Apparently, there will be a fresh round of anti-Semitism allegations against Labour left-wingers at some point over the Easter weekend, via the Sunday Times. The chances of these allegations holding any more water than previous ones seem pretty remote, especially given the Murdoch-ite nature of the source. All signs so far that I have seen are that it is yet another catalogue of examples of Israel being angrily criticised on social media, rather than of Jews being insulted for being Jews. In other words, anti-Zionism is being spun as 'anti-Semitism', and Israelis are being spun as 'every Jew' yet again. This is a relentless, aggravating, and Orwellian conflation to which the Labour left are largely, and correctly, refusing to give in.
But the right are showing no reluctance to keep pushing the conflation either. So alas it will be seconds out, round umpteen. Do you know what though? I am no longer terribly bothered about it.
The reason why is that the right wing media's attempts to smear the Labour left are proving more and more ineffective, and that is because they are so painfully predictable. Particularly over the last year or so, the pattern has been so regular you could almost set your watch by it. It is quite mechanical. So mechanical in fact, that it appears to be a carefully-structured program.
20 INPUT Tories have embarrassing Brexit/Austerity-related meltdown$.
30 LET Labour polling = Labour polling + 3.
60 INPUT right wing media foam-at-mouth-hysteria$.
150 LET Hysteria = dying down somewhat.
The fact that Labour are presently not just ahead, but now well ahead, in pretty much all the opinion polls for Westminster voting intentions, is evidence that this strategy – really about keeping an uncritically Zionist/pro-Israel policy platform alive in the British Government – is not really working very well anymore . (If it ever was.) It sometimes slows and scuppers Labour's impetus, but it has never caused Labour to slump. But it also explains why the Sunday Times are timing their latest attack for now.
The predictability of this pattern of behaviour is not only making it all-too-obvious to many people what is really going on, but it is also, frankly, getting thoroughly boring to be made to sit through it over and over, and I truly have serious doubts that many people will pay any attention to more of it. Common sense alone should lead most of the electorate to reason that if anti-Semitic behaviour were really anywhere near so prevalent in Labour as is being made out, there would have been hundreds of arrests by now for hate crimes.
Anyone who does believe the latest chapter will be the sort of person who would never vote Labour in the first place and is just looking out for any excuse to get angry with the party. There is no point in the Labour Party trying to appease people like that, so they should be left to go their own prejudgemental way. Labour should instead just refuse to dignify the latest smears with a response, and focus on what everyone should really be doing – fighting Austerity, and preventing a Conservative version of Brexit.
A vote of no confidence in the leadership of someone you do not recognisably follow is a pretty futile gesture. Imagine Joseph Stalin, in 1943, had run a ballot of the Soviet population asking them, say, whether they had confidence in the Presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt in the United States – the USSR's ally-of-convenience during World War II. Now I daresay the result of such a vote might have been interesting, but it would not have made any practical difference.
With this in mind, it seems bizarre that the media are reporting yesterday's news that the 'Jewish Labour Movement' have voted that they have no confidence in the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as though it is some major development. Does anyone in full honesty imagine that the vote matters one jot?
Membership of the 'Jewish Labour Movement' requires neither a Jewish background nor membership of the Labour Party.
Quite simply, if you wish to join JLM, you do not have to be Jewish, or a member of the Labour Party. Furthermore, while it is affiliated to the Labour Party, it is not actually a Labour Party organisation. Therefore JLM does not really follow Corbyn, as such, while the only real requirement for joining boils down to a prospective member must not already be a member of another party. Therefore, JLM's qualification as either representative of left wing British Jews, or even an organisation 'following' the leader of the Labour Party is shaky in the extreme.
Many of the same people who swear by the word of JLM frequently mock its rival, 'Jewish Voice For Labour', as being the proverbial 'two-men-and-a-dog'. But really, how do these people imagine JLM has any more credibility, when its very name is so hopelessly misleading?
JLM's expression of no confidence in Corbyn is both ignorant and insignificant.


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Q: How do I install and setup phpMyAdmin on a LAMP Droplet with Virtual Hosts I am trying to add phpMyAdmin to a droplet/server from Digital Ocean, I am trying to follow this tutorial the tutorial is written for Ubuntu 16.04 I run 18.04.
I have currently

*

*Installed LAMP stack

*Added SSH key

*Enabled HTTPS: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/marketplace/lamp/

*Setup a virtual host: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-16-04
Besides the above, I have run this in the terminal

*

*sudo apt-get update

*sudo do-release-upgrade

*apt-get upgrade

*apt-get dist-upgrade

I am now trying to install phpMyAdmin from this tutorial
The problem occurs when I run:
sudo phpenmod mcrypt

It gives me this error:  Module mcrypt ini file doesn't exist under /etc/php/7.2/mods-available
If I run sudo phpenmod mbstringnothing happens.
So I can't get any further with the tutorial
This person have/had the same problem as me and one guy reply to him and said:
"If you installed it in a different way or have multiple VirtualHosts, then we might need to do a little adjusting to get it running."
The thing is, this tutorial encouraged me to add VirtualHosts so I did that following this tutorial as I also mentioned above, but now I have no idea on how to proceed and install phpMyAdmin on one of the virtual host's websites

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Award-winning Cameramen Mark Moreve & Phil Coates Hosting Sessions In Ireland Next Week
03 Dec 2012 : By Eva Hall
Mark Moreve will attend the Camerakit event on December 11
Two of television's most renowned cameramen will touch down in Ireland next week to take part in an all-day camcorder and camera manufacturing event in Dublin.
BAFTA-nominated cameraman Mark Moreve, who has captured everything from the making of one of the most famous operas in the world, 'The Phantom of the Opera', to 'The Wire' star Idris Elba discussing the impact of clubbing on society, will be on hand to demonstrate the new Canon Cinema EOS System.
Moreve, who was nominated for a BAFTA for his work on BBC series 'A Private Life of a Masterpiece - Rodin's The Kiss', will give an insight into his own 20-year career, discussing his life of travel from Mongolia to Argentina, to working on UK homegrown series such as 'Watchdog' and 'Homes under the Hammer'.
Moreve will be joined at the special event, hosted by Camerakit Hire, by multi award-winning cameraman Phil Coates, who will give an audio seminar on Sennheiser Sound. Coates, an accomplished remote location director cameraman, who has worked on expedition-type shows such as Discovery International's 'Everest Beyond The Limit', 'Blizzard Race To The Pole' for the BBC, 'Ice Break Heart' for Channel 5 and 'Challenge 8000' for Channel 4, will give a Q&A after his session.
Both Moreve and Coates, who are based in the UK, will fly in especially for the industry event, which is taking place in Dublin on Tuesday, December 11.
Camerakit, the equipment supply store, is hosting this unique event for the first time in Ireland. The event will mark the first time a number of different manufacturers as well as spokespeople for the products will all attend the same seminar in Dublin.
In addition to Moreve and Coates' sessions, the latest products from Sony, JVC, Panasonic and Blackmagic Design will all be on display for industry members to interact with and avail of discounts.
Camerakit has secured Ireland's first look at the long-awaited Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera with EF mount, as well as the first Canon C100 to land in Ireland. Both products are in high demand all over the world.
Also attending the event next Tuesday are Matt Davies and Dave Young, who will give a rundown of Sony's latest products; Kris Hill, who is on hand for JVC; Alan Head for Panasonic and Nick Millen for Canon.
The event is free to attend but attendees must register for a place before hand by visiting camerakit.ie.
The event will take place in the Stillorgan Park Hotel in Dublin, where there is free parking available, on Tuesday, December 11. Sessions kick off from 8.30am until 6pm.
See How They Run starring Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell to release exclusively in Irish cinemas this September
Animation Ireland leads Irish Kidscreen delegation to Miami for world's largest animation event
New €300 million Greystones Media Campus to become Ireland's biggest Film & TV Studio

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
GERI World Fashion Blog
Home » Authentic Merchandise »
Authentic Merchandise
Aeronautica Militare for Cape Town City FC
Posted by	Catherine
aeronautica militare, Cape Town City FC, Football Club
Geri Boutiques is proud to announce a partnership with Aeronautica Militare and Cape Town City FC
Cape Town City FC debuted their Aeronautica Militare leisure kit at the MTN 8 Final hosted at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on Saturday, 29 September 2018.
Aeronautica Militare for Cape Town City Football Club
Cape Town City FC is a football club based in Cape Town, South Africa, that plays in the Premier Soccer League (PSL).
Cape Town City FC players dressed in the Aeronautica Militare leisure kit before the big game.
Aeronautica Militare is one of the most famous Italian fashion sportswear brands. It was created 13 years ago by a special agreement between the Italian Air Force and Cristiano di Thiene SpA. Aeronautica Militare tells an authentic story that promotes energy and enthusiasm; it is a successful mix of consistency, stylistic
ingenuity and quality, and in these years, it has gained a strong position both in the Italian and international markets.
Cape Town City FC Coach, Benni McCarthy, steps onto the pitch at Moses Mabhida Stadium wearing the Aeronautica Militare leisure kit.
The partnership between the football club and the fashionable Italian sportswear brand makes for a perfect synergy. Cape Town City FC went on to win their game and were crowned the MTN 8 Champions, clinching the trophy for the first time.
Cape Town City Football Club celebrates as they are crowned the MTN 8 Champions of 2018
Click here to discover the Aeronautica Militare collection.


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Ulrike Gerst (* 1953 in Neustadt an der Weinstraße) ist eine deutsche Malerin.

Leben
Ulrike Gerst studierte von 1972 bis 1976 Bildende Kunst, Deutsch und Sonderpädagogik an der Pädagogischen Hochschule Freiburg und von 1996 bis 2000 Malerei an der Freien Hochschule für Grafik-Design & Bildende Kunst Freiburg. Seitdem arbeitet sie als freischaffende Künstlerin.

Viele ihrer Bilder entstehen auf der Grundlage von Fotografien, die sie – meist spontan – selbst macht. Sie bevorzugt Orte mit besonderer Atmosphäre wie leer stehende öffentliche Gebäude oder Privaträume wie Wohnwagen und malt oft auch Einrichtungsgegenstände wie Möbel und Lampen. Sie setzt ihre Themen vor allem durch Ölmalerei auf Leinwand, aber auch durch Gouachen auf Papier um.

Ulrike Gerst lebt und arbeitet in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Auszeichnungen
 2003: Kleinbasler Kunstpreis
 2009: Stipendium Kavalierhaus Langenargen

Ausstellungen
Einzelausstellungen
 2004: Multimedia Art Event Galerie Irene Eikmeier, Berlin
 2005: Herz-Zentrum Bad Krozingen
 2006: Katholische Akademie der Erzdiözese Freiburg
 2006: Auf den zweiten Blick, Galerie Michael Schneider, Bonn (mit Max Diel)
 2008: Gesellschaft der Freunde Junger Kunst, Altes Dampfbad, Baden-Baden (mit Cora Volz) (Katalog mit einem Text von Susanne Buckesfeld. Modo, Freiburg i. Br. 2008, ISBN 978-3-9810432-0-4.)
 2008: Galerie Michael Schneider, Bonn
 2009: Produzentengalerie Langenargen, Bodensee

Gruppenausstellungen
 1999: Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, Kunstmuseum
 2000: Regionale, Projektraum M54, Basel
 2003: Regionale, Kunstraum Klingental, Basel
 2003: Multimedia Art Event Galerie Irene Eikmeier, Berlin
 2004: Badischer Rest – Malerei Drei, Markgräfler Museum Müllheim
 2005: Realität und Geheimnis – Zeitgenössische Positionen der realistischen Malerei, Galerie Epikur, Wuppertal
 2005: Kunstverein Freiburg
 2005: Regionale 6, Projektraum M54, Basel
 2005: Donaueschinger Regionale, Donaueschingen
 2006: Regionale 7, FABRIKculture, Hegenheim
 2006: Art Fair Köln, Galerie Epikur, Wuppertal
 2006: Auswahl 2006, Gesellschaft der Freunde Junger Kunst, Baden-Baden
 2006: Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, Sulz a. N.
 2006: Kunsthaus L6, Freiburg
 2006: Priceless Painting, Galerie Michael Schneider, Bonn
 2007: Art Karlsruhe, Galerie Epikur, Wuppertal
 2007: Regionale 8, Donaueschingen
 2008: Regionale 9, Kunstverein Freiburg

Weblinks
 Website von Ulrike Gerst
 Kurzporträt auf der Website des Künstlerbundes Baden-Württemberg (mit Foto)

 Anja Kaspers: Charakteristik der Malerei von Ulrike Gerst auf artfacts.net

Einzelnachweise

Maler (Freiburg im Breisgau)
Person (Neustadt an der Weinstraße)
Deutscher
Geboren 1953
Frau

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


We're republishing the following letter from the International Organization for a Participatory Society, which was launched in 2012 with the aim of giving democratic structure to the struggles that have recently emerged.
We are members of what is called the the Interim Consultative Committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society- or IOPS for short.
IOPS is actually an interim entity, pending a future founding convention. IOPS was convened just a few months ago and already has over 2,300 members from 85 countries and a ten language site, despite that it is barely known publicly. IOPS is currently building local chapters, which will unite to form national branches that in turn will compose an international organization.
We send this open letter to invite you to please visit the IOPS site to examine its initial features - including especially and most importantly its Visionary and Programmatic Commitments.
If Romney kept his pledge to avoid increasing the deficit (aside from the enormous deficit increase resulting from the Bush tax cuts), then someone will have to face a net increase in their taxes. These figures demonstrate that the very rich won't be the ones paying for Romney's proposals.
-Make permanent the Bush income tax cuts for all income levels.
-Further reduce all income tax rates by a fifth.
-Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax.
-Repeal the estate and gift tax.
-Exempt up to $200,000 of long-term capital gains, dividends and interest from taxable income for taxpayers who do not have $200,000 of other income.
-Maintain 15% rates for capital gains and dividends.
-Repeal all itemized deductions (all taxpayers take standard deduction).
-Repeal exclusion for employer-provided health care.
-Repeal deduction for health insurance for the self-employed.
-Repeal the Hospital Insurance tax increase on the wealthy that was enacted as part of health care reform.
It amazes me how people vote. What makes a Senior vote R? After all D gave done for them. A vet. AfterD got GI Bill and Vet Admistration. Pensions. Health Care etc? I have a list of 89 Great Things produced by D for middle class and poor. Only very rich should vote R. R have alwys been Country Club Party. Now Wall Street above all else.
2009---15%--------------------25---------------------=$1400B DeficitIn that time frame we had great redistribution of wealth Revenue declined %25% and Spending increased 38% =$6000B of Debt addedWhat is wrong with us? We cannot low such nonsense2012 is D--Day---Middle Class vs Wall StreetRomney wins more of that?
"without a priori prioritizing any of these over the rest"


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Oracle aims high-end cloudy database release at existing customers in 'defensive' move
Large existing install base that's pondering move to cloud will be reluctant to ditch 'existing investments' opines analyst
Lindsay Clark Fri 16 Oct 2020 // 17:59 UTC
Oracle has brought out a new Exadata Cloud Service based on the Exadata X8M platform, bringing its high-end persistent memory feature to the cloud. Well, Oracle's cloud at least.
The transactional and analytics database system Exadata X8M was first released last year in a launch Oracle claimed would reduce IO latency by up to 10 times with its use of persistent memory and remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Ethernet.
Bringing the system to the Exadata Cloud Service makes it available on a consumption basis in the Oracle cloud, including 26 global cloud regions and its on-prem service, Cloud@Customer. The omnipresent enterprise computing biz claimed it could help run applications needing multiple workloads and data types in a single converged Oracle Database, avoiding integration of multiple different database services.
Oracle claimed this meant 2.5 times higher transaction processing IOs, and 10 times better IO latency than its previous Exadata Cloud Service release.
The Exadata Database Machine started life in 2008 as an in-memory database appliance that supports OLTP (transactional) and OLAP (analytical) database systems. It was the result of a collaborative project between Big Red and HP (as it was then known), but was later ported to Sun hardware. A version has been available on Oracle Cloud since 2015.
David Floyer, CTO at Wikibon, said that with IO latency of around 20 microseconds and a 25 PB data warehouse available, Wikibon assessed it as the "highest-performance cloud database service available."
Regardless of its performance, part of the positioning is to boost Oracle in the cloud market, as it was with the Zoom deal earlier this year, said Philip Carnelley, associate vice president of software research at IDC.
It would suit Oracle's existing customers who want options in the cloud, he added.
"If you've already got loads of Oracle everywhere, then it's becoming more viable to move what you want into the cloud: that's their big thrust. There is such a huge install base of Oracle, it's offering them everything in the cloud, on prem, or wherever they want it. From Oracle's point of view, it could be seen as defensive. This will appeal to very large organisations with a very large investment in Oracle," he said.
Carnelley said businesses were looking to move to the cloud as soon as possible, while at the same time IT departments would be reluctant to abandon their existing investments. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it: you don't want to change too many things and fewer things you have to change, the better," he said.
But outside Oracle's install base, the appeal becomes less certain. In transaction systems Oracle would go up against IBM's Db2 and SAP's in-memory HANA database, both of which are available on the public cloud from the usual suspects.
On the analytical systems, Oracle must compete with cloud-native data warehouses such as Snowflake, AWS's Redshift, Google's BigQuery and Microsoft's Synapse. ®


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Homepage > News > News Details
Solano County Public Health reports first pediatric death related to COVID-19 in Solano County
SOLANO COUNTY –– The Solano County Department of Health and Social Services, Public Health division, has confirmed the first pediatric death related to COVID-19 in Solano County. The child was under the age of 1.
"We offer our deepest condolences to this child's loved ones during their time of grief," said Bela T. Matyas, M.D., M.P.H., Solano County Health Officer "This loss is an urgent reminder that children can get seriously ill and die from COVID-19. While pediatric deaths are incredibly rare, they are also very tragic."
As of Monday morning, December 20, 2021, there are 369 active cases in Solano County, and 342 cumulative deaths since the start of the pandemic. Approximately 77 percent of Solano County residents have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
"I urge Solano residents to get vaccinated, or boosted, for COVID-19," Matyas says. "Getting the COVID-19 vaccine is the most effective approach we can take to protect our families and communities, most especially the children who are too young to get vaccinated."
COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce the risk of severe symptoms, hospitalizations and deaths, and help reduce the spread of COVID-19. The COVID-19 vaccine and booster shots are available for individuals 5 years and older and are easily accessible at many provider sites throughout Solano County, including pop-up vaccine clinics, pharmacies and hospitals. The mass vaccination clinics at the Solano County Fairgrounds, located at 900 Fairgrounds Drive in Vallejo, will operate until January 29, 2022. For a list of upcoming vaccine clinics in Solano County, visit www.SolanoCounty.com/CovidVaccine.
Consider using the following safety measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, including:
n Get vaccinated for those 5 years and older, or a booster dose for those 16 years old and above
n Wear a face covering when inside indoor public spaces
n Avoid large crowds and poorly ventilated areas
n Stay home when you are feeling sick and wash hands frequently
n Get tested if you have symptoms, have been exposed to someone with COVID-19
n Be cautious around immunocompromised individuals, the elderly and young children
n For information about finding vaccine clinics in Solano County, visit www.SolanoCounty.com/CovidVaccine.
n Homebound individuals interested in requesting an in-home vaccination appointment are encouraged to call the COVID-19 vaccine line at (707) 784-8655 for scheduling assistance.
n Residents without transportation to and from vaccine sites hosted by Solano County are urged to call the COVID-19 vaccine line at (707) 784-8655 and arrange for a free ride through Uber.
n For vaccine clinics available throughout the State, visit https://MyTurn.Ca.Gov
n For recent local COVID-19 health information, including the number of COVID-19 cases in Solano County as reflected on the COVID-19 dashboard, visit www.SolanoCounty.com/COVID19
n Follow Solano Public Health on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/SolanoCountyPH (@SolanoCountyPH)


Flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) will pioneer a new era in the creation and implementation of electronic devices. Consumers will receive greater utility from electronics such as flexible smart phones that expand into tablets, or wearable devices that directly interact with the human body. Flexible displays will transform car interiors currently constrained by the rigidity of glass, and will bring greater cost-effectiveness and efficiency in the medical field with lighter devices, enabling doctors to make faster, more reliable diagnoses. Without a skilled workforce, however, the exciting potential of United States manufacturing in FHE may never materialize. From engineers to production technicians, R&D scientists to software developers, flexible electronics-related jobs are found in a variety of sectors.
As FHE-related work ramps up across the nation, understanding employer demand, workforce needs, and skill gaps is critical to the development of sustainable talent pipelines and relevant educational programming. There is also a need to diversify the FHE-related workforce to meet the needs of employers as the technology matures and production processes evolve. Currently, only 22 percent of the workers related to FHE are female, which indicates the need to engage young women in STEM activities and career pathways. The impending talent brain drain in many occupations related to FHE is another area of concern across the nation. Over half (52 percent) of the current FHE-related workforce is 45 or older and 25 percent are 55 or older. "Learn and earn" internships, apprenticeships, and other mentorship programs will become a crucial part of the knowledge transfer as workers begin to retire from FHE-related occupations.


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Robi Fun Portal – "joke off" to 4636.
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Robi Shorgol (community service) To unsubscribe, SMS community nameStop to 9090.


Todd Hackett is the owner of a successful construction company in Iowa who first became aware of PCS as an investment opportunity in 2007. Over the past five years his involvement with PCS has grown from a casual investor to a strong advocate for bringing educational opportunities to both children and young adults to strengthen their knowledge in math and science. Mr. Hackett brings a strong business background to PCS, well founded in the fundamental principles of building a successful company. He has demonstrated his abilities in the building of his own company from a startup in 1981 to a major construction firm now handling multimillion dollar projects. Many of his projects involve educational institutions such as community colleges, middle schools, libraries, and applied technology labs.
Mr. Hackett is actively involved in his community, is passionate about the potential of PCSV, and is actively engaged in helping to create a company that will have deep shareholder value as well as improve STEM education around the world. He and his wife, Tricia, have been together for 26 years and have three children.
Michael Bledsoe joined PCS Edventures in July of 2016. As Vice President, Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors, he brings over 20 years of financial experience, executive leadership and strategic management to his position. Mike received a BBA in Quantitative Management with an emphasis in Finance, from Boise State University in 1989 and was honored as the top graduate in his major. In 1993, he earned his MBA from Boise State University.
Prior to joining PCS Edventures, Mike spent his career in the investment management field, most recently at D.A. Davidson, where he was a Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager for 18 years. He earned the CFA Charterholder designation in 1994, and was an adjunct faculty member at Boise State University, where he taught classes in Personal Investing, fostering his passion for education and the sculpting of tomorrow's best thinkers. In his free time, Mike enjoys spending time with his wife, Karen, and their two children.


Do you have to believe in a soul, souls, afterlife, ascendency, past lives and all of that in order to be a Soul Pilot?
Can children be Soul Pilots?
Do I have to have any kind of training to be a Soul Pilot?
Can soul piloting be dangerous?
Can all souls be saved?
Can you do Soul Piloting with a partner?
Can you do Soul Piloting with a therapist?
I'm a therapist, can I do Soul Piloting with my clients?
Do you have to have special psychic talents to be a Soul Pilot?
Should we be saving lost souls?
1. Do you have to believe in a soul, souls, afterlife, ascendency, past lives and all of that in order to be a Soul Pilot?
No. You can just play it as a kind of "therapy game" or like a Project Sanctuary game. As long as you do it wholeheartedly and play it honestly, without looking over your shoulder or arguing it to death with conscious objections, you will gain all the benefits.
2. Can children be Soul Pilots?
Oh, very much yes! Indeed for some children, the idea that they can help someone, even just "in a story" is completely transformational and really changes their self concept. I believe in later life it leads to having more of a sense of one's own personal power to help others and change the world for the better. I also believe that it leads directly to feeling less powerless and worthless. That holds for adults too, and especially those adults who consider themselves broken in some way.
3. Do I have to have any kind of training to be a Soul Pilot?
No. All you need is a simple sanctuary to start off with and ask to be shown a soul that needs help, then proceed with what you get until a resolution is found for that soul.
Having said that, Project Sanctuary, who is the genesis of Soul Pilots, would be a good thing to learn about as it teaches many, many things that really come in handy when one is faced with tricky or perplexing situations.
4. Can soul piloting be dangerous?
Interesting question. I don't know. I have never found it to be so. I have certainly on occasion found it to be frightening or even terrifying. However, a part of being a Soul Pilot is to learn to not freak out when presented with dire/scary situations, to remember that we are dealing with realms that are made of energy, and that we wouldn't even be here if we didn't have the resources we need to solve the problem and help the soul.
If a person was really "off their head" with a mental illness, drugs, or a mixture of both, and stressed as well, they should probably learn some de-stressing techniques and emotional control techniques first to not get overwhelmed by their own reactions. I strongly recommend learning EMO and EFT first as these modalities give a person a totally different take on their emotions, and how to deal with emotions successfully.
Another interesting question. It's possible that for some we come too late, or it just doesn't happen right on the day. All you can do is do your best. People who work for emergency services don't rescue everyone all the time, but they always try their best, and it is that, not the success rate, that makes them the heroes we all admire.
Yes. Joint missions with one or more partners can be very different and bring Soul Piloting to a whole new level.
Obviously, the therapist has to know what Soul Piloting is and some experience in the matter. But if they do, doing soul piloting with a therapist can be a good way to start off.
Yes, but I would recommend at least a good familiarity with Project Sanctuary manual so you have an overview of the resources a client might need if they get stuck.
No, everyone can do it if they want to. It does help if you have an active imagination and if you are used to meditations, guided meditations and generally are able to track your own internal representations reasonably well.
Should we be saving lost souls? Isn't it important they should be punished for their wrongdoings and suffer?
I don't know about that. When I see someone who is in trouble and I can help them, I will help them. That's all there is to it.


How can I use the policy to select the option of "allow interactions with application interface"?
In my KES Policy / Endpoint Control / Application Privilege Control / Application Settings / Applications control rules / then right clicking a trusted object and selecting application rules: the History Tab and Exclusions Tab are not there.
please open "advanced settings", "disable external management of the system service".
Do you look for this option ?
Yes, it is currently unchecked.
"Allow interaction with application interface" is an option of a Trusted application. You can manage trusted applications in the policy, from the "General Protection Settings" tab, picking "Settings" from "Exclusions and trusted zone", then switching to Trusted applications.
Thank you Kirill, that's it !
A bit confusing since I thought the option would've resided as tabs in the Endpoint Control section like it does for the client.
Can we consider this topic as solved?
If yes, please evaluate support help by using "Rating" option!
Yes, I rated this topic the moment it was resolved for me.


In China, Communist Party officials recently met with journalists at Guangzhou's Southern Weekend newspaper in response to vociferous protests over censorship of the paper's New Year's Eve "seeking dreams" editorial, which called for greater respect for constitutional rights. After a propaganda official transformed the editorial into a paean to Communist Party policies, many Chinese celebrities and business leaders joined the protests. A tentative deal has reportedly been reached in which the protesting journalists agreed not to publicly blame Guangdong propaganda chief Tuo Zhen and not to strike. It is not clear what the Chinese authorities have offered in return, although the paper is seeking an inquiry into the incident and the role of Tuo and it wants to rescind an editorial absolving Tuo of any responsibility for the "heavy-handed" censorship.


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Middle East & AfricaSep 6th 2014 edition
Quarantines are hampering the fight against the epidemic
MORE than 100 doctors and nurses have died in the Ebola epidemic in west Africa, often because they have lacked rubber gloves and other protective equipment. But sending supplies and medical staff to help them has become harder, because of flight cancellations and border closures that were designed to stop the disease from spreading.
About 3,500 people have been infected by the Ebola virus in the three worst-affected countries, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; more than 1,900 have died. The World Health Organisation (WHO) expects the epidemic to worsen, reckoning about 20,000 will be infected. Médecins Sans Frontières, an aid group, says that the international response has been "lethally inadequate". The world is losing the battle against the disease and a military-style response is needed. Instead, governments are limiting themselves to trying to stop infected patients from travelling to other countries.
Indeed, isolation may in some ways be making matters worse. When the west African regional group known as ECOWAS held a conference of health ministers last month in Ghana's capital, Accra, the delegate from Sierra Leone (now sacked) could not travel from Freetown. Aid sent by Japan had to be loaded in Accra and sent 1,400km (900 miles) by road to Sierra Leone, because air transport was not available.
ECOWAS has called for an end to border closures and flight bans. International carriers such as British Airways, Emirates, Air France and Kenya Airways have stopped flying to the affected countries, as have several regional operators. The only flights now operate from Brussels and Casablanca. The three countries battling epidemics have shut their borders with each other; Senegal and Ivory Coast have in turn closed their frontiers with all three.
There is good reason to fear contagion. Senegal last week became the fifth west African country to report a case of Ebola, carried by a student who had been under surveillance in Guinea and slipped out to Senegal's capital, Dakar. There have been seven confirmed deaths in Nigeria, where the virus was brought in by a traveller from Liberia. An unrelated Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed 31 lives.
The African Development Bank expects the disruption in trade to cut GDP growth in the three countries by 1-1.5 percentage points. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says the epidemic is endangering harvests and pushing up food prices. The creation of quarantine zones has created labour shortages, hampered cash-crop production and led to panic buying.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Unintended consequences"
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The Decimation of the American Bison
July 13, 2021 July 12, 2021 michaelmccurryphd
I've unpacked The American Buffalo in Transition by J. Albert Rorabacher. It's available on kindle as well, and it is a good read. In his chapter "The Decimation of the American Bison" Rorabacher does explain how 60 million bison were reduced to well under a thousand during the 19th century – and he explains the hunting pressures that made it so possible.
"History records that the last free-roaming buffalo east of the Mississippi was killed in the early 1830's and the majority were gone well before this." (30) West of the Mississippi it was still the fur trade – but as beaver hats went out of fashion, buffalo robes became a source of income – "As early as 1820, the Red River Settlement, a prosperous trading post on the Red River in Manitoba, Canada, began sending out annual buffalo hunting expeditions. In the first year alone the hunters filled over 500 carts with robes of buffalo." (34) By 1840 the American Fur Company posts had sent 67,000 robes to St. Louis; and in 1848 110,000 robes and 25,000 tongues were sent to St. Louis." "So efficient were the Red River hunters that they annually brought in over 500,000 robes." By 1847 nearly all the buffalo had been killed in the area of the northeastern Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Manitoba and parts of Saskatchewan." (35)
"Preference was given to the killing of bison cows, for their hides were of higher quality and more easily worked than those of the bulls, and when desired, the meat from the cows was far more tender. The year-round killing of bison cows drastically lessened the birth potential of the herds. Thus, it was almost impossible for the herds to replenish even a small portion of their reduced number." (42)
Here, Rorabacher shows how the robe trade from the 1840's onward was setting the stage for the market hunters to move the buffalo into near-extinction. With each year, the herds become increasingly composed of old bulls. That time, in the 1840's, when hunting for robes was both a white and an Indian occupation set the stage – yet the herd numbers were still large, and nobody was noticing.
In 1871, a tanning process was developed that allowed hides from the old bulls to be processed into drive belts that would power the developing industrial state – and the market hunters, with the Sharps and Rolling Block Remingtons were ready to assist. Until 1871, the market picked off the cows for robes. With the new tanning processes, hides went up to as much as $3.00 each.
"The most intense killing of bison, particularly in the Southwestern United States, occurred between 1871 and 1874, At this time, hides could be sold for $1.25 apiece." (43). . . Colonel R. I. Dodge estimated that white hunters killed five buffalo for every hid that reached a market. (44)
By 1876 there were virtually no buffalo in the southern herd, and by 1880 the last buffalo of the once great southern herd was killed." (44) "When the Northern Pacific railroad opened the hitherto unsettled lands, of the northern Great Plains, the slaughter of the Northern herd greatly increased . . . in 1882 there were 5,000 or more white hide hunters and skinners actively searching out the buffalo of the northern herd. (45) In 1887, there remained roughly 541 buffalo in the entire United States. (49)
Rorabacher's explanation makes sense of how the near-extinction of the buffalo occurred. The robe hunters had been selecting for more bulls in the herd composition for at least 40 years. The technology shift that made the bull hides valuable for drive belts to power American industry came at a near perfect time, and the Northern Pacific was the final addition that all but wiped out the species.
I wish I could tell you where to get a hardcover of The American Buffalo in Transition – but Kindle copies are available, and it is a book worth having.
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December 2015 – February 2016 Dec 2015 – Feb 2016
Colloquium: Brian Jackson
On the Edge: Exoplanets with Orbital Periods Shorter Than a Peter Jackson Movie
Brian Jackson, Boise State Univeristy
From wispy gas giants to tiny rocky bodies, exoplanets with orbital periods of several days and less challenge theories of planet formation and evolution. Recent searches have found small rocky planets with orbits reaching almost down to their host stars' surfaces, including an iron-rich Mars-sized body with an orbital period of only four hours. So close to their host stars that some of them are actively disintegrating, these objects' origins remain unclear, and even formation models that allow significant migration have trouble accounting for their very short periods. Some are members of multi-planet system and may have been driven inward via secular excitation and tidal damping by their sibling planets. Others may be the fossil cores of former gas giants whose atmospheres were stripped by tides.
In this presentation, I'll discuss the work of our Short-Period Planets Group (SuPerPiG), focused on finding and understanding this surprising new class of exoplanets. We are sifting data from the reincarnated Kepler Mission, K2, to search for additional short-period planets and have found several new candidates. We are also modeling the tidal decay and disruption of close-in gaseous planets to determine how we could identify their remnants, and preliminary results suggest the cores have a distinctive mass-period relationship that may be apparent in the observed population. Whatever their origins, short-period planets are particularly amenable to discovery and detailed follow-up by ongoing and future surveys, including the TESS mission.
Categories: Colloquium Talks Tags: 2015F exoplanets K2 Kepler TESS tides
Colloquium: Steve Finkelstein (Host: Kristian Finlator)
Galaxy Evolution during the Epoch of Reionization
Steve Finkelstein, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract: The advent of the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope has heralded a new era in our ability to study the earliest phases of galaxy formation and evolution. The number of candidates for galaxies now known at redshifts greater than six has grown to be in the thousands. This allows us to move beyond mere counting of galaxies, to endeavor to understand the detailed physics regulating the growth of galaxies. I will review the recent progress our group in Texas has made in this arena using the exquisite datasets from the CANDELS and Frontier Fields programs. Specifically, our detailed new measurements of both the evolution of the stellar mass function and rest-frame UV luminosity function now allow us to probe the effect of feedback on low-mass galaxies, the star-formation efficiency in high-mass galaxies, and the contribution of galaxies to the reionization of the universe. Our most recent result comes from the Frontier Fields, where we have used an advanced technique to remove the light from the cluster galaxies to uncover z > 6 galaxies as faint as M_UV=-13. Our updated luminosity functions show no sign of a turnover down to these extremely faint levels, providing the first empirical test of reionization models which require such faint galaxies, and is in modest tension with simulations which predict a turnover at brighter levels. I will also discuss our spectroscopic followup efforts, which have yielded two of the four highest redshift confirmed galaxies, and also provide further insight into reionization, by the scattering of Lyman alpha emission by neutral gas in the intergalactic medium. I will conclude with a look ahead to the problems we can expect to tackle with ALMA, JWST, and even more future facilities.
Categories: Colloquium Talks Tags: 2016S high-z


In the 64-10 blowout spring game it could be hard to find some defensive highlights. However, when you look at when UK's first-team defense was the field the Wildcats did some very good things. Without their leader in the middle at Mike, there were some obvious holes but the Wildcats did a great job in plugging them up.
It was Brad White's first spring game in the coordinator role and we found out after the game that the plan moving forward will be for him to be on the field when the Wildcats open up the season in August. But right now the Wildcats have an obvious strength and an obvious weakness.
It's hard to evaluate when you can't rush the passer due to specific game rules and the twos were at an obvious disadvantage going against Kentucky's starting offensive line. With that said, it's clear that the three-down defensive line is going to be a strength of the team.
UK's white team was limited to just 52 yards on 21 carries and most of this was due to UK's front. Quinton Bohanna is a monster of a man in the middle while senior T.J. Carter is very solid at defensive end and he is rotating with former blue-chip recruit Joshua Paschal. Calvin Taylor, Jr. continues to be a consistent threat in run defense and the Wildcats should be about eight deep on the defensive line this year.
It took a very long time, but Kentucky has finally built a defensive line that can consistently go out and help you win multiple SEC games. Due to the spring game's structure, it was hard for them to do everything they wanted but this is an experienced group who knows how important they are to the team. That's big entering this fall.
With no Kash Daniel in the lineup, Chris Oats got the start at Mike with DeAndre Square right next to him. Redshirt sophomore Jamin Davis also cracked the rotation with the ones and made a great play in the first half with a strip of Boogie Watson. These three with Kash Daniel will provide UK's defense with an excellent two-deep this fall.
There still is depth questions behind that, but we saw walk-on Harold Lacy on the white team come out and really make some nice plays downhill. New assistant coach Jon Sumrall has some quality tools to play with in his return to Lexington.
Similar to the defensive line, we don't really get to see much in the ways of pass rush and that's one of the most important parts of this position. Boogie Watson is the obvious leader and the redshirt junior finished with three tackles and a fumble recovery. However, the biggest takeaway from the night will be the young guns.
Redshirt sophomore Jordan Wright got the start at Jack and flashed some big time ability as an edge rusher. He even recorded an interception in the fourth quarter and certainly looks the part. Jared Casey is a true freshman who enrolled early and played the Sam spot for the second-team defense. He finished with seven tackles and has so much potential. The future is bright, but this group is set to have a lot of growing pains.
All spring we heard Brad White talk about how far this group had to come and it's clear they still have a long road to travel. There's no hiding from the fact that this is going to be a young position all season and a ton of pressure will be on Boogie Watson to perform at a high level. In his first year in the coordinator role, Brad White has his work cut out for him.
At safety, UK should feel really confident. Davonte Robinson has a legit chance to turn into one of the SEC's top safeties and he'll have plenty of opportunities to make plays near the line of scrimmage with him being UK's primary nickel corner. Jordan Griffin is a senior who has played all over the secondary and should be a very reliable piece. Reserves Tyrell Ajian and Yusuf Corker were two huge recruiting wins who have high ceilings in a backup role. True freshman Moses Douglass has all the tools needed to be an impact player.
Safety is great, but corner play ain't.
Junior college transfer Brandin Echols was brought in to start and he's going to do exactly that. It's clear that he is UK's best corner and this defense will be heavily dependent on him. Quandre Mosely was also another JuCo player brought in to play immediately and it's clear he has a very long way to go.
At the corner opposite of Echols, redshirt sophomore Cedrick Dort, Jr. got the start but UK also played a lot of other guys. It appears that freshmen Jamari Brown Taj Dodson, and Stanley Garner are all in the mix for playing time. It currently doesn't feel like any of them are ready to be an SEC starter at corner.
Don't be surprised if UK starts multiple corners this season and they could be in trouble when they go up against some good passing offenses this fall.
This season it is clear that strength of this group is right up the middle. The Wildcats are excellent on the line of scrimmage and at the inside backer spots. They should be solid in run defense and will be able to cause a bunch of havoc in the interior of the line. However, the edges are a different story.
Last season, UK had the best defensive player in the country on the edge and three corners with a ton of size and experience. This year they will be facing the opposite. That's just how quickly things can change in college football and how the staff is able to hide their biggest weaknesses will be the biggest key to this upcoming season.
Didn't the 1st team d hold the 2nd team O to 10 points?
And should have had several sacks.


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ArizonaDesigner Craftsmen seminar on identity development with your hosts, Valley branding experts ThreeDames Webworks.
•1) You cannot clearly say what differentiates your brand from your competitors.
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We'll have exercises, activities, and the inside secrets on the components of a strong brand.
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Whither The Unwritten MSM Constitution?
Posted on August 18, 2014 December 28, 2014 Author Ron Coleman 1
Glenn Reynolds writes:
THE NEW YORK TIMES' PUBLIC EDITOR, Byron Calame, criticizes the Times' handling of the NSA story. Jeff Jarvis calls Calame's column "almost tough," and points to this post by Jay Rosen.
The Times' behavior on this story, and the Plame story, has undermined the unwritten "National Security Constitution" regarding leaks and classified information. Since the Pentagon Papers, at least, the rule has been that papers could publish classified information in a whistleblowing mode, but that they would be sensitive to national security concerns. In return, the federal government would tread lightly in investigating where the leaks came from. But the politicization of the coverage, and the outright partisanship of the Times, has put paid to that arrangement. It's not clear to me that the country is better served by the new arrangement, but unwritten constitutions require a lot of self-discipline on the part of the various players, and that sort of discipline is no longer to be found in America's leadership circles.
Andrew Sullivan seems to think that I'm blaming the NYT editors for everything. No. If, in fact, the Administration broke the law, then there's a story here, though that remains a pretty big "if" at this point. But he goes on to ask the same question I did, and everyone else has: Why did they wait for a year if it was such a big deal? And if reporting the story a year ago would have been too damaging to national security, why isn't it too damaging now?
And there's another point: A few years ago, I'd have given the NYT the benefit of the doubt. Now — because of the paper's bad behavior of the past few years, which Andrew played a major role in pointing out — I don't. That absolutely is the fault of the Times' editors.
And its ownership.
The Times, of course, doesn't have to tell anyone anything. It's a private company. But as has been mentioned more times than you want to hear, the self-anointed Fifth Estate considers itself a thing above the normal citizen, and indeed the "unwritten constitution" referred to by Instapundit is premised on just that. Those unwritten constititutions really are a problem, though, just as Glenn says: in all but the most unusual cases, say perhaps England, they fall apart because the incentive to cheat for short-term gains — especially when faced with what at the moment looks like a threat to the Arrangement — is just too great. And maybe because they lack, at the end of the day, that legitimacy that genuine constitutions have.
Is "anarchy" in the press a good thing? And is oligopoly its only alternative?
UDPATE: TigerHawk seems to agree, and in fulsome detail. (Via Instapundit, again.)
UPDATE: More reasons why special privileges merely for owning a printing press may not be such a great idea.
Category: Journalism1 Comment
The big crunch
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013: Using data to make voting easier
Democracy Works & TurboVote, Co-founder Seth Flaxman talks about using data and technology to help people vote via mail. Their main product, TurboVote has had great success due to their team's ability to gather the most accurate list of election locations in the country. They have made voting via absentee ballot as easy as getting a movie from Netflix, which is the first step of their larger plan to make voting easier in the US.
Mechanical Turk – you can use this service for large, repetitive tasks that require a human eye.
Odesk.com and screen scrapers – you can hire developers to create simple Python screen scrapers to aggregate data from the web.
TurboVote.org – great tool for setting up a voter registration and absentee ballots on your site.
George: This is Using the Whole Whale. A Podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This is George Weiner your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.
George: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probable that you have missed the chance to vote in more elections than you've actually voted in elections. And this is something that really frustrates today's guest, Seth Flaxmen who's a co-founder of democracy works. Welcome to episode thirteen where we're gonna be talking with Seth about how they use big data and aggregated polling locations in order to make it easier for people to vote via absentee ballot. This project gained the attention of little known companies like Google who actually contacted them for that database. So we're gonna talk with them and see where this project is going.
George: Seth thank you for having us here today on the podcast. You work for and you are the founder of Democracy Works. Tell us a bit more, who are you and what do you do?
Seth: Co-founder actually.
George: Co-founder.
Seth: Co-founder
George: Yeah I already got one wrong. Nailed it.
Seth: I have to make sure to give Katie credit you know. Owning half the organization.
George: So tell me what do you guys do?
Seth: So the idea's to use technology to make a seamless modern voting system for everyone. That's the sort of 30,000 feet deal. And turbo vote is the main sort of program we have a site and the idea there is that anyone should be able to sign up online one time and then get all the help they need to stay registered to vote and voting in all of their elections for the rest of their life. So an entirely voter centered design voting system. But we just launched this year our second program called Ballot Scout and it's a tool for local election offices. We did a nine month technology study to figure out what tech election offices actually wanted and would spend some money to acquire. And what they really want is a way to track all the mail ballots that they're starting to send people more and more. Cause in 32 states now everyone can vote by mail. Every year more people vote by mail, but the tracking system isn't that good so ballots get lost. People call them constantly ask them where their ballots are, have them returned. So that's our second program.
George: So it's pretty crazy to me that something as fundamental literally baked into our constitution the right to vote is so goddamn complicated. And one of the things I love about your initial approach is that you're trying to make it, as you said, as easy it is to watch a movie on Netflix. That's how easy voting should be. And you started actually by gathering a whole bunch of unstructured data. And can you tell us a little bit about, you know your process of saying. Tackling voting is a beast. Where did you start?
Seth: Yeah although I should say unfortunately in the U.S there is no right to vote in the constitution. This is something–
George: Oh good, but I can get bare arms, right?
Seth: Right yes exactly. I mean the U.S is the only country in the world that doesn't have a federal election system. All of our elections are run by counties and towns. And it's one of the reasons why every–
George: I have a right to badger my electoral college.
Seth: Right yeah.
George: Okay.
Seth: Yeah I mean this is the problem with having the oldest continually functioning democracy in the world is yous till have all of these sort of patches. like our whole democracy is a patch upon a patch upon a patch, for like 250 years. But the question about the data stuff is interesting.
Seth: So there's a challenge if you want to build a single system that anyone in the country can sign up online and get5 all the help they need to stay registered and vote in all of their elections. That means that you need to be collecting data from 8000 different local election offices. So into even the first iteration when we were doing the pilot in 2010 and we were just gonna be helping a few hundred college system use the system Even during the pilot we had to have the contact information of to the mailing address information for all 8000 of those local election offices. So that was the first data challenge that we faced. And we needed all of that address information because one of the ways we make registration, voter registration easy, or vote by mail easy is that when you sign up on the site, if you need to register or vote by mail there's a form associated with that. So we'll mail you that form already printed out, already filled out with a pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelope. So in order to pre-address that envelope, we had to collect all of this data. And there's no central repository. There's like no nationwide data setup. So we had to screen scrape every secretary state offices website.
George: Was this a manual or automatic process?
Seth: Automatic. Well we had to build screen scrape.
George: Yeah.
Seth: Build screen scraper for every site
George: So what exactly is screen scraping? Well it's kind of like it sounds. You're crawling through a site to find the relevant information you want and saving that to one central database. But instead of having a person do this ie: the worst intern task ever. You actually have a little bit of code that crawls the website and looks for the parameters that you set. Such as give me an email address that you'd find on here. Or give me the location and save that back to the main database. And this is not only time saving but can create a pretty valuable database of information. If you're interested in doing this for your organization there's a couple different ways. You can obviously Google screen scraper see what comes up. But you could also get a developer. You can potentially find them through odesk. You can find that developer and give them parameters. I want all of this kind of information from all of these kinds of sites. Have them build that algorithm for you. And then let it run and see what kind of data you come back with. Alright let's get back to the interview.
Seth: After we had it, we then had to feed it through a postal service address checking api just to make sure that they were all real places and several of them were not. I would think like five of the states. Well like Virginia there was Text, what was it, Text Virginia was one of them. Was one of the towns.
George: Text Virginia? Is Text a real place?
Seth: No. (laughs)
George: It's just a developer with a fake P.O box somewhere. So how did you figure that one out?
Seth: The address checker but then we had another town in Massachusetts and we sort of called them, like you know your address the postal service doesn't know where you are. And they're like of course they know! It was Barnstable, Barnstable Massachusetts. Of course the post office knows where we are, we're right across the street! And so there's a complete, like we don't need an accurate address in their minds because they're across the street from the post office in this small town in Massachusetts. So why would a correct address matter.
George: Frank knows exactly where we are!
Seth: Right exactly. So that was the first sort of level of challenge. And now what we did is we actually turned all the screen scrapers into a tool that automatically screen scrapes every month, called Dog Catcher. And that's how we see whether these addresses are changing and stuff like that. Yeah there's a bunch of those challenges. Like election dates. You have to collect every single election date in the country. Something a lot of people don't know is there is an election every single Tuesday. Somewhere in the country. Somewhere in the country there is an election every single Tuesday. So we've tried to bunch different ways to do that. Right now it's strangely enough the best way to do it is just setting up hundreds of Google alerts for election, like election data county this. Election date county this. And we have a full time researcher, and this is part of his job. We spent a whole summer trying to experiment with Mechanical Turk to see if we could collect all of the election dates in a sort of more automated way. But the quality wasn't good and it was too hard. So we're still looking for ways to do it more automated.
George: Mechanical Turk is actually a bit of software that allows people from remote locations to actually complete simple, what they call human intelligence tasks, or HIT's. And this is all run through Amazon, so you can look up Mechanical Turk and Amazon and see the types of tasks, such as, can you look through these images and find all of the things in this image. Write them down. Give them back to me. And so it's kind of like these things that need a little bit more human intelligence to accomplish. All itemized so that people anywhere, remotely can work on them. Mechanical Turk actually has a pretty hilarious back story as well. It came from someone in 1770, a guy named Wolfgang VanKemplan, who created this Mechanical Turk or automatic chess player to empress Maria Theresa of Austria. And this automatic, chess playing illusion traveled the country and played people like Napoleon and even Benjamin Franklin. Turned out that it was a hoax and there was a chess master hiding inside it to play. So that's a little bit of backstory in there. Alright let's jump back into the interview.
Seth: For now it's just blood sweat and tears.
George: No substitute. Accept no alternative's. So you have all of this data. Tell me a little bit how your impact measurement, like so what. It's nice but so what. I think there have been, I've heard of actually other projects that have been able to collect this data. How have you turned this into impact, and what are you measuring?
Seth: We collect all of this data. Election dates, forms, deadlines, I.D rules, addresses. In order to build Turbo Vote. And in Turbo vote the goal is, are we actually helping people register to vote and are we actually helping them vote. Are they actually voting. And right now, there's a huge data challenge to answer that question, because although whether someone votes is publicly accessible information. So you can actually see whether your user did register and did vote, the system is so bad. The only folks who have the, there's like sort of two or three firms that collect this data nationwide. Catalyst, Target Smart. They only update this information once every two years about. Right after a federal election. So we only have these brief windows to check in, once every federal election to see whether our folks voted. And it's good, like we had very high numbers in 2012 that we were really happy with. So of the people who we registered to vote who were first time voters, 76% voted in the 2012 election.
George: What was the total number on that?
Seth: The total number of voters?
George: Yeah, for you guys.
Seth: Oh so we actually I don't remember what number that is off the top of my head. I mean we signed up almost 200,000 folks to use Turbo Vote that year. But yeah I mean honestly what I would love to see. The metric I would love to have for turbo vote is the percentage of elections someone is voting in over the course of the year, over the number of elections they could vote in. Because there's so much obsession in our space with the federal elections, when really the way democracy most has the most direct impact in someone's life is through their local elections. There's lots of people who care about quality education and then don't vote in school board elections. And so we want to increase that sort of ratio and make people realize that a lot of democracy occurs between those four years when presidents are elected. But it's so hard to get that data. I don't have a plan for that yet. (laughs)
George: Well at least you know what you don't know.
Seth: Yeah right.
George: Puts you at least somewhere ahead of where you were before.
Seth: Yeah.
George: And that's a great way of looking at it sort of like an election penetration number.
Seth: Right and also cause if you can get someone to vote in even like two or three elections in a row, it changes their habits and become regular voters for life.
George: Like brushing your teeth.
Seth: Yeah exactly if you just sort of almost remember every four years you're never gonna become a regular voter.
George: So talk to me about what's coming down the pipe. What are you trying to work on to extend your mission?
Seth: I sort of alluded to it a bit before. We have these two big programs. One is Turbo Vote. In a sense that's everything you can do to make voting easier before you work with government. So you just, take all the information government has, the raw material and you turn it into an application that sits on top of the platform of government. And now what we're trying to do is to actually sort of become that platform. So to build our first tools that government election officials could use to make voting easier. And one of the reasons why we're doing this and why someone else hasn't done this already is what I was saying before. All of our elections are run at the county level. And in eight states the town level. And so no VC's are investing in companies that build great affordable technology for county government. There's no real market there. And so we're stepping in as a nonprofit tech startup to build that technology and sell it to them at sort of an affordable rate. And just because we want elections to be run better.
George: So this is hilarious. In order to be this type of solution, you realize after looking at the marketplace and gathering this information, you found a problem and you're like if we can fix the infrastructure of this. Then we can get back to our ultimate goal which is to get more goddamn people to vote. We got to fix literally the goddamn plumbing of everything that's going on.
Seth: Right exactly it's like we have to get all the gunk out of the pipes in our democracy and then see where we actually are. Right now we don't have a clear picture of what our participation rate actually are because the whole system is designed to decrease turnout. As opposed to make turnout easy.
George: I feel like that's a topic for a whole other podcast in terms of ease of voting and disenfranchising.
Seth: Oh my god I would love to geek out on the history of voting. (laughs)
George: What is your favorite tidbit that you think people don't know about the history of voting?
Seth: So why do we vote on a Tuesday? That is my favorite question. There's a whole nonprofit that's called, Why Tuesday? It's such an interesting question.
George: No clue.
Seth: We vote on a Tuesday because in the 1700s, Sunday was church day so you couldn't vote on Sunday.
George: That's gods day.
Seth: That's gods day, you're at church. Then Monday you would travel to the county seat. If you were in George Washington's district you would stay over at his house. You'd get a lot of beer, you'd party at his house. Then Tuesday morning you would go to the town square. Two candidates would line up and one at a time the white wealthy landowners would shake the hand of the candidate they wanted to support in front of everyone. And you'd have time to then travel back home that afternoon in time for market day on Wednesday. So from the beginning of the U.S voting was supposed to fit the way we live. And be really seamless and convenient. And instead we're just still voting like we live in the 1700s in a farming society.
George: Although I feel like it'd be pretty damn cool to shake Obama's hand. Be like, yeah I got your back.
Seth: Yeah exactly (laughs)
George: Not terribly effective.
Seth: One of the few things people know is that the highest participation in voting happened in sort of the Lincoln era, the mid 1800s we had like 70-80% participation in elections. And what you would do is you would grab, the parties would hand out ballots like already filled out, and you would choose the ballot you wanted. And then you would drop that filled out ballot in the ballot box. And it was important to have that because so many people couldn't read. So you had to be able to grab a filled out ballot. After the end of the Civil War and the sort of freeing in the first Black Americans voting, that's when we invented the ballot booth in the ballot. Because it kept illiterate people from voting. Specifically black voters from voting. So even the invention is called the Australian ballot. It was taken from there and then adopted nationwide almost over night in like 1870s. So it's just I love these stories like this because it shows that our voting system is not set in stone. We change it for all sorts of political reasons over time. And we could continue to change it.
George: We gerrymandered the heck of it.
George: Tell me a little bit about how it seems like you do think with a plumbing mindset, right? You have to look up the river for types of solutions, how do we look at the system as a whole. Tell me a little bit about your working with API's.
Seth: One of the things we're excited to be doing next year is we realize that our whole, the whole Turbo Vote application runs on all of this data. And we're going to open up each of those sort of data feeds as it's own individual API so all of their people can build interesting tools on top of it. So we have it so we're gonna be building API of every election date. So that if you want to build your own type of reminder tool of that election date.
George: Are you going to be charging for use?
Seth: No not for the raw election data.
George: It's mind blowing that nobody does this.
Seth: It's mind blowing.
George: The government should be freaking–
Seth: Well actually I forgot to finish my story here. Even when I, from before when we did the pilot in 2010 we built this data set of local election offices.
Seth: We were just sharing it online some labs list being like, here is this list. It's useful we put it together for our pilot. No one else has this. And someone from Google reached out to us, was on that list and said. That's amazing, that's the cleanest most complete list of that type I've seen. We're gonna use and we'd like to give you a grant. So–
George: How do you do?
Seth: Yeah, ooh! And actually I thought that's how fundraising worked after that that's like not true at all.
George: Just get out there do build all this stuff and then Google just drops you a check!
Seth: Yeah not true.
George: Yeah that's not how the world works
Seth: But it was just sort of amazing at that point because it's just three of us working at that point while we were in grad school part time and we put together a data set that Google wants to use because no one else had done it.
George: That's fantastic. So talk to me, you're opening up these API's and instead of doing what I think a for profit would have done, which is, it's mine it's ours and if you pay us an exorbitant fee we will this information to you. I love it. That's why a non for profit sector is I think are very stoic where technology needs to go because it's exactly this type of story.
Seth: Yeah this is like public data it belongs to everyone and it should reinforce the whole civic tech space. And a thousand different ideas.
George: Yeah data.gov. If you're listening. Come on!! And final question here. You're gathering these data, you're creating systems. What is it going to take you think to move the needle on turnout? What is the tipping point and what is the role of technology in hitting this tipping point?
Seth: So we work a lot with college students. Right now we have 125 college partners. And what that means is they actually pay us annual partnerships fees as part of our model and we build them a version of Turbo Vote with their logo and everything on it. and then they put their site by class registrations. So everyone who signs up for classes signs up to turbovote. Or could be freshman orientation or something else. So like a bottleneck point that every student has to pass. And college students are an amazing population for this question because in 2010 of the college students who didn't vote, 66% said they didn't vote because of process issues. They forgot, you were working, you were out of town. and these are problems that we can solve. This are the low hanging fruit of turn out. You know build a system that makes vote by mail easy, that sends reminders so that you can take out all of the process excuses for people.
Seth: So that's one part of the equation where I think we can increase turnout. Because voting, when you talk to a political scientist, there's a benefit cost analysis for every voter. Does the benefit of voting outweigh the cost of voting. And what politicians do is they usually try to up the benefit by promising you a bunch of shit. But what we're doing is we're lowering the cost of voting on the other side of the equation. And I think that's the first step to massively increasing turnout. But there's a second part of it where voting is a social behavior. You vote because your friends vote, your family votes, you know other people are voting, you don't wanna be seen like someone who's not voting. And I think my hope is that we can increase turnout enough by making the process easier that we can then sort of create more social pressure for people to vote. Especially by making vote by mail easier. I think it actually a lot of young people especially they can vote next to their laptop. So they like, have their ballot out and they're on Facebook. And they're like, hey guys what the hell is this person's name doing this. Like what's this ballot initiative. It actually makes voting more social and more informed.
George: I'm forced to agree with you and playing with the variables of ability, motivation, and trigger. If you moving down the sort of cost and opportunity cost of voting, that's one solution. Aside from keeping the U.S Postal service in business, obviously by mailing. How far out is the online ballot?
Seth: The online voting is tricky because it has to be both secure and anonymous. So you can bank online because it doesn't have to be anonymous. The bank knows every single click you're doing and so it can be secure. And they can also if you make a mistake and 100,000 dollars moves out they can put in a different 100,000 dollars. Money's fundable in a way votes are not. And so it's very challenging. I don't think that technology exists now to build a system an online voting system that is both secure and anonymous. So one massive issue, I actually think that the bigger problem beyond the technology. The technology's just one big problem and I don't see any solutions out there right now. I think trust is the bigger problem, especially after 6 months after all this NSA revelations and heartbleed. This has been a bad year for trust and the internet and I think that is actually gonna set it back even longer. So for now for me I think the best we can do in the short term and in the medium term is seamless vote by mail. Your ballot comes automatically in the mail . You get a text message, reminding you to mail it back. We're gonna know if you don't vote.
George: I will find you like Liam Neeson.
Seth: (laughs) Kidnapped. And that's the first step. And then the second step is gonna be building trust and figuring out what the technology is and building trust in it and I don't know how long that's gonna take.
George: That's a hard thing to measure. Seth, thank you so much for joining us. How do people find you? How do people help you?
Seth: If you, there's lots of ways to help us.
George: (laughs)
Seth: If you want to give us a grant, you can give us an email [email protected] and we will find you. But if you want to help us partner with a college that isn't already partnered with us. We're trying to get to 300 colleges this year from 125. And you can email [email protected]
George: Do you guys have Stanford yet?
Seth: We do, we just signed them last week.
George: We got a couple Stanford listeners, nice job guys.
Seth: Yeah good job! (laughs) And how else can you help, I don't know, just follow us on twitter and we'll figure it out.
George: Perfect and you're at?
Seth: @turbovote.
George: Seth thanks again.
Seth: Alright thank you!
George: Democracy Works and Turbovote are not just doing another get out the vote initiative which we've been doing for years and I think seen the results and the upper limits of what happens. They looked at the issue from afar and said, what can we do to make it easier? How do we reduce the activation energy that it takes to vote to go out there and go on location especially for a college bound displaced population. And they landed on absentee ballots and they said, you know, we're getting movies via mail through Netflix. That's easy enough. Why can't we make it as easy to get a Netflix video to our doorstep and back, as it is to send an absentee ballot. And as they chased that question, you see where they kind of ended up. They actually had to create the database. Now create the technology in order to reduce the activation energy, And I do believe that there's an inevitable step toward electronic voting. But as Seth said it's gonna definitely hinge a lot on our relationship of trust as it comes with technology and data security. And it's been a rough year, that's for sure. But I'm still hopeful that true democracy should be working best when it's people are able to vote and also be able to read the ballot of course.
George: Well we'll leave it there. Resources on today's podcast can be found at wholewhale.com/podcast. Thanks for joining us. This has been using the wholewhale. For more resources on today's show please visit wholewhale.com/podcast and consider following us on twitter @wholewhale. And thanks for joining us.
George: I see you're still listening so I'll keep talking. Special thanks today if the audio sounds a bit better it's because we have a new member. She's Sarah Finn who's helping us with audio for the podcast. And in the true tradition and spirit of using the wholewhale I enlisted our front end whaler Simon Gringregg on the banjo. And so we had a banjo recording session. And so thank you to both of you.


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