ecology, and cybernetics was leveraged by tobacco companies in the 1990s to take attention away from second-hand smoke in office health investigations. Second-hand smoke wasn't causing sickness, the hard-to-pin-down "sick building syndrome" was. For your reading pleasure, I've pulled a lot of text from "Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty," by Michelle Murphy. I've focused on Chapter 6, "Building ecologies, tobacco, and the politics of multiplicity." Thanks to Isaac.
The meat of the chapter is pp. 146-148, and on a bit:
In the 1980s, the largest building investigation company was healthy Buildings Internations (HBI), located in Fairax, Virginia. HBI had been a modest ventilation cleaning service called ACVA Atlantic until the Tobacco Institute, an industry lobby group, contacted its president, Gray Robertson 46. Tobacco companies hoped to thwart the regulation of secondhand smoke in workspaces, restaurants, bars, and public spaces. Sick building syndrome appealed to the Tobacco Institute because it drew attention to the multiple causes of indoor pollution. Only a few cases of SBS had been attributed to tobacco smoke, a fact that Robertson, HBI, and the literature sponsored by the Tobacco Institute emphasized over and over 47. Soon the Tobacco Institute and Philip Morris were building a database together on sick building syndrome cases, collecting a literature review, and contacting sympathetic indoor air quality experts who could spread news of sick building syndrome. In 1988, five big tobacco companies found the nonprofit Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR), which quickly became the largest nongovernmental source of funding for indoor air pollution studies.
Robertson, with a monthly retainer from the Tobacco Institute, began to underbid other companies for lucrative building investigation contracts in the Washington area–the US Capitol, the CIA headquarters, the Supreme Court, as well as corporate buildings on the East Coast such as the offices of IBM, MCI WorldCom, and Union Carbide. 49. Underwritten by Philip Morris, HBI expanded its scope by publishing a free glossy magazine that distributed over three-hundred thousand copies in multiple languages 50.
While Robertson was promoting sick building syndrome on the road, his company continued collecting data that later became tobacco industry evidence demonstrating that secondhand smoke —— unlike other culprits such as fungi, dust, humidity, bacteria, and formaldehyde —— was rarely a problem in buildings 54. His testimony before city councils, in court cases, and at federal hearings was pivotal to the tobacco industry's case that secondhand smoke was not a substantive indoor pollutant and thus not in need of regulation 55.
the effort was so successful that the Tobacco Institute launched similar promotions of SBS in Canada, Hong Kong, and Venezuela.
Healthy Buildings International was not the only building investigation company wooed by the tobacco industry, nor was the Tobacco Institute the only industry association invested in derailing possible regulation of indoor pollution 60. The Business Council on Indoor Air, founded in 1988, represented industry sponsors such as Dow Chemical and Owens-Corning at fifteen thousand dollars for board membership. It too promoted a "building systems approach" 61. In addition, the Tobacco Industry Labor/Management Committee developed a presentation on indoor pollution for unions, creating a coast-to-coast roadshow that ran from 1988 to 1990 62. Conferences, professional associations, and particularly newsletters proliferated in which industry sponsored experts rubbed elbows with independent building investigators.
The appeal of sick building syndrome was that pollution and its effects could be materialized in a way impossible to regulate —— as an unpredictable multiplicity. "Virtually every indoor decoration, building material or piece of furniture sheds some type of gaseous or particulate pollutant," testified Robertson 63. In its manual for building managers, the EPA warned that indoor pollution was "the product of multiple influences, and attempts to bring problems under control do not always produce the expected results" 64. Managing complex relationships among many "factors" and "symptoms" replaced a "naive," "single-minded," and even "dangerous" attention to specific pollutants.
and last,
The implication is that multiplicity was not a quality that could be simply celebrated for its eschewing of reductionism and embracing of diversity. Materializing an object as a multiplicity allowed historical actors to do concrete things about chemical exposure; at the same time, it disallowed and excluded other actions. It was precisely this capacity to exclude specific causal narratives and affirm ambiguity that made ecology and multiplicity such powerful ways to manage the physical corridors of capitalism. p.150
All this comes with interpretation. Murphy takes ecology and cybernetics to be fundamentally "establishment." She documents the affection of management rhetoric for ecological and cybernetic concepts, but she goes further, citing Eugene Odum's declaration of ecosystems ecology as "a new managerial ethos for society" (p.134). Then she moves into buildings, the business of buildings, the rhetoric of buildings as living things, wrapping up with research on the idea of questionnaires.
Throughout the book the author rocks a latent hostility to these concepts and also to criticisms of them. The author pulls the same trick with sick building syndrome itself: criticizing the establishment for not recognizing it as a disease, but also criticizing the people who suffer from it because they are too privileged to have actual problems. I guess that's why they call it critical theory, but I can't help but feel like critical theorists do it as a hyperdefensive maneuver to avoid being vulnerable in front of their own peers. So I did find myself reading past her writing for the content, but there is a lot of that. She collected a ton of evidence, and its an impressive case in showing that everything has got politics.
Here are all of the citations, copied straight out of the footnotes.
46 Myron Levin, "Who's Behind the Building Doctor?"; Mintz, "Smoke Screen."
47. Using its own building investigations as the data, HBI often cited its estimate that tobacco smoke played a role in 3% of SBS cases. However, this obscures incidents when tobacco smoke might have been named as an irritant unassociated with any larger SBS episode.
48. The CIAR was disbanded in 1998 as part of the Master Settlement Agreement.
49. On the sponsorship of Robertson, see Mintz, "Smoke Screen." For a list of buildings the firm investigated, see References, Healthy Buildings Internationsl, Web site, http://www.hbiamerica.com/references/index.htm (accessed Nov. 19, 2003).
51. Healthy Buildings International, "Sick Building Syndrome Causes and Cures," 1991. Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2022889303-9324, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/hpc78e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003).
52. "Business Council on Indoor Air: A Multi-industry Response," 6.
53. Gra Roberston, Healthy Buidings International, Sick Building Syndrome—Facts and Fallacies, Obt. 23, 1991, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, R. J. Reynolds, Bates No. 509915547-5568, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/qbr63d00. Recent Advances in Tobacco Science, v. 17. Topics of Current Scientific Interest in Tobacco Research, Proceedings of a Symposium Presented at the Forty-Fifth Meeting of the Tobacco Chemists' Research Conference (accessed Nov. 27, 2003): 151-52.
54. Healthy Buildings International, "HBI Experience."
55. HBI's relationship with the tobacco industry was revealed in 1992 when a fired employee turn whistle-blower. By 1998 the Master Settlement Agreement, a settlement between the U.S. state attorneys general and major tobacco companies, along with the Tobacco Institute, mandated that the industry release digital snapshots of millions of pages of internal documents, which have since demonstrated the industry's support of indoor air s quality research and investigators, establishing ties not only with Rboertson but a host of other indoor air quality specialists.
56. U.s> Environemtnal Prote tionAgentcy, "Indoor Air Facts." Much of the credit for the successful publication of this pamphlet is due to James Repace, a senior EPA scientist, whistle-cloer, and active NFEE union member, who widely published his rebuttals to the tobacco industry. On the EPA's building assessment approach, see U.S. Envionmental Protection Agency and National Instutute of Occupational Safety and Health, "Building Air Quality."
57. Healthy Buildings International, "About Us," http://www.hbiamerica.com/aboutus/index.htm (accessed Nov. 11, 2003).
59. Gray Robertson, "Sick Building Syndrome," Nov. 18, 1987. Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2061692010-2012, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/pjf49e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003).
60. See, e.g., the role of tobacco industry representatives within ASHRAE; Glantz and Bialous, "ASHRAE Standard 62."
61. Business Council on Indoor Air, "Indoor Air Quality: A Public Healthy Issue in the 1990s; How Will It Affect Your Company?," undated brochure, received on April 11, 1996, and "Building Systems Approach."
62. "Labor Indoor Air Quality Presentations and Events," Jan 1990, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Tobacco Institute, Bates No. TI02120328-0338, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/wht30c00 (accessed Nov. 23, 2003).
63. "Investigating the 'Sick Building Syndrome':ETS in Context," statement of Gray Robertson, president, ACVA Atlantic, Inc., before the National Academy of Sciences Concerning the Contribution of Environmental Tobacco Smoke to Indoor Air Pollution, Jan. 14, 1986, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2021005103-5125, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/epj34e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003) 7.
64. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, "Building Air Quality," x.
65. Robertson, "Investigating the 'Sick Building Syndrome'," 21.
And, as an extra snippet, Here is an excerpt bringing ecology in:
… moreover, the healthfulness of buildings was of deep interest to a selection of industries and their associations, most particularly the chemical, carpet, and tobacco industries. Ecology proved a very useful frame to this set of financially driven actors, each of which brought distinct motivation to the materialization of sick building syndrome. Ecology gave a framework for affirming the nonspecific and multiplous quality of sick building syndrome that was especially appealing to the tobacco industry, which actively resisted regulation. This chapter concludes that the concept of sick building syndrome achieved the prominence it did in the last two decades of the twentieth century largely because of the tobacco industry's efforts to promote an ecological and systems approach to indoor pollution
Sick building syndrome would have looked very different without the cybernetically inflected ecology of the 1970s. 'Ecology' was a word used to describe both a field of study (the scientific discipline of ecology) and an object of study (ecologies that existed in the world). Systems ecology took as its primary focus the study of the abstract patterns of relations between the organic and inorganic elements of a system. An emphasis on the management of the system, on the regulation of its flows, relationships, and second-order consequences, made systems ecology enormously attractive as a management ideology for business. This chapter traces how ecology was used to grant a complex, fluid, and multi causal form to business practices, building systems, and finally to sick building syndrome itself. The foregrounding of relationships defined by contingencies made ecological explanations extremely useful for assembling accounts that did not lay blame for indoor pollution on any one thing. p. 132
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Walter M. Yoka Has Been Selected as the Best Lawyers' 2012 Los Angeles Product Liability Litigation — Defendants Lawyer of the Year
Best Lawyers, the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession, has named Walter M. Yoka as the "Los Angeles Best Lawyers Product Liability Litigation - Defendants Lawyer of the Year" for 2012.
After more than a quarter of a century in publication, Best Lawyers is designating "Lawyers of the Year" in high-profile legal specialties in large legal communities. Only a single lawyer in each specialty in each community is being honored as the "Lawyer of the Year."
Best Lawyers compiles its lists of outstanding attorneys by conducting exhaustive peer-review surveys in which thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. The current 18th edition of The Best Lawyers in America (2012) is based on more than 3.9 million detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.
The lawyers being honored as "Lawyers of the Year" have received particularly high ratings in our surveys by earning a high level of respect among their peers for their abilities, professionalism and integrity.
Steven Naifeh, President of Best Lawyers, says, "We continue to believe — as we have believed for more than 25 years — that recognition by one's peers is the most meaningful form of praise in the legal profession. We would like to congratulate Walter M. Yoka on being selected as the 'Los Angeles Best Lawyers Product Liability Litigation - Defendants Lawyer of the Year' for 2012."
With warm regards,
Steve Naifeh
Best Lawyers
steve.naifeh@bestlawyers.com
T: 213-427-2300 | F: 213-427-2330
http://www.bestlawyers.com
http://twitter.com/#!/BestLawyers
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Most material-producing corporations provide an item assurance following usage which might end up being highly helpful to a resident if a decline in standard shows up once the renovating work is done. Additionally, Seymour workers often also supply warranties for the quality of their service which really should be found as a section of the written contract they offer in the appraisal. Contractors who refuse to furnish this type of warranty are more high risk to use, because they are likely to work with less enduring or high quality items and tools to complete the work. In order to secure an enduring measure of appeal, both a product warranty and a project commitment are required.


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I love doing property inspections! I can do annuity/structured settlement transactions. I also do car title transfers, bill of sale transactions, certified true copies, donations, power of attorney forms, etc. Quotes for wills upon request.
I am available after 4 p.m. Monday-Friday, during lunch hour by appointment, and all day every weekend.
RATES: First Seal: $20, Additional Seal: $10, will discuss rate if more than two (2) seals are required.


On a very hot day in Betim, the court got even hotter from the very first serve, with European champions Zenit Kazan taking things very seriously against debutants Tala'ea El-Geish from Egypt. There was absolutely no room for surprises as Kazan used all of their aces to nail this Pool A game - Maxim Mikhaylov, Wilfredo León and Matthew Anderson led the constellation of stars at a super-solid win by three-nil.
On the next shift, UPCN survived a close first set against hosts Minas Tenis Clube from Brazil, just by 25-22. To those who say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Argentinean champions proved them right as they swept Minas from the court, easily wrapping up the match in the next two chapters.
Finally, it was time for what local fans had been waiting for - Sada Cruzeiro jumping on court to face Taichung Bank from Chinese Taipei, in their first test of their title defence. Firing an awesome total of 11 service points, the reigning champions didn't have to switch gears to ride past Taichung, also in straight sets and even without 60 minutes of contest.
Day 2 in Betim will be highlighted with the first game of Argentina's Bolívar and former mega-champions Trentino from Italy. While the light-blue team will have an all-Argentinean duel against UPCN, Trentino will also play in Pool B, taking on hosts Minas. Once again, local idols Sada Cruzeiro will be in charge of the final act, this time against Tala'ea El-Geish.


Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum • View topic - Adapter to mount Elinchrom SBox on Einstein?
Adapter to mount Elinchrom SBox on Einstein?
Hello. I'm new to the PCB products so bear with me; I've tried finding an answer on this forum but no luck so far. I came across a good used Elinchrom Octa at a great price just after getting my first Einstein. Now I'm trying to find an adapter to mount the Octa on the Einstein. I heard about Kacey Enterprises, but their site is not clear and their response to 3 separate email queries has been... non-existent. Does anyone know if Kacey makes such an adapter, or if there's another option? I really want to try out the Elinchrom/Einstein combo.
Re: Adapter to mount Elinchrom SBox on Einstein?
Generally, you would buy a replacement speedring that is designed for the softbox/light combination you wish to use it for. Elinchrom should have one that fits thier boxes and our lights. I believe they have two lines, one which may be universal fit, and the other (Rotalux?) I think has to come from them.


For shoppers, it should be a more convenient, faster, and less expensive option than delivery. For retailers, it's an opportunity to drive foot traffic to the store and personally engage with customers. When executed properly, click and collect is a win-win. Let's look at why Millennials, the world's largest group of shoppers, are finding that today's click-and-collect experiences don't meet their expectations and how retailers can begin to create a win-win situation.
Like our US shoppers, our U.K. shoppers found disparities in product availability and levels of in-store engagement. One of the most disturbing findings in the U.S. is that when an item is unavailable for store pickup, the consumer is forced to have the item shipped to their home, incurring the delivery fee, which is not even discounted. However, in the U.K. some retailers attach a 3-5 day waiting period until the ordered product could be picked up, and some attach a cost for picking up items that don't meet basket minimums. Yikes! Egad! Really? None of these alternatives are satisfactory—offering a no-cost customer service option that falls way short of meeting expectations of convenient, speedy fulfillment without the cost of delivery.
To manage these risks and realize the full potential of buy online and pickup in store, retailers must mesh the fast-growing appeal of ubiquitous e-commerce (more than 11% of all retail sales) with in-store fulfillment. And they must create a unified commerce experience that boosts e-commerce conversion and in-store foot traffic and increases additional purchases.
The availability and retention of information in and across e-commerce and store channels are fundamental prerequisites for any truly seamless shopping experience. The ability to purchase and flawlessly fulfill wherever a customer wants to shop is fast becoming table stakes for omnichannel retailers. Add to this the significant impact in return merchandise costs from online orders, and click and collect (also known as BOPIS, Buy Online/Pickup In-Store) becomes a highly attractive option for fulfilling orders, bringing customers to the store and opening an opportunity for customer identification, cross-selling and upselling. On a grander scale, click and collect gives omnichannel retailers a critical leg-up in competing with Amazon's convenience and speed.
However, if the retailer is unable to follow the consumer journey through all touch points, glitches in the overall experience highly impede the results from these activities. For click and collect, the critical retail linchpins to ensure noteworthy customer experiences are precise inventory management, powerful order orchestration that puts the goods where you need them in the fastest and most efficient way, and point of sale that is capable of understanding all engagement points and providing the full customer picture to associates. So let's examine how these three areas impact the success of click and collect fulfillment, and what retailers need to do to address potential problems.
Numbers 1, 3, and 4 can be corrected fairly easily with proper processes and training. After being notified that an order is ready for pickup, the last thing a shopper expects at pickup is waiting for staff to gather items from the sales floor or stock room. The first step is ensuring you have technology that can keep your store staff on point and ready for customer pickups. This means driving pick lists to floor associates, ensuring pick, prepare, or ship capabilities will ensure that certain goods are ready for the customer exactly as needed. And finally, there is the need to know the customer who is coming, their buying preferences, and their intentions before they come in the door, so your staff is ready to provide a value-added service to this additional traffic and maximize cross-sell and upsell.
The second and often overlooked step is gathering feedback about the experience by capturing details via your store app or customer reviews on their experience, their feelings for your brand and more. Ensuring you are engaging customers in this digital feedback is absolutely critical to being relevant in today's digital reality.
Customers should tell you how they felt about wait time, communication, service, associate engagement, and overall satisfaction of the experience. Listen, learn, and leverage this feedback to differentiate your brand from the competition.
Finally, you need to drive associate workflows and store operational processes to educate and support engagement of customers during in-store pickups. An investment in training can pay off in additional revenue from cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Staff should be empowered with digital point of sale that prepares them with detailed information on the customer's profile and history that is then used to initiate engagement, and segue into a discussion that includes additional product suggestions.
The human factor is key to mastering the art of click and collect. Our next post will examine how to manage the science (technology) of click and collect and earn customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Contact us if you would like to learn how companies like Molton Brown, Wickes and Discount Tire and changing the face of retail.


So much happened this episode, I hardly know where to begin. Last week, Pike's first move as Chancellor was to pardon himself and prepare to go to war with the Indra's forces. It was clearly a decision born of the attacks his people suffered at the hands of the Ice Nation, but was short sighted in that he didn't for a moment consider that there are different nations for a reason. This week we watched him go off to war with Bellamy in tow and when his forces returned, they had slaughtered the entirety of the army save Indra whose life Bellamy begged for. Bellamy suggested that Indra remain a live in order for her to be able to tell her people that Skaikru was claiming the land for themselves and promised death to any Grounder who violated their new territory. Pike didn't suffer a single loss because of the fact that they had guns and the Grounders did not.
I think in many ways, The 100, have constructed Skaikru to be European conquerors and the Grounders to be Indigenous people. This is a troubling juxtapostion in that Grounders are always presented as backward and Skaikru as forward thinking. I think making this story about colonization is great but for this to really work they need to make the Grounders far more sympathetic. We need to learn more about the culture and their language. The 100 needs to make sure that the audience sees the Grounders as people who in their own way are being wronged. This is particularly true with Pike declaring war.
Pike at this point is really a despicable character and though I can understand that he is acting out of fear and anger, it doesn't even come close to justifying his actions. It's particularly appalling given that on the station, Pike was a teacher, meaning that he better than most should have had some idea about colonialism which is what the theft of the grounder land is. Furthermore imprisoning people is beyond problematic. Pike pulled people out of sickbay claiming that they didn't have enough medical supplies to share. Lincoln was thrown in with the Grounders when he was deemed disruptive. As a teacher, Pike must have learned about minorities being locked up, he must have known about internment camps and he still went ahead and threw them in prison. For the life me, I don't understand why beyond, Abby, Marcus, Octavia and Clarke that no one else can see the harm which will come of this. In earth's history, might is right has always lead to war and oppression. Having the person responsible for the atrocities be a man of colour also flies in the face of exactly who in earth's history has been responsible for things like slavery, internment camps, genocide etc,.
Marcus continues to show us how much he has changed. He's not willing to openly challenge Pike, because Pike won the election fairly. Well, plenty of harmful dictators were originally elected with a mandate that turned out to be destructive. It's a testament to how far his character has grown that I find myself rooting for Marcus of all people.
From the moment Bellamy decided to side with Pike, I very much felt that this decision was out of character for him. As much as Bellamy has been actively involved in the decision making for Skaikru since receiving his pardon, he has very much been in a secondary role, happy to follow the orders of others or even more specifically Clarke. Siding with Pike very much feels like he simply substituted Clarke with the first strong person to come along and to deal with his grief at the loss of girlfriend. I really do think that we need more of an explanation for Bellamy's decision to partner with Pike.
When Octavia sneaks Clarke into Arkadia to discuss the slaughter of the Tree Nation warriors, Clarke is at first convinced that she will be able to talk sense into Bellamy. This is a very emotional scene and it's so well acted, especially on the part of Bob Morley. Bellamy cannot let go of the fact that Clarke left him alone to do the clean up after the events of Mount Weather, and he cannot let go of the fact that they had to look for her and when they finally caught up with her, she turned her back on them to stay with Lexa. Bellamy even brings up Clarke's willingness to drop a bomb on Tondc, even though it endangered so many. Clarke tries to explain that she knew that she could leave because she left their people in good hands - Bellamy's hands but he is not the least bit pacified. If anything, all she does is harden Bellamy's heart.
Lexa is true to form when she first learns about the slaughter and says, "blood must have blood." Clarke does her Gandhi impression and points out that this will just lead to more blood and no end. In a surprise twist, Lexa agrees not to retaliate against Skaikru, even though Indra warns that the members of the council will not accept this decision. I cannot be the only one who doesn't believe for even one second that Lexa is going to follow through on her promise to Clarke. Lexa has already sold Clarke out once and the moment she saw the dead Tree Crew warriors one of her first orders was to ban Clarke from leaving. This is a woman who will always act in her own best interest.
Jaha has made his way back to Arkadia to share the news about the City of Light. Pike is initially concerned that Jaha will pose a threat to his leadership but clearly rights him off as irrelevant when Jaha starts to speak of mental and spiritual healing. Abby is also dismissive when Jaha says that he has found the City of Light and that his dead travelling companion is there now. Jaha is not dissuaded however and he targets Raven because he sees the pain that she is in because of her disability. Given Raven's increasing frustration about her limitations, pain and being taken off of active duty by Abby, it's not surprise at the end when Raven takes the chip from Jaha. I'm really disturbed by this because it positions Raven as the weak link. There are plenty of people in Arkadia who are suffering and could probably use a break from reality but using Raven, erases all of the strength that she has shown. I didn't think it was possible but this scene made me hate Jaha that much more.
In the following weeks, it's clear that The 100 will focus on the fragile truce Clarke has negotiated, Pike's increasingly blood thirsty plans for Skaikru, as well as Jaha's mission from the tech. I still very much think that The 100 needs to move away from the constant war and tensions with the Grounders and go about showing us how Skaikru builds a life. This tension already feels like a reboot to what happened in the first season. They really need to humanise the Grounders as well as make it more explicit that what Pike is planning is colonialism.


We know it's sad when businesses and schools don't caption their videos, but don't feel too bad. In the future it will be better, organisations are getting more aware about inclusive design, and we will continue to tell everyone why open captions are awesome. We want everyone to start captioning their videos and we need to tell them why.
1 – They make sure everyone gets the same message, including those who are deaf.
2 – People with accents like me can be understood easier.
3 – Search engines have more content to search on.
5 – Lastly, it's inclusive and the right thing to do.


Laurie Edwards is a an award-winning writer, editor, and consultant. She teaches writing at Northeastern University and blogs at www.achronicdose.com. Her first book, Life Disrupted: Getting Real About Chronic Illness in Your Twenties and Thirties, was named a 2008 Best Consumer Health Book by Library Journal. Her second book will be published in 2012.


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text:
All posts tagged kurt vonnegut
"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."
Way back in the 4 June issue of The Nation, William Deresiewicz published a review essay about Kurt Vonnegut. As I read Mr Deresiewicz' piece, it dawned on me that I had never read Slaughterhouse-Five. I'd read several of Vonnegut's novels and miscellaneous writings, but had missed the most famous one. Embarrassingly enough, I had talked about Slaughterhouse-Five with a number of people over the years, conversations in the course of which I sincerely, if somewhat vaguely, believed that I had read the book at some point. Once, while still in high school, I even suggested to a friend that we co-author a tribute to Slaughterhouse-Five in comic book form. If he'd taken me up on that, I suppose it would have become clear to both of us quickly enough that I hadn't read it, but we settled on a tribute to Froissart's Chronicles instead.
So, not long after I read that issue, I reported to the library and checked out a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. It was well worth reading. Mr Deresiewicz says that the novel's real subject is not the firebombing of Dresden, but the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that the firebombing bequeathed to Vonnegut and other survivors. Mr Deresiewicz quotes a remark from the beginning of the novel, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." The novel is great, he argues, because Vonnegut doesn't try to offer answers or find meanings. He looks directly at an unintelligible world, a world in which human beings by the thousand can be incinerated in their homes, and does not flinch by looking away to something else, something reassuring in its logic. Instead, the novel's Billy Pilgrim, like Vonnegut in his own authorial voice, says simply, "I was there." Mr Deresiewicz writes:
"I was there," he says. And he adds, "So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare." The moment prefigures the novel's moral climax a few pages before the end. Billy's in a hospital in 1968, after the plane crash. His roommate is a former Air Force general who is working on a history of the Army Air Corps in World War II. He is wealthy, healthy, masterful, accomplished (his name is Rumfoord, by the way), and he dismisses Billy, in his quasi-comatose state, as so much human refuse. He is telling someone that the raid on Dresden had been kept a secret for so long
"For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts…might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do."
It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. "I was there," he said.
"I was there." Meaning not, I suffered, but simply: It happened. It doesn't fit the story that we tell ourselves about the war, but it happened. And I alone escaped to tell the tale. But not completely alone: my old war buddy was there as well, which means you can't dismiss me as a lunatic. I was there. Or as the novel's famous invocation, thrice repeated, puts it: Listen.
"I was there"—not, "The death of Dresden was a bitter tragedy, needlessly and willfully executed." The sentence comes from a short, unpublished manuscript, included in the Library of America edition, that Vonnegut had worked on in the years immediately following the war. Before he could write the novel, I believe, he needed to surrender that sense of judgment. "It had to be done," Rumfoord finally says to Billy. "I know," Billy replies, "everybody has to do exactly what he does."
Elsewhere in the novel, Vonnegut explicitly disavows judgment of the pilots who carried out the raid. He never did blame them, he says; he has known bombers and admired them. He describes the bombs as if they acted on their own, unassisted by human agency. In the novel, that description figures not as a psychological evasion, but as the facing of a supreme horror. A world dominated by malevolence and permeated by guilt would have a structure, and so would be intelligible. As such, even a realm of villainy would be easier to bear than the realm of sheer absurdity into which the massacre introduced its survivors.
In a bit of the novel that Mr Deresiewicz does not quote, Billy Pilgrim and his fellow prisoners are herded into Dresden. The crowd gives Billy dirty looks; one man confronts him and demands to know if he "thought we would laugh"? Billy is confused, then realizes that the miscellaneous items of clothing he has scavenged to cover his nakedness in his weeks as a prisoner adds up to a clown's costume. Here, Billy parallels his creator. Cobbling together a way to tell his story, Vonnegut has gathered up bits of wartime memoir, of science fiction, of midlife-crisis narrative, of soft-core porn, of half a dozen other genres, and pasted them together. The result is a very odd book, at first glance an aggregation as clownish as Billy's costume. It is precisely because Vonnegut is entirely willing to play the fool, to make himself as much a stranger to smart rhetoric as the war has made Billy a stranger to smart attire, that Slaughterhouse-Five is a possession for the ages.
As the Periodicals Notes section of this website attests, I read a lot of magazines. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, I dropped several titles from my list of regular reads. These included The New Statesman, The National Review, The London Review of Books, and The American Spectator. Each of these magazines carried a number of piece about that series of massacres. There were many things to find objectionable about those pieces; certainly the right-wing publications did not cover themselves in glory by arguing that the appropriate response was to adopt policies that would punish all Muslims everywhere, and the others did their reputations no favors when they published remarks such as "the United States had it coming." What I found most rebarbative about all of them was something I couldn't put into words at the time, but Vonnegut crystallizes it perfectly. Each of those commentators, left and right, treated the massacres and their aftermath as a continuation of their lifelong quest to display their own brainpower to the utmost possible advantage. Because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, the result of this contest to be the smartest one was an exhibition of moral idiocy on a spectacular scale.
If we don't endeavor to make intelligent remarks about a massacre, how do we honor the dead it leaves behind? This is typically a religious question, so let's see what we can say about Vonnegut and religion.
As Mr Deresiewicz documents, Vonnegut was raised to be skeptical of conventional religion*:
Vonnegut saw our spiritual anxiety, in the postwar chaos, and as a former public relations man, he knew our mass gullibility. He had also studied anthropology, an experience, he later said, that "confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I'd always thought they were." Now machines were taking control, so we needed to pretend that something else was in control. Or as he puts it in The Sirens of Titan, "Gimcrack religions were big business." The Age of Aquarius surely came as no surprise to him—the age of crystals and gurus and mystical hucksters. Charles Manson and Jim Jones surely came as no surprise, and neither did L. Ron Hubbard, a man who started writing science fiction but decided he was writing Scripture.
If we reject the belief systems and hierarchies of traditional religions and the rites that go with them, how do we go about honoring the dead? I think I detect a kindred spirit in the Vonnegut/ Deresiewicz emphasis on "I was there, and so was Bernard V. O'Hare." We honor the dead by remembering them. To do this we must turn our attention from ourselves and focus it on them, on them as they were individually and as they interacted with each other in groups. To sustain this focus we must resist the temptation to retreat into distractions, whether those distractions take the form of ideologies that make our losses bearable or of activities in which we ourselves become again the center of attention. We must give the dead our undivided attention, if only for a moment, if we are to honor them.
Religions can certainly be fruitful source of excuses for keeping the focus off the dead. Many funerary rites focus attention on clergy or other performers; many include invitations to dwell on recondite theological doctrines about the relationship between life and death. So I sympathize with opponents of religion like T. H. Huxley who say that respect for the dead requires us to renounce the conventional forms of religion. On the other hand, for many mourners these things quiet their minds and take them outside of themselves, enabling them to maintain a clear, unwavering focus on the dead. And there's nothing to say that persons who find the ritual elements a distraction can't learn to respond to them in the desired way. After all, the others learned it; no religious practice comes instinctively to anyone, even if there is an instinct for something called religion in general. So even proceeding from my idea that mourning should be a matter of focusing our attention on the dead, we don't find an argument against funerary rites.
Of course, funerary rites do something else as well. They reassure the mourners that the remembrance of the dead is not a burden they will carry alone, but a bond they share with their community. Funerary rites aren't the only social practices that give that assurance; one of the reasons we want medical professionals to make heroic efforts to save our loved ones is that we want to know that those professionals will remember them, at least as an interesting case. When someone is to blame for the death of a loved one, we want the same attention from the criminal justice system, in part for the same reason. That's probably why murder mysteries are so popular. Some time ago, I saw an episode of Columbo on some cable TV channel that specializes in nostalgia. Lieutenant Columbo had caught the murderer hiding the victim's body. In his bizarrely friendly way, Lieutenant Columbo was trying to keep the murderer from feeling too bad about himself, telling him, "Dead bodies have a way of turning up." In reality, of course, they don't. The only thing dead bodies actually have a way of doing is decomposing. Given enough time, it will be as if the dead had never lived. That may well be the world's most unbearable fact. Many years ago, my wife lost her closest friend to an act of violence that was never investigated; with each passing year, fewer people remember her, and her family's burden grows more obvious.
Medicine and the criminal justice system, whatever their virtues, are never entirely satisfactory substitutes for funerary rites. A course of medical treatment is an exercise in technology and finance that revolves around the person of a patient, but is never simply a tribute to that patient; a criminal proceeding is an exercise in institutionalized conflict in the course of which a person who is unavailable to participate actively is likely to vanish from view altogether.
Many people recommend political action as a way to honor the dead. I'm all for democracy, and I understand the power of martyrs to arouse a citizenry to action. So I'm not opposed to the idea of waging a campaign for reform in the name of some dead person. But consider. Every political dispute is complex; every political issue shades into other, related issues, and every person who takes part in a political disagreement is pursuing several objectives at once. To turn a person into a political symbol, therefore, is likely to make it virtually impossible to focus our undivided attention on that person. Again, not everyone sees that focus as the essence of honoring the dead; some may define honoring the dead in a way that begins and ends with the political utility of martyrdom, or in other ways that put a low priority on memory of them as they were. But for me, and perhaps for Vonnegut, the key thing is to meet the dead on their own terms, not to impose our preconceived notions on them or to lose sight of them in the midst of some other activity.
If we say that our ways of honoring the dead are part of our religion, whether we belong to any recognized religious tradition or not, then Vonnegut and I may share a religion. Moreover, at least in my version of that unnamed religion, politics is not part of the funerary rites by which we honor the dead. The rites of the various religious traditions that do have names and belief systems and hierarchies aren't really part of it either, though they can serve the same purpose. What is a part of it? How do we go about focusing our attention simply on a person, not on desires and ideas of our own that we may associate with that person?
In a post a few years ago, I quoted a man who had said that his way of praying for a person was to hold an image in his mind of that person against a plain white background. This meditative exercise does not involve any words; that way he isn't tempted to wish things on the person, or to try to recruit God as an ally in an effort to make the person do what he thinks is right. Instead, it enables him to see the person clearly, to listen to what the person is actually saying, to accept the person as s/he is, and to respect his or her journey in life. I've tried this exercise myself on many occasions, and can recommend it highly.
So that exercise is part of my religion, if you call it that. Science is part of it, too. Richard Feynman said in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech that in science, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool." My favorite living philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, argues that healthy religious traditions represent lines of inquiry that guide their followers away from particular forms of self-deception. I don't really understand how that is supposed to work; MacIntyre's own religious tradition, as embodied in the Roman Catholic Church, seems to me to be an ever-flowing fountain from which self-deception springs in forms unimagined anywhere else. Be that as it may, science offers its practitioners tools unmatched in any other avenue of human pursuit for disabusing oneself of one's pet ideas. Thomas à Kempis said that the highest reward of the contemplative life was that it had enabled him to free himself of a multitude of opinions; to the extent that Thomas's words apply to religious practice in general, scientific inquiry is the most efficient of all forms of worship.
*To be precise about it, the Vonneguts were members of All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana when the novelist was growing up. At that time, the congregation met in a building designed by architect Kurt Vonnegut, Senior. In his maturity, Kurt Vonnegut, Junior did not identify even with the creedless religion of the Unitarians, or the Unitarian-Universalists as they became in 1961.
by acilius on August 16, 2012 • Permalink
Posted in Politics, religion, Science, The Nation, Violence
Tagged alasdair macintyre, funerals, kurt vonnegut, william deresiewicz
Posted by acilius on August 16, 2012
https://losthunderlads.com/2012/08/16/there-is-nothing-intelligent-to-say-about-a-massacre/
Some comments that have appeared on the backup site
I maintain a site on blogspot that consists almost entirely of reposts from this site. This site is a backup, so that I won't lose too much of my work in case something happens to WordPress. As of now, there is little reason for anyone to read that site.
Every so often, a person offers a comment on the blogspot site. I rather feel for these people, since there is virtually no chance that anyone but me will see what they have written, and I will occasionally go for weeks or even months on end without checking. So, early in July, someone posting under the screen name "erplus" wrote this, in reply to my notes on an essay on theoretical studies in biology that Miriam Markowitz wrote for The Nation magazine last year:
please see the reader letter below which The Nation refused to publish neither in print nor online; tell me about esprit du corps.
Miriam Markowitz did not do her home work for an article that contains way too many platitudes imported from secondary sources. Just two examples.
A) Markowitz writes that Darwin's "only explanation for the evolution of sterile insects was the good of the group." This is a lie long peddled by Hamilton and his sycophants. In the The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote clearly that "This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together. An animal thus characterized has been slaughtered, but the breeder has gone with confidence to the same stock and has succeeded" [www.classicreader.com/book/107/59/]. Here "the family" does not stand for the mafia and "stock" does stands for a kin group. These passages and others by Darwin about "kin selection" are highlighted and justly celebrated in DJ Futuyma's textbook of reference Evolutionary Biology and in EO WIlson's Sociobiology. This intellectual heist by the late Hamilton and his sycophants is perhaps the most brazen ever, since it's literally Darwin whom they insist(ed) in trying to rob!
B) Markowitz treats Dawkins as a scientist but he is not. In the said "Evolutionary Biology" textbook, e.g., Dawkins' popular-science books are cited for the metaphoric syllogism about genes with intentionality; otherwise there is only a citation for a paper with trivial applied math. Dawkins indeed has never made a discovery. Had Markowitz talked to say E.Sober or even Futuyma, she would have written a much better article.
Given the above and much much more, Nation readers stand warned that almost nothing in Markowitz article has any depth, especially her cheapo-melodramatic pieties towards the end (albeit certainly not because Dawkins and Co. are right about anything).
I didn't see this comment until Sunday, almost two months after erplus posted it. I felt bad about that, especially since he had asked us about the original posting before turning to the blogspot site. I apologized for my negligence there, and repeat that apology here. Sorry, erplus! I hope you find it in yourself to forgive me.
I have served a couple of other commenters slightly better, at least to the extent of reading their comments in a timely fashion. Charles J. Shields gave us the following:
Just a note to let you know about a book blog I've started with a different twist: "Writing Kurt Vonnegut." Every Saturday, I post another excerpt from my notebook as Vonnegut's biographer— profiles of the people I met, the difficulties encountered, and the surprises, such as finding 1,500 letters he thought he had lost forever. It's a blog written in episodes about being a literary detective.
Perhaps you'd like to give it a look at http://www.writingkurtvonnegut.com
Charles J. Shields
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Holt, November 2011)
That was in response to my repost of "Kurt Vonnegut, Junior, on Extended Families." Writing Kurt Vonnegut is worth a look, and so I thank Mr Shields for letting me know about it.
by acilius on September 6, 2011 • Permalink
Posted in AboutTheBlog, Quick Links
Tagged Acilius, Darwinism, kurt vonnegut, slavery, US Civil War
Posted by acilius on September 6, 2011
https://losthunderlads.com/2011/09/06/some-comments-that-have-appeared-on-the-backup-site/


text:
MainAll NewsDefense/SecurityArab States in Key UN Positions in September
Arab States in Key UN Positions in September
As the PA statehood bid at the UN approaches, Lebanon prepares to chair the Security Council and Qatar the General Assembly.
Gabe Kahn., 09/08/11 21:32
Israel news photo: UN.org
Arab states will be chairing the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly in September as the Palestinian Authority makes its statehood bid.
Lebanon is slated to preside over the Security Council in September while Qatar will head the General Assembly.
Israel's Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor refused to address any possible moves Lebanon's Hizbullah-backed government may make during its tenure in the presidency.
"This is the daily reality we face in the UN. It requires double the effort in an arena which has an automatic majority against us," Prosor told reporters.
Qatar begins its one-year General Assembly presidency term in September, where Arab states enjoy an automatic majority.
The General Assembly, however, cannot admit a new state to the United Nations without the consent of the security council.
There, Lebanon's Ambassador to the UN Nawaf Salam will have the customary privilige of raising one one special topic for discussion by the Security Council.
Beirut may raise the issue of PA statehood for a vote in the Security Council even without serving as president if the Arab League and the PA follow through on their plans to raise the issue.
It may also raise other subjects, however, such as the oil fields Israel is developing of its northern coast, on which the Hizbullah-backed government in Lebanon has made a counter-claim.
Iran came out in support of Lebanon's claims on Monday, prompting the IAF to deploy drones over the disputed gas fields in the event of attack.
It is unclear whether the Security Council president has the authority to invite a speaker who is not its citizen, such as Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
But observers say it may not matter what Lebanon decides to do, or who it invites to speak, as the US has telegraphed the use of its veto in the Security Council should the PA statehood bid be brought to a vote.
The Security Council has five permanent member states with veto power (The United States, Russia, China, France and Britain).
Tags:UN, General Assembly, UN Security Council, PA Statehood Bid


text:
Q: Qlik sense problem with filtering panel and a graph I am trying to move the old excel to qlik sense, there is a graphic that is made from the previous day. Then that graph has the dimension of date and measurement has the sum of the amounts per month.
So filtering this by day can be done with a filtering panel, but clicking every day to show me everything can be annoying.
My idea was something like a box where you can enter a value, for example a 6, so when typing a 6 I should show the graph from day 1 to 5.
That is my problem, how could it be done? where can I enter some expression or something to the dimension to calculate the days I want in a simple and intuitive way.
Another idea I had, was to create in qlik sense when preparing the data, a new column that content the sum of the amounts of each day, so that value that I want to show would accumulate
What do you recommend? any help is welcome thanks

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


CNC surgical steel body jewellery is made from a high quality 316L surgical stainless steel. It is made to the highest of standards to make sure that it is strong, durable and reliable for a professional finish. We have jewellery suitable for various piercings including navel piercings, ear piercings, nose piercings and much more. Our choice of barbells, ball closure rings, curved barbells, circular barbells and studs ensure that there is something to meet the needs and expectations of every studio. We also have a choice of plain jewellery and jewellery with various coloured jewels to ensure that there is something for every customer.


1,2Department of Electronics and Telecommunication, MGM's JNEC Aurangabad,Maharashtra, India.
Life as we know it would be impossible without electricity. But as our supply of fossil fuels, energy source for electricity, continues to dwindle, we face a majorchallenge. Renewable energy that we get from the environment is a commendable option for providing green energy to homes. A high efficiency power management system for solar energy harvesting applications is proposed. Admiring efforts have been made recently in transforming the power grid into smart grid by means of unifying extensive information and communication infrastructures. In this paper a versatile stochastic optimization approach has been proposed for smart grid, to meet the need of the residential customers in an efficient energy management comprising high penetration of renewable and distributed energy sources, market based online electricity pricing, large scale storage of energy and high quality demand side management, mitigating monetary expense.The concept Boost converter used in this paper increases the throughput of solar panel voltage. Smart energy meter, an added advantage of the proposed system provides a two way communication between the utility board and residential unit.
Snehal D Solunke, Vishwashri A Kulkarni. "A Review Paper On Latest Trends In Distributed Smart Grid Technology." International Conference on Information Engineering, Management and Security (2015): 334-337. Print.


Welcome to the ISU Program for Instructional Effectiveness website! The purpose of this program is to support great teaching by promoting all campus activities related to enhancing instructional effectiveness.
Below you will find a calendar of events occurring across campus that relate to teaching and instructional effectiveness.
Are you organizing a workshop, seminar, speaker, or other activity designed to support and enhance teaching and instructional effectiveness? If so, please click here to get your event on the ISU Program for Instructional Effectiveness website.
Here you will find resources associated with campus-wide activities related to teaching and instructional effectiveness. You can also view our workshop series videos from 2018 below.
Dr. Donna Lybecker, Professor of Political Science at Idaho State University, shares her Great Ideas in Teaching with: "Teaching to Create Communicators."
Dr. Karen Appleby shares her thoughts with "No Social Loafers Here! A Strategy to Design Effective Group Work."
Do you have a question or comment about the ISU Program for Instructional Effectiveness? If so, please email Karen Appleby at applkare@isu.edu.


m2m Imaging have recently commissioned ARRK Australia and New Zealand to produce 15 units of a new subject holding system. The system provides a platform to interchange various products used in MR imaging.
The new subject holding system is a unique product that does not require mass production. Using ARRK silicone tooling and vacuum casting technologies was suitable for m2m Imaging's purposes as it provided a quick turn around and cost effective solution.
The use of vacuum casting enabled the design team to work beyond the usual constraints of conventional injection moulding and machining guidelines. Additionally, by using a cast Poly-urethane, m2m Imaging were able to add vibrant colours to parts that traditionally would have been machined from a white plastic.
The final assembly is a combination of vacuum cast parts, machined parts and off the shelf components as well as sophisticated electronic circuitry. The vacuum cast PU parts integrated seamlessly into the assembly.


Watching sports and betting on the outcome was practiced since ancient times but now it is more organized and easy to do. This is what led to the emergence of companies offering betting tips and picks. If you thought knowing everything about football or any other sport will make you an expert in matters to do with betting then you need to give it another try because that is far from the truth. Winning the bets is more than that. These services have become even more popular since the internet is now widely available. There are some of them which are free but just like any other thing that is free, you are not likely to benefit much from them. The rest of the service providers in this sector will ask for payments. Some sports bettors find themselves on the fence on whether to pay or not. The short answer is that the paid services in betting tips and picks are worth every coin you spend if you pick the right firm to work with. You can get a good return on your investment in this sector if you work with these service providers. Some millionaires have got there because of sports betting but it is a quite tough process if you have no one to help. It is not given that you will become a millionaire but you can still make a good additional income through sports betting if you are dedicated. This task does not require much of your time but the returns are handsome. The subscriptions cater to people with different budgets which is why it is something you should highly consider.
Another thing you should think about before you decide against the betting picks and tips services is how convenient it will be for you. Placing winning bets requires a lot of research and evaluations. If your job is keeping you busy or you are not well versed with sports the this can get tricky. Things will work quite well for you if you are dealing with a firm that will be doing the necessary research for you. Your job will be just paying and waiting for the matches to be completed. When you betting on something with a high likelihood of giving you great returns, there is no question of losing your money.
For best free sports pick you can read more now. If you want free sports picks then Oskeim sports has got you covered. You can click for more here or see page.


Opened the door and just plopped down on my bed and went to sleep. I didn't close my door that night and I always did. Next thing I know I'm woken up to someone talking at my door. Here I am frozen on my bed like who is this.
brothers name. No answer, then I yell it out again... No answer, so I just yelled out stop it Zachary don't mess with me please go to bed.
hear it again after that. After that I closed my eyes, about 15 minutes later I woke up. I felt paralyzed, I couldn't move anything. The hair on my body was standing straight up and I was listening to someone having a full convo with someone else right next to my head.


text:
Q: Input type=file" drag-and-drop IE I'm looking for a way to utilize drag-and-drop with the standard file input tag. It works in Google chrome, but not in internet explorer (11).
What I've done so far is adding a drop-event listener which gives me access to the file in the input parameter.
What I want to do is to add this file to the files of the input element.
HTML:
 <div class="files" id="fieldAttachments">
       <input id="attachments" type="file" class="form-control" droppable />
 </div>

Javascript/angular:
el.addEventListener(
    'drop',
    function(e) {
        debugger;
        if(e.stopPropagation) e.stopPropagation();

        $('#testfilefield').prop("files", e.dataTransfer.files);

        console.log('files added');

    },
    false);

Like I said, this works well in Chrome but not in IE. Any ideas?
Thank you


20. RColony - The RColony package provides tools for the implementation of the Colony pedigree analysis software. In addition it provides tools for visualising, and summarising the results of the Colony analyses.
21. Structural equation modeling - Several SEM related packages are developed for conducting structural equation modeling.
24. Corbi - A collection of bioinformatics tools for general purposes such as network query, protein structure alignment, gene expression analysis.
25. projectr - project directory management - The projectr package for R provides tools for managing project directories programmatically.
28. Computational Statistics: Intro to R - Course material and supplements for a compact course on statistical computing, including an introduction to R.
30. abind: Create multi-dimensional arrays - The abind package supports the use of multi-dimensional arrays. The function abind() is a multidimensional analog of rbind() and cbind(). adrop() and asub() allow arguments to specify dimensions to drop or subset.
31. NlsyLinks - Utilities and kinship information for Behavior Genetics research using the NLSY.
32. Sweave for the Open Document Format - The odfWeave package extends the R's Sweave function to documents saved in the Open Document Format (ODF). This means that users can add R code into their documents and use R to translate the code to output such as images, tables and text.
33. Weighted random subspace method - This project is an implementation of a weighted random subspace method proposed by Xiaoye Li and Hongyu Zhao of Yale University.
34. r2dRue - 2dRUE is a methodology to make a diagnostic of land condition in a large territory during a given time period. Was developed under the DeSurvey IP.
35. afex - Analysis of Factorial Experiments - This project has the goal to provide convenience functions for analyzing factorial experiments, namely provide convenience tools for ANOVA and ANCOVA analyses with type 2 and type 3 sums of squares for classical ANOVA and lmer().
36. cRacker - cRacker automates standard normalization strategies of quantitative proteomic experiments. It simplifies the analysis of quantified peptide lists coming from various proteomic quantitation softwares.
37. doSMP - The doSMP package provides a parallel backend to the foreach package's %dopar% operator, allowing parallel operation on a symmetric multiprocessor workstation.
38. Estimation and Model Checking for GLSM - This package mainly deals with generalized linear spatial models for estimation, model checking and prediction by using MCMC algorithms.
39. splm: spatial panel data models - A comprehensive toolset for ML and GM estimation and diagnostic testing of econometric models for spatial panel data.


text:
In India, the truck went off the bridge, more than 10 people were killed
May 11, 2017 IMMWorld
In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, at least 11 people were killed, 15 injured in road accidents. About it reports "112 Ukraine" with reference to the Agency ANI.
The incident occurred at about 01:00 on Thursday (22:30 Kyiv time) in the district of Jabalpur. The truck carrying the body of the passengers, went off the bridge.
In the truck, which belonged to the forestry Department of Madhya Pradesh, were working from Maharashtra, who were sent to collect tendu (Coromandel ebony).
Earlier, in the Indian state of Rajasthan during the celebration of the wedding of the collapsed walls of the building, under the rubble which killed 23 people, another 28 were injured.
The President of Macedonia is ready to change the name of the country for accession to the NATO media
The people's Deputy from BPP advanced version theft Goncharenko
Natalya Kosenko: Why is it important to work in a team of like-minded people
The Euro exchange rate in Ukraine fell back after rising
Dr. Komorowski explained why Samoilova participated in the Eurovision song contest is good
Tillerson called for the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine
There were photos of the people's Deputy Goncharenko and his captors
Today Ukrainians are beginning to send a summons to the army
How to cheer up without a single Cup coffee: TOP 7 right products
From the earthquake in China has suffered 12 thousand people