Wishing you a prosperous and happy new year from the Amver team!
What were the most popular Amver blog posts of 2011? Take a look!
A further key link in the plan to provide effective search and rescue (SAR) coverage off the coast of Africa has been established, with the commissioning of a search and rescue sub-centre that will operate in conjunction with the regional Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Cape Town, South Africa.
The sub-centre, at Antananarivo, Madagascar, was commissioned on 11 December 2011 by IMO Secretary-General Efthimios E. Mitropoulos, together with Madagascar's Minister for Transports, Benjamina Ramarcel Ramantsoa and Mr. Jérôme Sambalis Director General of the Agence Portuaire, Maritime et Fluviale (APMF).
The inauguration of the new facility, which will operate as a joint maritime and aeronautical centre, marks an important step in a process that began at a conference on Search and Rescue and the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, convened by IMO in Florence, Italy, in October 2000. African Governments represented at the Conference agreed on a regional approach to the provision of SAR services in western, southern and eastern parts of the continent as well as in island States around Africa. To that effect, they adopted a resolution inviting the African countries bordering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the nearby Atlantic and Indian Ocean Island States, to establish five regional centres and 25 sub-centres to cover their entire coastline for SAR coordination purposes.
The establishment of appropriate SAR facilities off the coast of Africa was seen as a key component in the implementation of the Global SAR Plan, the final part of which had been agreed in 1998 at an IMO Conference in Fremantle, Australia.
The commissioning of the Antananarivo facility brings the number of sub-centres now in operation to 15. In March 2011, the fifth and final African MRCC was established in Rabat, Morocco, joining those previously commissioned in Mombasa, Kenya (2006); Cape Town, South Africa (2007); Lagos, Nigeria (2008); and Monrovia, Liberia (2009).
With the completion of the five regional MRCCs, IMO is now using the experience gained in the successful establishment and operation of these centres in Africa as an example for other regions to follow. The Organization is currently embarking on a similar project for seven countries in Central America, involving the creation of two regional MRCCs, covering areas of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea respectively, together with five associated sub-centres.
Rescue personnel in Madagascar can enhance their search and rescue capabilities by requesting Amver data from the United States Coast Guard. Requesting an Amver surface picture greatly enhances a rescue organizations ability to perform their search and rescue mission.
We hope you're enjoying the holiday break! Here are the latest ships to enroll in Amver. Thank you for a record breaking 2011!
The best thing about the internet is the amount of niche information you can find. One blog we recently discovered is the Old Salt Blog.
Lot's of great maritime information for the Amver community. Check it out.
What else do we read here in the Amver office?
Finally, you just have to check out the Amver podcast, The Quarterdeck!
The entire Amver team wishes you a very happy Holiday Season!
The numbers just keep going up. You have helped contribute to a record setting year and we thank you. This week another 38 vessels have enrolled in the Amver system joining the ranks of mariner helping mariner. Enjoy this holiday season, remember our shipsmates who are still underway, and help us thank these latest participants.
Did you make Lloyd's List Top 100 in shipping list? Amver didn't. Maybe by sharing it with our readers it will give us a little clout and we can garner a spot next year? Who knows.
What we do know is that if the top 100 in shipping all worked to encourage Amver enrollment we'd have hundreds more ships available to save lives (hint hint).
Download the entire list here (link to pdf).
This episode of The Quarterdeck is a short wrap up of just how Amver performed in 2011. It was a record breaking year with over 2,000 ships enrolling and ended with over 5,000 vessels on plot. Our co-host, Admiral Jim Watson, is now Director Jim Watson of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement for the U.S. Department of Interior. We wish him well.
Here is a direct link to The Quarterdeck audio file.
We'll be back in 2012 with more interviews and Amver stories. Have a wonderful and safe holiday!
The Quarterdeck theme song is Botany Bay by the Blaggards available on musicalley.com. Don't forget to download The Quarterdeck in iTunes!
Is there something specific you would like to hear on The Quarterdeck? Leave your suggestion in the comments below and we'll do our best to cover it in an upcoming episode!
According to a press release by the Maritime Administration, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy has transferred the training ship Kings Pointer to Texas A&M University. The U.S. Merchant Marine academy is preparing for a renovation of Mallory Pier. The project is expected to take 12 to 18 months during which time there will be no docking facilities for a vessel the size of the Kings Pointer.
The Academy will still use the training ship Liberator and will continue to send midshipmen on commercial ships to obtain their sea time.
In addition to their sea time, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy midshipmen learn about the Amver system and often file Amver reports while underway.
The rowers, a Dutch and British national, were participating in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge from the Canary Islands to Barbados when their boat capsized.
They immediately activated their Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon alerting rescue authorities at MRCC Falmouth, United Kingdom. Rescue authorities in Falmouth also requested Amver information from the United States Coast Guard. Using an Amver surface picture, the cruise ship Crystal Serenity was located 120 miles away from the rowers and asked to divert to rescue them. The cruise ship immediately changed course to assist the rowers. The rescue was complicated by winds in excess of 25 knots and 10 foot waves.
According to crew members aboard the Crystal Serenity the survivors are in good health and will stay aboard the cruise ship until it reaches St. Maarten.
The Bahamian flagged cruise ship enrolled in the Amver system in 2003 and earned over 6 awards for participation.
Want to learn more about Amver? Check out the Amver video.
The end of the year is near. Despite the holiday rush, you continue to enroll your vessels and save lives at sea. During the holiday rush, take some time to think about the impact that makes in the lives of those you have helped. You, the Amver participant, provide a remarkable service. Thank you. Now please help us welcome the latest members of the Amver team.
According to a press release by the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the Amver participating ship Ocean Titan rescued seven sailors yesterday after the collision of two ships (M/V Florice and M/V Afrodite) south southwest of Lands End within the British search and rescue region.
Using a combination of Long Range Identification and Tracking and Enhanced Group Calling the rescue professionals at Rescue Coordination Center Falmouth were able to divert the Ocean Titan to the distress position where the crew of the Florece had taken to their life raft. The seven crew members, made up of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian nationals, were safely taken aboard the Ocean Titan.
The United States flagged ship enrolled in Amver in 2005 and has earned six awards for participation. The Ocean Titan is managed by Pacific Gulf Marine of Gretna, La.
Want to join these companies at the next Amver awards ceremony in China? You can if you enroll your ships in the Amver system.
We recently learned the Amver participating research vessel, Atlantis, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution recently rescued 93 Egyptian fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Atlantis enrolled in the Amver system in 1997 and has earned another award for participation in 2011.
The research vessel Atlantis, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), rescued 93 Egyptians aboard a disabled fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea late Friday night (Nov. 25).
Atlantis was commencing an oceanographic research expedition, steaming toward its first study site, when it was diverted by a mayday call at 9 p.m. from a fishing boat that was relayed to all nearby ships by the Greek Coast Guard. Atlantis responded to the call and began the rescue, coordinating with the Greek Coast Guard and the Rescue Coordination Center.
Following standard security procedures, Atlantis Captain A.D. Colburn III raised the ship's U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Security Level from I to II and took protective measures to secure non-crew members inside the vessel, locking all exterior hatches and portholes before boarding the Egyptians.
By midnight, all 93 men were aboard the deck of Atlantis, a ship that had 50 crew, technicians, and scientists aboard. The fishing boat was abandoned with its lights and power on, its position radioed to the Greek Coast Guard.
The Atlantis crew provided blankets, pillows, and clothing, including dry socks for the Egyptians, who had been standing in water aboard their boat and were cold, hungry, and dehydrated. Atlantis's cook gave them loaves of bread and other food. Crew members stayed on deck with the Egyptians through the night, as Atlantis diverted 88 miles to the Greek port of Kalamata.
Atlantis arrived in Kalamata at 8 a.m. Saturday. The Egyptians disembarked and were processed by Greek officials. After Captain Colburn gave his statement to authorities, Atlantis departed Kalamata at 10:30 a.m. to return to its research mission Sunday.


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Canouan es una de las Islas Granadinas perteneciente a San Vicente y las Granadinas. Es una pequeña y árida isla que mide 3,5 por 1,25 millas y tiene una superficie de 76 km².

Una barrera de arrecifes del Atlántico se extiende a lo largo de la isla. El punto más alto en la isla es el Monte Real (Mount Royal). Dos bahías, brillante (Glossy) y la Amistad (Friendship), separan la parte meridional de la isla de Canouan.

Canouan se encuentra aproximadamente a 25 millas al sur de San Vicente que, desde 1871 a 1969, fue parte de la colonia británica de las Islas de Barlovento (colony of the Windward Islands.) Los Locales que necesitan suministros más allá de los básicos los reciben bordo de los buques de carga que están a dos o tres horas de la isla principal de San Vicente.

En 1979, la isla pasó a ser independiente con un gobierno democrático basado en el sistema británico. La historia recuerda que 200 años antes de cristo; una rica tribu llamada los Arahuacos llegó en canoas a la isla. Estos nuevos residentes trajeron el fuego, las plantas y los animales, la agricultura, la pesca y conocimientos básicos con ellos. Ellos vivieron en paz durante 1.500 años hasta que una tribu de feroces guerreros llamados los caribes, invadieron y mataron a los hombres obligándolos a irse.

Más de 200 años después de la llegada de Colón los europeos pusieron su ojos en San Vicente y establecieron asentamientos permanentes. Las zonas montañosas y densamente pobladas de bosques de la geografía local permitieron a los Caribes defenderse contra la colonización europea aquí más tiempo que en casi cualquier otra isla del Caribe.

Los caribes temieron la dominación completa británica por lo que permitieron a los franceses construir un asentamiento en la isla en 1719. Los franceses trajeron esclavos para trabajar sus plantaciones. En 1748, por el Tratado de Aquisgrán, San Vicente fue declarado oficialmente un dominio conjunto de Gran Bretaña y Francia, posteriormente sería una colonia británica solamente.

A principios de los años 1990's la empresa CRDltd se formó y obtuvo el arrendamiento de algunas zonas de la isla para construir 2 hoteles.

En 2004 comenzó la gestión del Raffles Raffles Resort, que ocupa 1 / 3 de la isla. El resort cuenta con un campo de golf, casino y 150 habitaciones. El Campo de Golf Robb Informes ganó como el mejor de los mejores Campos de Golf en el Mundo de 2005.

Los dos principales centros turísticos en Canouan Raffles y el tamarindo, mantienen un marcado contraste con la vida en el resto de la isla. Fuera de los dos resorts, perros salvajes vagan libremente, junto con los pollos, cabras, tortugas, lagartos, murciélagos.

El aeropuerto de Canouan es el único aeropuerto. Recientemente se ha alargado la pista para dar cabida a aviones más grandes. Ahora es la puerta principal de entrada a las Granadinas.

Puntos de atraque de yates charter tienen su base en la Gran Bahía de Canouan .

Véase también
Pequeñas Antillas

Referencias

Archipiélagos e islas de San Vicente y las Granadinas
Granadinas

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Aiming to raise the ante on security technology inside the connected home, Nest Labs has announced Nest Cam IQ, a security camera with 4K video recording capability and enhanced intelligence features. Engineered around a cup-shaped polycarbonate shell that echoes much of the design of Nest Cam Outdoor, the new camera brings a host of intriguing features to smart-home owners, but will come at a relatively high cost: Nest Cam IQ will retail for $299 in the U.S. when it starts shipping to customers around the end of June 2017, a 50% premium to the Nest Cam Outdoor and Nest Cam Indoor products, which will remain as siblings in the Nest line and cost $199.
And while the new camera has a 4K image sensor, the feed from the ubiquitous Nest app will be in enhanced 1080P resolution only to conserve network bandwidth, though some of the signature face-recognition technology and zoom-in features of the product will take advantage of the 4K data to present higher-definition imagery.
[/media-credit] Nest Cam IQ is designed for interior use only and echoes the cup-shaped design of the Nest Cam Outdoor while adding a weighted stand for easy placement.
Nest says they have reengineered this camera from the ground up with entirely new hardware and software to go inside that expresso-cup-sized white shell, and then added a weighted stand that looks on paper to be more stable than the one on the Nest Cam Indoor.
An optical glass lens, 4K image sensor, embedded on-chip smart technology for facial recognition, and HDR image processing work together to enhance indoor security capabilities.
Much of the new tech here is around what Nest has dubbed Supersight, where the 4K sensor, wide 130-degree field of view, and high dynamic range (HDR) image processing are employed to enhance the video stream delivered through the Nest app. In tandem with the company's Person Alerts feature, the embedded technology can zero in on a person entering the scene, deliver a close-up view, and then follow the person across the room—while at the same time retaining a full 130-degree view of the entire space.
As with other Nest cams, to reap the benefits of some high-end features in the design a subscription to the Nest Aware service will be required, which begins at about $10 per month. That's the case with the new Familiar Face Alerts feature in Nest Cam IQ, which can differentiate between known family members and strangers, then go a step further to identify family members by name.
As we did with our in-depth review of Nest Cam Outdoor, we are looking forward to bringing a production-level Nest Cam IQ into our Digitized.House smart-home labs for thorough testing. Stay tuned for more.


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Cancer Survivor Herzlich The Real Hero of Super Bowl XLVI
by Arik Parnass — February 6, 2012
When it comes to major events like the Super Bowl, there are always compelling storylines.
I remember one of the first articles I ever wrote. It was in the midst of Super Bowl XLIV. Three weeks earlier, earthquakes had ravaged the country of Haiti. Native Haitians Pierre Garcon, Pierre Thomas and Jonathan Vilma used the spectacle to spread awareness about the tragedy. The image of Garcon holding up a Haitian flag following the Colts' win in the AFC Championship game is one of the most iconic from that season.
This year the only flags held up were those of the two teams involved. This Super Bowl was not one of mourning; it was one of celebration. For the Giants, that celebration centered on a man who was not even on the field for the 21-17 victory.
Mark Herzlich was a standout linebacker at Boston College a few years ago when he began waking up in the night in serious pain. Assuming the discomfort was a lingering effect of rough play during the season, the Pennsylvania native didn't give it a second thought. When Herzlich's leg began to swell up, however, doctors discovered that a tumor had completely engulfed his left leg, and he went from a football player to a cancer patient. Given only a 60-70 percent chance of survival — presuming the cancer hadn't spread — Herzlich was fearful not only for his football career but also for his life. He was told he would never walk again, let alone step onto a football field. The day he was diagnosed, though, Herzlich told his father, "Dad, I'm going to make it, and I'm going to play football again."
Herzlich never gave up, and was back on the field for his final season at Boston College less than a year later. The former 2008 ACC Defensive Player of the Year got another chance.
Despite going undrafted, Herzlich signed with the New York Giants prior to this season, overcoming the diagnosis he had been given and conquering his life-changing cancer. He started two games for the Giants this season, and captured the attention of the football world with the following tweet days before Super Bowl XLVI:
"2 yrs ago I was told I'd never walk again, Just WALKED off plane to #Indy to play in #SuperBowl #TakeThatCancer"
Despite not suiting up for the Super Bowl, Herzlich has become an inspiration to cancer patients across the country. He has gained a massive Twitter following, and, before leaving for Indianapolis, even called a young woman in Georgia to offer some kind words prior to her undergoing a surgery of her own.
Sometimes, it takes an event unrelated to sports to inspire teams or individuals to greatness. Playing for a teammate, especially one who has overcome as much as Herzlich, can spark a team to do incredible things. Stories like this exhibit the influence that professional athletes can have on others in similar positions, and Herzlich's story in particular proves the importance of never giving up. When asked about overcoming the odds given to him by specialists in the industry, Herzlich responded, "I know my doctors know cancer, but they didn't know me. … Realistically it shouldn't be possible, but somehow, some way, it is possible." Herzlich may have been on the sidelines for Super Bowl XLVI, but his impact was felt.
Hopefully, more cancer patients will have the courage to chase their dreams despite their illness. If so, Herzlich will have done more good from the sidelines than he ever could have done on the field.
Arik Parnass is a freshman in the College.
CANDID CANADIAN appears every Tuesday.
Tags: Arik Parnass, candid canadian, Mark Herzlich, Super Bowl XLVI
Author: Arik Parnass

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Metro Motion — Metro's popular quarterly cable TV show — has just been released. The newest edition celebrates summer with a breathtaking ride along the beautiful Pacific. All we need to do is take the Metro Rapid 720 to Santa Monica, hop on a bike and pedal the South Bay Beach Trail all the way to Redondo Beach. It's a great bike path — partially funded by Metro — and the perfect highway for a gorgeous sea-side excursion.
Another Metro Motion piece takes us on a day trip to explore a few fascinating offerings in Metro's Destination Discounts program. It's a reminder that Metro riders with valid TAP cards can get special offers for great shopping and dining, museums, sporting events and more. Tag along and sample a couple of participating locations along the Gold Line in Chinatown. There might just be an experience in it for you.
In another story we explore Metro's growing highway program and answer the questions: Are freeways free? Have they ever been free? Find out how highways are evolving and HOT lanes are helping Metro relieve traffic and may one day even speed up construction projects.
Finally, take a walk through Metro's new gate-latching system and see how easy it is. And watch a demonstration of Metro's innovative new hands-free system for unlatching the gates so that people in wheelchairs don't need to do it themselves.
Does the version disseminated on cable include closed captions? If so, could you have those captions uploaded to YouTube?
If not, please make captioning a requirement for all subsequent productions.
I'll note that some of losangelesmetro's YouTube videos already do have captions. I'd like Metro to determine what would be involved in captioning the remainder, starting with the three most recent episodes of Metro Motion (which are in English, scripted, and longer than 10 minutes, i.e. exactly the kind of programming FCC captioning rules primarily target).
Forget about YouTube's "automatic" captions: they're practically incomprehensible, and unavailable to many mobile users.


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The BES Pre-University College is one of many educational institutions established and managed by BHARATH EDUCATION SOCIETY. It came into existence in 1972 with specific intention of...
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Bharath Education Society (R), was founded in the year 1971 under the aegis of Late Sri K.R. Marudeva gowda, retired IAS officer, and Sri B.L. Lakkegowda, retired Special Deputy commissioner with many others...
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LAW: Ending the Stranglehold of Public Employee Unions –
The threat of faction—a "mortal disease," James Madison warned in Federalist 10—has plagued popular government since time immemorial. The eternal desire to improve one's economic position at the expense of others without the benefit of consensual exchange has long tempted mankind into (again, using Madison's words) "mutual animosities" that eventually found voice in Karl Marx's toxic class consciousness. In the pre-industrial era, the "dangerous vice" of rent-seeking often consisted of debtors seeking to avoid their repayment obligations through the use of worthless paper money. During the 20th century, the New Deal institutionalized economic warfare between employers (capital) and employees (labor) in the guise of collective bargaining.
In the 1960s, the private-sector model of unionization was imprudently extended to government employees, and in the ensuing decades—coinciding with the meteoric growth of local, state, and federal employment—public employee unions have become one of the most powerful factions in America. James Madison would be astonished and chagrined. The number of unionized government employees now rivals that of their private sector counterparts, forming a special interest group that in many cases controls the dynamics of representative self-government. Unions representing government workers plunder public treasuries, hamstring elected officials, hinder efficiency and reform, and aggressively lobby to benefit the narrow interests of their members over those of the taxpaying public.
The baleful effects of public-sector unionism are particularly evident in the field of K-12 education, where unionized teachers dictate a self-serving agenda. In America's major cities, government employee unions such as SEIU and AFSCME have replaced Boss Tweed as political power brokers.
Yet, despite the dysfunction resulting from the indefensible extension of collective bargaining to government workers—something that both FDR and George Meany opposed—the topic of public-sector unionism has largely been ignored by the legal academy as if self-interested public employees tilting the playing field of democracy in their favor is no different than the influence of K Street lobbyists or climate change activists. The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME drew fresh attention to the subject of public-sector unionism, but the focus was generally limited to agency fees and compelled speech. Unlike, say, the administrative state or campaign finance regulation, there is a dearth of current legal scholarship on public-sector unionism.
Into that vacuum steps well-respected lawyer and veteran public policy analyst Philip K. Howard in his latest book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. Howard, Chair of the nonpartisan reform group Common Goodis a serial best-selling author with a knack for explaining complex problems in simple terms and identifying common-sense solutions. In Not AccountableHoward boldly takes on the juggernaut of public-sector unions and concludes that collective bargaining by government workers is an unconstitutional subversion of sovereign power.
Not Accountable explains the problem in a nutshell:
Union power in government happened almost by accident in the 1960s, ostensibly to give public unions the same bargaining rights as trade unions. But government bargaining is not about dividing profits, but making political choices about public priorities. Moreover, the political nature of decision-making allowed unions to provide campaign support to friendly officials. Public bargaining became collusive. The unions brag about it: "We elect our own bosses."
Sitting on both sides of the bargaining table has allowed public unions to turn the democratic hierarchy upside down. Elected officials answer to public employees. Basic tools of good government have been eliminated. There's no accountability, detailed union entitlements make government largely unmanageable and unaffordable, and public policies are driven by what is good for public employees, not what is good for the public. Public unions keep it that way by brute political force—harnessing the huge cohort of public employees into a political force dedicated to preventing the reform of government.
This critique echoes the work of public-sector union critics such as Daniel DiSalvo, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, CUNY professor, and author of Government against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences. The only solution, Howard argues, is to declare public-sector collective bargaining unconstitutional: "America's republican form of government requires an executive branch that is empowered to implement public policies, not one shackled to union controls. Public employees have a fiduciary duty to serve the public and should not be allowed to organize politically to harm the public."
Not Accountable is not a dense treatise or a legal brief. In 200 pages of text, including a Foreword by Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana and President of Purdue University, Howard ably distills the issues into a five-point indictment. He argues that public employee unions have:
Severed the links of accountability;
Rendered government substantially unmanageable with detailed rules and veto powers;
Made government unaffordable with opaque benefit packages and compensation manipulations;
Changed public policies to the harm of the public good; and,
Entrenched these abuses, and made reform practically impossible, through organized political power.
Howard elaborates on each of these points in a series of concise, elegant chapters, with anecdotes drawn from current events, references to classical political theory, and supporting end notes for readers wishing to dig deeper. For the most part, a 30,000-foot overview is enough to convince the reader that we face a serious problem—loss of sovereignty coupled with what Howard aptly calls "bureaucratic kleptocracy" via a "union spoils system." The more difficult issue is crafting a solution. Political reform is stymied by unions' pervasive rent-seeking and institutional capture of state and local government.
The Founders would surely object to a collective-bargaining scheme that structurally empowered union officials at the expense of governors, mayors, and other public executives.
Howard's constitutional objections, while—to my mind—compelling, are not particularly original; he mainly cites scholars who made similar arguments decades agoincluding the prolific Sylvester Petro (who unsuccessfully argued Abood v. Detroit Board of Education [1977] before the U.S. Supreme Court, only to be posthumously vindicated when the decision was overturned 41 years later in Janus) and Edwin Vieira, Jr. However, the legal case against public-sector unionism (other than Abood, Janusand similar agency fee challenges) was never fully litigatedhas been all-but-forgotten, and unfortunately vanished from the public conversation—until now. Howard has resurrected formidable but neglected legal arguments so that they may, hopefully, gain the overdue airing they deserve.
One of the reasons public-sector unionism has not attracted the attention of many legal scholars is that the subject is governed by a patchwork quilt of state laws and regulations. The federal National Labor Relations Act applies only to private-sector employees. Nationally-prominent scholars tend to be drawn to uniform schemes of law, such as the NLRA. Collective-bargaining rights for federal government employees, first conferred (via Executive Order 10988) by President Kennedy in 1962, were later expanded by Congress in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
Although seldom noticed, government employee unions are a major issue at the federal level. Howard notes that "All told, the executive branch must bargain with a dozen different unions, each focused on specific cohorts. Together 25 percent of federal employees belong to unions, with total coverage somewhat higher." These unions contribute to the Beltway morass.
Unlike some critics of public-sector unionism, Howard does not overlook congressionally-mandated collective bargaining by federal government employees, which he contends usurps the executive branch's authority under Article II of the Constitution. Moreover, Howard ingeniously argues that the states' surrender of sovereignty to unions representing government employees violates the Guarantee Clause of Article IV, which guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." Stripping elected officials of their authority, and conferring it instead on self-interested representatives of government employees, robs the voters ("we the people") of control over state and local government. The Founders would surely object to a collective-bargaining scheme that structurally empowered union officials at the expense of governors, mayors, and other public executives. Therefore, Howard maintains that the issue should not be deemed a non-justiciable "political question."
Whether these—and other—constitutional objections to public-sector unionism will find a sympathetic hearing in court remains to be seen, but this much is clear: Absent a constitutional challenge, the dysfunctional the status quo will continue or even worsen. Howard ends Not Accountable with these words:
No one elected unions to co-run American government. No democratic principle gave legislators and other officials the right to surrender governing powers to unions. No ethical value allows public employees, having taken an oath to protect the public, to organize politically to harm the public. Democracy under union restraints can't work as the framers intended. That's why union controls on the operating machinery of government should be ruled unconstitutional.
Judging from the enormous impact of Howard's numerous prior booksincluding the critically-acclaimed national bestseller The Death of Common Sense (1995), and The Collapse of the Common Good (2002), Not Accountable will be widely read and find a large and receptive audience on both sides of the partisan aisle. (His 2010 Ted Talk entitled "Four ways to fix a broken legal system" has been viewed over 770,000 times.)
Howard's thoughtful perspective and well-deserved reputation for dispensing non-wonkish common sense make it likely that his message and proposed reforms will not be ignored. A half-century ago, when America began the failed experiment of public-sector unionism, a small group of perceptive scholars predicted doom, in heavily-footnoted jeremiads that were largely ignored. It turns out they were prophetically correct. One hopes that Philip Howard's Not Accountable will motivate Americans to pay closer attention and heed his sensible recommendations.
It is not often that public policy disasters offer a second chance at correction. Getting it wrong a second time would be unpardonable—and tragic.
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Arts & Humanities - History
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Bingo! Show Us What You Know about the U.S.A.!
A game to help our ELLs learn more about the United States and Wisconsin!
Ancient Greece: Chapter 8
Desde la Independencia Hasta Hoy
Choose a Spanish category to answer and earn points.
BEEware the Ides of March
Learn fun and amazing facts about the Ides of March!
Latin Roots Matching Game
Match the Latin Root with the correct definition
Mythology Midterm
Mythology Review Game
The Great Fire Of London destroyed over half of London and caused 100,000 people to become homeless. If you want to lean how this happened and what was done to prevent it, then play this game!
Presidents #1-22 Matching
Play this matching game to learn the first 22 U.S. Presidents.
Investigating the Ancient World: The Pharaohs role
This game is built for multiple players. The game is focused on the Pharaoh's role in ancient Egypt. Students are expected to participate in the game and attempt to answer each question to the best of their ability.
Antebellum Reform
Matching antebellum reforms with important people and ideas


Here are a few steps that should help you calibrate your extruder.
With 1.75mm Filament you want to use about 90mm per minute. With 3mm filament you want to use 30mm per minute.With 1.75mm Filament you want to use about 90mm per minute. With 3mm filament you want to use 30mm per minute.
1. Mark your filament at 150mm above your extruder. You can use any point of reference as long as it does not change. Something you can always reference again.
2. Using the interface of choice Pronterface, Octoprint, etc.. Send the following codes.
7. Now issue a M500 to record to the firmware.
You can use this Calculator to figure your new value.


Junk Jaunt is a 300 mile continuous Yard Sale in central Nebraska. Each of 35-40 towns organizes a 3-day yard sale. Most towns will have at least one "Central Set-Up" location for vendors. Last year, this fun event drew 20,000 people from 32 states and 70 of 93 Nebraska counties. Always held the last Friday, Saturday & Sunday in September.
Bowman Lake is a 23-acre area lying adjacent to the Loup River and features a 20-acre manmade lake. It is located one mile west of Loup City Bowman Recreation Area offers picnicking, fishing and primitive camping. There are 10 non-pad sites without electricity available.
The museum collection is housed in several buildings that have been saved from around the county and moved to the museum site on the edge of Loup City. These include the Hawk Schoolhouse, the Ohlsen/Jenner House and the Austin School.


Python is the programming language which is more preferred for Raspberry Pi programming. Configuring GPIO pins is very much easy with Python. In this tutorial we are going to show you how to detect inputs in Raspberry Pi using Python….


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Data Science and Ethnography: What's Our Common Ground, and Why Does It Matter?
Posted by Jennifer Collier Jennings • March 7, 2018
by TYE RATTENBURY (Salesforce) & DAWN NAFUS (Intel)
As EPIC2018 program co-chairs, we developed the conference theme Evidence to explore how evidence is created, used, and abused. We'll consider the core types of evidence ethnographers make and use through participant observation, cultural analysis, filmmaking, interviewing, digital and mobile techniques, and other essential methods, as well as new approaches in interdisciplinary and cross-functional teams.1
We've also made a special invitation to data scientists to join us in Honolulu to advance the intersection of computational and ethnographic approaches. Why?
One of us is a data scientist (Tye) and the other an ethnographer (Dawn), both working in industry. We regularly see data science and ethnography conceptualized as polar ends of a research spectrum—one as a crunching of colossal data sets, the other as a slow simmer of experiential immersion. Unfortunately, we also see occasional professional stereotyping. A naïve view of "crunching" can make it seem as if all numerical work was brute computational force, as if data scientists never took the time to understand the social context from which data comes. A naïve view of ethnography can make it seem as if ethnography were casual description, "anecdotal" rather than systematic research and analysis grounded in evidence. Neither discipline benefits from these misunderstandings, and in fact there is more common ground than is obvious at first glance.
We also believe that the stakes in expanding this common ground are pretty high. The work of data science is increasingly ubiquitous—computational systems are there "in the wild" when ethnographers go into the field, and have consequences for the human experience that is so central to ethnographic understanding. Data science also offers new opportunities for mixed methods research, for example to generate a multidimensional understanding of human experience both digital/online and offline.
For data scientists, meanwhile, ethnography can offer a richer understanding of data and its provenance, and the sociocultural implications of data science work. As Nate Silver has written, "Numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning…. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of our selves." There is huge potential when we demand "more of ourselves", but to realize that potential, people from both fields have to be in the room. It's not enough to have one side of a conversation.
To spark discussion about these issues, we sat down together to talk about the practices and possibilities we're seeing in the data science/ethnography landscape. What are some features of data science and ethnography that make collaboration possible in practical terms, not just in theory? What areas of common ground form a basis for creating value, not just for our respective fields but for the organizations we work for and the people and communities we work with?
Our characterizations here gloss complex debates within each field. Exciting innovation is increasingly being developed, often defying stereotypes that "data scientists do this and ethnographers do that." Nevertheless, data science/ethnography collaborations are still rare, and part of the reason they are rare is that a basic understanding of how "the other" actually works is still hard to come by. So we offer this conversation (edited) between the two of us as a starting point for many more discussions that will move us collectively forward. Please join in!
A Conversation about Data Science and Ethnography
TYE: Research combining quantitative and qualitative methods have been around for a while, of course. There's a clichéd logic to mixed methods research–"quant" + "qual", "hard" + "soft". EPIC people have broken down assumptions about the quant/qual divide and reframe the relationship between ethnography and big data, but the fact is, mixed methods research combining ethnographic and data science approaches is still rare.2 Some examples are Gray's (et al.) study of Mechanical Turk workers, Haines' multidimensional research design, and Hill and Mattu's investigative journalism, and Bob Evans' work on PACO. There was also our own early work on making sense of telemetry data (written up here for computer scientists and here for ethnographers).
DAWN: Work like this isn't common yet, but I think it will grow as the debate about fairness in machine learning (ML) is heating up. There are now many calls for more interdisciplinary work in order to make ML systems work better for society. Making technical systems fairer is a problem that we all share, so I absolutely agree that there's a need. But as anyone who has done this kind of research can attest, the real value—and the real work to realize that value—is in the details.
TYE: Some of those details in how we tend to work can be surprisingly similar. Before diving deep, if we look down from 10 miles up, both data science and ethnography have undergone similar expansions: from coherent historical lineages and epistemologies they have expanded into trans-disciplinary practices, with the accompanying tensions and identity issues. Still, there's a recognizable core to both.
DAWN: That's true for ethnography, certainly. And it's created quite a bit of consternation in anthropology, where ethnography originated! Ethnography is now used across anthropology, sociology, marketing, strategy, design, and other fields, but regardless of where it's used, the core is about understanding people's beliefs and behaviors and how these change over time. Ethnography is a research skill that makes it possible to see what the world looks like from inside a particular context. If "man [sic] is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (Geertz), this skill involves systematically tracing out the logic of those webs, and examining how those webs structure what people do and think. Depending on the domain of study, these webs can be large scale or small, and in applied work they are often about people's multidimensional roles as customers, users, employees, or citizens. Ethnographers look at the social world as dynamically evolving, emergent systems. They are emergent systems because people reflexively respond to the present and past, and this response shapes what they do in the future. Years of building ethnography from this core has generated both analytical techniques and a body of knowledge about sociocultural realities.
TYE: Data science, across its variety of forms, is rooted in statistical calculations—involving both the technical knowledge and skill to assess the validity and applicability of these calculations, and the knowledge and skill to implement software or programming functions that execute the calculations. Underpinning the application of statistical calculations are assumptions about systemic structures and their dynamics—e.g., whether or not entities or events operate independently from one another, whether the variability of measurements, relative to an assumed or imputed trend or structure, is "noise" adhering to a separate set of rules (or not), and so on. Historically, these skill sets and conceptions of reality have been most heavily utilized in scientific inquiry, in finance and insurance, and business operations research (e.g., supply chain management and resource allocation). More recently, data science has expanded into a much larger set of domains: marketing, medicine, entertainment, education, law, etc. This expansion has shifted a large portion of data scientists toward data about people—some of that data is directly generated, like emails and web searches, some of it is sensed, like location or physical activity.
DAWN: So has that changed what's considered "core"?
TYE: No, not really. The core expectation of data scientists is still to apply appropriate statistical calculations, though there has been an increasing emphasis on integrating statistical calculations into wider systems—both human systems and technological.
DAWN: For ethnographers, we still have a core too—it's still about the ability to appropriately interpret belief systems and behaviors. But now many belief systems and behaviors are changing with data science practices and technical systems. Your core has come into my core! For example, in many parts of the world, datasets from Fitbits or social media metrics are as likely to be found in someone's home as other cultural artifacts. While both areas have a core set of expectations, they both have to extend beyond their core in order to deal with data about social life—data which has very real social consequences.
TYE: This is all the more true in industry contexts, where we often have to make social decisions, or design decisions, regardless of expertise.
DAWN: One difference is that in many data science scenarios, the available data has already been collected, whereas most ethnographic projects include field research time to gather new data.
TYE: Although this tendency doesn't hold true all the time, it is a common expectation, and that expectation results in a divergent initial perspective on projects: data scientists often think about working within the available datasets while ethnographers tend to begin their projects by thinking expansively about what dataset could be created, or should be created given the state of the art of the relevant discipline (anthropology, sociology and so forth). This difference in perspectives leads to different attribution models for the results. Data scientists will often describe their results as derived from the data (even if the derivation is complex and practically impossible to trace). Data scientists will readily recognize that they made decisions throughout the project that impacted the results, but will often characterize these decisions as being determined by the data (or by common and proven analyses of the data). You have a totally different way of dealing with that.
DAWN: Yes, for sure. It's all coming from "the data" but ethnographers themselves are a part of the data. A crucial part. If you were an active part of its creation—if you were there, having conversations with people, looking them in the eye as they try to make sense of your presence—you just can't see it any other way. It's unavoidable. You're also aware of all of the other contingent factors involved in the data you collected in that moment. So we have to be explicitly reflective and critical of how our social position influenced the results. I am woman from the United States, and when I was studying consumption patterns in Russia for my PhD, this influenced the way I was treated by locals. The two countries already have a 'web of significance'—including a shared Cold War history—that means that before anyone starts communicating, assumptions are being made. My research questions were also influenced by what questions were conceivable from this position as opposed to some other position. The ethnographic approach to this issue is to treat bias as data about the phenomenon to be explained—not as a corrupting factor to be eliminated. What is it about being a woman, or a person from the US, that elicited some kinds of responses, but not others? What is it about one's research funding, or intellectual networks, or politics, that leads to this research question and not that one? To use this observation, but ignore that one as "noise"? The ethnographer takes a cold hard look at these issues of context and social position as part of the analysis process.3
TYE: So we have different ways of attributing the results, but the research process is somewhat similar, from what I have experienced. The three main steps in the data science process are:
data sourcing—more than mere access, it's also about understanding lineage and assessing quality and coverage;
data transformation—from filtering and simple arithmetic transformations to complex abductions like predictions and unsupervised clustering; and
results delivery—both socially and programmatically (i.e., as lines of code).
Of course, this conception of the data science process glosses over some significant details, like the wide range of data transformations involved from cleaning through modeling, and the range of skills and domain knowledge required to deliver results. Also, different data scientists specialize and concentrate their time and energy on different steps.
DAWN: Different ethnographers also concentrate their efforts differently. Some revel in field research and description while others are more focused on building concepts and theories from those descriptions. Although not commonly articulated this way, ethnographic work relies on the same basic steps you just outlined: source data, transform it, and share insights.
TYE: One thing I've observed about ethnography is that ethnographers often collect metadata simultaneously to collecting data—e.g., taking notes on why they might have made certain observations instead of others, how the observations align or conflict with their expectations, etc. Provenance is built-in. The equivalent metadata about provenance might be recorded post hoc for the data scientist, or she might have to create it by talking to the stakeholders who did the collection.
DAWN: We don't make hard distinctions between metadata and data because you don't know which is which until you do the analysis, but the provenance is definitely still there. Yet in some ways, we also both have a notion of data transformation, even if the ethnographers don't call it that. And both kinds of transformation rely on trained judgment. In data science, trained judgment determines which aggregation function, or classification method, best transforms data into to appropriate patterns. Analogously, each ethnographer has to have a way of going from field notes or verbatim speech to a higher-level pattern that says something about the research question. It's an "aggregation function" in a way, but the aggregation happens through identifying shared qualities in the data. And that's a matter of trained judgment. You look at what the literature says on the topic, how often this or that theme seems to come up, who talks about it a lot and who talks about it only a little, what their incentives are to talk about it in a certain way or ignore other things, and you triangulate. In many cases, the "write up" is the place where analysis really occurs—where all those transformations become an argument that some phenomenon is happening.
TYE: Trained judgment is certainly paramount in data science as well. The relative value of an experienced data scientist versus a freshly minted one is the experience they can draw on to steer a set of transformations (be it data manipulations or algorithm configurations or sample weighting schemes) toward a better, more robust set of outputs. Where I do see some significant divergence is around the sharing of results: ethnographic findings are rarely delivered programmatically. They are textual manuscripts and/or presentations that explicate the findings, including how the ethnographer's social position shaped those findings.
DAWN: I have in fact seen one ethnography done through programming—it was an analysis of Github's count of repositories, and the claims Github made about it, by essentially "recounting" the repositories number by making API calls, processing it in R, and then both reporting on that process and analyzing the new numbers in relation to the scholarship on cultures that form in places like Github. But the code was not the 'deliverable', the writing was.
TYE: Ultimately, though, both processes are driven by people—the data scientist(s), the ethnographer(s). It is often the intuition of the researcher or exogenous sociocultural pressures that drive iterations in the research process. Neither is a linear set of steps. But a key difference is that ethnographic work critically assesses the role of the researchers as an explicit, expected part of the research process. If data science projects were truly determined by the data alone (sensor data, click data and so forth), then repeated analyses should yield identical results. They don't. More light has been shed on this recently and is captured by concepts like "p-hacking". Minimally, it's clear that data science processes could benefit from more documentation and critical reflection on the effect of the data scientist themselves. The ethnographer's ability to identify and explicate researcher biases and social pressures could be helpful.
DAWN: I'm always curious about how data scientists measure the consistency or sensitivity of results from datasets. You have a notion of confidence intervals that communicates in a shorthand way "this is the size of grain of salt you have to take." Ethnography doesn't look at the world probabilistically, so we can never say, "9 of 10 times this will be the case." But there are patterns, and those patterns can be relied upon for some purposes but not others. Even though we have messy complicated debates about how culture "scales" (which isn't the same thing as reliability of results, but it's related), we still don't have clear ways to communicate to clients "this is the size of the grain of salt you need to take."
TYE: Another area ripe for collaboration is in research question formulation and data gathering. To the extent that some data scientists do collect their own data, an ethnographic intuition about what is fruitful to collect, what biases are likely to come into play, and what outliers could be signal, can be useful.
DAWN: And vice versa. Some research questions are only conceivable after a data scientist has looked at a particular dataset, and finds patterns that require further explanation. Those questions can be hugely ethnographically interesting, and not ones that ethnographers can find on their own. Pursuing them qualitatively could lead to new data science questions, and so on (see also this). In both cases, explicitly documenting research iterations, and the factors that drive them, is critical to reaching the most robust and viable results.
TYE: We touched on data provenance earlier, but I want to come back to it from the perspective of quantitative data. In particular, I think it is critical to keep in mind that the systems that generate quantitative data are necessarily embedded in socio-technical systems. The technological elements of those systems (electronic sensors, software-based telemetry, etc.) are designed, manufactured, and maintained by sociocultural factors. So, a data scientist who is diligently trying to understand where their data comes from in order to interpret it, will sooner or later need to understand sociocultural phenomena that produced data, even if that understanding is more meta-data than data. It would make sense to co-develop rubrics for assessing the quality of data generated by socio-technical systems. Shining a bright light on the deepest lineage of data that impacts business or design decisions is important for everyone involved. Such assessments could lead to more cautious ways of using data, or be used in efforts to improve the explainability of technical systems.
DAWN: I agree there's a lot of potential in collaborating to illuminate the systems that create data. Part of that potential, I think, will be realized by leveraging the different epistemological assumptions behind our respective approaches. For example, there is unquestionable value in using statistical models as a lens to interpret and forecast sociocultural trends—both business value and value to growing knowledge more generally. But that value is entirely dependent on the quality of the alignment between the statistical model and the sociocultural system(s) it is built for. When there are misalignments and blind spots, the door is opened to validity issues and negative social consequences, such as those coming to light in the debates about fairness in machine learning. There are real disconnects between how data-intensive systems currently work, and what benefits societies.
TYE: Definitely! There's a lot work to be done in assessing the quality of that alignment. It requires knowledge from both domains to determine what is missing, what is under/over-emphasized, and what is mischaracterized entirely.
DAWN: There's lot's more to talk about here, and in Hawaii. I'm curious about what others have done, about how teams have formed, what worked and what didn't, and what ethical issues arose in the process. It's worthwhile conversation to have in and of itself, and my hope is that it will feed into our broader conversation about what evidence means, too.
1. Some people considering whether they should submit have asked us if we are only seeking mixed methods work, or work that deals with data collected electronically. The answer is a resounding no: as with any other EPIC, we think there is value in juxtaposing ethnographic work from a variety of different contexts, using a variety of different methods and analytic stances.
2. A growing number of publications at EPIC (e.g., by Churchill, Fiore-Silfvast & Neff, Nafus, and Norvaisas & Karpfen) and elsewhere (e.g., by Elish & boyd and Kitchin) have also furthered the discussion about ethnography's relationship to data and ML, though much work has remained conceptual.
3. This is not to say that ethnographers think it is a good idea to use data that badly represents a population under study, or that they are somehow okay with other sources of bias associated with the statistical meaning of the word. Instead, it is a claim about the need for skillful interpretation when these issues are larger than data collection procedure or appropriate statistical technique, like the problem of which research questions get asked and which do not.
anderson, ken, Dawn Nafus, Tye Rattenbury & Ryan Aipperspach (2009). "Numbers Have Qualities too: Experiences with Ethno‐Mining." Ethnographic praxis in industry conference proceedings.
Churchill, Elizabeth (2017). "The Ethnographic Lens: Perspectives and Opportunities for New Data Dialects." Perspectives, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community, September 26, 2017.
Crawford, Kate (2017). "The Trouble with Bias." NIPS 2017 Keynote.
Elish, M. C., and boyd, d. (2017). "Situating Methods in the Magic of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence." Communication Monographs.
Evans, Bob (2016). "Paco—Applying Computational Methods to Scale Qualitative Methods." Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings.
Fiore-Silfvast, Brittany and Gina Neff (2013). "What We Talk about When We Talk Data: Valences and the Social Performance of Multiple Metrics in Digital Health." Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings.
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gray, Mary L., et al. (2016). "The Crowd is a Collaborative Network." Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM.
Haines, Julia Katherine (2017). "Towards Multi‐Dimensional Ethnography." Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings.
Hill, Kashmir & Surya Mattu (2018). "The House that Spied on Me." Gizmodo, February 7.
Kitchin, R. (2014). "Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts." Big Data & Society 1(1).
Mackenzie, Adrian (forthcoming). "Operative ethnographies and large numbers." In Knox, H. and D. Nafus, Ethnography for a Data Saturated World. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Nafus, Dawn (2016). "The Domestication of Data: Why Embracing Digital Data Means Embracing Bigger Questions". Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, 384–399.
Norvaisas, Julia Marie & Jonathan "Yoni" Karpfen (2014). "Little Data, "Big Data and Design at LinkedIn." Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings.
Patel, Neal H. (2011). "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: Rebellion Against the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide." Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings: 43.
Rattenbury, Tye, Dawn Nafus, and ken anderson (2008). "Plastic: A Metaphor for Integrated Technologies." Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, ACM.
Selman, Bill, (2014). "Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research?" Mozilla UX, October 30.
Image: Overlapping Rhythms by Rosa Say (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr.
Tye Rattenbury is a Senior Director of Data Science and Machine Learning at Salesforce, supporting the Customer Success organization. He is primarily focused on generating predictions of customer attrition, likelihoods to purchase additional products and services, and forecasts of support volume. Prior to Salesforce, Tye held various data science roles at Intel, R/GA, Facebook, and Trifacta. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a BS in Applied Mathematics from CU Boulder.
Dawn Nafus is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Corporation, where she conducts anthropological research for new product innovation. Her ethnographic research has been primarily on experiences of time, data literacy, self-tracking and wearables. Most recently, she has been working on instrumentation and data interpretation for community-based environmental health projects. Her work takes place in the US and Europe. She is the editor of Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life and co-author of Self-Tracking. She holds a PhD from University of Cambridge.
big data & analyticscollaborationcomputer scienceEPIC2018evidenceinterdisciplinary researchmixed methodsquantitative methods
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So glad you are visiting Mom this weekend. But you haven't seen her in a year. Has anything changed? Well a year in the life of an Alzheimer's patient can mean a lot. I can't remember what was true last year. But here's what is true now.
She doesn't know the date anymore. I don't know if they just don't make sense or they got too confusing but she doesn't know what day of the month it is. Or maybe the month either.
She can only use the green credit card. The others are deactivated. It's a long story.
She can't suggest restaurants, or even types of food. Just decide and make a plan.
If you go out to eat, just order something for everyone. She gets really confused with the menu and ordering. Say you will all share something.
Pay for dinner. Save yourself the embarrassment of trying to help your friend figure out money. It's not going to work.
She doesn't know the way home anymore. Call a cab or drive there and back. Use your own GPS.
She might not know your name.
It's not true that people are stealing from her.
She hasn't been sick. But she does go to the doctor a lot. So she might tell you she has been sick.
She can't do math, read long paragraphs, identify people in pictures, ask you detailed questions or remember names, dates or places.
Her outfits might be weird, or the same thing two days in a row. She has a ton of clothes but doesn't wear them. I might burn this light blue sweater that I keep seeing on her.
Her hair is grey now. She says it's "always been like that" but as you know, it was brown last time you saw her.
One of Mom (and Dad's) favorite places, the beach in Ocean City, NJ. She might not remember it by name, but I really hope she remembers being there and how it feels like some part of Dad is in the dunes or when you walk near the water.
There are a few other things you should know.
She still loves to paint and do pastels. She just erases what she did the day before and does it again and again. Sometimes she paints the same picture over and over. But they are still well done and beautiful.
She still likes food and red wine with ice cubes.
She loves her kids, even when she can't remember what they do for a living, which one had a baby, what her grandkids' names are or where we live. The love is there.
She is happy you are with her. Even if she forgot to do "host" things like leave out towels or completely clean the room you are staying in, or buy wine or clean the fridge or wash the dishes out with soap.
My boy playing "bouncy bounce" at Grandma's house.
Don't pander to us "kids" and tell us that Mom is "doing well" after your visit. We know it's not true and it doesn't help us and actually denies our reality of what we are dealing with every day.
Offer to help with something concrete- taking her to get groceries, to get clothes for an upcoming event, to help her straighten out one section of the endless mounds of papers everywhere.
Call us later and talk it through.
Remember that we are without guidance from parents right now. Offer some. If you see something that you think we haven't, it's okay to ask or even give ideas about it.
Visit again. Mom loves you too. Even if she can't remember details about your relationship, she can know that you love her and that you are committed to being her friend.


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Home » News » #EndSARS Panel: Sanwo-Olu sets up 4-member committee for white paper report
#EndSARS Panel: Sanwo-Olu sets up 4-member committee for white paper report
Lagos State Governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has set up a four-member committee for White Paper on the reports submitted by the Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for victims of SARS related abuses and other matters.
Sanwo-Olu constituted the committee after receiving the two reports of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for victims of SARS related abuses and other matters presented to him at the Lagos House, Ikeja, by Chairman of the panel, Retired Justice Doris Okuwobi.
The four-member committee is led by Lagos State Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr Moyosore Onigbanjo (SAN).
Other members of the committee are; Commissioner for Youths and Social Development, Mr Segun Dawodu, Special Adviser, Works and Infrastructure, Mrs Aramide Adeyoye and Permanent Secretary, Cabinet Office, Mrs Tolani Oshodi.
He said that the committee would bring forward a white paper within the next two weeks to be considered by the Lagos State Executive Council.
According to him, the reports and recommendations will be made public and submitted to the National Economic Council for discussion.
The two reports submitted by the Panel to Lagos State Government are on investigation on petitions on several abuses and killings by the Nigerian Police, especially the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and the Oct. 20, 2020 Lekki Toll Gate shootings during the #EndSARS protests hijacked by hoodlums.
He reassured Nigerians, especially residents of Lagos that the government's action would be guided by the law and in the public interest.
Sanwo-Olu said that he was hopeful the Lagos State Government's decision on the reports would bring complete healing, reconciliation and restitution.
"The four of them will immediately look through and bring forward a white paper within the next two weeks that will be considered at the Lagos State Executive Council and would be gazetted as a white paper coming from the Panel of Inquiry.
"We will ensure that the recommendations that are coming out will be turned into a white paper and made available to the public.
"We will do it appropriately so that history will judge us well and we will have a document that will stand the test of time.
"That is what the tribunal law says, so that it will be properly documented and gazetted in government's records," he said.
Sanwo-Olu who pointed out that the panel had operated independently, commended members of the Justice Okuwobi-led panel for a job well done.
He also expressed appreciation to residents for their cooperation during the exercise, which lasted for almost a year.
Speaking earlier, Justice Okuwobi, expressed deep appreciation to the Lagos State Government and all stakeholders who appeared before the panel.
She also thanked members of the panel for their uncommon resolve to bring closure to the assignment and their good team work.
Okuwobi said that part of the recommendations of the panel was the establishment of a body to take over human rights abuses in Lagos.
She disclosed that the panel awarded a total of N410 million to 70 victims of Police brutality, and 235 petitions were received, with only 14 of it being on the alleged Lekki shooting incident.
"As much as the panel desired to have taken all petitions, the ones that were not taken by the panel were those that did not comply to our rules, so in this report, we made recommendations for a body to take over human rights abuse cases in Lagos State," Okuwobi said.
It would be recalled that Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Oct. 19, 2020 inaugurated the Judicial Panel of Inquiry to investigate alleged cases of brutality and human rights violations perpetrated by the Police and operatives of the dissolved Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
The panel was also saddled with the investigation of the alleged shootings that took place on Oct. 20, 2020, at the Lekki Tollgate.


nisldap_manage is a tool for NIS (Network Information Service) and Samba schema management on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) servers. The tool has been coded in Perl. It has been successfully used in small computer networks. It may contain several bugs so I would not recommend its use, especially in large networks, uneless you are able to correct things on your LDAP server using LDIF and LDAP server tools.
Currently, the tool supports the managment of users, groups, hosts, netgroups, and aliases, stored on an LDAP server. It supports only crypt passwords. I will try to incorporate additional capabilities in the future.
After you start the program, select the LDAP server and press the connect button. If you like what you see, just play with the tool to learn how to use it.
Then import the ldap_schema.ldif on your LDAP server. Finally, run the nisldap_manage.pl program to add users, groups and other NIS and Samba entities.
managment of RPC, services, protocols, netinfo NIS records.
© 2007 - Tsantilas Christos.


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National Bankshares, Inc. Declares Special Dividend
BLACKSBURG, VA, January 11, 2023: National Bankshares, Inc. (NASDAQ: NKSH) (the "Company") announced today that its Board of Directors has declared a one-time, special cash dividend of $1.00 per common share.
National Bank Promotes Lara Ramsey to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
National Bank is pleased to announce the promotion of Lara E. Ramsey to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.
David Skeens named Senior Vice President/Senior Operations, Risk and Technology Officer at National Bank
National Bank is pleased to announce that David K. Skeens has been named Senior Vice President and Senior Operations, Risk and Technology Officer.
National Bank Promotes Lora Jones to Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
National Bank is pleased to announce the promotion of Lora Jones to Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
National Bankshares, Inc. (NASDAQ: NKSH), parent company of The National Bank of Blacksburg, today announced its results of operations for the first quarter of 2022.


Carlos Sarraute has studied Mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires. He has been working since 2000 in CoreLabs, the research laboratory of Core Security Technologies. His areas of research are security vulnerabilities, attack planning and modeling, security events visualization, secure triggers, protocol design flaws (MySQL authentication, SSH timing analysis) and cryptoanalysis. He has given talks and courses about information security and cryptography in several universities in Argentina.


Bezons (France), Uxbridge (UK) 6 July 2016 – Atos, an international leader in digital services, and Xerox have launched a new cloud-based 'Business Process as a Service' (BPaaS) offering for clients streamlining their finance and accounting functions.
The new service offers 'Source-to-Pay', 'Order-to-Cash' and 'Record-to-Report' and can be scaled to meet fluctuating demand and workloads. Complete with industry leading intelligence products to ensure internal controls, this 'out-of-the-box' service drives efficiency and up to 30 percent in cost savings.
The service combines the strength of Xerox's global finance and accounting capability with Atos technology and digital skills in systems integration to provide a pay-as-you-go cloud-based service. The ready-to-go solution offers low upfront costs and no requirement for additional infrastructure, meaning that clients can be using the service in a matter of weeks. The fully configured technology platform leverages the advanced functionality of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud to drive productivity, lower costs, and improve controls in the finance function.
The Atos and Xerox BPaaS offering for finance and accounting is available in Western Europe immediately.


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Who Can Beat Trump?
In Iowa, candidates and voters show little interest in impeachment, much in victory next November.
Peggy Noonan · Dec. 16, 2019
The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs.
A surprise is there's little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it's true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment from a voter in a forum. The candidates seem bored with the subject and don't bother to fake passion if you ask. Impeachment is a reality show going on in Washington, and everyone knows the outcome, so it's not even interesting. On my way to Waterloo I realized: We're about to have the third impeachment of a president in American history, and the day it happens it's not going to be Topic A in America. It will barely be mentioned at the dinner table. It is a coastal elite story, not a mainland story.
The Democratic race is as fluid as it looks. No one, even bright party professionals speaking off the record, knows what to expect. Biden was inevitable, then maybe Elizabeth, maybe Pete's inevitable, but Bernie may be inevitable, and don't write off Joe.
But "Beat Trump" is back. When 2019 began Democrats were thinking that was priority No. 1. Then other things became more important — Medicare for All, climate change, policy. But it feels like Democrats here are circling back to their original desire. "Who can beat Trump?" is again the most important question. They don't know the answer. They're trying to figure it out.
You can hear this in what the candidates say.
At a Teamsters forum in Cedar Rapids Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders was burly in his aggression. "This is a president who is a fraud," "a pathological liar," "a homophobe," "a bigot." Mr. Sanders said his campaign is about "telling the billionaire class that their greed is unacceptable." He got a standing ovation.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar the day before, in Grinnell, spoke to about 150 people at the Iowa Farmer's Union: "We're not gonna let this Gilded Age roll right over us." Donald Trump made promises he didn't keep. After his tax cut passed, "he went to Mar-a-Lago and told his rich friends, 'I just made you all a lot richer.' And I can tell you none of them were farmer's union members."
"He thinks the Midwest is flyover country."
Leaders are making decisions for seven generations, she said: "He can't keep his decision seven minutes from now."
Pete Buttigieg, at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, told a crowd of more than 1,000 — lots of students but others too, many of them prosperous and middle-aged: Don't just watch "the Trump show — help me pick up the remote and change the channel."
Before he spoke, a handsome, gray-haired psychotherapist from Iowa City told me why she supports him: "I think he has empathy. His orientation, what he's been through. Yet also the military and a Rhodes scholar." She liked his liberal Christianity: "He hasn't let anyone else co-opt his spiritual life."
Mr. Buttigieg used to say his name was pronounced "Buddha judge." When he went national he changed it to what his crowds now chant: "boot edge edge." I suspect he did this because America wears boots and likes edginess, but no one wants to be judged by the Buddha. I mention this because Mr. Buttigieg has the air of someone who thinks through even the smallest questions of presentation.
In person he seems like the smart young communications director for a Democratic presidential candidate, not the candidate himself. Yet he gets a particular respect because people think whatever happens this year, he's going to be president some day. The local congressman who introduced him said as much: "No matter who comes out of this … Pete Buttigieg is the future of the party."
He is personable in an old-fashioned sense; he reminds me of Michael Kinsley's description of Al Gore when he was 38: "an old person's idea of a young person."
Mr. Buttigieg is often painted as a moderate. After he spoke I asked about something I'm interested in, how people develop their political views, where they get them. Do most inherit them, swallow them whole? His father was a Marxist-oriented academic at Notre Dame; he himself, I said, is a man of the left. Had he ever kicked away from family assumptions? Did he ever feel drawn to conservatism, to Burke or Kirk? He had not, though "I will say this: I came to respect the ways in which, right around the time of Russell Kirk, conservatives came to be very much in touch with the relationship between their ideas and their politics and politicians. I think it was born out of a period when the left had universities already, and the right needed to construct a structure of think tanks and so forth."
When he was an intern on Capitol Hill, every young Republican staffer had a copy of Hayek on his desk. "On our side, the academic left, particularly in the humanities, had gotten into really abstruse things around postmodernism and poststructuralism. There was, ironically, contrary to our self-image, I think less of a clear relationship between ideas and politicians on the left. We had our policy intellectuals, but there was less of a connection between our politicians and our political theorists."
He came to respect "the organizing efforts of conservatives." I asked if this was around the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Of a sudden the Republican Party is the party of ideas." He smiled and shrugged: "Just a hair before my time."
Ms. Klobuchar's polls have been going up, from 1% in the Emerson College poll in October to 10% now. Her audiences are bigger. It has broken through that she's a moderate, a senator, a Midwesterner: "I'm from Minnesota and I can see Iowa from my porch!" She has wit. She knows she has to prove that she's tough, that she can go toe to toe with Donald Trump.
She's had strong debates. In the last one, social media went crazy because her hair shook. Not her face or voice, her hair. She later joked on Twitter: "I'll plaster my runaway bangs down for the next NBC debate."
What happened? She told me the debate hall had been reconfigured, overly air-conditioned, and unknown to her, a nearby air vent was blasting at the top of her head. She didn't know there was a problem until the break, when a tech came by and said he was sorry.
"Now I guess hair spray," she laughed as she told the story.
How difficult will it be to beat Mr. Trump? While I was in Iowa the new jobs numbers came out. America has functional full employment. It is a marvelous thing. We're not in any new wars. With peace and prosperity, how can the incumbent lose?
The counterargument is that his approval is stuck in the low 40s with peace and prosperity, which tells you everything — he is vulnerable, more than half the country rejects him in what are for him ideal circumstances. This in turn brings back the familiar 2016 theme of shy Trump voters, people who don't tell pollsters they're going to vote for him, or even tell themselves.
Maybe the real story is that it's all fluid.
Republished by permission from peggynoonan.com.
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AVR LCD Visualizer is a software program developed by Atmel. We know of version 1.1. Version 1.1.37 is available for free download at our site. AVR LCD Visualizer installation file has a size of 1,397,042 bytes. Atmel also publishes WinCupl.