Background: The main aim of the early treatment of polytrauma is recovery of patient's physiological functions. The early achievement of therapeutic goals, mainly adequate tissue perfusion and repayment of oxygen debt, are postulated.
The aim of the study was to confirm whether blood lactate level as a quantifier of oxygen deficit, as well as normalization of blood lactate level within the first 24 hours, have an impact on the mortality and morbidity of seriously injured patients.
Methods: Sixty-nine mechanically ventilated patients with a severe trauma and organ dysfunction defined according to SOFA score and ISS >17, age >15 years, were enrolled into this retrospective study. 8 patients died within first 24 hours, 8 patients did not reach serum lactate level above 2 mmol/l on admission to hospital.
The hypothesis that normalization of serum lactate level within 24 hours is related to lower mortality and morbidity, was assessed. Reduced mortality and morbidity were represented by lower severity of multi-organ dysfunction, the highest SOFA score during hospitalization, lower incidence of sepsis, number of days in ICU and artificial ventilation.
Results: The association between severity of multi-organ failure (p=0.0006), mortality (p=0.0022) and repayment of oxygen debt was confirmed.
Hypothesis of sepsis incidence was not confirmed (p=0.34).
The association between number of days on artificial ventilation and number of days in ICU to repayment of oxygen debt was not confirmed either. Multivariate significant factors were age, GCS, ISS and SOFA score on patient's admission.
Conclusion: The patients, who repaid oxygen debt within first 24 hours, have lower morbidity and mortality (Tab. 6, Ref. 19). Full Text in PDF www.elis.sk.
Keywords: polytrauma, lactate, MOF, SOFA score.


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Weekly Roundup: The Recession is Canceled, US Air Force Needs Hackers, Elon Makes An Offer Texans Can Refuse
Lawren Henderson
Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash
It's Friday which means it's time for your weekly dose of the top stories in engineering, hiring, and aerospace including information on a not-so-top-secret US Air Force Hacking Competition.
The Recession Is Canceled – Maybe
Cancel culture has reached the US economy as recent data suggests that a much-feared recession might not be in the cards after all. Existing home sales and jobless claims have beat expectations, and even the Philadelphia Fed's recent reading of manufacturing business activity has topped estimates. Meanwhile, upbeat investors are lifting US equity benchmarks back to record highs and both Europe and Japan are flashing more positive economic signs. Still, it's a little too early to celebrate just yet as a Bloomberg survey of economists peg the chances of a recession in the next 12 months at 35%, up from 20% at the end of last year.
Read more at MSN >>
Air Force Hacking Competition Invites Hackers to Use Powers for Good
If you're an elite hacker then Uncle Sam wants you to serve your country. The Air Force will soon put out a call inviting code ninjas to participate in a live hacking competition with the mission of virtually penetrating an orbiting satellite and its ground station. Of course, you'll need to pass a battery of security checks to win a spot on the hacking team, but if you make the cut, you'll get to show off your skills in finding software vulnerabilities in order to improve our nation's aircraft cyber security.
Read more at Wired >>
Flights to Space Departing Every 32 Hours
If you're, say, a Bitcoin millionaire and don't know what to do with all your cryptocurrency winnings, then perhaps Sir Richard Branson can interest you in a $250,000 trip to space. The legendary entrepreneur's spaceflight company Virgin Galactic announced it intends to launch 16 flights in 2020, with plans to increase to 270 flights annually by 2023. That's a launch every 32 hours so if you miss your once-in-a-lifetime trip you may be able to stick around and fly standby.
Read more at Business Insider >>
Boeing Bets On Electric Planes
The world's largest aerospace company is helping bring electric airplanes one step closer to reality. Boeing HorizonX Ventures and Safran Corporate Ventures have made a joint investment in Electric Power Systems – a company engineering aviation-grade energy storage solutions aimed at reducing the cost of battery systems for electric airplanes. In a news release Boeing HorizonX Ventures said, "This strategic investment accelerates the development of clean, quiet and safe urban air mobility solutions."
Read more at GeekWire >>
These Texans Want No Part of Elon Musk's Space Money
The 20 or so elderly residents of Boca Chila Village, Texas, recently received buyout offers from SpaceX, and the townsfolk aren't exactly jazzed about it. Elon Musk's rocket company has offered to buy their homes for three times the appraised value. SpaceX has already constructed its experimental spaceport near the tiny community and, citing safety concerns, now wants to relocate the people who live there. However, many residents don't intend to take SpaceX up on the offer.
Not ready to leave us just yet? Check out last week's roundup. There's a very cool video of a 3D printed rocket you have to see to believe.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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This is a biography of the country music singer songwriter whose battles with drink, drugs and God is the stuff of legend, with a foreword by Kris Kristofferson.
This book presented the religious, fanatical side of Cash. It was informative but seemed to skip over the relationship with June and his son.
A good overview of Cash's life.
Even if you are not a Cash fan, it is still a great story about faith, hope, love, addiction, unfaithfulness, the cutthroat music industry and finally, personal redemption.I confess, I was never a fan, but I enjoyed this book immensely. I occasionally stopped to listen to songs mentioned in the text. His collaboration with dozens of other musicians had me checking out their history too.
Wahrscheinlich gut recherchiert, aber es ist ein Sachbuch und ich fand es teilweise anstrengend zu lesen.
A good introduction to the man in black with a few excellent anecdotes that seasoned fans will not necessarily already know.
I've never really been a Johnny Cash fan. But I certainly respect his musical contributions. I was only mildly interested in him. However I found this to be a very enjoyable read. It was encouraging to hear how deep his faith was at the end of his life after a lifetime of swinging back and forth between addiction and faith.
While this is an abridged version of the authorized biography of Cash, it has this to recommend it: It is narrated in its entirety by Kris Kristofferson himself. (Kris Kristofferson writes the forward the print edition and Rex Linn narrates all other audio versions I know of.)The abridged version (3 hrs and 21 mins) gets the highlights of Cash's career from humble beginnings, to dizzying heights, to prison concerts, to obscurity, to the Rick Rubin resurrection, to his ultimate demise.


Snack Attack or Namkeen Attack in India is an age-old war, which the wise men and women have now given up fighting against. Reason: Resistance from body, mind, and soul. Just like the Christmas tree lights up your house resembling the venue of an awards show perfectly similarly the presence of crunchy snacks in your kitchen lights up your life even brighter! You just won't stop at one!
Prabhuji's assorted range of Namkeen like Bhujia, Khatta Meetha Mixture, Bhakarwadi, to name a few, aims to bring the best of Indian savories! These crunchy, crispy and low cholesterol delights made of high-quality ingredients flavoured in a blend of handpicked traditional spices are not only the perfect companion for your tea time but are also a great gifting option during the festive season.
It's midnight, you have the most important presentation to present the next morning, and the nervousness is consuming all the carbs you just had for dinner! In the dark hours of distress, when the immature cook within you remembers the wise words of your mom, the only Indian dry snack that comes as a savior and shines as an armor is "The Great Taste of Bhujia " The crunchiest snack, Prabhuji Bhujia is seasoned with rich spices, the flavours and aroma make up for the best midnight-snack experience. Buy Prabhuji Bhujia Online here.
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A crunchy delight with lentils, grams, cashews, raisins, and corn as the primary ingredient, Haldiram Dry Fruit Mixture is the most healthy namkeen you will come across. The nutritional goodness of kaju with a spicy touch makes it the most popular snack among Indian families. Oh, and Prabhuji also offers cashback of 4% on every product and shipping charges are on them if you order beyond INR 600. How about we call it a legit deal online!
Keep a pack of Haldiram mini samosas ready for the times when guests drop in unexpectedly! This bite-sized version of the most popular snack in India is made of wheat flour with a stuffing of green gram, cashew, raisins mixed with chilies, sugar, and other spices. A twist to the traditional samosas, Prabhuji Mini Samosa is a perfect bliss for teatime. Also, for next the tea-time party, simply order online in bulk and did we say, first time buyers enjoy 5% off on orders above INR 600!
Prabhuji Haldiram is in vogue during the festive season, as they stock the best traditional delicacies in the city. Speaking of traditional delicacies, their exclusive range of Dry Fruits Mazza Boxes and trendy packs of mouth watering sweets will make you miss the trimmed waistline.


This West-Chester school house was a new building at the time, and was located in the portion of the new Cinnaminson Township that was later to become Delran confusing, isn't it? The Burlington County Freeholders rebuilt that end of the bridge and traffic soon began moving again between Camden and Burlington across the old covered bridge. Everyone wanted a voice in the building of new schools and roads, and in a day of horse-drawn vehicles, it was not too easy to attend the township meetings at the new town hall, even though the hall was rather centrally located. A pioneer settler of the Fairview locality was Benjamin Bates. One result of the influx of new faces and ideas was the demand for a partitioning of Cinnaminson Township, which had itself been set off from old Chester Township not too many years before. The old mill site, later owned by the Kendal and Laslocky families, and transformed into Millside property, is one of the historic locations within present-day Delran. Charles Haines lived in a brick home built by his ancestors in the 's on Taylor's Lane. The first Town Meeting was held at the West-Chester schoolhouse. Later, Wallace Lippincott was the lumber dealer.
The mounds of oyster and clamshells found along the coast by early colonists attest to the Indian visits, and to their duration. This was not the only Indian road across Jersey to the sea, but it was a much-used one. A Coach-horn would be sounded as the coach neared the bridge or rumbled into the old Tavern nearby to take on passengers or change horses. This old house, occupied a number of years ago by the McCarter family, was razed in the 's, walk-in fireplace and all. One wonders, conversely, what the pioneers might make of the what was the Millside Heights Shopping Center now Target Center near the old mill stream, or of Tenby Chase, the then Millside Manor Apartments now Hunters Glen Apartments , or of the housing development named for ancient Swedes Run! Charles Haines lived in a brick home built by his ancestors in the 's on Taylor's Lane. The new change came largely because the balance of population in ChesterTownship had by this time shifted toward the river portion of the township. Of the total Delran population of persons, were listed on the school rolls as "scholars registered. Laurel, and Medford to approach the seacoast. At the beginning of ferry operation in , a tavern was. In the Zion Lutheran Church at Riverside, the services of the early years were in the German language. This left both Delran and Cinnaminson as L-shaped townships each with some frontage on river and creek. Peter's Roman Catholic Church was in the midst of a growing parish dating from about Later, Wallace Lippincott was the lumber dealer. By two new schools were on the scene; one at Bridgeboro, replacing an earlier building, and a new building on the "Burlington Pike" at Fairview. The estimated population in is approximately 17, Riverside's growth, along with continued growth at Bridgeboro accounted for the next change in territorial boundaries. No longer in a location to serve either Cinnaminson or Delran satisfactorily, the town hall was sold and eventually became Frank's Market on Rt. Griscom The history of the territory now known as Delran Township began long before the present name was given to the area in Babington; Collector, Robert M. It was succeeded by a new bridge in , and by a later one in Riverfront towns grew beside the railroad across the next two decades: Great however was the demand for the further partitioning. The Township seat was then known as Chester or Chestertown, which a half-century later became Moorestown. Among these relics are such native tools, ornaments, and weapons as skinning knives, spears, mortars, pestles, pendants, squaw knives, stone pipes, tomahawks, adzes, spades, and bowls.
Most of this history was written by Lloyd S. The tracks of this early line were laid in , along the riverfront portion of the Township.


"I saw a few pictures of Rafa, last week," said Federer, who joked: "I see he's still a left-hander - and his shirts looked good."
"I'm happy to see him back and playing on the Tour," said the two-time Rotterdam champion.
"He seems to have good energy. I was surprised he lost a final against a player ranked outside the top 50.
"I'm sure he got a lot of information about his game last week (in Chile). He knows now how much strain he is putting on his body and how he is dealing with it."
Sijsling also reached the Australian Open doubles final, partnering Robin Haase to a runner-up finish (l. to Bryans).


text:
Tadhg Ó Murchadha
On the right in Ballingeary, 1912
(Credit: Barra Ó Suibhne)
(Colourised: Matt Loughrey, 2020)
Tadhg Ó Murchadha (1843-1919). Born in Macroom, Ó Murchadha left school at a young age and set off to be a tailor in nGleann na Láine (Ballinagree), where he learned Irish. He moved to Cork city in 1864. The country was boiling with the spirit of Fenianism and Ó Murchadha became an activist. He was present at the founding of the Cork branch of the Gaelic League in 1894.
He seems to have had little ability in writing Irish but he was involved in the translation of Robinson Crusoe into Irish. Diarmuid Ó Murchú is said to have helped him and Traolach Mac Suibhne/Terence McSwiney recorded his memories in The Story of 'Shandun' which relates to the time of the Fenians in Cork. It was published in 1920 and Ó Murchadha never saw it in print.
There is one sentence in the preface which expresses the old tailor's eagerness for accuracy of speech: 'most vigorous and fluent '.
Shán Ó Cuív held him in high esteem as an Irish speaker and he appears in a number of the surviving photos in Ballingeary from around 1912.
Foinse/source: Ainm.ie [ar líne/online]: https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=96 (ceadaithe/accessed 21/10/2020).


text:
Home > Beacon Press
Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim
A searingly honest memoir of one young woman's journey toward self-acceptance as she comes to see her body as a symbol of rebellion and hope and chooses to live her life unapologetically
Author: Leah Vernon
Publisher: Beacon Press
Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn't any room for imperfection. Good Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn't have a missing father or a mother with mental illness. They didn't have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the white characters they saw on TV. They didn't have husbands who abused and cheated on them. They certainly didn't have secret abortions. In Unashamed, Vernon takes to task the myth of the perfect Muslim woman with frank dispatches on her love-hate relationship with her hijab and her faith, race, weight, mental illness, domestic violence, sexuality, the millennial world of dating, and the process of finding her voice.
She opens up about her tumultuous adolescence living at the poverty line with her fiercely loving but troubled mother, her deadbeat dad, and her siblings, and the violent dissolution of her 10-year marriage. Tired of the constant policing of her clothing in the name of Islam and Western beauty standards, Vernon reflects on her experiences with hustling paycheck to paycheck, body-shaming, and redefining what it means to be a "good" Muslim.
Irreverent, youthful, and funny, Unashamed gives anyone who is marginalized permission to live unapologetic, confident lives.
Part 1: Good Muslim Girl
1. The Shirt That Swallowed Me Whole
2. Child Support
3. Vernon v. Smiley
Part 2: Jezebel
4. Flushed
5. Mom Ain't Mom No More
6. Playing House
Part 3. Life, Unfiltered
7. Caged In
8. Covering
9. That Time We Went to Guatemala
Part 4: Busting Out
10. Rebel with a Hijab
11. Sex Object
12. Perfectly Imperfect
Part 5: Unapologetically Me
13. To Wear or Not to Wear
14. Life in the Day of a Fat Model
15. Muslim Girl Dance
"Vernon's determined advocacy for body positivity as a feminist and mental health issue, and her painful journey to self-acceptance, are moving and powerful, forcing readers to examine their own preconceptions about beauty standards and health." —Booklist
"This candid memoir will be of interest for those who have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual violence, and who are seeking forceful encouragement toward self-empowerment and self-expression." —Library Journal
"Vernon's narration reads like an intimate heart-to-heart chat with a friend . . . Irreverent, vulnerable, and unapologetic in every sense." —Kirkus Reviews
"I love the fierce, unflinching honesty and integrity in Unashamed. The courage and raw emotion grabs you from the start and demands you open your heart and mind without judgment or preconceptions. I laughed and cried and read this book in awe of Leah Vernon's brave, bold, and beautiful voice." —Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of The Lines We Cross and Does My Head Look Big in This?
"Deeply powerful in its vulnerability, Unashamed invites us into the pain, beauty, and redemption that have shaped Leah Vernon. We are transformed through the act of witnessing. Yes, this is a book for Fat Studies and Critical Race scholars, but it's also one of the most generous memoirs I've ever read. There's not a moment in this book where Vernon doesn't take risks. That's rare and beautiful to see." —Virgie Tovar, author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat
"Unashamed is everything Leah Vernon embodies on a daily basis: authenticity, resiliency, and, most of all . . . unquestionable courage. Unashamed is exactly what this world needs, and I'm so thankful for Leah: the fantastically powerful force behind this literary triumph." —Jes Baker, author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls and Landwhale
Author: Charlene Carruthers
Reclaiming Our Space
Author: Feminista Jones
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
Author: Mona Eltahawy
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


Rustic Chicken with Potatoes, Olives and Prunes | The Local Palate | The Local Palate is the South's premier food culture publication.
Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Brown in oil on all sides and remove from pan.
Add potatoes to same pan and brown, stirring often, about 10 minutes. Add onions, garlic, and prunes and cook until onions are lightly colored, about 5 minutes.
Deglaze pan with wine, scraping up all the caramelized bits stuck to the bottom and cook for another 5 minutes.
Add chicken back to the pan along with olives, rosemary, and stock. Simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally to avoid sticking.
Cook for about 20 minutes or until chicken is done and potatoes, onions, and prunes begin to break down slightly and make a sticky sauce coating the chicken. Serve garnished with parsley.


text:
Home Perspectives Pentagon preparing for War with The Enemy: Russia
Pentagon preparing for War with The Enemy: Russia
Rick Rozoff
"Today the situation is much more serious than before August 2008….[A] possible recurrence of war will not be limited to the Caucasus.
"The new President of the United States did not bring about any crucial changes in relation to Georgia, but having a dominant role in NATO he still insists on Georgia's soonest joining of the Alliance. If it happens, the world would face a more serious threat than the crises of the Cold War.
"Under the new realities, Georgia's war against South Ossetia may easily turn into NATO's war against Russia. This would be a third world war."
On May 12 James Mattis, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation [ACT] and commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, spoke at a three-day symposium called Joint Warfighting 09 in Norfolk, Virginia, where NATO's Allied Command Transformation is based, and stated: "I come with a sense of urgency. The enemy is meeting like this as well." [1]
A local newspaper summarized his speech:
"Mattis outlined a future in which wars will not have clearly defined beginnings and ends. What is needed, he said, is a grand strategy, a political framework that can guide military planning." [2]
He failed, for what passes for diplomatic reasons no doubt, to identify who "the enemy" is, but a series of recent developments, or rather an intensification of ongoing ones, indicate which nation it is.
Last week the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Kevin Chilton, told reporters during a Defense Writers Group breakfast on May 7 "that the White House retains the option to respond with physical force – potentially even using nuclear weapons – if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks…."
An account of his talk added "the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes."
Chilton "said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms," [3] though the likely first target of alleged retaliation against equally alleged cyber attacks would be another nation already identified by US military officials as such: Russia.
In late April and early May of 2007 the government of Estonia, which was inducted into NATO in 2004 and whose president was and remains Toomas Hendrik Ilves, born in Sweden and raised in the United States (where he worked for Radio Free Europe), reported attacks on websites in the country which were blamed on Russia.
Over two years later no evidence has been presented to substantiate the claim that Russian hackers, much less the government itself, were behind the attacks, though it remains an article of faith among US and other Western officials and media that they were.
The response from American authorities in the first place was so sudden and severe, even before investigations were conducted, as to strongly suggest that if the attacks hadn't been staged they would need to be invented.
Right afterward Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne stated, "Russia, our Cold War nemesis, seems to have been the first to engage in cyber warfare."
The US Air Force news source from which the above is quoted added that the events in Estonia days earlier "did start a series of debates within NATO and the EU about the definition of clear military action and it may be the first test of the applicability of Article V of the NATO charter regarding collective self-defense in the non-kinetic realm." [4]
NATO's Article 5 is a collective military defense provision, in fact a war clause, one which first and to date for the only time has been used to support the protracted and escalating war in Afghanistan.
References to it, then, are not to be taken lightly.
On a visit to Estonia last November Pentagon chief Robert Gates met with the country's prime minister, Andrus Ansip, and "discussed Russian behavior and new cooperation on cyber security…."
It was reported that "Ansip said NATO will operate under the principle of Article 5 of the alliance's treaty, which states that an attack on one ally is treated as an attack on all," and "We are convinced that Estonia, as a member of NATO, will be very well defended." [5]
That the repeated mention of NATO's Article 5 continued a year and a half after the alleged cyber attacks when none had occurred in the interim is revealing.
At the beginning of this month the Pentagon announced that it was launching what it called a "digital warfare force for the future," at Fort Meade in Maryland under the control of the U.S. Strategic Command, whose chief, Gen. Kevin Chilton, was quoted earlier as threatening the use of force up to and including nuclear weapons.
The initiative was characterized in a news report as follows:
"Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, also the Pentagon's leading cyber warfare commander, said the U.S. is determined to lead the global effort to use computer technology to deter or defeat enemies…." [6]
The Pentagon is a synecdoche for the Department of Defense and everything related to its activities is cloaked in the same euphemism, so when pressed the US will insist its new cyber warfare project is intended for defensive purposes only. Any nation which and people who have been on the receiving end of US Defense Department actions know better. The new US cyber warfare command, its rationale based on a supposed Russian threat emanating from a non-military incident in the Baltics over two years ago, will be used to cripple the computer systems of any nation targeted for direct military assault, thus rendering them defenseless, and will be particularly effective for space-based and Star Wars (missile shield, interceptor missiles) first strike plans.
On the same day the report of General Alexander's pledge to "defeat enemies" appeared another news item reported that "A quasi-classified satellite that will serve as an engineering trailblazer for ballistic missile tracking technologies flew into space Tuesday [May 12]." [7]
It was a Space Tracking and Surveillance System Advanced Technology Risk Reduction (STSS-ATRR) satellite, which "is part of a space-based system for the Missile Defense Agency.
"Sensors aboard the STSS-ATRR satellite and on the ground will communicate with other systems to defend against incoming ballistic missiles." [8]
A few days earlier the California-based manufacturer Ducommun in a news report titled Ducommun Incorporated Announces Delivery of Nanosatellites to U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command announced that "its Miltec Corporation subsidiary delivered flight-ready nanosatellites to the U.S. Army pace and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command (USASMDC/ARSTRAT) in Huntsville, Alabama on April 28, 2009."
The delivery was "the completion of the first U.S. Army satellite development program since the Courier 1B communications satellite in 1960."[9]
Military satellites used for neutralizing the potential of a rival nation not so much to launch a first strike but to respond to one blur the distinction between so-called Son of Star Wars missile shield projects and full-fledged militarization of space.
A recent Russian commentary saw it in just that manner:
"Withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty signified a switch to the testing and deployment of a global missile defense system, with a view to fully removing the deterrent potential of China, and partially that of Russia.
"Washington [is] still trying to eliminate international legal restrictions on the formation of a system, which would theoretically make it invulnerable towards an act of retaliation, and even a launch-under-attack strike." [10]
Added to which is another "quasi-classified" subterfuge related to a prospective resumption of Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) talks between the US And Russia.
American Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller stated this week "that the US is not prepared to cut warheads removed from delivery means and kept in storage." [11]
So in addition to US plans to deploy ground-, sea-, air- and space-based anti-missile systems primarily around and against Russia (Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway, Britain, Japan and Alaska to date), the Pentagon will hold in reserve nuclear warheads for activation without a monitoring mechanism provided to Russian inspectors and arms reduction negotiators.
On May 6 Euronews conducted an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who warned, "The way it [the US anti-ballistic missile shield] is designed has nothing to do with Iran's nuclear program. It is aimed at Russian strategic forces, deployed in the European part of the Russian Federation." [12]
To add to the concerns of Russia and other nations, On April 30 the US established a Navy Air and Missile Defense Command (NAMDC) at the Naval Support Facility at Dahlgren, Virginia.
"NAMDC is the lead organization for Navy, joint and combined Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD). NAMDC serves as the single warfare center of excellence to synchronize and integrate Navy efforts across the full spectrum of air and missile defense to include air defense, cruise missile defense and ballistic missile defense." [13]
The past two weeks has been a fertile period for stories in this vein and, to bring attention nearer the Earth, the US-based Strategy Page reported from a Russian source that "The United States has bought two Su-27 fighter jets from Ukraine" to "be used to train American military pilots, who may face opponents in them" and that the "US military will use them to test its radar and electronic warfare equipment." [14]
This was at the very moment that the US client in Ukraine, President Viktor Yushchenko, his national poll ratings plummeting to near 1%, signed a directive to prepare for full NATO membership and a few days after a US military delegation visited the country to inspect a tank unit and to plan "reforming the system of combat training…." [15]
In terms of US training for warfare against the Russian Air Force, the Ukrainian development is only the latest in a number of such activities.
Immediately following the nation becoming a full member of NATO, the US 81st Fighter Squadron flew to Constanta, Romania (in which nation the Pentagon has acquired four new bases since) to engage in combat training against Russian MiG-21s.
According to one US pilot present, "It was pretty neat – you're sitting in a MiG-21 that will be airborne with a MiG-21 pilot within days. This was an arm of the Soviet Union. These pilots were flying before the Soviet Union fell. They have quite a bit of perspective." [16]
In July of the next year the US 492nd Fighter Squadron was deployed to the Graf Ignatievo Air Base in neighoring Bulgaria to insure the opportunity for "Air Forces from multiple nations to learn about each other's aircraft tactics and capabilities.
"The pilots of the F-15E Strike Eagles and the MIG-29s and MIG-21s are sharing knowledge of aircraft and tactics as the exercise wraps up its first week of training."
A US Air Force colonel was quoted as saying, "Only two of the 38 aircrew members have had a chance to fly against MIGs. By the time the exercise is over, everyone will have had a chance to either fly in a MIG or fly against one." [17]
A month afterward the US Air Force 22nd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron arrived in Romania for the Viper Lance exercises which "marked the first time U.S. F-16 pilots have trained in Romania" and "where "MiG-21 and F-16 pilots [flew] integrated formations to conduct basic fighter maneuvers, dissimilar air combat training and air-to-ground strike missions…." [18]
This time the quote is from an F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot:
"My flight in the backseat of a Lancer [MiG-21] is a good opportunity to look at different aircraft and it's a real privilege and an honor. I want to see what they see from their cockpit, and view a new angle of understanding against our adversaries." [19]
Two weeks ago a US Air Force fighter squadron flew to the Bezmer Air Base in Bulgaria where an American airman said, "This is the first time a USAFE [United States Air Forces in Europe] fighter squadron has deployed to this location….The most rewarding part of this experience is knowing that I am helping the pilots train for war." [20]
To prepare the US for air combat against the full range of Russian military aircraft, India was invited to the annual Red Flag air combat exercises in Alaska in 2007, war games "meant to train pilots from the US, NATO and other allied countries for real combat situations.
"This includes the use of 'enemy' hardware and live ammunition for bombing exercises." [21]
India provided six Sukhoi SU-30MKI fighters which were "particularly interesting to the exercise as [they are] Russian-made, thus traditionally considered 'hostile.'" [22]
May 1st, on the occasion of the Czech Republic taking over the six-month NATO air patrol rotation in the Baltic skies over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – five minutes flight from Russia's second largest city of St. Petersburg – a Czech official boasted "The area we are protecting is about three times larger than that of the Czech Republic. This is a NATO outpost."
Lithuanian Air Force Commander Arturas Leita announced that "the Baltic countries would probably ask for the prolongation of the air force mission within NATO until 2018." [23]
From June 8-16 Sweden will host a NATO drill, Loyal Arrow, described as "biggest air force drill ever in the Finnish-Swedish Bothnian Bay," [24], also not far from St. Petersburg, with a British aircraft carrier and more than 50 fighter jets participating.
That exercise will begin exactly a week after the US-led NATO Cooperative Lancer 09 war games end in Georgia on Russia's southern flank.
In speaking of the dangers of the last-named but with equal application to all that has preceded it, the South Ossetian Ministry for Press and Mass Media website recently quoted political scientist Irina Kadzhaev as warning:
"Today the situation is much more serious than before August 2008. The then threat endangered only South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but after Russia's recognition of these states' independence and the conclusion of agreements envisaging the presence of Russian armed forces on their territories, a possible recurrence of war will not be limited to the Caucasus.
"Under the new realities, Georgia's war against South Ossetia may easily turn into NATO's war against Russia. This would be a third world war." [25]
[1]. Virginian-Pilot, May 13, 2009
[2]. Ibid
[3]. Global Security, May 12, 2009
[4]. Air Force Link, June 1, 2007
[5]. U.S. Department of Defense, November 12, 2008
[6]. Associated Press, May 5, 2009
[7]. Space Flight Now, May 5, 2009
[8]. Pratt & Whitney, May 5, 2009
[9]. Ducommun Incorporated, April 29, 2009
[10]. Russian Information Agency Novosti, May 7, 2009
[11]. Russia Today, May 5, 2009
[12]. Euronews, May 6, 2009
[13]. Navy News, April 30, 2009
[14]. Moscow News, May 11, 2009
[15]. National Radio Company of Ukraine, April 29, 2009
[16]. Air Force Link, August 2, 2005
[17]. U.S. Air Forces in Europe, July 24, 2006
[18]. Stars and Stripes, August 26, 2006
[19]. Air Force Link, August 17, 2006
[20]. Air Force Link, April 28, 2009
[21]. Indo-Asian News Service, November 26, 2007
[22]. Avionews (Italy]. , November 28, 2007
[23]. Czech News Agency, May 1, 2009
[24]. Barents Observer, May 7, 2009
[25]. Ministry for Press and Mass Media of the Republic of South Ossetia, April 27, 2009
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Rick Rozoff, a peace activist and an analyst of international affairs for forty years, contributed this article to Media Monitors Network (MMN) from Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Will Friendly Judge's Rulings, Continued Delays Jeopardize AIPAC Trial?
The Bundeswehr is back to the World Military Stage
Welcome to Israel, Joe!
Elections a Western obsession, not the Afghans' need


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Not that much has changed in 30 years...
Eva Murray: How to get a teacher to an island
Eva Murray
Matinicus airstrip (Photo courtesy Shawn Michaud)
As we meet this year's new Matinicus teacher, and as he meets his little class, I recall my first few days working on this island 30 years ago.When I taught school, the group included very nearly one of each grade. My second grader is an island fisherman with a little boy of his own now, the young fellow still a preschooler but a big wheel in the chicken industry around here. I see my kindergartner's two sons out here every summer.
Last month I was treated to a happy surprise when a very special student — my third grader, now married and in her 30s — appeared in my bakery. I remembered a 9-year-old who read Mark Twain and who wrote like a high school student. She was many years advanced in her schoolwork, but family didn't make her childhood easy, and she left the island the next year. I had always wondered what she'd done next, and it was wonderful to see her smiling face.
Tuesday was the first day of school here on Matinicus, as it was in many places. We don't even think about having our little elementary school open before Labor Day for a variety of reasons, not least among them that there would most probably be nowhere for the teacher to live if he or she arrived in August.
No, the teacher doesn't live on Matinicus year-round; not typically, anyway.
As school opens I think back on my own arrival here as the new teacher 30 years ago. Keep in mind that the job of schoolteacher on Matinicus Island is nobody's career. Before I moved here in 1987 I thought — as many people who have never been here do think — that the offshore islands have long-term teachers, people, presumably starchy old ladies in sensible shoes, native born, who have deep island roots and who never leave, who exist in a sort of way-back machine and who have taught generations of island kids the same lessons, with globe, pointer, and a bun in their hair, and who hold a sort of unbreakable tenure that comes with being a cultural institution. Nope.
(Well, I did meet a teacher on one of the Casco Bay islands a few years ago who nearly rose to that rank, and who had been there for decades, but she was the exception rather than the norm. She is also a real person, not a caricature of a one-room school teacher from Tom Sawyer's day.)
On Matinicus, and on Monhegan, and on Isle au Haut, and on Frenchboro, and on the Cranberries, the teachers stay a year or two; occasionally, as much as six or eight years. Here, at least, the position does remind folks a bit of a Peace Corps posting. Often people only expect to be here a year, and have no illusions about "moving here" with all of their possessions. Frequently, they store their furniture, pack a few duffels bags and cardboard boxes, and figure they're in for an adventure. Even if a teacher wanted to stay for more than a couple of years, and could find a place to rent that allowed for some stability, and their family went along with the whole deal which is unlikely, this community knows that it is beneficial for our students to have a few different teachers over their elementary school career. After all, no one person specializes in everything, and it is one person. Maybe two. It seems that for the moment, anyway, this year's teacher works alone. Likewise, when I was the teacher, I worked alone.
That teacher from Casco Bay with the many years of experience once offered a comment on this two-year business common to the other small islands: "Only two years? It takes people two years just to learn where all the light switches are!"
I made my first trip to Matinicus on the airplane when I interviewed for the teaching job in May. I had answered a classified ad in the Bangor Daily News a few months before, reading only, "Teacher wanted for one-room school."
I was to apply to the superintendent in Rockland. That's not how they do it anymore. These days, advertisement for teachers go online, through a nationwide network called ServingSchools.com, and the island school board gets applications from all over the country. That brings with it some potential for complication if a teacher is hired who hasn't yet thought about seasickness, bush pilots, and log stretches of fog. Sometimes the superintendent has to explain things to an applicant who has not yet looked at a map. No, you cannot commute. No, there is no bridge. No, we don't pay for all of your transportation.
Mine was not a random lark of an application (although a few South Thomaston neighbors worried I was venturing into quite a den of iniquity).
Before Matinicus, I'd considered a teaching position in Kotzebue, Alaska, recommended to me by the career help folks at the University of Maine. I had applied for a job in Rockland's own SAD 5 in 1986, but they kept asking me whether I was a "team player."
When I squirmed a little trying force myself to reply in the affirmative they could probably tell I wasn't a genuine "team player." The superintendent who hired me for Matinicus never once asked about being a "team player."
I remember well the airplane ride to the interview. The air service was called "Penobscot Air Service" at the time, just recently changed from "Stonington Flying Service."
Will Smith was the pilot and the wind was blowing hard. We stayed high over the end of the airstrip and then, as I recall, powered down through the wind ("dive-bombed it for the airstrip" was how I described it years ago, before I understood a bit more about back-country flying). There was plenty of kidding about how, if the teacher applicant didn't puke on the way to the interview, it was a check-mark in their favor.
These days, one of the islanders makes the suggestion on a regular basis that the way to sort the applicant pool should be by e-mailing interested teachers and simply indicating that, "Your interview will be at 10 a.m. on Thursday the third," or whatever, "at the school on Matinicus." Offer no other information or assistance, no instructions, definitely no hand-holding. Do not book their passage for them. Answer questions only when asked. The successful applicant would be the one who figures out how to get here.
A few years ago, when I was on the Matinicus school board, the dispatcher at Penobscot Island Air mentioned that we didn't really need a school board interview at all; they could tell us who the successful applicant would be, just based on how the individual applicants handled the logistics and reacted to the flight.
Some arrive late, in the wrong footwear, and seem annoyed; a few look a little shell-shocked or a turn a bit green.
Some get off the plane grinning from ear to ear.
That is always a plus.
More Industrial Arts...
Cardinals, cows, and computers – A few things have changed in 30 years
A great place for honeybees
• Apple blossom time (June 7, 2017)
• Old fogeys, twitchers and stowaways: a birder's evolution (May 22, 2017)
• LifeFlight visits Matinicus Island for community training (March 20, 2017)
• At what risk? (Feb. 7, 2017)
• Using it twice (Jan. 25, 2017)
• Christmas on Matinicus, back a ways and these days (Dec. 19, 2016)
• Remember civilian heroes – A Christmas tree, two guys named Coleman, and a lot of other people (Dec. 19, 2016)
• Eva Murray: Haul away, haul away, boys... (Nov. 23, 2016)
• Politics, the middle ground, and a few probably unwelcome observations (Nov. 5, 2016)
• Islander (Oct. 20, 2016)
• Eva Murray: Brier, Muck and Igiugig (Sept. 28, 2016)
• Doctor Lightning (June 27, 2016)
• Search and Rescue (May 27, 2016)
• It's about the water (May 11, 2016)
• Eva Murray: In defiance of mud season - tips for the inspired homeowner
• Plesiosynchronicity, and a snowy day
• A day of planning and practicing in preparation for major storms (posted March 10, 2016)
• Time to take down the (island) Christmas tree (posted March 3, 2016)
• Snow Day on Matinicus (posted Feb. 14, 2016)
• Going to Rockland for pie (and beer and art glass and ukuleles...) (posted Feb. 3, 2016)
• Eva Murray: Pencil to paper (posted Jan. 21, 2016)
• A new year, a new winter (posted Dec. 31, 2015)
• 'A tiny, happy place' (posted Dec. 14, 2015)
• Metal artist Blair Clement brings wave-washed junk to life (posted Sept. 20, 2015)
• Maine veterans and a most sentimental biker (posted June 1, 2015)
• Wild Island Child (posted April 8, 2015)
• Last holdouts of offshore outpost finally accept reality (posted April 1, 2015)
• Truck on boat (posted March 16, 2015)
• Public works (posted Feb. 25, 2015)
• A constant struggle (posted Feb. 14, 2015)
• Pie Hero, Pie Villain (posted Jan. 29, 2015)
• Safely out to sea (posted Jan. 27, 2015)
• Je suis (posted Jan. 13, 2015)
• Making merry on Matinicus, with only a few (posted Dec. 25, 2014)
• The smallest emergency medical service around (posted Sept. 29, 2014)
• Islanders host 'Man Overboard!' discussion, rescue demonstrations (posted Sept. 8, 2014)
• Logistics (posted July 31, 2014)
• Black Hawks over Criehaven (posted July 16, 2014)
• On a sunny Saturday, when the steel band came to Matinicus (posted June 6, 2014)
• The last day of winter (posted April 16, 2014)
• Puppies, basketball champs not injured by explosive five-bulldozer wreck, dump fire, and zoning board (posted March 13, 2014)
• In a good old hardware store (in memory of Everett Crabtree) (posted Feb. 28, 2014)
• What is it like to be one of Maine's Search and Rescue volunteers? (posted Feb. 9, 2014)
• Arts and hobbies (posted Jan. 31, 2014)
• Santa Claus and the yard sales - why I own more monkey wrenches than you do (posted Jan. 15, 2014)
• Quiet on this last day of the year (Dec. 31, 2013)
• A one-room school Christmas (posted Dec. 21, 2013)
• Here's wishing us all a little rebellion in this happy season (posted Dec. 12, 2013)
• Roadside assistance (posted Nov. 27, 2013)
• On the many kinds of emergency responders (posted Nov. 18, 2013)
• (In defense of...) Breakfast for supper (posted Oct. 22, 2013)
• Fish Factory (posted Sept. 9, 2013)
• 350 dot Rockland... and many ruminations on small efforts (posted Aug. 30, 2013)
• Trains and planes and heroes (posted July 15, 2013)
• Joining the community of artists (posted July 4, 2013)
• Worth every penny (posted July 27, 2013)
• It's about showing up. Some thoughts on EMS Week (posted May 27, 2013)
• Ethanol, gasoline, and public safety (posted April 17, 2013)
• A system that makes it hard on people who want to do the right thing (part 2) (posted March 29, 2013)
• 'It's important' (posted Jan. 18, 2013)
• Tree crew (posted Dec. 28, 2012)
• Light the candles (posted Dec. 13, 2012)
• Firewood (posted Dec. 2, 2012)
• Missing man formation (posted Oct. 18, 2012)
• In the middle of the bay (posted Oct. 3, 2012)


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Of late, there have references to the price of fertilizer being reduced from D950 to D700 per bag. NFSC wishes to bring to attention of all stakeholders that the actual reduction is far more than the said level. Taking into consideration the CIF value and local handling and distribution costs, the weighted average market value sale price was D1,555 per bag of 50kg. It was this price that government initially reduced to D950 per bag and lately to D700 per bag.
The Corporation is making this clarification in order to ensure that the actual situation is reported and the stakeholders, especially the farmers, are informed accurately.
This clarification is not in any way intended to influence recent calls for further reduction to the price of the fertilizer; that decision is entirely the prerogative of the Government of The Gambia.


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THE TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES 2016 TCA AWARDS WINNERS
August 07, 2016 / Social Spread Media
THE TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES
2016 TCA AWARDS WINNERS
The Night's Top Winner, the FX True Crime Thriller THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY, Earns Three Awards Including Program of the Year
Other Honorees Include THE AMERICANS, MR. ROBOT, BLACK-ISH, MAKING A MURDERER, and CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, as well as THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW & Comedy Pioneer Lily Tomlin
The Evening was Emceed by JANE THE VIRGIN's Jaime Camil, with Telenovela Superstar Rogelio De La Vega Making a Cameo Appearance
BEVERLY HILLS, CA – August 6, 2016 – The Television Critics Association (TCA) recognized the top programs and actors from the 2015-2016 television season tonight, at its 32nd Annual TCA Awards presentation. The prestigious organization's event was held at the Beverly Hills Hilton hotel, hosted by THE CW's JANE THE VIRGIN fan-favorite Jaime Camil. Beloved telenovela icon Rogelio De La Vega, star of the hit dramas THE PASSIONS OF SANTOS and TIAGO A TRAVÉS DEL TIEMPO, was also on-hand making a cameo appearance.
The results were determined from votes cast by the TCA's membership, comprised of more than 220 professional TV critics and journalists from the United States and Canada. The winners represented an eclectic blend of shows and stars in 12 distinct categories, putting the spotlight on the best of the best in comedy, drama, reality, miniseries, news, and youth programming. Highlights included USA's first-year hacker hit MR. ROBOT taking the crown for Outstanding New Program, and Netflix's controversial docu-series MAKING A MURDERER winning Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming.
FX emerged as one of the evening's biggest winners on the strength of its celebrated true crime thriller THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY, which snagged three awards including Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries, and Specials; Individual Achievement in Drama, given to star Sarah Paulson for her stunning portrayal of troubled head prosecutor Marcia Clark; and the night's top honor of Program of the Year. Rounding out the network's big night was acclaimed Soviet spy thriller THE AMERICANS, which captured the award for Outstanding Achievement in Drama for the second consecutive year.
Additionally, ABC's BLACK-ISH received the award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy; Rachel Bloom, star of The CW's CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, claimed the award for Individual Achievement in Comedy; TBS' freshman comedy show FULL FRONTAL WITH SAMANTHA BEE earned top honors for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information; and the PBS animated series DANIEL TIGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD won Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming.
The TCA also bestowed a Heritage Award upon CBS' groundbreaking 1970s sitcom THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW for the tremendous cultural and social impact it has had on society, and presented legendary comedy pioneer Lily Tomlin with a Career Achievement Award for her diverse television legacy that spans over 50 years and includes seven Emmy wins, and unforgettable roles in classic series such as ROWAN & MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN, MURPHY BROWN, THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS, THE WEST WING, and GRACE AND FRANKIE, among others.
"This was truly a landmark season—not just for television, but for women in television," said Amber Dowling, TCA President. "We had an unprecedented amount of female winners this year, which is a testament to both the talented actresses who were honored tonight, as well as to the growing number of high-quality roles being created for and by women. It's extremely encouraging to see this growing trend being embraced, accepted, and expanded upon, and I look forward to seeing even more of it in the future."
Photographs from the TCA Awards are available at .
2016 TCA Award recipients are as follows:
Individual Achievement in Drama: Sarah Paulson (THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY, FX)
Individual Achievement in Comedy: Rachel Bloom (CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, The CW)
Outstanding Achievement in News and Information: FULL FRONTAL WITH SAMANTHA BEE (TBS)
Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming: MAKING A MURDERER (Netflix)
Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming: DANIEL TIGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD(PBS)
Outstanding New Program: MR. ROBOT (USA)
Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries and Specials: THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY (FX)
Outstanding Achievement in Drama: THE AMERICANS (FX) – second consecutive year
Outstanding Achievement in Comedy: BLACK-ISH (ABC)
Career Achievement Award: Lily Tomlin
Heritage Award: THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW (CBS)
Program of the Year: THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY (FX)
ABOUT THE TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION
The Television Critics Association (TCA) represents more than 200 professional journalists who cover television for publications across the United States and Canada. The members reach tens of millions of consumers each week, and are considered experts within the industry, representing their employers as moderators, panelists, radio/TV guests and more. The prestigious organization honors outstanding achievements in television and enduring contributions to the medium's heritage through the TCA Awards each year. This year's TCA Awards are the organization's 32nd anniversary. For additional information about the TCA, visit www.tvcritics.org; Facebook; and Twitter. To follow the Summer TCA on twitter, follow tweets with the hashtag #TCA16.
-TCA16-
categories / TCA
Sonny & Cher Return to Network TV starting Mon., Sept. 12 on getTV
Lucille Ball Birthday Block and Special Merv Episodes Highlight getTV in August
© 2019 Social Spread Media


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Looking for something fun and interesting to do in Ahmedabad? Head to the Maniar's Wonderland Snow Park and check out the range of things they offer you there! It is actually the first snow theme park that Gujarat has ever had and is a popular place for tourists and folks to venture into. Even in scorching summers, you can always rely on this place that will serve as your personal winter and provide ample indulgence to keep you entertained. Of course, there are normal rides too that you usually see in other theme parks; which, we must agree, goes really well with its other snow-laden activities. To perfect the chilly ambience, there are artificial snow huts and numerous snow games like Aqua Roller, Aqua Ball, Traffic Island, Funny Cars and such. The list is endless and you can keep aside an entire day for that! Just make sure to keep enough woolly clothes with you!
Ensure to carry some extra layers that will keep you warm.
Adult: 220 INR Per Person.
Children: 180 INR Per Child.
Park ticket counter opens at 10:00am.
How popular is Maniar's Wonderland?
People normally club together Bhadra Fort And Teen Darwaja and Acropolis Mall while planning their visit to Maniar's Wonderland.
Awesome place for entertainment. Here so many rides are available like Aqua splash,Aqua space,break dance rides,zip line,jumping jacks,Aqua Roller, cricket zone, fun house, wonder chair, joy train, buggy ride, sling shot, Columbus ride, masti planet, indoor and outdoor games etc. there are snow park is also available and 5D cinema is also available at that place so go there and enjoy a whole day to complete all the rides. Really it was amazing place.
I think this become famous because of water park is only I Bhavnagar. This is very small water park. Which has less space less rides. And its tickets price is 500(not exactly). This my personal opinion about this place.
Good Picnic spot near to Ahmedabad. Cricket Ground, volley ball ground, Rides for Kids and Main attraction is Snow park. Snow park extremely nice but rates are very high. Cricket ground is too small for cricket lovers. Rides maintenance not up to the mark. Water fun also lacking maintenance. Staff are very polite and co operative. Canteen facility also inside. If you want to enjoy snow park you will definitely have Fun.
is right to all rides in just 220 Rs. Only?


Diana Laurillard chipping in with a perceptive set of observations, most interestingly describing education as a personal client industry, in which tutor/student ratios are remarkably consistent at around 1:25, so it is no great surprise that it doesn't scale up. Seems to me that she is quite rightly attacking a particular breed of EdX, Coursera, etc xMOOC but it doesn't have to be this way, and she carefully avoids discussing *why* that ratio is really needed – her own writings and her variant on conversation theory suggest there might be alternative ways of looking at this.
Her critique that xMOOCs appear to succeed only for those that already know how to be self-guided learners is an old chestnut that hits home. She is right in saying that MOOCs (xMOOCs) are pretty poor educational vehicles if the only people who benefit are those that can already drive, and it supports her point about the need for actual teachers for most people *if* we continue to teach in a skeuomorphic manner, copying the form of traditional courses without thinking why we do what we do and how courses actually work.
For me this explains clearly once again that the way MOOCs are being implemented is wrong and that we have to get away from the 'course' part of the acronym, and start thinking about what learners really need, rather than what universities want to give them.
Everyone is talking about MOOCs.
Every institution of higher learning I visit or talk with seems intent on joining the MOOC scrum or, if not, is coming up with arguments why it shouldn't. There's also a wealth of poorly considered, badly researched opinion pieces too, many of them published by otherwise fairly reputable journals and news sources. I've been doing my bit to add poorly researched opinion too, talking in various venues about a few ideas and opinions that are not sufficiently rigorously explored to make into a decent paper. This post is still not worthy of a paper, but I think the main idea in it is worth sharing anyway. To save you the trouble of reading the whole thing, I'm going to be making the point that MOOCs disrupt because they quietly remove two of the almost-never-questioned but most-totally-nonsensical foundations on which most traditional university teaching is based – integral accreditation and fixed course lengths – and their poor completion rates therefore encourage us/force us to ask ourselves why we do such things. My hope is that the result of such reflection will be to bring about change. To situate my opinions relative to those of others, I will start by offering a slight caricature of the three main stances that people seem to be taking on MOOCs.
The cantankerati are, of course, telling us that there is nothing new here, or that online learning isn't as good as face to face, or that it is all hype, or that the learning outcomes are not as good as those at (insert preferred institution, preferably one's alma mater, here) etc. This is a fad, they tell us. They look at things like drop-out rates or Udacity partnering with Georgia Tech or Coursera moving into competition with Blackboard, or the fact that millenial college students prefer traditional to online classes (err – seriously? that's like asking iPhone users if they prefer them to Android phones) and nod their heads sagely, smugly and in an 'I told you so' fashion. No doubt, when the bubble bursts (as it will) they will be the first to gloat. But they are wrong about the failings of MOOCs, on most significant counts.
Others think that there is something worth preserving here and are trying to invent new variants – usually xOOCs of some kind, or MOOxs, or, in rare cases, xOOxs, liking some aspect of the MOOC idea such as openness or size but not liking others. The acolytes of online learning (AOLs for short, oddly enough) are getting all excited about the fact that people are at last paying attention to what they have been saying for years, though most are tempering their enthusiasm with observations about the appalling pedagogies, the creation of a two-tier system of higher education, problems with accrediting MOOC learning, and high 'dropout' rates. They are wondering why these MOOCish upstarts haven't read their own august works on the subject which would obviously steer them right. They will, when pressed, grudgingly admit that these rank enthusiastic amateurs are (dammit) quite signally succeeding in ways they have only dreamed of, but they still know better. There are many of these, some of which are actually very thoughtful and penetrating and by no means unsubtle in their analysis: John Daniel's well-informed sagacious overview, Paul Stacey's intelligent mourning of the overshadowing of a good idea, or Carol Edwards's slightly jaundiced but interesting and revealing first-person report for BCIT, for instance. There are far more unsubtle and far less well-informed rants that I won't bother linking here that complain about the pedagogies, or tell us that there is nothing new at all in this, or that think they see an alternative future etc. Oh, alright – here's one that I find particularly silly and here are my comments on it.
Opinion 3 – the sky is falling! The sky is falling!
There is a third group that is fairly sure that MOOCs are very important and that they are causing or, at least, catalyzing a seismic shift in education. The popular press clearly demonstrates that there's a revolution happening, for better or worse, and most people who hold this position want to be on that bandwagon, wherever it may be going. If not, they fear they will be left in the dust. There are some notable holders of this perspective who justify and examine their beliefs in intelligent ways, such as the ever-brilliant Donald Clark, for example, who has recently written a great series of posts that are both critical and rabble-rousing.
Between and spanning these caricatures are some really interesting and perceptive commentaries, and only a few have as clear-cut an opinion as I portray here. Aaron Bady's post casting a critical eye on the hype, for example, picks apart the sky falling very carefully, and situates itself a little in the 'right direction' camp without being too much on the 'but…' side of things. The recent Edinburgh report on their pilot MOOCs is a model of careful research and openness to critical and creative thinking. George Siemens's excellent analysis of x-vs-c MOOCs is another great piece that avoids much bias one way or the other while identifying some of the key issues for the future.
You could call me a fan. My PhD (completed well over 10 years ago) was largely about how large online crowds can learn together. I've signed up for (but not completed) quite a few MOOCs since 2008, and I've been a more active participant at times, playing a teaching role in a couple and helping to lead one in early 2011. I ran my first education-oriented web server offering what we would now call open educational resources in 1993. I read an average of two or three articles on MOOCs every day, maybe more. I've joined up with the newly formed WideWorldEd project and have been engaged in discussions and planning about MOOCs at three different institutions.
I am definitely not one of the cantakerati though I am highly sceptical of any blanket claim that a particular flavour of teaching leads to better or worse learning than any other, be it online or not. It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
I do not believe that the pedagogies of most MOOCs are particularly bad or retrograde. Talking heads, objective tests and other favourite tools of early xMOOC providers are not my cup of tea, and the chaos of cMOOCs (that I like a lot more) seems to favour only a few neterate winners, but most that I have seen are actually at least as good as their paid-for counterparts. There are quite a lot that do not fall neatly into either of these main camps too – e.g. http://ds106.us – and both camps share a lot in common with each other that neither camp seems particularly happy to acknowledge: connectivist networks thread through and around xMOOCs and disrupt their neat outlines, while cMOOCs often employ what look and smell a lot like instructivist lectures as significant parts of the process. But, whatever the similarities, what and how people teach is seldom what and how people actually learn so it is not that important. Quality is not a direct correlate of the pedagogies and other technologies used. In fact, it is interesting to note that a recent article on MOOC junkies highlighted the greater significance of passion in the professor, something I and many others have been saying for quite a while. It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
For me, the sky is not falling yet though it certainly has a few more interesting colours than it had a year or two ago and there are some fascinating systemic effects that are mostly, but not all, positive. But this is not the beginning of the end of higher education as we know it. In some ways, it could be the beginning of something much more interesting.
What really appeals to me most about MOOCs is their almost universally low completion rates. Whatever this means for MOOCs themselves, and however much it upsets their providers (not their learners), in my opinion this is by far their most positive systemic feature. While It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, I have one important proviso that needs to be added to that: there are some things that you can do that will most probably and in some cases definitely fail to get results. And this is really what this post is about.
So, what about those completion rates?
One thing that many of the cantankerati, the fearfully curious and the AOLs amicably agree on is that that fact that most people drop out of most MOOCs shows that there is something wrong with the idea, or how it has been implemented, or both. Some MOOCs struggle to keep 2% of their students while the best (on horse feeding, as it happens) have managed a little over 40%. The vast majority (so far) have succeeded in keeping less than 10% of their students to the bitter end. This is particularly odd given that, on most MOOCs, the majority of course-takers have at least one degree, many are educators, and quite a few have post-graduate qualifications. These are, for the most part, mature learners who know how to learn and probably think about how they do it.
But there is something odder going on here that seems to be mostly slipping under the radar, apart from the odd mention here and there by people like Alan Levine and a few others. I've long been bothered by the mysterious and improbable fact that, in higher education, all learning is neatly divisible into 13 (or 15, or 10, or something in that region) week chunks. This normally equates to an average of around 100 hours of study time, give or take a bit. Whatever the particular length chosen, they are almost always unaccountably multiples of chunks of the same size at any given institution, and that size is broadly comparable to other courses/modules/papers/units/etc in other institutions. It's enough to make you wonder whether there might be a god as it suggests intelligent design may be at work here.
Actually, it's the result of unintelligent design. This is an evolutionary process in which path dependencies pile up and push their way into adjacent possibles.
So, why do we have courses (or modules/papers/units/etc depending on your geographical region)?
Well, in the first place, it is true that some things take longer to learn than others. Not everything can be mastered by asking a question or looking it up on Wikipedia. That's completely fair and reasonable. It doesn't, however, explain why it takes the same amount of time (or multiples of it) for everyone, regardless of skill, experience or engagement, to master everything – Modern European Philosophy, Chemistry 101, Java Data Structures, Literary Culture & the Enlightenment, Icelandic Politics: all fit the same evenly sized periods, or multiples of them. For an explanation of that, we have to turn to a combination of harvest schedules, Christian holidays and the complexities of managing scarce physical resources that are bound by physics to a single and somewhat constrained teaching space.
The word 'lecturer' derives from the fact that lecturers used to read from the very valuable and scarce single copies of books held by institutions. Lecture theatres and classrooms were thus the most efficient way to get the content of books heard by the largest possible number of people. If you want to get a lot of people to listen at once then it helps if they are actually there so, if they are taking a religious holiday or helping with the harvest (this last point is a little contentious as it doesn't fully explain a long break from July to October), there is no point in standing up and talking to an empty lecture hall. So, putting aside Easter's irritating habit of moving around from year to year that continues to mess up university teaching schedules, this divides things up quite neatly into roughly 13 week chunks separating harvest, Christmas, and Easter breaks. The period may vary a little, but the principle is the same.
This pattern has become quite deeply set into how learning happens at most universities, even though the original reasons it occurred might have faded into insignificance had they not become firmly embedded through momentum and the power of path dependencies. Assessment became intimately linked to the schedule, with 'mid-terms' and 'finals' and then came to act as a major driver in its own right. Teacher pay and time was allocated according to easily managed chunks and resources. Enrolments, registrations, convocations and the familiar rhythms of the university calendar helped to consolidate the pattern, largely driven by a need for efficiency and bureaucratic convenience. It is really hard to allocate teachers and students to rooms. Up to this point, there was no particular reason to divide the learning experience into modularized chunks and many universities did (and some still do) simply have programs (or programmes or, to confuse matters, courses lasting 3-5 years) with perhaps a few streams but without distinct modularized elements. To cap it off and set it in stone, three forces coincided. One was a laudable desire to allow students the flexibility to take some control over what they learned. Another was the need to simplify the administration of programs. The last was the need to assert equivalence between what is taught at institutions, whether for certification purposes or for credit transfer. This last force, in particular, has meant that this way of dividing learning into modular chunks of a similar length has become a worldwide phenomenon, even in countries for which Easter and Christmas have no meaning or value.
All of this happened because there had to be a means of managing scarce resources shared among many co-present people as efficiently as possible but, for centuries, there has been no good reason for picking this particular term-length apart from the force of technological momentum. There have been innovations, here and there. Athabasca University, for instance, gives undergraduates 6 months (extendible at a price) in which to complete work in any way and timeframe that will fit their needs. Similarly, the University of Brighton runs 'short fat' masters modules that last for half a week, combined with a period of self-study before and after. But, in order to maintain accreditation parity, the amount of work expected of students on such courses broadly equates to what, in conventional classes, would take – yes – 13-15 weeks. Technically, thanks to a bit of reverse engineering, this translates into roughly 100 hours of study in the UK, a little more or less elsewhere, particularly where people take the insanely bad North American approach of counting teaching hours rather than study hours (what madness gripped people that made them think that was a good idea?). Whatever the rationale, this has nothing to do with learning, nothing to do with the nature of a topic or subject area, nothing to do with the best way to teach. It's just the way it turned out, and certification requirements reinforce that anti-educational trend.
Courses are not neutral technologies. One of the least loveable things about them is that their content, form and process are, at least ostensibly, controlled by teachers from start to finish. Courses are a power trip for educators that, in institutional incarnations, often require some quite unpleasant measures to maintain control, typically based on long-discredited models of human psychology that rely heavily on rewards and punishments – grades, attendance requirements, behavioural constraints in classrooms, etc. That is just plain stupid if you actually want people to learn and believe that it is your job to help that process. There can be few methods apart from deliberate torture and punishment that more reliably take motivated, enthusiastic learners and sap the desire to learn from them. We do this because courses are a certain length and we think that students have to engage in the whole thing or not at all.
Students, meanwhile, have little choice but to accept this or to drop out of the system, but that's tricky because those uniform-size credentials have become the currency for gaining career advancement and getting a job in the first place.
Teachers need to work on maintaining that control because there are very few topics that can, in and of themselves, sustain a large number of individuals' interest for 13 solid weeks and those that do are highly unlikely to naturally fit into that precise timeframe. Sure, some students may passionately love the whole thing and may have learned to gain some immunity from the demotivating madness of it all, or the teacher may be one of those rare inspiring people that enthuses everyone she gets to teach. But, for most students, it will be, at best, a mixed bag. Even for those that enjoy much of it, some will be irrelevant, some too easy, some too complicated, some simply dull. But they have to do it because that what the teacher demands that they have to do, and teachers have to fit their courses to this absurd length limit because that's what the institutions demand that they have to do, and institutions do it because that's how it has always been done and everyone else does it.
So much of what makes a great teacher is therefore the ability to overcome insanely stacked odds and work the system so that at least a fair number of people get something good out of it. Teachers have to find ways to enthuse and motivate, to design assessments that are constructively aligned, to perform magic tricks that limit the damage of grading, to build flexible activities that provide learners with a bit of self-determination and control. Sadly, many do not even do that, relying on this juggernaut and the whole unwieldy process to crush students into submission (of assignments). It really doesn't have to work like that.
Thankfully, an increasing number are not doing that at all: a glance through the range of MOOCs currently on offer via the (excellent) MOOC aggregator at http://www.class-central.com/ shows a range of lengths between 2 and 15 weeks as well as a goodly range of self-paced courses of somewhat indeterminate length. After early attempts mostly replicated university courses, the norm now appears to be around 6 weeks, and falling fast. The rough graphs below (that I created based on class-central's data) of those starting soon and those that have already finished illustrate this trend quite nicely. Note in particular the relative drop in 10-week and higher courses and the rise in those of 4, 6 and 8 weeks. While it is far from all being down to better teaching – some of the rise in shorter courses is notably due to a trend towards samplers that are intended to draw people in to fee-paying courses – there is a pattern here. And, to counterbalance such forces, it should be remembered that a fair number of the longer courses have ambitions to reintegrate their students within their paid-for broken systems, so they are sometimes timetabled with learning as a secondary consideration and so retain their infeasible length.
Though the interest in MOOCs is fuelled and sustained by the fact they are free (though sadly, increasingly not as open as they were in the halcyon days of cMOOCs), popular and online, the really interesting thing about them is the attention they are drawing to what is wrong with the notion, form and above all the length of the course. This little thing is the real revolution. It radically changes the power dynamics. If people begin to disaggregate their courses, making them shorter and less teacher-controlled, they will put learners ever more in control of their own learning, giving them choices and the power to make those choices. Better still, it means that teachers are starting to create courses without unnecessary time constraints that are the size they need to be for the subject being taught. Pedagogy, though still not coming first, is playing a more significant role. But this is just a step in the right direction.
People who question completion rates for MOOCs almost never ask those same questions about Q&A sites, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Fixya or How-Stuff-Works tutorials, OERS and Google Search. Indeed, the notion of 'completion' probably means nothing significant for such just-in-time tools: they are useful, or they are not, they work or they don't. People use them or they don't. You might waste a few minutes here and there on things that are unhelpful and those minutes add up but, on the whole, just-in-time learning does what it says on the box. And people use these tools because they need to learn. If someone needs to or wants to learn, you have to try really hard to stop them. But just-in-time is not always the way to go.
I am not a great programmer but it is something I have been doing from time to time for about 30 years. When I'm stuck, I increasingly turn to StackOverflow, a brilliant set of sites based around a collectivized form of discussion forum – a bit more sophisticated than Reddit, a bit less intimidating that SlashDot (which remains perhaps the greatest of all learning tools for anyone with geek tendencies, but that needs a fair bit of skill and effort to get the most out of). StackOverflow doesn't have courses, but it does have answers, it does have discussions, and it does have some very powerful tools for finding answers that are reliable, useful and appropriate to any particular need. The need can range from the very specific and esoteric ('why am I getting this error?') to matters of principle ('what methodology is best for this problem?') to general learning ('what's the best way to get started in Ruby-on-Rails?') and everything in between. It's like having your own immensely wise team of personal tutors, without a beginning date, an end date, or a fixed schedule of activities. This is not a course – it's more like a Massive Open Online Club, with no restrictions to membership, no commitments, no threshold to joining. Conveniently, this has the same acronym as a MOOC. In fact, just as MOOCs subtly transform the social contract that is involved with traditional courses, so these 'clubs' are not exactly like their hierarchical, closed, membership-based forebears. They are what Terry Anderson and I have described as sets: not exactly a network of people you know, certainly not a hierarchically organized system like a group, just a bunch of people with a shared interest, some of whom know more than others about some things.
Why should accreditation be something that happens only in and as a result of a course? It is bizarre and open to abuse that the people who teach a course should also be its accreditors. It is strange in the extreme that they should be the ones to say that students have 'failed' when it is obvious that this failure is not just on the part of the students but also of their teachers, which makes those teachers very poor and biased judges of success. It might be just about acceptable if those teachers really are the only ones who know the topic of the course but that is rare. In Eire, students have a right to write and defend a PhD (by definition a unique bit of learning) in Gaelic. Despite the fact that the number of Gaelic speakers who are also experts in many PhD topics is not likely to be huge (unless the topic is Irish history or somesuch) they still manage to find expert examiners for them. It can be done.
At Athabasca University we have a challenge for credit option for many of our courses that can be used to demonstrate competence for certification purposes. Alternatively, if the match in knowledge is not precisely tuned to the credentials we award, we and many others have PLAR or APEL processes that typically use some form of portfolio to demonstrate competence in an area. And then there are upcoming and increasingly significant trends like the move to Open Badges, closed LinkedIn endorsements, gamified learning, or good old fashioned h-index scores that sometimes tell us more, at least as reliably, and in some ways in greater detail than many of our traditional accreditation methods.
There is seldom a good reason to closely link accreditation and learning and every reason not to. Giving rewards or punishments for learning is the academic equivalent of celery – to digest it consumes more calories than it actually provides, distorting motivation so much that it demotivates.
I have no doubt that some people might bemoan the loss of attention implied by just-in-time learning or this weakly structured club-oriented perspective on learning which has no distinct beginning and no specific end. It is true that courses do sometimes include things like 'problem solving', 'argument', 'enquiry', 'research' and 'creativity' among their intended outcomes and, assuming they provide opportunities to exercise and develop such skills, that's a lot better than not having them. And some (indeed, many) courses are a genuinely good idea, because it really does take x amount of time to learn some things (where x is a large number) and learning works much more smoothly when you learn with other people and have a specific goal in mind. But many are not such a good idea, and most get the value of x completely wrong. No more should we assume that a 10-week (or 100-hour) course is the right amount of time needed to learn something than we should assume that the answer to teaching is a one-hour lecture (even though it sometimes really is part of a good answer).
There are those who cynically believe that the sole purpose of going to a university is to build a network of contacts and gain credentials that will be valuable in a future career, so you can do what you like to students while they are in college and it won't matter a bit. In fact, there's a fair bit of research that shows that it typically doesn't, which is yet another reason to express concern that we are not doing it right. If that were really what universities were about then I would stop teaching now because it would be boring and pointless. I think that, if we claim that what we are doing is teaching then we should at least try to do so. But accredited, fixed-length courses get in the way of doing that.
It is true that much of the really interesting learning that goes on in courses is not really about the topic, but the process of learning itself – that is why there is a vague and hard to pin down notion of graduateness that makes a fair bit of sense even if it cannot be well expressed or measured, a problem that Dave Cormier and others have grappled with in interesting ways. I'm not at all against lengthy learning paths if that is what is needed to learn, nor do I object at all to letting someone guide you along that path if that is what will get you where you want to be, and I am very much in favour of learning with other people. My problem is that the fixed-size course with fixed learning outcomes and tightly integrated accreditation is not the only way, is seldom the best way, and is often the worst way to do it. The biggest thing that MOOCs are doing, and the most disruptive, is visibly disaggregating the learning process from the unholy alliance of mediaeval bureaucracy and Victorian accreditation methods. As long as MOOCs retain the form and structure of courses that are tied to these unholies, they will (from their purveyors' rather than their students' perspectives) mostly fail, and that is a good thing. Even cMOOCs, that deliberately eschew learning outcomes and fixed accreditation, still often fall into a trap of fixed lengths and processes. If we can learn something from that then they have served a useful purpose.
So there you have it – another long, opinionated piece about MOOCs with little empirical data and a lot of hot air. But I think the central point, that fixed course lengths and integrated accreditation lie at the heart of much that is wrong with traditional university education and that MOOCs bring that absurdity into sharp relief, is worth making. I hope you agree.
You may have seen my recent post on MOOPhDs and might be wondering whether I am contradicting myself here. Well, maybe a little, and there was a little hint of satirical intent when I first suggested the idea that attempted to exaggerate the concept of the MOOC to show the absurdity of courses. But the MOOPhD idea grew on me and it actually makes a little sense – it does not demand fixed length courses and completely separates out the accreditation from the process, and is far more like an open club or support network than an open course. Indeed, the way PhDs, at least those that follow a vaguely European model, tend to be taught provides an expensive-to-implement but workable model of learning that entirely (or, following a sad trend towards great bureaucratization in some countries, to a moderate extent) avoids courses. So, universities do know how to break the chains. Most just haven't yet figured out how to do that for their mass-produced courses.


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Home FOR WRITERS Advice for the Lit-Lorn Funnies by any other name
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Dear Geist,
I'm writing and drawing a book, a true story, and I don't know what to call it. Comic book? Graphic novel? It's about my cousin who was buried in the rubble for three days after the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and miraculously survived. I thought "graphic novel," but it's not a novel. Or "comic book," but even though it has some humorous bits, it's not a funny story. Help!
—Scribbler, Lethbridge AB
Dear Scribbler,
In Japan it's manga, in Korea it's manhwa, in continental Europe it's bande déssinée ("drawn strips"), and so on. But North America and Britain are still wrestling with the umbrella terminology. Perhaps that's because the form has developed more recently here; or because comics, which evokes newspaper funny pages or cheap 48-page superhero episodes in racks, is deemed too pedestrian for more high-toned works; or because comics implies "comical"—not accurate, as you say, for books like Maus, Persepolis or Clyde Fans. Interesting suggestions over the years include graphic album, drawn book, comic-strip novel, visual novel and picture novella. But graphic novel, which appeared in the 1970s, is the term that has stuck in the book business, even though some graphic novels aren't novels and some prominent people in the biz think that label is too big for its pants. Art Spiegelman likes the word comix, which honours the older term without limiting it. Some writers and publishers have begun to add "graphic" to established writing genres and forms: graphic non-fiction, graphic memoir, graphic biography, graphic journalism.
In short, Scribbler, if you call your project a graphic novel, graphic memoir or graphic non-fiction, most people will get the drift. When it comes time to publish it, your agent and/or publisher will work with you on what to call it.
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