This time four years ago Lloyd wrote in a blog, 'I probably give Paddy Power too much blog time' and here we are, four years later, talking about the PR wizards yet again - is it boring yet? Of course not!
A lot can happen in four years; One Direction went their separate ways, Leicester City won the Premier League and Donald Trump became president… showing, effectively, anything is possible!
One thing that hasn't changed though is the ability of Paddy Power's PR team to cause controversy.
Its latest, rather topical, PR stunt is a mix of usual laddish banter...combined with environmental politics.
Paddy Power decided to paint the town red on Tuesday - quite literally - by leaking 'live' footage of a 'wild' polar bear being spray-painted with an England flag, by a Russian-speaking (or so it sounded to our Western ears) man.
The PR stunt gained a full page feature in the metro, with the catch line 'England 'til I dye' - get it? The puns didn't stop there either, with the article, unsurprisingly, riddled with bear puns that explained the cause behind the campaign.
And despite the usual vegan millennials crucifying the brand on social media (can they ever have a laugh?), the bookmakers revealed the 'good' intentions behind this campaign, as it revealed it to be a collaboration with NGO Polar Bears International to highlight the current plight of polar bears in the Arctic – which managed to take the sting out of some of the venom thrown its way.
It looks like Paddy Power has decided to make saving the environment a quadrennial occurrence (apparently the term for every four year) by speaking out about climate change in Russia in time for the World Cup, much like they did with the rainforest in Brazil.
If the stunt sounds familiar, it's because the PR team caused a stir around the same time at the last World Cup in 2014. As we documented on our a blog four years ago, the betting company looked like it had carved the message, 'C'mon England, PP', in the South American rainforest four years ago when the tournament was hosted by Brazil. Yet again, it riled up a good number of eco-lovers (rightly so, at first look) before the brand revealed the truth that it was in fact a faked CGI job, with a deeper message behind it.
It turns out the spray paint job was in fact faked (have people not heard of CGI? *knowing hindsight eyeroll*). Although the humorous bunch at Paddy Power love a good laugh (we'd definitely be up for Friday drinks with them), I somehow doubt they'd get the 'go-ahead' for painting a living polar bear roaming the Siberian wilderness.
It was, apparently, a captive ('privately owned' as they termed it)' bear used in the footage, with the spray painted flag purely a CGI addition.
PP opted to 'apologise', which really turned out to be the opportunity to use a snowflakes gag; a double entendre aimed at both global warming and 'millennial' wet lettuces.
Plenty of brands try to team up with charity when promoting their message (with the ultimate aim to raise the brand's profile), but none create a bigger stir than Paddy Power, which has added yet more polish to its the stunt crown once again.


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Blues all too real for Tedeschi Trucks Band that begins U.S. tour in late June
The band kicks off its 40-city U.S. tour June 28 in Jacksonville, Florida, and ends mid-November in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Blues all too real for Tedeschi Trucks Band that begins U.S. tour in late June The band kicks off its 40-city U.S. tour June 28 in Jacksonville, Florida, and ends mid-November in Little Rock, Arkansas. Check out this story on naplesnews.com: https://www.naplesnews.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/06/11/tedeschi-trucks-band-begins-tour-florida-late-june/1353238001/
Dave Osborn, Naples Daily News Published 8:00 a.m. ET June 11, 2019 | Updated 8:39 a.m. ET June 11, 2019
Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi of the Tedeschi Trucks Band kick off their U.S. tour June 28, 2019, in Jacksonville, Florida, Trucks' hometown. (Photo: Courtesy Shervinlainez Duo Generaluse2)
The blues pouring from Derek Trucks' guitar these days sound more real than ever.
Trucks, his wife Susan Tedeschi and other band members soon will embark on a 40-city U.S. tour with heavy hearts after the deaths of family and friends. The Tedeschi Trucks Band's latest album, "Signs," that dropped earlier this year reflects much of those losses, Trucks said.
His uncle, Butch Trucks, the drummer and co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, longtime friend Bruce Hampton and Gregg Allman all died in the first five months of 2017.
Then longtime band member Kofi Burbridge died from heart complications Feb. 15 of this year, the same day "Signs" was released. Burbridge was the band's keyboardist and flautist.
"We wrote a record about loss and getting through it and then it kind of double-backs on you," Trucks said in a recent telephone interview about losing Burbridge that same day. "This record was kind of a way, I don't want to say cope, but a way to deal with a lot of the losses. When you lose people that are important to you, it's in the air.
"The band is in a raw place."
More: Naples singer offers Randy Travis an impromptu duet partner
Music can heal as well, Trucks noted, and hopes the band's latest U.S. tour that kicks off in late June in Florida will prove cathartic.
In addition to the passing of Burbridge and his uncle, Trucks recalled being on stage with his band on May 1, 2017, at Atlanta's Fox Theater for tribute show honoring longtime friend and Hampton on his 70th birthday. Other musicians performed too, including Peter Buck of R.E.M. and John Popper of Blues Traveler.
Gregg Allman performs with the Allman Brothers band at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, Sunday, April 25, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Photo: Gerald Herbert, AP)
During the concert, Hampton collapsed on stage while performing. Trucks – who turned 40 on June 9 – said he first met Hampton when he was 11 or 12 years old.
"He was family, he was a mentor, really, to everyone in the band," he said. "And Bruce was a big stickler for intention. What are you doing it for, what you are playing? What's your goal? It's important to keep that stuff front and center. You always have to dig down and give people a little bit of honesty."
He also lost fellow musician and longtime friend Gregg Allman, who helped form the Allman Brothers Band along with his uncle Butch (Derek Trucks also was an Allman Brothers Band member for a few years). Allman died in the same month as Hampton.
"Everyone deals with loss," Trucks said. "You just have to put your head down and charge forward. You try to honor these people and what they taught you and you try to do it right. A large part of the 'Signs' record was that."
The Tedeschi Trucks Band, led by Derek Trucks and his wife Susan Tedeschi, kicks off its 2019 U.S. tour in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 28. The tour ends in mid-November in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Photo: Joe Giblin, AP)
Derek Trucks said he grew up knowing his connection to the Allman Brothers, but they were not living in Jacksonville where he grew up and still calls home.
His father was a roofer, his mom worked at an elementary school and Trucks began playing and practicing guitar at a young age.
"I was on the road really from 9 years old on," he said. "I played every hole in the wall, every bar in America, for the next eight, 10 years. You have to log a lot of miles."
Trucks' recognized that his rock lineage didn't hurt, "but it only gets you so far."
"You've got to do it," he said of paying dues. "You end up playing close to 300 shows a year on the road and you just do it. It's a slow build."
There were times when he would perform with band mates in front of 30 people some nights.
"But you keep going back," he added. "If you're supposed to do it and it's in your blood, you get bit with the bug."
Trucks said he's fortunate to have grown up when he did, before social media and YouTube.
"I'm glad everything wasn't filmed along the way," he said. "I appreciate all that that time that I had on the road. I wouldn't have become the musician that I did if it happened too quickly."
His guitar brilliance caught the attention of musical legends, as he performed around age 11 or 12 with blues great Buddy Guy and later with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and others. (Twice Trucks has appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, including being ranked No. 16 on the 2015 list.)
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Trucks' recalled the surreal moment when he toured with Clapton and performed the Derek and Dominos hit "Layla" that Clapton sang.
"I was named after that record. That's some weird full-circle stuff," he said of "Layla." "My dad was a roofer and he flew to London and was having tea with Eric Clapton at his estate. You do pinch yourself sometimes. We've been incredibly fortunate. You just want to keep doing it the right way. You try to carry the torch a little bit."
The Tedeschi Trucks Band (Photo: Courtesy of Shervinlainez Band Generaluse1)
The band that consists of 12 musicians is touring Japan before kicking off the U.S. tour at Jacksonville's Daily's Place on June 28, followed by June 29 in Boca Raton; June 30 in St. Petersburg; and July 3 in Orange Beach, Alabama, near Pensacola. Tyler Greenwell, the band's drummer, is from Pensacola and Susan Tedeschi's mother was born there, Trucks said.
The tour rolls throughout the country until ending in Little Rock, Arkansas, in mid-November.
Trucks called it a joy to play alongside his wife.
"Growing up around the Allman Brothers, music and family have kind of always been the same," he said. "It never felt separate. I'm lucky I found somebody who's a total badass and there's never a point where I'm on stage thinking she's there because she's my wife.
"I'd be lucky to be in her band. And I'm lucky that I found someone that believes in the same music I believe in and just as deeply."
More: Summer's no sweat for Collier music lovers with cool concerts planned
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JLB review: Flavors by Brazil serves South American flair
JLB review: Greektown Taverna is a hidden dream

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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By Meredith Bryan • 11/25/08 6:20pm
"I'll make fun of Mira Nair, but only up to a point," said Daily Show correspondent and Mumbai native Aasif Mandvi, calling to discuss his gig hosting the Gotham Independent Film Awards."I'm the only Indian actor that she still doesn't know is Indian," continued Mr. Mandvi of Ms. Nair, a presenter at the awards. "'Cause she's never hired me. So obviously she must not know I'm Indian. I'm excited to let her know I'm of the tribe!" Presenters (and comic fodder) include Mickey Rourke, who has just been getting progressively stranger since 9 ½ Weeks; scruffy divorcee Ethan Hawke; perky Amy Adams; attitudinal sister-girlfriend Marisa Tomei; and indefatigable gossip film, which he wrote with comedic scribe (and fine hubby of an Observer editor!) Jon Bines. "It's a movie called 7 to the Palace and it's about an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights," said Mr. Mandvi. "Originally we had a whole horror movie concept we were working on and then we said, 'Let's make it a comedy!'" Further uptown, Domino editor Deborah Needleman signs The Book of Decorating at Bergdorf Goodman over cocktails with social types such as Celerie Kemble, Charlotte Moss and Queer Eye vet Thom Filicia. But Ms. Needleman's mind was still on Thanksgiving when she emailed the other day: "Just did a count today and realized I'm having 25 people to my house," she wrote (that would be the Tribeca loft she shares with hubby Jacob Weisberg). "Want to ditch the turkey, because who likes turkey? Not me. If turkey was so good, we'd cook it year round. I'd like a big leg of lamb. But my children won't let me. I do make a killer cranberry sauce, but that is really because it involves two cups of sugar. What doesn't taste good with two cups of sugar in it?"
[Gotham Independent Film Awards, Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-465-8200; Domino: The Book of Decorating signing, Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.]
mbryan@observer.com
Filed Under: Home, Lifestyle, Politics, The Eight-Day Week


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Nethea is a genus of sponges belonging to the family Pachastrellidae.

The species of this genus are found in Southern Europe.

Species:

Nethea amygdaloides
Nethea nana

References

Tetractinellida
Sponge genera

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Albany, N.Y. - State Agriculture Commissioner Darrel J. Aubertine has announced that the Great New York State Fair is teaming up with one of the state's largest breweries to offer one home beer hobbyist the opportunity of a lifetime. It all begins with the State Fair's annual Home Brew competition, which takes place on Friday, May 31 and Saturday, June 1, 2013. In 2012, dozens of amateur beer brewers submitted bottles of their best work for judging. Judges from the Salt City Brew Club handed out bronze, silver, gold and double gold medals in the American Homebrewers Association-sanctioned event. This year, there's an additional prize for the best beer in the competition. Utica's F.X. Matt Brewing Company, brewers of Saranac beers, will offer the winner the opportunity to have his or her beer recipe brewed in Saranac's new pilot brewery, its research and development facility. The beer that results from the work in the pilot brewery will be entered in the Pro Am Competition at the Great American Beer Festival in Colorado. "This is a great opportunity for us to work more closely with the homebrewing community," said F.X. Matt's Product Development Manager Rich Michaels, who runs the state-of-the-art pilot brewery. "There's actually a chance for us and the homebrewer to win a medal." Michaels said that the winner will provide him with two bottles of the winning brew. The beer will then be analyzed in the pilot brewery. The recipe may undergo slight modification, if necessary, so it can be brewed in a commercial facility. Michaels will set a date for the beer to be brewed and the winning homebrewer will be on hand to watch and assist in the production of the final product to be sent to the competition. "This competition and our partnership with F.X. Matt Brewing Company is one more way that the Fair will live up to its theme of 'Sharing the Bounty and Pride of NY' and its mission of showcasing the state's agricultural industry," said New York State Agriculture Commissioner Darrel J. Aubertine. "Our support of amateur brewers in turn helps them support a growing sector within agriculture, strengthening farms and local economies." "I see the State Fair as a great opportunity for people to come from all around the state to taste the products that make the state's brewing industry great," said Nick Matt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of F.X. Matt Brewing Company. "This competition is exactly the kind of thing that brings emphasis to New York State products." Home brewers interested in entering the competition should be advised that the deadline for entries is May 16. Full entry rules and instructions can be found on the State Fair website at: www.nysfair.org www.nysfair.org The New York State Fair features competitions in a wide range of categories, involving animals, crops, cuisine, cars and more. Any New York State resident can enter any State Fair competition. You do not need to have won a local competition. In addition to the annual New York State Fair, the Fairgrounds host dozens of agricultural events throughout the year, including some of the Northeast's most prestigious horse and livestock shows. The home of the Great New York State Fair is a 375-acre exhibit and entertainment complex that operates all year. A year-round schedule of events is available on the Fair's website. Find The Great New York State Fair on Facebook or follow NYS Fair on Twitter. Also, New Yorkers are invited to send their ideas on the Great New York State Fair at statefairideas@agriculture.ny.gov.


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My Reincarnation
PBS Premiere: June 21, 2012Check the broadcast schedule »
Tibetan Buddhism from A to Z
Adept. A highly realized master -- either the bodhisattva ("seeker of full enlightenment") of exoteric Buddhism, or the siddha ("highly accomplished one") of esoteric Buddhism.
Ananda. Sakyamuni Buddha's first cousin, one of his foremost disciples, and his contestant attendant for his last twenty-five years.
Artisan Manifested-Body (Skt., silpin nirmanakaya; Tib., bzo sprul sku). One of the four kinds of manifested-bodies of the Buddha.
Asanga (fourth century). One of the two greatest scholars and writers of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and the founder of the Mind Only school.
Atisa (980-1054). A great bodhisattva and scholar from Vikramasila Monastery in Bengal, India, who invigorated and refined Buddhism in Tibet. His chief disciple, Dromton, founded the Kadam school.
Avalokitesvara.
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Avalokitesvara (Tib., spyan ras gigs). Also known as the Buddha of Loving-Kindness or the Buddha of Compassion. In meditations he is an object of prayer with devotion, a source of blessings, and the means of transforming oneself into the mind and actions of loving-kindness.
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Bardo (Tib., bar do). The "intermediate state," the period between death and rebirth that every being travels through after death.
Birth Manifested-Body (Skt., janma-nirmanakaya; Tib., skye ba sprul sku). One of the four manifested-bodies of the Buddha taking the forms of ordinary beings. This is the main basis of the tulku tradition of Tibetan Buddhists.
Blessed Tulku (Tib., byin gyis brlabs pa'i sprul sku). A tulku who is not the actual rebirth of the identified deceased lama, but is recognized as the tulku so that he or she can serve others on behalf of the deceased lama.
Bodhicitta (Tib., byang ch'ub kyi sems). Enlightened aspiration, the intention or aspiration for all to become buddhas and the vow to lead all to peace, joy, and buddhahood.
Bodhisattva (Tib., byang ch'ub sems dpa'). The "seeker of enlightenment," one who has developed bodhicitta, the vow to lead all beings to happiness and enlightenment without self-interest.
Buddha. A fully enlightened one or fully enlightened state. According to Buddhism, it is the ultimate nature and qualities of all. Full enlightenment consists of attaining three Buddha bodies (dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya) and it is the ultimate goal of Buddhist training. The term buddha can be singular or plural. To indicate the absolute Buddha, which is the unity of all, Buddha is used in the singular. To indicate the manifestations of Buddha, which are infinite, the plural is used.
Buddha of Loving-Kindness. See Avalokitesvara.
Buddha Sakyamuni. The name of the historical Buddha. He is also known as Gautama Buddha or the Buddha.
Credit: Wikipedia user Marco Bonavoglia,
Dalai Lama. The most important tulku lineage in Tibet. The present Dalai Lama is the fourteenth.
Diverse Manifested-Body (Tib., sna tshogs sprul sku). One of the four kinds of manifested bodies of the buddhas that appear in various forms.
Enjoyment-Body (Skt., sambhogakaya; Tib., longs sku). One of the three bodies or aspects of buddhahood; the subtlest form-body.
Enlightened Aspiration. See bodhicitta.
Final Five-Hundred-Year Period. The last five hundred years of the five thousand years of Buddhism's expected life. It is a synonym for the degeneration of Buddhism.
Four Ways of Gathering Others (Skt., samgraha-vastu; Tib., bsdu ba rnam pa bzhi). The four ways through which the bodhisattvas bring others to the Dharma.
Five Buddha-Families or Buddha Lineages (Skt., pancabuddhakula; Tib., rgyal ba rigs lnga). It is the state of being in all phenomena -- physical and mental, as the union of the five male buddhas and the five female buddhas.
Five Certainties (Tib., nges pa lnga ldan). The five everlasting and never-changing qualities of the enjoyment-body of buddhahood: (1) the place is self-appearing or self-present, free from dimensions; (2) the teachers are the Buddhas of the five classes or families; (3) the disciples are infinite and inseparable from the teacher; (4) the teachings are great luminescent vision, ineffable beyond concepts or words; (5) the time is changeless and timeless time.
Fivefold-Wisdom (Skt., pancajnana; Tib., ye shes lnga). The fivefold-wisdom of buddhahood: (1) the Wisdom of the Ultimate Sphere; (2) the Mirror-like Wisdom; (3) the Wisdom of Equanimity; (4) the Distinguishing (or All-knowing) Wisdom; (5) the Wisdom of Accomplishment.
Fallen Tulku (Tib., sprul rgod or sprul log). A tulku who has ceased to remain as a tulku.
False Tulku (Tib., sprul rdzun). One who has never been a tulku and has been designated as such falsely or by mistake.
Garuda.
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Gelug. One of the four major Buddhist schools of Tibet. It was founded by Je Tsongkhapa.
Kadam. An important school, founded by Dromtonpa, the chief disciple of Atisa. Later, the Kadam teachings were disseminated and absorbed into the teachings of other schools.
Kagyu. One of the four major Buddhist schools of Tibet, founded by Marpa Chökyi Lodrö.
Karma. A habitual pattern sown in our mind-stream by our thoughts and deeds. Such karmic patterns determine what kind of life experiences we will have in the future.
Karmapa. One of the most important tulku lineages of Tibet. The present one is the seventeenth in the tulku lineage of Karmapas.
Khenpo (Tib., mkhan po; Skt., upadhyaya). An abbot; a designation of senior monks, whose roles are detailed in the vinaya scriptures of Buddhism.
King Trisong Detsen. A great king of Tibet, who was responsible for establishing Buddhism in Tibet in the ninth century.
Kor (Tib., dkor). Materials and services dedicated for Dharma purposes.
Lama (Tib., bla ma; Skt., guru). One of the "superior ones"; a senior teacher of Buddhism.
Loving-Kindness (Skt., maitri; Tib., byams pa). The thought of wishing joy and enlightenment for all.
Mahaparinirvana. Literally, "going beyond suffering"; the death of the Buddha or of any highly realized tulku or lama.
Mahayana. One of the two major divisions of Buddhism -- Mahayana means "the Great Vehicle," and Hinayana means "the Common Vehicle."
Manifested-Body (Skt., nirmanakaya; Tib., sprul sku). One of the three bodies of the Buddha, the one that appears in ordinary forms so that it can be seen by ordinary beings. In Tibetan this is called tulku.
Nagarjuna (first to second century?). The preeminent proponent of emptiness philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism and the founder of the Middle Way.
Nalanda Monastery.
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Nalanda Monastery. One of the greatest academic institutes of the ancient mahayana tradition of India. Its ruins can be found in Bihar State of modern India.
Nyingma. Literally, "the Ancient One"; one of the four major Buddhist schools of Tibet, founded by Guru Padmasambhava in the ninth century.
Openness. A translation of the Sanskrit word shunyata, which is a philosophical term that is often translated as emptiness. Openness denotes the unrestricted, uncontrived, unbounded, unhindered, nondual, unchanging, and fully-awakened state, Buddhahood.
Padmasambhaba. Also known as Guru Rinpoche. One of the greatest adepts of India, who founded Buddhism in Tibet in the ninth century.
Path (Skt., marga; Tib., lam). In Mahayana Buddhism, one progresses through five paths and ten stages of training in order to attain buddhahood.
Pure Land (Skt., Buddhaksetra; Tib., zhing khams or dag pa'i zhing khams). A buddha paradise. There are two levels of pure lands: the pure land that belongs to the manifested-body of the Buddha, which can be seen by ordinary beings; and the pure land of the enjoyment-body of the buddhas.
Rainbow Body (Tib., 'ja' lus). Some adepts totally dissolve their gross/mortal bodies at the time of their death, leaving only the nails and hair behind. This dissolution is called "the attainment of rainbow-body" since while their bodies totally dissolve, a mass of rainbow-lights in the form of beams and circles, and especially spheres of light (Tib., thigle) appear for days.
Rainbow Body of Great Transference (Tib., 'ja' lus 'pho ba ch'en po). The subtle body of light into which a great adept transforms his or her gross body in order to serve others.
Rebirth. What eventually occurs after one's death, which is not the end of one's existence. Again and again, after each death, one's mind, the consciousness, takes rebirth as another being.
Rebirths of Virtuous Lamas. See Virtuous lama.
Recognition. The term used in Tibet for the way realized lamas identify the rebirths of deceased lamas through their clairvoyance and spiritual power.
Renunciate (Skt., pravrajika; Tib., rab byung). One who has renounced household life and lives as an ascetic or a celibate monk or nun.
Returner from Death (Tib., 'das log). A person who has died and then, after a number of days, returned to life with vivid memories of his or her after-death experiences. A phenomenon known for centuries in Tibet and reported by many.
Ringsel (Skt., sarira; Tib., ring-bsrel ). Highly respected sacred relics materialized from the cremated bones of highly accomplished masters. They are pellets that might look like small pearls, hard and shiny; they are mostly white, but they could also be in various colors. Ringsels are produced from the cremated bones of meditators and they are believed to be great signs of their high realization.
Sakya. One of the four major Buddhist schools of Tibet, founded by Khon Könchok Gyalpo.
Sangha (Tib., dge 'dun). Dharma communities: the communities of monks, nuns, tantrikas, or devotees.
Seeker of Enlightenment for All. See bodhisattva.
Siddha. A highly accomplished master who has reached high attainment through trainings in the esoteric teachings of Buddhism.
Sixty Aspects of Melodious Voice. The various wondrous qualities of the speech and voice of the Buddha.
Santaraksita.
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Santaraksita (ninth century). A great mahayana scholar of ancient India, who established the monastic ordination lineage in Tibet.
Stages (Skt., bhumi; Tib., sa). According to Mahayana Buddhism, one must advance through ten stages and five paths to reach the goal, buddhahood.
Supreme Manifested-Body (Skt., uttama-nirmanakaya; Tib., mch'og gi sprul sku). The supreme among the four classes of the manifested-bodies of the Buddha that appear in ordinary forms, such as the historical Buddha.
Sutra (Tib., mdo). The exoteric, common teachings of Buddhism taught by the historical Buddha himself.
Tathagata . Literally, "such gone"; an epithet of the Buddha.
Tantra (Tib., sngags). The esoteric or uncommon teachings of Buddhism taught by the historical Buddha or other buddhas.
Tantrika (Tib., sngags pa). A follower of esoteric teachings, the tantra.
Ter or Terma (Tib., gter or gter ma). Literally, "the treasured or hidden ones." Unique esoteric teachings concealed and discovered through enlightened power. In Tibet, most of them were concealed by Guru Padmasambhava in the ninth century and discovered by the tulkus of his disciples starting in the eleventh century and continuing until today.
Tertön (Tib., gter ston). Literally, "treasure discoverer." A master who discovers the ter teachings through his or her enlightened mystical power.
Thigle.
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Thigle (Tib., thig le). The Tibetan word thigh generally means a circle, sphere, disc, or drop. However, in the context of thigle of light in esoteric teachings such as Dzogchen, it is a sphere of rainbow light -- small or big -- made of single or multiple colors. Thigles are neither the beams nor the empty circles made of rainbow-like lights, but are spheres of colorful light fully filled with light. Highly accomplished meditators might see them as Buddha images or might see Buddha images inside them. Thigles are one of the signs that the particles of the physical body of the deceased meditator have been, or are being, transformed into pure light in order to unite with the mother luminous light of wisdom, the ultimate pure body of Buddhahood, which ordinary eyes cannot see as it is.
Thirty-two Major and Eighty Minor Excellent Marks . The 112 extraordinary physical attributes of the supreme manifested-body, such as the historical Buddha.
Three Buddha-Bodies (Skt., trikaya; Tib., sku gsum). The ultimate-body, the enjoyment-body, and the manifested-body of the Buddha.
Tulku (spiral sprul sku; Skt., nirmanakaya). The manifested-body. One of the three bodies of the Buddha. In Tibetan tradition, however, we find three divisions within tulku itself: the tulkus of the Buddha, the tulkus of the adepts, and the tulkus of the virtuous or meritorious lamas.
Tusita Heaven (Tib., dga' ldan). One of the six heavenly fields of the desire realm.
Ultimate-Body (Skt., dharmakaya; Tib., ch'os sku). One of the three bodies or aspects of buddhahood -- the absolute and emptiness or openness nature of buddhahood and of all.
Unrecognized Tulku. One type of the infinite tulkus of buddhas and adepts who, with the exception of a few, mostly remain unrecognized.
Virtuous Lama or Virtuous Friend (Skt., kalyanamitra or guru; Tib., gde ba'i bshes gnyen or bla ma). A teacher who has not yet attained the level of an adept or a buddha, but has generated virtuous deeds or meritorious karmas and whose rebirths will benefit many. Most of the tulkus of Tibet could belong to the rebirths of such lamas.
Zangdok Palri (Tib., zangs mdog dpal ri). The Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain. A manifested pure land, where Guru Padmasambhava remains in his rainbow body of great transference.
From Incarnation, by Tulku Thondup, © 2011 by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.
Film Length: 90 min.
Premiere Date: June 21, 2012
Photos: Download Here
Filmmaker(s): Jennifer Fox
Press: Critical Acclaim | Fact Sheet | Press Release | 2013 Emmy Nomination Press Release
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Film Description
About the Characters
Film Update
Book Excerpt from "The Crystal and the Way of Light"
Book Excerpt from "Incarnation" (1 of 2)
Getting Started With Meditation Newsletter
Who Were You In a Past Life?
Sneak Preview: Watch 'My Reincarnation' on Your iPad or iPhone
Filmmaker Bio
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A beautiful song from Lou!! Haunting!!
But I'm still part of the debate. I care so much about our children's future. As the green ray lights up my sky, these things I will not forget. These fragments will stay until the end, going back in time, starting now.
← Is intelligent and rational thought still possible?


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Fredo Confirms He's "Not In Jail" Following Recent Arrest
Fredo confirms he's not in jail with social media return. Picture: Getty
'So High' rapper Fredo was arrested recently, however he's returned to social media to confirm he's not in custody.
Rapper Fredo was recently arrested by police in London just minutes after he posted a video on Snapchat showing off a pile of cash in the Range Rover he was driving.
> Drake's Birthday Party Awkwardly Interrupted By Pusha T
But following rumours that the 'Funky Friday' rapper was still being held by police, he's made a return to social media to deny the claims and reveal that he's actually in the studio.
A post shared by @fredo on Oct 28, 2019 at 3:27pm PDT
Alongside posting the pictures above on his Instagram feed, Fredo shared a video of himself in the studio and stated "Turned the studio into the Caribbean Talking bout I'm in jail, does this look like jail?".
In a statement folloing the arrest, police said "The vehicle was searched and a quantity of cash was recovered. The driver of the vehicle, a 24-year-old man, was arrested on suspicion of possession of criminal property. A 27-year-old man was also arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon, theft and making threats to kill."
Following Fredo's arrest no more details were revealed, but now that he's out and in the studio again, we'll keep our eyes open for more new music from the rapper before the end of the year.
> Download Our Free App For All The Latest Music News!


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[1:00pm] Cheney Homestead Open House
Open House at the Cheney Homestead, second Sunday of each month. View the 1785 house, and hear commentary about the residence, which was donated to the Manchester Historical Society by the Cheney family in 1968 for use as a house museum. Guided tours include history of the building and its contents, and of the family who lived there. As with many New England homesteads, the house is built into a hill, with doors opening out to the yard on both the upper and lower level. Hours:1pm-4pm The Keeney Schoolhouse is on the grounds of the Homestead, and is open when the weather is warm enough. More about local history: www.manchesterhistory.org. Donations accepted for the upkeep of the Homestead.
[2:00pm] Little Theatre of Manchester Presents: Dream Girls!!!
DREAMGIRLS • Dates: April 12 – 28, 2019 • Times: Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM / Sundays at 2 PM No Performance on April 21 / Special Saturday Matinee on April 20 at 2 PM • Ticket Prices: $30 for VIP / $25 for General Seating (Student & Senior Discounts Available) Winner of six Tony Awards and two Grammy Awards. A sweeping and inspirational journey through 20th-century American popular music, DREAMGIRLS chronicles one Motown group's rise from obscurity to superstardom. Through gospel, R&B, smooth pop, disco and more, this audience favorite features unforgettable hits by Academy Award nominee Henry Krieger – including "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," "One Night Only" and "Listen."
Cheney Homestead 106 Hartford Rd.
Open House at the Cheney Homestead, second Sunday of each month. View the 1785 house, and hear commentary about the residence, which was donated to the Manchester Historical Society by the Cheney family in 1968 for use as a house museum.
Guided tours include history of the building and its contents, and of the family who lived there. As with many New England homesteads, the house is built into a hill, with doors opening out to the yard on both the upper and lower level.
Hours:1pm-4pm
The Keeney Schoolhouse is on the grounds of the Homestead, and is open when the weather is warm enough.
More about local history: www.manchesterhistory.org.
Donations accepted for the upkeep of the Homestead.
177 Hartford Rd.


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[Rant] Media vs. Media Center
When I woke up yesterday, I took my shower, grabbed a Coke, checked my E-mail, and then sat down at my TV to watch the latest episode of "Mythbusters." My wife had left for a small part of the day, so my timing couldn't have been better.
Now, because I only watch a few shows and am rarely around when those shows air, I've got a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 installation on a computer hooked up to my TV that acts like a TiVo: recording TV shows, getting TV listings, et cetera. I also use it as a true media center. My pictures, music and movies are all on this one central machine.
Over the last few months, I've had to deal with a few inconveniences. Lots of TV channels have started using the broadcast flag, so not only have I been unable to keep some shows until I had time to watch them, but any that are copy protected can't be viewed from other computers in the house. But while inconvenient, I've been able to get around it via weekend reruns or other options.
But Saturday took the cake. I sat down to watch "Mythbusters," but before I could select anything, I noticed an odd error message on the screen.
I'm used to errors greeting me in the morning. My wife isn't very technically adept, so she'll usually leave errors on either her machine or the TV for me to troubleshoot in the morning. Fortunately, on a Media Center PC, it's generally easy enough to just hit the "Back" button on the remote to see what she was doing.
After hitting back, I noticed that she was watching TNT. I hit "OK" to select TNT again, and still got the "Restricted Content" message.
Now, it's one thing to prevent someone from recording a television broadcast, but it's something else to prevent someone from watching a live broadcast. What's even worse is that the signal they embedded to trigger the broadcast flag messed up Media Center so that if I switched to a different channel, I still had the "Restricted Content" message, but with the audio of the channel in the background.
Turning off my Media Center and turning it back on resulted in everything being okay until I changed to TNT, and then it all repeated itself.
This brings me to my point. Microsoft has been making a lot of concessions to big media over the last few years in an effort to get studios to use Microsoft DRM technologies for copy protection with some measure of success. However, Microsoft has now given these companies the tools to not only prevent unauthorized use of their content, but to actually prevent authorized use of their content. Heaven forbid that someone actually want to watch live television via their computer.
What kills me is that I'd most likely have a better end-user experience using technology that pre-dates the broadcast flag. I've got an older TV tuner card in another machine that not only ignores the broadcast flag, but gives me slightly higher image quality. Of course, that card doesn't work with Media Center...
So what are we as consumers to do? The Bush Administration and the FCC have pretty much proven that consumer rights are the last thing on their agenda. The senators for my state are too busy trying to get memorials for astronauts to actually do any work. The senators in my last state weren't any better, suggesting that media companies should actually be allowed to bypass due process and destroy people's computers while at the same time violating license agreements themselves.
I'm really at a loss.
[Personal] Negativity and letting go...
Those of you who know me know that in general, I'm a pretty calm person on the surface. The unfortunate reason for my calm exterior is that for several reasons, I always expect the worst to happen. I'm rarely disappointed that way.
Pessimism actually helps quite a bit with my profession. Generally, the pessimism of the quality assurance department acts as a dose of reality for departments that are, well, over-optimistic.
However, pessimism does have several consequences. Stress is perhaps the biggest side effect. When you are always dreading the worst, it's hard to see the small things that make you happy. Pessimism also affects how you are seen by others.
So I've been going over my goals for what I want to try for "SiN Episodes: Episode 2 (Tenative Title)," and I think the biggest goal is to try to scale back my pessimism.
I'm still going to look at things in the most pessimistic way possible when doing asset reviews for ESRB issues, especially given some events that occured during the creation of "Emergence." And I'm still going to be as forceful as possible when fighting for the consumer.
But I need to get to the point where I can seperate my professional pessimism from my personal views on life. In these days where a person's job can vanish overnight, television companies can tell your television not to air certain shows because your TV isn't "compliant," and parents would rather censor entire classifications of entertainment than actually act like parents, there is enough negativity in this world without me adding my personal blend of sulk.
I hope that by letting go of some of my negativity, I can open myself up to some more opportunities as well as find more ways to help others.
For example, while I may have had some negative experiences back with MGS, a lot of those experiences can really be traced to my own negativity. So why should I hold anything against them? They reflected my negative energies back at me in a tangible fashion, but I was still the originator.
I'm not getting rid of all of my negativity, however. Pure optimism is just as unhealthy, if not moreso. Keeping some of my negativity will keep me grounded in reality, which is right where I need to be.
[Industry] Thanks and Verification
First off, I'd like to thank Laura Crowley at Day 1 Studios (makers of the wonderful and unfortunately now-defunct MechAssault series of games) and David Pickett at New Boundary Technologies for sending out job information for those who were recently laid off from Indie Built. It sounds like Avalanche/Buena Vista in Salt Lake City has been trying to pick up a lot of people, and Ritual has also send information along.
For those who have been waiting for more verification to act, this is a post from someone who was laid off on their blog.
We're a small industry, and we need to look out for our own.
[Industry] Access Software, RIP 1983-2006
Access Software, one of the last great independent developers, finally met its untimely end the afternoon of April 27, 2006.
Access Software was founded back in 1983 by the late Bruce Carver and Chris Jones, and quickly rose to the pantheon of classic game developers, with classics such as the "Links" series of golf games, the "Tex Murphy" series of adventure games, and the "Beach Head" series of action games.
The cost of acquiring rights to golf courses escalated over the years while Access was competing with Electronic Arts. In order to keep the company alive and give "Links" a solid financial backing, the company was sold to Microsoft in 1999. (MobyGames incorrectly shows 1998.)
However, Microsoft Game Studios managed to strip the profitability away from the studio by eliminating the means that Access had used to keep their products low-cost. As a result, the studio did not have many profitable titles during its stay with Microsoft.
In 2003, there was a massive layoff at the studio, which Microsoft promptly denied to "Penny Arcade." Less than a year later, the studio was sold to Take-Two Interactive and renamed to Indie Built, Inc.
Access had about seventy employees left at the time of their untimely demise. If you know of a position that is available for someone in the area, let me know and I'll try to pass the word on to the appropriate people.
[Personal] Me against the Movies
I just watched "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children," and I think I finally figured out why I'm so aligned with most gamers on games, but so completely off-kilter with most gamers when it comes to movies.
Games are generally about knowledge, learning and choice. "I know facts A, B, and C; from that I can learn item D; and that helps me make choice E." Games that violate previously learned knowledge tend to fare very poorly with most gamers.
Movies are generally about suspension of disbelief. "I don't exist in their world, I'm merely observing it from a safe distance."
Gamers tend to watch movies in cued-anticipation mode. "I have learned from cue A that when it occurs, action B will follow. Therefore, I'll prepare myself accordingly there." That's why you see all the gamers going on about the first siren scene in "Silent Hill (2006)", because it's the first time in the movie that the associated cue appears, and therefore the first time they are able to apply their knowledge. The momentary expectation and action are the primary drivers.
Cued anticipation works wonderfully for games. Most games give you a clue that X is going to happen so that you can properly react to it, like the creak on trapped chests in "Diablo," or tracers on bullets in most first-person shooters. The clue informs you as to how you should react, and you try to react accordingly.
General movie-goers tend to watch movies in anxious-anticipation mode. Cues can act as foreshadowing, but it isn't the action, it's the resolution that matters. The movie goers who went to see "Silent Hill" were more concerned with figuring out the Alessa/Sharon, trying to figure out how this was going to lead to a happy ending, etc.
Anxious anticipation works well when you have no pre-existing knowledge, because you spend your time gathering clues and trying to analyze them. It helps with the immersion because you're brain is active trying to figure things out.
So, why did I like "Silent Hill" when most gamers and most reviewers tended to loathe it? When I'm gaming, I follow the cues. When I watch movies, I only care about the ending. With that combination, "Silent Hill" was essentially made for me. It relied on having some base knowledge of the source universe to be able to decipher the conclusion, but it strayed enough from the cues from the game that I wouldn't have been able to use any of my learned knowledge from the gameplay to prepare myself for the future.
In short, it was a video game movie for fans of the video game that were willing to leave the game behind. Gamers kept picking up on the gamisms in there, expecting pop-ups like "You got the school office key," while the moviegoers were simply wondering what would be found as a result of finding the keys.
For the most part, I was able to leave the game behind. Only the last two minutes threw my gamer half into convulsions, and that was because everything that occured in those two minutes betrayed all of the knowledge that I had acquired previously.
Gamers were feeling their knowledge betrayed from the start, with Rose instead of Harry, the creatures from "Silent Hill 2" instead of the original game, Rose not having a clip-on flashlight, etc. Moviegoers were feeling off because of Christopher's search for Rose, the interdimensional aspect that was added to the town to support the last two minutes not really meshing with the remainder of the world knowledge presented to them, and the pacing wasn't exactly standard for horror flicks, but was established fare for the game.
This may not make a lot of sense to you. To be honest, it barely makes enough sense to me to write it...but at least I now know why I'm able to enjoy flicks that my gaming buddies seem to loathe with a passion normally reserved for cross-dressing Nazi pedophiles on acid.
[Sin] Au
"SiN Episodes: Emergence" has gone gold.
This project really is the product that I'm proudest to be associated with. Even though it was the most challenging product I've ever tested, I feel that the challenge was met...and exceeded.
Now it's just a matter of playing the waiting game...May 10 can't come soon enough.
[Politics] Open Letter to Senator Hutchinson
To the Honorable Senator Key Bailey Hutchinson from Texas:
Why even bother sending out a form-letter response to Video Game Voters Network members if you aren't even going to address the issue in your letter?
When your constituents write letters to you, we are doing two things. We are saying, "This issue concerns us," and we are also trying to ascertain your stance on the issue. Of course, if anything about your stance was anywhere on your website, we wouldn't have to write.
So in short, your constituents want to know what you are planning on doing about FEPA. Cop-out form-letter non-answers aren't going to cut it this time.
Provide an answer, or we'll vote someone in who will do something other than try to get memorials for space shuttle pilots.
[Review] "Silent Hill" (2006)
Tonight, I had the pleasure of watching "Silent Hill", and to say that it's by far the best video-game-to-movie conversion would be an understatement. It's a great movie in its own right, with one small problem...the last two minutes.
The movie does an amazing job of capturing the feel of the games and loosely following the storyline of the original game without aping it or ridiculing it. As a horror movie, it succeeds marvelously...except for the last two minutes.
Basically, the movie was perfect...except for the last two minutes.
I know I'm harping on the last two minutes quite a bit, but to be honest, they're the worst part of the entire flick. If you are a fan of the games, close your eyes and/or leave once the Jeep engine starts and you'll have a satisfactory ending. If you've never played the games, close your eyes and/or leave once the Jeep engine starts and you'll be able to fill in the gaps yourself given enough time.
But if you watch the last two minutes, not only do they betray everything that the "Silent Hill" universe stands for, but it also confuses the living daylights out of you. The group I was in consisted of three people who had played all of the games in the series, and one neophyte. Those of us who had played the games all agreed that the tacked-on ending betrayed the core of the "SH" universe, and the one who hadn't played any said that she felt like she had it...until the ending, and then all comprehension flew out the window.
The amount of confusion over the ending was very apparent when we left the theater as well. Everyone was discussing the ending, trying to figure it out.
So Christophe and Roger, way to go. You did the job better than anyone else. You just added one extra ingredient that really wasn't necessary and it left a bad taste in the mouth of your viewers.
[Personal] Enjoying Work
You know that you're enjoying your job a wee bit too much when you can throw up the horns while testing an installer...and mean it.
I've really enjoyed being at Ritual. True, the politics may occasionally get to be too much and there are the inevitable arguments over trivial bullshit, but in the end, I can honestly say that I come into the office each day because I enjoy it here.
In some dark corner of my mind, I keep thinking back to Microsoft Game Studios. Right now, I feel like I did after about three years at MGS: content and happy, but with an undercurrent of "what now?"
Unlike Microsoft, there really isn't any room for vertical growth where I am. I can grow my department, and I can help my people grow, but I'm already as high as I can get, or as high as I would want to be.
I don't want to get too high up in any organization. I want to stay low enough that I can keep my fingers in production. I want to know that I'm not a useless middle manager.
Here, I am productive. As long as I can stay productive with a minimum of frustration, I should remain happy.
[E3] Not This Year...
For the third year in a row, I'm not going to be going to E3. Two years ago, I was working as a civil servant; last year, I was still establishing myself here at Ritual.
This year, I've got two reasons. First, we're launching "SiN Episodes: Emergence" on May 10, the first day of the actual show portion of E3. Second, E3 seems to be denying applications for no apparent reason.
Part of me is encouraged by all of the app cancellations I'm hearing from around the industry, because it means that E3 seems to be serious about keeping non-industry out of the expo. However, the sheer quantity of industry cancellations I hear about worries me. I've heard tales of new hires getting accepted no problem, but industry veterans with ten years experience getting rejected.
I'm all for limiting E3 attendance, but come on...it doesn't make sense for E3 to be an exclusive industry event if the industry can't get in.
[Testing] The Hidden Costs Of Testing At The End
There's been a disturbing trend in the gaming industry lately. More and more publishers are scaling back their test organizations to only having a small quantity of test leads, and then hiring on tons of contingent testers in the final eight weeks of a project. This is a bad idea.
On paper, it seems to make sense. You can get a contingent tester for about $320/week on average, while an experienced tester with three years experience is going to run you $600/week, and your test lead is going to run you just over $900 a week. (For the sake of this argument, we'll measure coverage by contingent manweeks, and consider a test lead and a regular tester as two contingents for purposes of measuring productivity. These figures also assume that nobody will ever be working overtime, which as we all know, is completely unrealistic, but the numbers would get a lot scarier if we factored in the OT.)
The way that some companies work is that they have a test lead on the project from the beginning, add three regular testers to the project about six months from ship, and then bring on about six contingents during the last four months. On a one-year project, that works out to about $115,000 for 324 contingent manweeks of testing. Under the "new" approach, a test lead is assigned six months prior to ship, and about 34 contingents are brought on eight weeks before ship. This amounts to about $111,000 for the same number of contingent manweeks, or a savings of about $4,000 on one project.
The "savings" scale the longer the project is going on. Assuming a two year project, given the above rules, the contingent spending wins $144,000 to $163,000 if you bring in 47 contingents to match the manweeks.
So on paper, these sorts of decisions make sense from an accounting standpoint, until you factor in two items: facilities costs and software development.
First off, it's significantly cheaper to come up with space and equipment for ten people than it is for 35. Space, power, computers, consoles, TV's, monitors, snacks, etc., it all adds up.
Second, let's say that after 324 manweeks on a project, your test team has found a total of 5,000 bugs. Under the initial system, those bugs would have been found and fixed throughout the development cycle. Under the "cheaper" system, all of those bugs would hit the development team at the very end.
Massive amounts of showstopper bugs at the end of a project lead to slips, and that's where the savings erode. For every week slip under the initial system, testing costs increase by $4,600 just for manpower. Under the contingent-heavy system, you're paying them all for an extra week, so your 34 contingents and your test lead just added an extra $11,800 to your project's cost. Larger teams, like the 47 CSG team mentioned earlier, add an extra $16,000 a week.
On a one year project, a one-month delay eats away all of your savings. On a two-year project, six weeks eats away your savings. Of course, some companies decide to ship and patch rather than slip, but that costs reputation and support costs as well.
So by scaling back your test organizations, what are you really saving?
(Edit: Added tag, fixed typo.)
Posted at 4/18/2006 09:11:00 AM Tags: Testing
[Personal] Procrastination Helped?
Some of you may remember that I was audited recently because of a glitch in the tax software I used that year.
I used TaxCut this year, and when I did my taxes back in February, it said that I owed a little over $150 for federal. Error check popped up everything as clear, so I felt like it was accurate. So I did what anyone would do...I decided to wait until the last minute to file.
Today, I loaded TaxCut and it said it had a massive update. I downloaded it, ran error check, and had four warnings. Turns out that the old version missed four deductions. I'm now getting almost $500 back from my federal taxes.
So I E-filed before another update came down the pike to take it away, and now to wait for the check and be happy. Whee.
[Personal] My captioned office
Sorry about all the drama lately. I'm still busy as all hell, so while I finish up my current project, here's a bit of an inside look into my workspace and potentially the very scary place that is my mind... (click for full-size)
I should be back in full force shortly.
[Personal] Closing The Borders
I've been told by a lot of people that I have a near-infinite well of patience that I can draw from. However, an event from last night essentially emptied the well.
Our home usually acts as neutral territory for neighbors, a bit like Switzerland. We're known for not taking sides in conflicts and acting as buffers, as mediators, and as listeners. As a result, we're usually considered the "safe" alternative by families in trouble.
Over the last few weeks, my wife has been babysitting one child in particular. To call this thirteen-year-old a "problem child" would be an understatement. The child honestly seems to love negative attention. She cuts herself, but not deep enough to do any damage...just deep enough to make marks. She oozes lies through every pore. Personal responsibility for her actions is a foreign concept. In other words, she acts just like my stepson.
My wife has been working with her, trying to help her out. It's been taking a lot out of my wife, but helping her out made my wife feel good. However, after last night, our house is off-limits to this child, because when I stepped out for twenty minutes to go to Movie Trading Company and left her with only my wife for supervision, she went into the bathroom and tried to kill herself.
At least that was what she intended everyone to think. In actuality, the number of pills that she took of what she took is going to do nothing more than make her constipated for the next few days.
Regardless, suicide attempts (legitimate or faked) are really the straw that break the camel's back for me. I've had friends commit suicide growing up. I've had friends with no self-respect who acted in extremely self-destructive manners.
But I just can't invest any emotional currency in someone who is that self-destructive. I just can't. I have my limits, and they have been reached.
So I may not be doing a lot of posting until I'm mentally recharged from the events of last night. Just warning you ahead of time.
[Sin] Let The Preload Begin!
For those of you who have been wondering why I've been so quiet lately compared to my normally verbose self, wonder no more.
Update: Damn, I missed being the first purchase by 27 seconds...
[Peeves] Pop-Ups
I hate to say this, but I've had to stop visiting "Blue's News" at home. Why? One of the pop-ups on the site causes Internet Explorer 6.0 with the MSN Popup Blocker toolbar to hang.
At work, I use IE 7.0 Beta, and I was finally able to at least isolate out the pop-up that causes it to hang. The ad starts a Webpage Dialog with the following code in the address:
javascript:window.onerror=function(){return%20true};%20setTimeout("window.close()");%20x=window.open("about:blank","1144252689462","height=600,width=800,left=400,top=300,toolbar=0,status=0,menubar=1,scrollbars=1,resizable=1");%20%20x.blur();%20window.close()
For whatever reason, this causes IE6 to launch a new instance of Internet Explorer which goes to 100% CPU utilization. The initial IE6 instance is waiting for the other instance to do something, so it doesn't progress until I open up Task Manager and end-task the pop-up.
I don't want to have to end-task a process if I visit a page. At least with IE7, the dialog pops up as a empty window and I can close it easily.
So, until this is corrected, I'm only going to visit Blue's from work. Sorry, Blue.
[Blog] Anonymous Comments Disabled
Last week, one of my co-workers said something that seemed fairly straightforward to me. He said, "Internet plus anonymity equals asshole."
Those of you who visit the site rather than read the feed know that I've had a particularly stubborn thorn in my side over the last month and a half.
To be honest, this wouldn't be the first time that I've had a critic and it won't be the last. However, most of my critics have either posted using contact information so I could communicate with them in a meaningful fashion, or contacted me out-of-band so that we could debate in a private forum.
I don't mind critics, but I do like having a general idea who is criticizing me so that I can properly gauge the criticism.
When I see a mail notification saying that I have a comment from "Morgan," for example, I know that it's most likely a well-thought-out post and I'll have something to either research or think about. While I have no idea who "Morgan" is, the name association along with the quality of the posts has given credence to the feedback.
When I see a mail notification saying that I have a new comment from Anonymous, however, I have no idea what to expect. While I suspect that this most recent Anonymous is one of my former co-workers from Microsoft Game Studios in Salt Lake, I can't prove it. It also doesn't correspond to any of my four major traffic pulls over the last month: Hanover, Pennsylvania; Redmond, Washington; Rochester, New York; or Bangalore, India.
If my anonymous critic wishes to continue being critical, he is welcome to. I haven't deleted any of his comments to now, and I have no intent of doing so in the future. But he'll have to log in just like everyone else.
[Gaming] Insane Full Installs
I downloaded the demo for "Tomb Raider: Legend," and was slightly surprised by the minimum system requirements.
Microsoft Windows 2000, XP
Pentium 3 1.0Ghz or Athlon XP Equivalent
100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 64 MB 3D Accelerated Card with TnL (GeForce 3Ti / Radeon 9 series)
Microsoft Windows 2000/XP compatible sound card (100% DirectX 9.0c -compatible)
DVD-ROM:
Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive
HARD DRIVE:
9.9GB free disk space
INPUT DEVICES:
100% Windows 2000/XP compatible mouse and keyboard
To be honest, most of this looked pretty reasonable, but...9.9Gb of free space on your hard drive?
This is one thing I like about consoles. If it needs an asset, it gets it off of the DVD. Levels are optimized to load in a reasonable amount of time off of a limited-performance medium.
If this was a PC-only title, I'd grumble but I wouldn't give it a second thought...but this game was developed for multiple platforms. Why should the Xbox version be able to use a maximum of 750Mb of hard disk space on a temporary basis while its PC cousin is forced to dedicate over thirteen times as much to hold the game? Why isn't the work done to get the game onto the consoles carried over to the PC?
PC gamers are accustomed to having to have the disc in the drive anyway for copy protection purposes...you may as well put that media to good use.
[Testing] Ratings Board Submission Materials
Creating ratings materials for the various ratings boards worldwide is a stressful ordeal even when you know what you're doing. Creating them in this post-"Hot Coffee" world is even more insane.
First, you play through the game, making notes of anything that would be considered "disclosable." Have one guy smoking a cigarette? Disclosable. Have an empty beer bottle in a level? Disclosable. Have bleeped lyrics? Disclosable. Could lyrics have a special meaning if taken out of context? Disclosable. An irreverent image of a priest? Definitely disclosable. A fart noise? Disclosable.
Then, you create your "first draft" of the submission packet, trying to categorize all of your notes into the proper holes.
Then you record yourself playing through the entire game, exposing all secrets.
Then you step through the video and delete any sections that aren't really severe in order to try to get your video under an hour. Walking through a hallway? Cut. Walking through a blood-soaked hallway? Keep it. Walking through a hallway that is bloody, but not as bloody as the last one? Keep it, but make a note in case you need to shave more time off. Don't forget to show what happens when you die, though...even though it may not be pertinent to you, showing player death is important...
Then you watch your final video, looking for anything you missed in your initial notes, and for anything you should have taped, but didn't.
Then you gather the soundtrack together, burn it to a CD, get the lyric sheets pre-bleep, mark which words were bleeped, get the script together, highlight every swear word from "hell" and "damn" on up, prepare a build in case the ratings board wants it along with a full-walkthrough with all cheat codes and secrets documented and save games located at each pertinent location.
Then you pull up the various asset browsing/creation tools looking for anything that is disclosable that isn't in the game and either get it removed from the tree, or get it put in a placeholder area so you can tape it for disclosure and add it to the form.
Finally you submit and pray that you caught it all...and that's just the ESRB.
For other ratings boards, you feel like splitting hairs even more. ("Is this a depiction or a moving image?" "Is saying 'God damn it' bad enough to be blasphemy, does it have to be an image of the anti-Christ violating the Virgin Mary to be blasphemy, or is the line somewhere between?" "Is showing a crime be committed 'encouraging' said crime?")
[Public] CGC '06
If you are in the Dallas area and want to hassle me, I'm supposed to be speaking at the Dallas CGC this coming weekend. I'm not sure which day my panel is yet, but I'll post it as soon as I know.
I'm sharing the panel with the wonderful QA staff over at Gearbox Software, so even if you disagree with every single thing I say or stand for, you will at least get a contrasting view of quality assurance practices at different companies.
Update April 3, 2006, 5:36pm: My team and I will be there at 4pm this Friday. Look forward to seeing some of you there.
[Review] "The Godfather" (Xbox)
(Note: This is based off of about 16 hours of gameplay, during which the story mode was completed, but only 33% of the total game was completed.)
Follow the movie
While aping "Grand Theft Auto"
And having fun, too
I just finished playing "The Godfather" for the Xbox. While I personally disliked the melee controls, I found very little wrong with the rest of the game. I found that it approached the movie with respect, had decent controls, wonderful character customization, minor visual defects (necks clipping through collars were the worst offenses), and a decent amount of strategy. The game also seemed to feature a bit of a dynamic difficulty system where after dying a few times on a mission, one or more enemies wouldn't be there the second time...although I could be mistaken on that part.
All in all, an enjoyable game that was worth the $40.


A view of the Royal Flotilla on the 3rd June 2012.
Today, I went to the flotilla on the Thames to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. I am no ardent monarchist, but I do like the historical continuation of parades on the Thames.
We were promised a thousand boats, choirs, bells and grand stuff, looking like this.
Unfortunately, it was wet, crowded and rather boring. I was fondled for three hours on the bottom by an old lady trying to push into my spot, I got very humpy with her. The drizzle didn't really stop, but became torrential rain, and the fact is, that a procession of white pleasure boats is rather dull. Never again - thank goodness.
The highlights: Thefirst boat, one with a working carillon of bells on it, was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.
As was the larger one the Queen actually rode in.
The rowing bit at the beginning was wonderful.
There were plenty of moments that made me go wow (though yesterday I went to the 'Making of Harry Potter' Exhibition and wowed even more - the animatronics, astonishing).
Here is a video of the good bits, including the bell-boat in close up and all the Royals.
My little cousin summed up the occasion best with the following picture, which she said is her, waving her flag and smiling while peering through dense rain.
If you look carefully, however, you will see that she is smiling, and I think part of that is pure 'keep your pecker up' spirit, partly the English resilience against drizzle and mostly the fact that she was there with a pretty decent family - as was I.
Tomorrow is a picnic in Hyde Park - Brollies packed.


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What are the charachteristics of the kind of society that beckons the wrath of God? Have we reached that point yet?
Learn how the concept of tolerance has been twisted and perverted into an idea that threatens both society and the Church.
Learn the significance of interpreting the Bible literally, particularly as it applies to Bible prophecy.
An analysis of the three great waves of the Spirit in the 20th Century.


High utilizers are not a new problem at 872-bed Parkland Memorial, one of the 10 biggest hospitals in the United States. Parkland is best known as the place where President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead 54 years ago after being shot while his motorcade passed through downtown. These days, its emergency room overflows with injuries and illnesses large and small: people with bullet wounds and heart attacks, strokes and pneumonia, and also chronically ill patients with nowhere else to go, for whom Parkland's emergency room is a refuge from their disordered lives. And then there were patients whose medical emergencies could easily have been prevented with regular medical care, or housing or decent food.
Every big city has a hospital like Parkland Memorial, but Dallas, land of vast freeways, barbecue and suburban sprawl, is in a category all its own, and so is its safety net hospital. About 85 percent of the patients at Parkland are uninsured or on Medicaid; the hospital spent $871 million on uncompensated care last year, which accounts for over half its budget and more than 2 percent of all the unpaid hospital care provided in the United States. The unpaid bills arise because only two-thirds of Dallas's adult residents have health insurance of any kind, the lowest coverage rate of any big city in the country.
In parts of south Dallas, fewer than half of the adults are insured, and not because they don't need health care. Asthma rates in these districts are nearly double the national average, as are obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and mental illness. Generations of the poor and uninsured in Dallas and surrounding counties have followed a familiar routine: When you're really sick or at wit's end, call 911. Tell the EMS driver to take you to Parkland, which accepts everyone and won't saddle you with a bill you can't pay.
The "frequent fliers" account for the running red ink in the hospital's finances. Parkland needed to do something about them, and beginning in 2015 it did. That year, the Parkland Health and Hospital System christened a new $1.3 billion hospital, a 17-story glass-and-steel behemoth, shiny on the outside and quiet on the inside, funded by municipal bonds and donations from local oil zillionaires. It also launched an innovative new initiative that would reset the hospital's ledger by creating a safety net for the city's most vulnerable citizens.
Less than two years after its launch, the PCCI portal contains 150,000-plus names and had been accessed nearly a million times by 98 community groups, including some, like the local community college, that officials never anticipated would participate. And the list is growing. The Dallas public school system has expressed interest in using the portal to detect whether kids' asthma medications are getting filled by their parents. There has even been talk of hooking up the network with the city jail, or the fire department because most of its calls are health care-related. The goal is to link 300 community groups by the end of 2018.
But addressing those inequalities depends on having resources available and in Dallas that was complicated by a conservative state's preference for low taxes and limited handouts. So officials turned to data to make the evidentiary case for how to fill the gaps in care.
The blueprint for the Parkland community's renovation originated with Ruben Amarasingham, a computer engineer and doctor supported by the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Young Leader Award. Amarasingham had seemingly been bred to undertake this complex task. He was the child of Sri Lankan immigrants—his father a doctor, his mother a social worker—and even as a high school student in Newark, Delaware, he set up with his brother a company that sold database programming to medical equipment suppliers. "It wasn't successful enough for me to skip college," he says with a laugh. So he studied science at Brown University and medicine at the University of Texas-Southwestern in Dallas.
In his third year there he got to know Ron Anderson, president of the Parkland system, who encouraged him to create a computer program for a network of vans that provided services to the homeless. After two years at Johns Hopkins University, Amarasingham returned to Parkland with further expertise in computers and health care systems, as well as an MBA, and began working on software to help the hospital predict which patients would require readmissions.
One evening in 2011, during a shift at the hospital, it all sort of coalesced. He entered the room of a patient who seemed very familiar—his chart showed it was the sixth time he had been admitted to Parkland in the past nine months. The man was in his late 50s, homeless and mentally ill, and he'd been brought into the intensive care unit in a coma stemming from a condition called hypothyroidism. The entire expensive, terrifying episode could have been avoided if the patient had been regularly taking a drug called levothyroxine, which costs less than 50 cents a day.
But "he had no family and no social support; he was not very literate. He was a boarder at the Salvation Army, but gradually falling apart," Amarasingham recalled. "We had a wonderful conversation and figured out how to prevent this cycle of readmissions and poor health." The hospital helped the patient find permanent housing, and he stopped coming to the hospital. If they could multiply such solutions with better coordination between the hospital and community organizations, Amarasingham realized, patients could be protected far more cheaply and with better results.
The following year, the W.W. Caruth Jr. Fund, endowed by a real estate scion who owned 50 square miles of land within Dallas, gave Amarasingham's new venture, the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (or PCCI), $1 million to explore the feasibility of a network that linked public health and community groups. After 18 months, Caruth kicked in $12 million more to implement the idea. Obamacare was just coming into place, with penalties for hospitals that had too many readmissions. There was a bipartisan consensus that the $3 trillion health care system was an iceberg that had to be towed into fresh waters. Society had to start paying for things that promised good health rather than health-related procedures—and good health, as people had been observing ad nauseam, required healthy communities.
Amarasingham called his case management software Iris, because it would allow everyone to keep watch over the most vulnerable people. As he conceived it, social agencies would use the software for their own case management efforts and to connect through an information exchange portal that would link them to each other and to Parkland.
Building Iris and the portal was a process of baby steps. Amarasingham and his colleagues at PCCI didn't want to make the same mistake that organizations called health information exchanges had stumbled into when they were rolled out beginning in 2009. The exchanges, funded initially out of the Obama administration's economic stimulus, were networks in which hospitals and medical practices could share information on patients to coordinate their care as they moved among primary and specialty care practices, hospitals and long-term care facilities. But many of the exchanges failed because they were put up without figuring out how or whether health care providers would use them. After the exchanges spent their seed money, many—including the Dallas exchange—found that not enough health care organizations were willing to pay to share data, and the exchanges flopped.
To avoid something similar, Parkland decided to give community groups a tangible benefit before asking them to share data—a step that made many leery, out of concern for the privacy of their clients. Amarasingham and colleagues would offer them a software platform they could use for internal needs, and only then ask them to connect with other agencies and the health care system. A fancy new software platform was a real asset to small, low-budget organizations that helped the poor. Some were still working with pen and paper on spreadsheets. "If it works initially, word of mouth spreads it, then you have grass-roots buy-in," Amarasingham thought to himself.
His good intentions weren't enough, at first. When he brought the first version of Iris to a community town hall meeting, "they destroyed it," Amarasingham recalled. "They were like, 'This sounds like a bunch of doctors put it together.'" The software was structured like an electronic health record, which not even doctors liked. Amarasingham quickly realized that the system needed to be flexible to meet the needs of community groups that each had its own mission, expertise and technical ability.
Cindy Crain, who runs an alliance of 38 federally funded homeless organizations in the Dallas area, explained to Amarasingham that any case management system had to be compliant with the requirements of the many health and housing agencies that fund homelessness; they had to respect privacy and security requirements and demonstrate high data quality and integrity.
After the meeting it was back to the "bare bolts" of the software, Amarasingham said. But within a year, the portal had electronically tied together a handful of the larger community groups, says Steve Miff, who became chief executive of PCCI after Amarasingham stepped down to create a venture capital-backed partner company, Pieces Technology. To deal with the issue of sensitive information, the system would have three different levels of consent. "Stage 1" meant that an individual's data could be used in the record system of an individual organization. "Stage 2" allowed general information about a person to be shared with the health care system and "Stage 3" meant health care providers and community organizations could share detailed information about a patient's diagnoses and needs, and the services they were getting—even the specific foods they took home from a pantry. There were, to be sure, certain kinds of information, about things like addiction or sexual abuse, that remained protected. "The principle is only to access a patient's data to help them," said Dustin Perkins, director of programs at the Austin Street Center, a homeless shelter.
One of the advantages to the system, for Parkland, was that its patients were more willing to agree to share their personal data when they were asked to do so by a food pantry, rather than in the emergency room. "We had the hardest time recruiting people. In the ER you have more important things to do and you are sick," said Yolande Pengetnze, PCCI's medical director. "At the pantry, you know them, they've fed your family, there's trust." At the same time, the easily grasped value of the data helped overcome doubts and suspicions in the community-based organizations. Iris allowed them to easily refer clients to needed services, using a resource page that mapped out other local organizations. "You've got something in common now—this platform. So it's a great step forward in doing population health as a community," said Keith Kosel, a vice president at the innovation center.
Within a year, the software portal was having a powerful impact on overwhelmed homeless organizations in Dallas. By entering personal data from each of the 17,009 Dallas residents registered as having been homeless over the past year, homeless advocate Crain has created a triage system that allows her to make the best use of scarce resources. She maintains a housing list that ranks 700 of the neediest men and women in the city based on factors like level of disability, arrests and ER visits. Sir Michael Marmot might shake his head at the lack of resources that Texas made available for such desperate people.
But the portal at least could rank them by priority and find a home for the one at the top of the list when someone died or moved out—which happened an average of 24 times a month. "I use data science to make sure we make the best targeted choices based on vulnerability and the lack of independence," says Crain.
It wasn't long before some surprises emerged from the data that was being collected, said Vikas Chowdhry, who came to the innovation center to lead the data science team after 15 years at Epic Systems, the electronic health records giant. For one thing, the single most common group seeking services at different places around town was made up of people who had at least some college experience.
Chowdhry didn't know why, but it certainly undercut the image people had of who was coming into shelters and pantries for help. The data revealed something else about the anatomy of what makes it so hard to be poor in Dallas: The services might be in the wrong parts of town. Poverty is concentrated on the south side of Dallas, but community organizations are concentrated in the north. And the organizations, with some exceptions, weren't close to one another.
At the hospital, officials see the database as key to getting accurate information from patients, who often give distorted accounts of their lives outside its walls because they are embarrassed, mentally ill, or "poor historians," says Callies. "A patient will say, 'Yes, I'm going to that pantry,' but when I talk to the pantry they say, 'No, we haven't seen them.'" Such discrepancies can be solved by a phone call, but it's easier to use a database that everyone can access. Follow-ups are already getting results. Callies points to the graph for a man we'll call Mr. Johnson. Hypertension and a stressful situation at home gave him severe headaches, which he has dealt with by frequent visits to the emergency room. It cost the hospital $108,500 to care for him in December 2016. But last January, after they connected him with a community clinic and a mental health center, his bills dropped to $91,000 that month, and to $8,400 in February. In March he had a toothache—a $52 charge—and in April, he didn't come in at all.
Case managers in hospitals have always sought to find resources for needy people when they leave, and the best case manager, the kind who has been in the business 25 years and has folders full of information about different services with phone numbers and names of friendly contacts scribbled on them, is probably better than any software. But such talented individuals can't be everywhere. Software can.
Still, PCCI officials were cautious about using the system too ambitiously before they were confident it worked. To test whether it would be possible to share fairly detailed information through the portal, early this year they started a pilot project called Data Across Sectors for Health, or DASH. About 150 Parkland patients with diabetes or hypertension who also used food pantries or homeless shelters were enrolled in the pilot, after they had consented to the sharing of their health and other information. The goal was to see whether it could cut their emergency room visits.
Each time a DASH patients entered the Sharing Life pantry—they typically came twice a month—volunteers engaged them in a four- or five-minute interview. There might be a record in the portal that they had seen a physician in the past month. Had they filled the prescriptions the doctor ordered? If not, did they need a free pharmacy card to get it filled? Or a voucher to get bus fare? Then the volunteer would lead the DASH patient through Sharing Life's three "shopping" aisles, which were stocked largely with canned and box foods but also frozen meats and fresh vegetables. The volunteer gave advice on healthy choices—and wrote down what the DASH client chose, although they were ostensibly free to pick any food they wanted.
Losing privacy is "part of being vulnerable and homeless," said Crain. "There is no privacy. Your living room is shared with a group of other people. You do offer informed consents, but what person who's got nothing can refuse it?" She has no choice, Crain said; to use her resources wisely, she needs criteria for deciding who gets them. "That means collecting data on them." For the most part, the homeless accept being tracked, officials say. Of the thousands of men and women who have come the past year to the Austin Street, two raised doubts about having their names put into the system, said Dustin Perkins. They backed down when he told them he had no choice if they wanted to stay there.
In April, the federal government gave a powerful signal of approval to the Iris project by awarding the Parkland innovation center a $4.5 million grant from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Parkland health system, along with the Baylor, Methodist, Children's and Dallas MetroCare systems, will host one of 22 demonstration projects in the Accountable Health Communities initiative, which is really just a more formal version of what Amarasingham and his colleagues have already started doing.
Several other communities were showing promise integrating health care with community services, said Patrick Conway, who led the federal agency's innovation center and now heads Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina. Hennepin County, Minnesota, has had a similar, though less tech-heavy program for many years. In North Carolina, the Blue Cross Foundation has invested since 2014 in food, transport and homelessness programs aimed at improving health and lowering health care costs, in part to lower the insurer's health are costs, Conway said.
If the pilot is successful in Dallas and other cities, it's likely the government will start providing incentives, in the form of additional Medicare payments to health care systems that use approaches like Iris to keep track of their patients outside the health care system—and possibly even assess penalties for hospital systems that don't do a good job at this.
Up until now, most of the PCCI work has been funded by by private or non-profit grants—$50 million worth to date—and there's still a question whether hospitals and community groups that serve poor people will be able to pay to maintain the software and the labor involved in setting it up and running it. For now, PCCI is providing Iris to its Dallas partners for free, but at some point they may be asked to start paying licensing fees. "I'm not sure how we'll pay," said Sara Gorath of the North Texas Food Bank.
Another possible solution is to franchise the PCCI model to other parts of the country. The innovation center and Pieces Tech are building a similar system for Louisville and one for a city in North Carolina, and they've been talking to hospitals in Chicago and Atlanta. The idea even plays in Peoria, Illinois. In that city, OSF Healthcare System will turn on the portal in January to connect a satellite clinic with the YMCA and other social agencies in nearby Streator.


Phillip Lim continues to rethink the way he conceives womenswear this season. By blending fashion and functionality, 3.1 Phillip Lim's latest collection is undeniably appealing. Crafted from black cotton, this skirt features a fitted waist, a flared style, a mid-length, an asymmetric hem and a side slit. Perfect for day or evening-wear, this skirt can be layered over a sweater or blouse this SS19.


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New ASU certificate dedicated to military, veteran experiences
'Veterans, Service and Society' is a new 18-credit certificate program designed to foster dialogue between military, civilians
"Thank you for your service" is a wonderful sentiment, and it can be a nice thing for civilians to say to active military personnel and veterans. Unfortunately, it often doesn't get much deeper than that.
Despite most people having great respect for servicemen and -women, the current divide between military and civilian cultures is deep and often results in misunderstandings, said Arizona State University educators.
"The media is flooded with representations of veterans as either homeless 'head cases,' or as heroes who are placed on a pedestal. Both are shallow binary portrayals, rendering society unable to make space for conversation," said Mark von Hagen, a history professor and the director of the Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement.
"'Thank you for your service' is a cheap, throwaway line, and it's really not enough. It's a meaningless gesture unless you follow it up with something more significant."
Von Hagen and a group of ASU professors are proposing something very significant — the university's first undergraduate certificate dedicated solely to the study of veterans, military culture and how it relates to society.
"Veterans, Society and Service" is a new 18-credit certificate program that is expected to launch in the fall, pending approval from the Arizona Board of Regents. Enrollment for two core courses, "Veterans, Society and Service: America's Experience of Modern War" and "Representations and Self-Representations of Veterans in Media and the Arts," will be offered next semester. Registration opened Feb. 22.
Nancy Dallett, assistant director of the Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement, and Mark Von Hagen, the office's founding director, have designed "Veterans, Society and Service," a new 18-credit certificate program that is expected to begin in fall 2018. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU Now
The Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement proposed this new field of academic study, which will be housed under ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It takes an interdisciplinary approach on new core tensions and deep-rooted issues regarding how the wider culture understands and supports today's all-volunteer, post-9/11 military force in order to develop new bonds and understandings.
Thirteen faculty from nine ASU departments and schools and five community partnerships have committed for the first year of the certificate program. The project structure will be composed of four required courses, including an internship or capstone project, and electives. They are also hopeful that veterans are willing to share their experiences.
"We want veterans in our classes to enable them to be teachers while they are students," said Nancy Dallett, a public historian and assistant director of the Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement. "It should be a mix of veterans and civilians so they get an idea of the ethos of the people who are serving or who have served our country."
She said the certificate program will combine the disciplines of history, literature, law, ethics, politics, psychology, sociology and the arts, preparing students with a transferable set of skills for careers in veterans' affairs, public policy, politics, nonprofits, criminal justice, education, health care, business and even journalism.
"Many corporations today are initiating veteran hiring initiatives," said Steve Borden, director of the Pat Tillman Veterans Center. "Veteran success in the workplace, retention of hired veterans as well as their career progression, is predicated upon developing a greater understanding of the difference between our military and civilian cultures."
Census figures from 2015 and 2016 estimate there are now approximately 18.5 million veterans nationwide, 600,000 of whom reside in Arizona. ASU currently enrolls more than 7,300 active military, veterans and military family members, making the university a top choice and leader in enrollment among the nation's most military-friendly schools.
Suniya Luthar
When Suniya Luthar heard about the new offering, she felt it was a good match for her research on the subject of resilience. Luthar also wanted more interaction with veterans by teaching a course.
"Asking for help might be a big issue for some military personnel because it's so ingrained in them to be strong, self-reliant and disciplined," said Luthar, Foundation Professor of psychology at ASU and a professor emerita at Columbia University's Teachers College. "We as educators, professors, staff and civilians don't really understand how strongly some of these messages are internalized. It's important that we are empathic, that we try and understand the complexities of this 'way of life.' And it is critical that we ensure reliable support because for military folk, like the rest of us who have been through trying times, resilience rests most fundamentally on relationships."
Matthew Delmont, a professor of history and director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, said he also wanted to give back to veterans.
Matthew Delmont
"The United States has been at war for most of our students' lifetimes, yet fewer than 1 percent of Americans serve in the military," said Delmont, who will be teaching a course on World War II. "Given this, it is crucially important that we support veteran students and that we make veterans studies a central part of the academic experience for many more ASU students."
Von Hagen promised the coursework wouldn't be stale or drab and would address issues such as civil-military relations, the role of the armed forces in a changing society in areas of class, gender, civil rights and LGBTQ issues. It will also pose questions such as: What are society's obligations to veterans and families, and how do they transition through health care, higher education, employment and continued service?
"As a society we have an obligation to try and know and understand our veterans for what they have done for us," von Hagen said. "Whatever their motives were for joining the military, it changes them and, in some cases, profoundly. Those who didn't serve at least ought to acknowledge their service and hopefully do more in our capacity."
Top photo by ASU
Solutions Tempe campus Military Veterans Psychology Academics The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Pat Tillman Veterans Center Department of Psychology School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies yes Community Military / Veteran Student
Marshall Terrill
480-727-5176 marshall.terrill@asu.edu
ASU urban planning students to be recognized for research project, outreach
Student planners with Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning are raking in the accolades leading up to the 2018 National Planning Conference in New Orleans.ASU's Student Planning Association, comprised of students interested in urban planning and issues associated with it, has been selected for the 2018 Outstanding Planning Student Organization Award for Co...
Student planners with Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning are raking in the accolades leading up to the 2018 National Planning Conference in New Orleans.
ASU's Student Planning Association, comprised of students interested in urban planning and issues associated with it, has been selected for the 2018 Outstanding Planning Student Organization Award for Community Outreach. ASU's Student Planning Association created a special event in honor of Native American Heritage Month, "Wandering Stories," to create awareness and learning opportunities surrounding planning within Native American communities. This event brought together architects, urban designers, engineers, and construction managers to discuss the challenges and opportunities of planning for Native Americans' communities on tribal land. Genevieve Pearthree (left) presenting her research at ASU's Institute for Social Science Research's annual poster contest. ASU's Student Planning Association (right) celebrates the conclusion of their "Wandering Stories" event. Download Full Image
Also receiving recognition is Genevieve Pearthree, a recent graduate of the school's Master of Urban and Environmental Planning program. Pearthree has been selected for the 2018 American Institute of Certified Planners' Student Project Award for Applied Research. Her submission, which also served as her capstone project, focused on affordable housing in communities with a strong tourism industry.
Pearthree spent 16 months researching Ketchum, Idaho, as she examined the affect of short-term rentals and vacation rentals on affordable housing within the community. Funded via a $10,000 fellowship from the city of Ketchum, the research project was created in response to Idaho House Bill 216 that limits a county or city from enacting and enforcing an ordinance prohibiting short-term or vacation rentals. As a result of her research, Pearthree submitted policy recommendations to the city that would positively impact the supply of affordable, long-term housing including incentivizing long-term rentals by increasing the lodging sales tax collection from short-term rentals. She also recommended tracking the short-term rental market to better inform future policy.
As a result of Pearthree's research, the city of Ketchum has shared the results and recommendations to other communities in Idaho who also face similar housing issues. The findings were also discussed at the annual statewide Idaho Housing and Finance Association conference and the annual Sun Valley Economic Development Summit, and has sparked conversations about affordable housing across the state.
Pearthree and the Student Planning Association will be recognized for their great work at the 2018 National Planning Conference in April.
Sun Devil Life Tempe campus School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning CLAS top headlines Research Grants / Awards Environment Student Graduate student
Manager, Marketing and Communication, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
480-965-1348 Megan.A.Martin@asu.edu


text:
Великое () — село, входит в Подлозцовский сельский совет Млиновского района Ровненской области Украины.

Население по переписи 2001 года составляло 40 человек. Почтовый индекс — 35132. Телефонный код — 3659. Код КОАТУУ — 5623886702.

История
В 1946 г. Указом Президиума ВС УССР село Великие Рыканы переименовано в Великое.

Местный совет
35132, Ровненская обл., Млиновский р-н, с. Подлозцы, ул. Независимости, 4.

Ссылки
 Великое на сайте Верховной рады Украины

Примечания

Населённые пункты Млиновского района


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