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Enjoy a classical spectacular
The traditional end-of-summer celebration concert at Darley Park in Derby takes place this Sunday (September 6), from 6pm.
Tuesday, 1st September 2015, 5:58 pm
Darley Park concert Photo by Gareth Chell
Derby LIVE, in association with Sinfonia Viva and Classic FM, presents the hugely popular outdoor concert.
Derby LIVE is delighted to announce that Classic FM, the UK's most popular classical music radio station, is once again the media partner for the event.
Classic FM's Saturday lunchtime presenter Nicholas Owen will be introducing an audience of more than 30,000 people to the concert which features the world's greatest classical music from concert hall, stage and screen.
Derby-based professional orchestra Sinfonia Viva will perform a programme based on the theme of couples.
The theme has remained dominant in musical history right up to the present day – from famous collaborating composer-and-lyricist teams, sensational performing duos, to the many thousands of songs and melodies which explore the highs and lows of relationships between people in or out of love.
The concert will open with Glinka's bustling Russlan and Ludmilla Overture followed by pieces inspired by Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, including Prokofiev's Montagues & Capulets – well-known as the theme tune to the television series The Apprentice - and Bernstein's Tonight from West Side Story.
Listeners will be taken on a journey with a cinematic twist that embraces John Williams' timeless film theme Superman before enjoying Freddie Mercury and Mike Moran's 1987 modern classic Barcelona that came to prominence as the 'theme' song for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Other works include a selection from Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, Puccini's La Bohème, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's March of the Siamese Children from The King And I, Mendelssohn's Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Elgar's Nimrod, Mercury and Moran's Barcelona and Offenbach's Infernal Galop(Can Can).
Nicholas is the voice of Saturday lunchtimes on Classic FM, the UK's most popular classical music radio brand - after joining the Global station in January 2011.
He is also a presenter with BBC News, having rejoined the Corporation in 2007 and appears on BBC1's Six O'Clock News, Ten O'Clock News, BBC Breakfast, and the 24-hour BBC News Channel.
For well over a decade before that, he hosted all ITN's major news bulletins, including Channel Four News and News at Ten.
From 1994 to 2000, he was Royal Correspondent for ITV News. In that capacity, he played a major role in reporting on the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Nicholas compiled a book on her life entitled Diana – A People's Princess, updated and republished in 2007.
Cllr Martin Rawson, deputy leader and cabinet member for Communities and City Centre Regeneration, said: "I'm delighted that once again Darley Park will be packed with people enjoying a fantastic evening of music. The Darley Park Concert is a highlight of the cultural calendar and I would like to welcome everyone to come along to revel in the music and fireworks."
More information on the concert can be found on the Derby LIVE website www.derbylive.co.uk or by calling the Derby LIVE box office on 01332 255800.


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Small Arms—they cause 90% of civilian casualties
This Page Last Updated Saturday, January 21, 2006
This page: http://www.globalissues.org/article/78/small-arms-they-cause-90-of-civilian-casualties.
The growing availability of small arms has been a major factor in the increase in the number of conflicts, and in hindering smoother rebuilding and development after a conflict has ended. It is estimated, for example, that:
There are around half a billion military small arms around the world;
Some 300,000 to half a million people around the world are killed by them each year;
They are the major cause of civilian casualties in modern conflicts.
This section attempts to look at some of the issues surrounding small arms.
What are Small Arms?
Civilians Affected Most by Small Arms
Small Arms are an Ever-Present Problem
Small Arms Linger Long After Conflicts are Over and Hinders Development and Rebuilding
Small Arms are Proliferated Through Both Legal and Illegal Trade
Small Arms Cause Mass Destruction
People and Governments are Trying to Address the Issues
UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms, July 2001
United Nations Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and the Programme of Action, 7-11 July 2003
© Panos Pictures
Small arms include weapons such as
sub-machine guns
light missiles.
There are many more which are often not regarded officially as small weapons, as described by Philippe Riviere, in Small Arms Cover-up; The problem of proliferation, Le Monde diplomatique , January 2001
Consider, for example, the following:
Modern conflicts claim an estimated half a million people each year. 300,000 of these are from conflicts, and 200,000 are from homicides and suicides.
Over 80 percent of all these casualties have been civilian
90 percent of civilian casualties are caused by small arms. This is far higher than the casualty count from conventional weapons of war like tanks, bomber jets or warships.
Estimates of the black market trade in small arms range from US$2-10 billion a year.
Every minute, someone is killed by a gun
At least 1,134 companies in 98 countries worldwide are involved in some aspect of the production of small arms and/or ammunition.
Civilians purchase more than 80% of all the firearms that are currently manufactured worldwide each year.
There are at least 639 million firearms in the world today, of which 59% are legally held by civilians.
Some of the factors include that small arms are often
Long-life;
Low maintenance;
Relatively cheap and easily available;
Highly portable and so easily concealable.
The above therefore makes it easy for things like:
Illicit trafficking;
Operation by young children. (There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world.)
Professor Robert Neild of Cambridge University is quite blunt about it, too:
It has been estimated that there are now about 500 million small arms and light weapons in circulation in the world, one for every twelve people. Gone long ago is the time when we Europeans could subdue other continents because we had firearms and the local peoples had not. In 1999 it was reported that an AK-47 assault rifle could be bought in Uganda for the price of a chicken.
Robert Neild, Public Corruption; The Dark Side of Social Evolution, (London: Anthem Press, 2002), p. 131
As the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs describes, Small arms and light weapons destabilise regions. This is because they
Spark, fuel and prolong conflicts;
Obstruct relief programmes;
Undermine peace initiatives;
Exacerbate human rights abuses;
Hamper development; and
Foster a culture of violence.
The Control Arms Campaign also notes that
… illicit drugs production thrives on territory outside the control of recognised governments, and 95 per cent of the world's production of hard drugs takes place in contexts of armed conflict. Valuable natural resources are illegally exploited by armed groups and their state sponsors, ruining millions of lives and impeding local development, as has occurred in DRC. International trade suffers and illicit markets thrive, to the detriment of national economies.
Towards an Arms Trade Treaty; Next steps for the UN Programme of Action, Control Arms, July 2005, p.8
However, as the UN also adds, unlike nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, there are no international treaties or other legal instruments for dealing with these weapons, which States and also individual legal owners rely on for their defense needs.
During the cold war, many nations were flooded with small arms by powerful nations such as the USA and the former Soviet Union and their major allies. Even though the cold war has ended, the small arms still remain and help fuel political and ethnic differences into conflict.
For example, an extensive report from Oxfam in 1998 revealed that UK involvement in the small arms trade is much higher than previously acknowledged. Between 1995 and 1997, UK sold small arms to over 100 countries.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council—France, Russia, China, the UK, and the USA—together account for 88 per cent of the world's conventional arms exports; and these exports contribute regularly to gross abuses of human rights. as a report from the control arms campaign, Shattered Lives, mentions.
As the report notes further:
The lack of arms controls allows some to profit from the misery of others.
While international attention is focused on the need to control weapons of mass destruction, the trade in conventional weapons continues to operate in a legal and moral vacuum.
More and more countries are starting to produce small arms, many with little ability or will to regulate their use.
Permanent UN Security Council members—the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China—dominate the world trade in arms.
Most national arms controls are riddled with loopholes or barely enforced.
Key weaknesses are lax controls on the brokering, licensed production, and end use of arms.
Arms get into the wrong hands through weak controls on firearm ownership, weapons management, and misuse by authorised users of weapons.
The Arms Bazaar, Shattered Lives, Chapter 4, p. 54, Control Arms Campaign, October 2003
This presents a huge obstacle to development in some of these countries. Furthermore, Control Arms, in another paper in 2005 noted that many countries are invovled in this trade.
Measuring SALW [Small Arms and Light Weapons] transfers by financial value [alone] ignores the potentially huge impact of relatively small-value transfers. Assault rifles cost only a few hundred dollars each—but only a few hundred such rifles can lead to major instability, with catastrophic effects for civilian populations.
The international arms trade is not based solely in the North. At least 92 countries have the capacity to produce small arms or ammunition, and around half of these are developing countries. Some of this is production licensed from manufacturers in rich industrialised countries…
Countries which are not renowned for the manufacture of weapons often play an important role in the transit and transfer of arms. For example, Viet Nam has reportedly transferred weapons to Myanmar; Lebanon, Liberia, Burkina Faso, and Niger have transferred weapons to Sierra Leone; Namibia to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Angola; Burkina Faso to Benin.
…Thus arms transfers involve all countries, whether they suffer the effects of arms or transfer weapons—not only newly manufactured arms, but re-exported, second-hand, surplus, or collected weapons, and weapons in transit.
A documentary back in 1998, from the Center for Defense Information, describes the problems of small arms as epidemic.
The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) describes that, in effect, small arms are weapons of mass destruction. Summarizing and quoting IANSA:
Small arms are a Big Problem
Small arms are Big Business
Small arms lead to Big Damage
300,000 deaths a year from conflicts
200,000 deaths in peacetime nations (from homicides, suicides, unintentional shootings and shootings by police)
2 million children are thought to have been killed since 1990 with small arms
1.5 million non-fatal injuries each year
They also have a humanitarian impact:
Guns are the primary tools used to force families and entire villages to flee their homes
During humanitarian crisis, armed people can make it harder, or impossible, for the most needy to get aid.
Small arms inhibit development.
Small arms present a Global Challenge
A documentary from the Center for Defense Information in 1998 suggested that one step towards peace and stability in some regions can be taken by stopping the flow of small arms.
There have been a number of examples of governments and people trying to address the issues. For a small example:
There had been an increase in pressure to discuss disarmament issues and the United Nations was trying to seek a moratorium on small arms trade. The G8 (the world's major economies plus Russia—also the world's major arms suppliers) met in Birmingham, UK, 15–17 May, 1998, as part of their annual meetings. Small arms was a major topic of discussion.
In Oslo, Norway, July 1998, there was a meeting where representatives from a number of countries were present to tackle and control the spread of small arms. Although some major producers of small arms were not in attendance, this was still seen as a positive step forward.
South Africa started to take a positive step forward by attempting to tackle the problem that it has created in the past of availability of small arms in Africa and other parts of the world. Yet, as the section below on the UN conference on the illicit arms trade shows, they were against certain moves to tackle exporting of arms to troubled areas.
For the first time in the United Nation's history, the issue of small arms was finally a topic of conversation at a UN Security Council meeting in 1999, where Kofi Annan also noted the efforts of NGOs in this. NGOs are often doing the hard work and are in the front line. When it comes to small arms, they have been working diligently to fight the effects of small arms. This is not an easy undertaking given the amount of small arms that are traded legally and illegally.
Also in 1999, the UN General Assembly voted to hold a Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects which was to occur two years after this conference:
Since the beginning of the conference on 9 July [2001], an estimated 25,000 people worldwide will have been killed by small arms.
UN Conference on Small Arms on the brink of failure, Amnesty International, July 20, 2001
A UN conference was set up from 9th to 20th July, 2001, to try and address issues regarding the proliferation of small arms in conflict zones. Amongst the numerous issues at hand, some major gun-producing countries such as the United States, China, Russia, India, and others were against effective universal criteria against arms export. In fact, it is interesting to note the United Statess' stance on this, as reported by the radio show, Democracy Now!:
John Bolton, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, bluntly told the delegates that The United States will not join consensus on a final document that contains measures contrary to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. He also said the United States, the largest supplier of arms worldwide, would not support moves to outlaw any arming of rebel groups, nor would it help fund a campaign by human rights groups to raise awareness of the trade. He also said the U.S. would not support a ban on private ownership of military weapons, including assault rifles and grenade launchers.
Amy Goodman, A Ban on Private Ownership of Military Weapons Including Assault Rifles and Grenade Launchers? Bush Administration Just Says No, Democracy Now!, July 11, 2001. (An interview with various activists and campaigners around the world on the UN Conference on small arms.)
This is a remarkable position, as one must note how much controversy and concern was raised in the U.S. when there were revelations about Chinese influences in previous elections. That led to such vehement statements by U.S. politicians. Yet, the above statement says that while others should not be involved in such political interference, it is ok for the U.S. to do this (and, historically, more) to others.
As the Guardian in Britain reported, the United Kingdom, a close ally of the U.S., offered £19.5m to UN efforts to curb the supply of small arms, and yet, the US is opposed to even a commitment to negotiations on a binding legal agreement. (emphasis added). A partial reason for this, as explained in the Guardian article, is due to the influential gun lobby in the U.S.
On a slightly lighter note, there was the following response to a comment from someone against the UN conference:
[Amy Goodman]: Phylis Schlafly founded the Eagle Forum, a conservative force in this country [the United States] … and she says about the UN conference, that the purpose of conference is to demonize the private ownership of guns and get government to confiscate all privately owned guns . She says, don't be misled by the term of illicit trade . UN documents make it clear that since most illegal guns start out as legal purchases, illicit trade must be stopped by clamping down on legal gun owners. And adds, don't think this UN conference is just a talk fest. It's scheduled to produce a legally binding treaty to require governments to mark, number, register, record, license, confiscate and destroy all guns except those in the hands of the military and the police. What's your response to that?
[Cesar Villaneuva]: I hope that, that will be true.
As with the John Bolton comment, the above confuses the issue of of domestic gun control with the trade and transfer of small arms and light weapons across international borders, which is what the UN conference was about.
As with numerous other international issues, this issue has been putting the U.S. at odds with many of its other allies, such as various European nations.
As the session was nearing a close, Human Rights Watch was raising concerns that this conference would [fail] to produce a serious plan of action. They further pointed out that, Many delegates have tried to single out shadowy gunrunners as the chief culprits, while neglecting the governmental role in supplying the weapons used to commit atrocities.
Amnesty International also pointed out that when some countries tried to get committments that small arms wouldn't be sold where there was a high risk of human rights violations, or fueling tensions etc, the USA, China, many ASEAN countries, the Arab Group and South Africa, were amongst those governments that blocked moves to secure such commitments.
As the conference ended, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) described the result as a squandered opportunity as the final agreement was watered down so much. The Washington D.C.-based Center for Defence Information also described how the United States repeatedly used its political capital to weaken the Programme of Action :
The Conference, held July 9-20, 2001, began on a rather sour tone with the statement of U.S. Under Secretary of State John Bolton, who expressed the U.S. position on the issue of small arms and the Conference in no uncertain terms. Bolton stressed that the Conference should address only the illicit transfer of military style weapons, excluding firearms and non-military rifles (the weapons responsible for terrible carnage and destruction around the world every year).
Bolton bluntly stated the position of the United States in front of the ministerial-level portion of the meeting, describing the U.S. redlines, items unacceptable for inclusion in the Conference plan. Bolton stated that the United States could not support a final Conference document that included:
restrictions on the legal trade and manufacture of small arms and light weapons;
promotion of international advocacy by NGOs and international organizations;
restrictions on the sale of small arms and light weapons to entities other than governments;
a mandatory review conference; and
a commitment to begin discussions on legally binding agreements.
Rachel Stohl, UN Conference on Small Arms Concludes With Consensus, Weekly Defense Monitor, Center for Defense Information, Volume 5, Issue #29, July 26, 2001
The final Programme of Action was created, but weakened:
The final debate centered on the U.S. refusal to allow any mention of restrictions on sales to non-state actors, with several African states taking the opposite position. In the end, the Africans relented and all paragraphs related to non-state actors and civilian possession were stricken from the action plan.
The United States repeatedly used its political capital to weaken the Programme of Action and block progress in the debate. While the United States had clearly defined the items that would receive no U.S. support, the United States did not publicly push U.S. best practices on export criteria or on export controls. In addition, the United States did not push for an international agreement on brokering (or the beginning of discussions of such an agreement).
… Although many compromises could not be reached, the Conference document did succeed in establishing a comprehensive approach, and included recognition of the grave humanitarian consequences caused by the proliferation of small arms. In addition, states now have a document on which they can base their future work on small arms. The Conference also agreed on a follow-up conference no later than 2006 with the precise date to be determined by the General Assembly at its 58th session, and biennial conferences to gauge progress on the implementation of the Programme of Action.
As IANSA summarized, the programme of action committs governments to:
Make illicit gun production/possession a criminal offence
Establish a national coordination agency on small arms
Identify and destroy stocks of surplus weapons
Keep track of officially-held guns
Issue end-user certificates for exports/transit
Notify the original supplier nation of re-export
Disarmament, Demobilisation & Re-integration (DDR) of ex-combatants, including collection and destruction of their weapons
Support regional agreements and encourage moratoria
Mark guns at point of manufacture for identification and tracing
Maintain records of gun manufacture
Engage in more information exchange
Ensure better enforcement of arms embargoes
Include civil society organisations in efforts to prevent small arms proliferation
However, as IANSA adds, the programme provides no international mechanism for monitoring compliance, and the UN's role has been limited to compiling information submitted by states on a voluntary basis.
I must … express my disappointment over the Conference's inability to agree, due to the concerns of one State, on language recognizing the need to establish and maintain controls over private ownership of these deadly weapons and the need for preventing sales of such arms to non-State groups. The states of the region most afflicted by this global crisis, Africa, had agreed only with the greatest of reluctance to the deletion of proposed language addressing these vital issues… They did so strictly in the interests of reaching a compromise that would permit the world community as a whole to proceed together with some first steps at the global level to alleviate this common threat.
Ambassador Reyes of Columbia, Conference President at the conclusion of the 2001 conference, quoted from UN Meeting on Small Arms July 7-11: A battle between rich and poor?, ID21, July 3, 2003
(The official UN web site for this conference also contains the full text of the Programme is available on the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs.)
A follow-up biennial conference to guage the progress of the programme was held in July 2003.
This follow-up meeting was to consider the national, regional and global implementation of the Programme of Action agreed at the 2001 UN Conference and for governments to report their progress and lessons learned in the first two years of implementing it.
Leading up to the meeting, IANSA noted how many states had progressed poorly so far on this issue, under their obligations to the Programme of Action.
Human Rights Watch detailed misuse of small arms by many governments and groups around the world.
Robert Muggah, senior researcher at the Small Arms Survey—the principle international source of public information on all aspects of small arms based in Geneva—detailed that the issue also involves a difference between the rich and poor. The NGO, ID21, summarized Muggah's report noting that:
People living in poor countries in Africa and the Americas are more than twice as likely to die a violent death as those living in rich European countries.
Many of these deaths are due to the misuse of small arms, the ownership of which has spread throughout poor communities as a result of war and the insecurities of poverty.
The spread of small arms is both an effect and a cause of underdevelopment and poverty.
Small arms misuse means that instead of making investments in improving their well-being and economic development, the already poor are burdened with the cost of nursing the injured and paying for informal forms of security such as vigilantism and para-militaries.
Yet much of the initiative to reduce and control small arms has been left to the poor communities themselves, with little help from international governments or agencies.
One of the causes behind the inaction of some of the world's wealthiest states is domestic politics and economic self-interest.
On the political front, not all governments in a position to donate funds towards small arms control recognise civilian ownership of arms as a problem.
In terms of economic self-interest, a number of governments are also reluctant to be involved in initiatives which seek to reduce armed violence by restraining local markets in small arms. The value of the legal global trade in small arms is estimated at 4 billion US dollars per year. The estimated value of the illegal global trade in small arms is an additional 1 billion US dollars. Yet the UN's current Programme of Action on arms control focuses only on illegal trade in small arms, despite the fact that most illegally sold arms initially come from legal sources.
IANSA summarized the outcome of the meeting as having some critical positives, and some negatives:
The UN Biennial Meeting of States on small arms produced a number of significant outcomes, including:
The UN Group of Experts on Marking and Tracing released a report indicating that it is feasible to have an instrument on weapons tracing, and a recommendation for such an implementation will be submitted to the General Assembly. It is clear that we need a legally binding instrument on tracing, which includes marking, record keeping and international cooperation. IANSA will support this measure and push for its adoption.
…[An] EU statement on brokering, which calls for a registry of arms brokers, exchange of information between states and adequate sanctions to ensure effective enforcement of brokering controls.
A number of UN agencies, including UNDP, WHO, UNIFEM and UNIDIR, have made strong statements about the human costs of small arms proliferation, and clearly recognize that this process must be focussed on reducing the damage and destruction on individuals caused by small arms.
…While less than half of all governments—about 80—submitted reports to the conference, this is more than have previously ever done so.
Despite these achievements, a number of challenges remain:
Member states are still far away from achieving global legal standards, which would help keep small arms away from human rights abusers. This is particularly important as delegates and civil society from Africa, the Middle East and Central America, among other regions, are facing crises of armed conflict.
We need greater recognition that domestic laws and international policies are interdependent, and that each country's national laws affect the small arms proliferation problems of its neighbours and even countries in other regions.
We need greater recognition that the legal and the illegal markets for small arms are inter-related, that many illicit transfers start out as legal ones, and that small arms are responsible for deaths and destruction whether they are technically held illegally or not.
The minimal requirement on governments to report to the UN on their small arms activities and efforts is woefully low and must be raised.
Small Arms now Firmly on Global Policy Agendas, Say NGOs, International Action Network on Small Arms, July 11, 2003
You can also find out more about this meeting from the official United Nations web site for this conference.
Various efforts have resulted in codes of conducts and even a call for an Arms Trade Treaty. These are discussed in more depth in the next section on this site.
For more information, the following links are good places to start:
The International Action Network on Small Arms has a lot of links and documentation on small arms issues and is a good place to find out more.
Small Arms, Big Impact has a lot of information, with a lot of tables and statistics.
Small Arms, Wrong Hands from Oxfam examines the role of the UK as a supplier of small arms to zones of conflict.
The Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Trasfers (NISAT) combines the resources and networks of its partner organizations to help block the spread of small arms to areas where they are likely to produce conflict, violence and human rights abuses.
Small Arms Campaign from Human Rights Watch.
Small Arms Survey is an independent research project serving as the principal international source of public information on all aspects of small arms, and as a resource centre for governments, policy makers, researchers, and activists.
Official United Nations web site from the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs
Control Arms is a campaign jointly run by Amnesty International, International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) and Oxfam.
The Illicit Arms Trade is a basic introduction to the issue of small arms/light weapons trafficking and national and international efforts to control it, from the Federation of American Scientists.
Small Arms Survey is an international research organization serving as a principle source of information on all aspects of small arms.
The Arms Trade is Big Business
Military Propaganda for Arms Sales
A Code of Conduct for Arms Sales
Military Aid
Arms Trade Links for more information
See more related articles
<p>Anup Shah, <a href="http://www.globalissues.org/article/78/small-arms-they-cause-90-of-civilian-casualties">Small Arms—they cause 90% of civilian casualties</a>, <cite>Global Issues</cite>, Updated: January 21, 2006</p>
Anup Shah, Small Arms—they cause 90% of civilian casualties, Global Issues , Updated: January 21, 2006
Shah, Anup. "Small Arms—they cause 90% of civilian casualties." Global Issues . 21 Jan. 2006. Web. 21 Jan. 2020. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/78/small-arms-they-cause-90-of-civilian-casualties>.
Last Updated: Saturday, January 21, 2006
Arms Code of Conduct
Hermann Scheer: Big Energy's Last Stand
Document Revision History
January 21, 2006 A couple of additional sources for more information were added as well as a small note on the ease of availability of small arms
December 04, 2005 Added additional information on the impacts and who trades in small arms (remainder is not updated since October 12, 2003)
Alternatives for broken links
Sometimes links to other sites may break beyond my control. Where possible, alternative links are provided to backups or reposted versions here.
Actual Link:
'Small arms are weapons of mass destruction', International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA)http://www.iansa.org/media/wmd.htm
'Small arms, Wrong hands', Oxfam UK, April 23, 1998http://www.oxfam.org.uk/press/releases/smarms.htm
'Light Weapons, Heavy Casualties', America's Defense Monitor, Center for Defense Information (CDI), December 1998http://www.cdi.org/adm/1216/
'Small Arms and Light Weapons', United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs, 2002http://disarmament.un.org/cab/salw.html
'Shattered Lives', Control Arms Campaign, October 2003http://www.controlarms.org/downloads/shattered_lives.htm
Cahal Milmo, 'One death a minute: toll of the booming arms trade', The Independent (UK), October 10, 2003http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?stor...
'Activists Toolkit', IANSAhttp://www.iansa.org/action/toolkit.htm
http://www.controlarms.org/downloads/shattered_lives.htm
This is the actual chapter itself, in PDF formathttp://www.controlarms.org/documents/chapter4_colour.pdf
Thalif Deen, 'UN Chief Seeks Moratorium on Small Arms Traffic', Inter Press Service, March 20, 1998http://www.oneworld.org/ips2/mar98/unarms.html
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?documentid=694&prog...
'United Nations Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and the Programme of Action 7-11 July 2003', International Action Network on Small Arms, July 2003http://www.iansa.org/media/bms.htm
http://www.iansa.org/un/index.htm
'UN Arms Agreement Poorly Implemented', International Action Network on Small Arms, July 7, 2003http://www.iansa.org/media/poa_pr070703.htm
http://www.iansa.org/documents/03poareport/index.htm
'UN Meeting on Small Arms July 7-11: A battle between rich and poor?', ID21, July 3, 2003http://www.id21.org/id21-media/pressjuly0303.html
'Holding up development: The effects of small arms and light weapons in developing countriess' is the actual article by Robbert Muggah, that ID21 was referring tohttp://www.id21.org/id21-media/arms.html

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Joining exhibitions and fairs can do wonders for your business. You can increase chances of onsite sales and also promote your brand in a place where the target audience is already present. But it is not an easy task to do. You may need to do some preparations to ensure the success of your event participation.
The first move that you need to do is to make a research on a couple of things about your upcoming exhibition. Doing some research would make you fully prepared for your upcoming fair event. Do some competitor scan and know what the exhibition is all about. You need to determine if the fair is related to the industry you are in. You may also need to weigh in the pros and cons of joining.
A lot of participants commit the same mistake of joining an exhibition event that is not suitable for them. Joining the wrong one will cost you money and all your efforts will be put to waste.
Once you find the exhibition event to participate in, you can now start meeting prospective exhibitions companies in Dubai to talk about the design of the booth. Be sure to bring in the important details to the meeting like the date and venue of the event, the specs (size, dimension, etc.), pegs and references. You may also list down what you want with the design.
Also, do not forget to discuss the timeline and the cost. It is important that these matters will be discussed upon the initial meeting so you can agree on the terms in the earliest time possible.
Having a rocking booth is not enough, you need a competent staff to man and engage the customers. Be sure that the staff that you will be bringing with you are briefed about the company and the products and services. You may also need to train him on how to handle potential customers and engage booth visitors to make them like the product and increase the chances of buying or subscribing to your services.
Remember that your sales force will be the front liners of the company, so it is a must that you train them well.
Organizing a booth can be overwhelming and you need to mind a lot of things. To ensure that you will not miss a thing, you need to create a checklist. List down everything that you need to do and all the things you need to accomplish it. You can also add a date to ensure that you are guided in terms of the timeline.
Interested in exhibition? Click here and learn more facts and tips.


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Mood: tired, happy, disbelieving
Music: easyInternetCafe background music x2
LIve from easyInternetCafe, it's Nimbus - 2003!
Nimbus - 2003 was superb; I'm really glad I went. I loved it. However, I didn't realise how much I loved it until it was over.
Here's the relatively short version - you're in distinct danger of getting a chronological account at some later date.
The wibbling.
[Location: easyInternetCafe, 234 W 42nd, New York, NY; time: noon Eastern, Tuesday 22nd]
Nimbus - 2003 was pretty stressful for me, though it was probably as close as it could have been to what I ought to have expected in advance. The main problem I had was that I knew I had prepared for the events for which I was responsible but not nearly as thoroughly as I could or should have done. (In a previous friends-only post I had written "Simultaneously I am as well prepared for it as I ever could be and horribly, impossibly under-prepared...") Accordingly, I spent most of my time at the event working on finishing off the Quest and Fandom Sqaures rather than being able to enjoy the programming and other activities. This put me in a strange mood which took an unusually weird and unhelpful turn; I ended up feeling guilty when I wasn't working, when there were other folks busy and I wasn't helping them out. Accordingly, I ended up spending very little time with my suitemates, about which I feel rather sad, and even ended up having a couple of lonely meals forced by temporal considerations. If I had been posting this on (say) Friday night then this would have been really rather a negative post; there were times when everything was getting on top of me and I wanted to cry myself to sleep.
Please don't take this the wrong way, especially the staff and my suitemates. My lifestyle, thought patterns and experience over the con were about 90% by choice. I do know that I could've told people how difficult I was finding things and asked people to help me out. I definitely did do this to some extent (I certainly didn't completely avoid doing so) and certainly thought about doing this to a greater extent, but decided against it purely because it wouldn't've been efficient; it would have been a poor way to waste their time and not particularly more effective than me working on my own. Also, I recognise that the underpreparation was purely my own fault and so it would seem very selfish to force other people to change their behaviour on my behalf to a greater extent than I already did. I already felt very guilty about how much of (effectively chair and deputy chair) Gwen and Amy's time I took up over the duration off the symposium, for instance. They had so much to do that it felt awful to drag their attention onto things which I know I really ought to have done myself before I got here.
I don't say this as a brag or a boast at all; I am ashamed about this and do feel bad. I am not proud of this. I recognise that I let the team down to an extent. It's horrible.
On the other hand, I do recognise that Nimbus was identifiably a little better as a result of the activities I organised. Furthermore, I acknowledge that it's being realistic rather than immodest to suggest that, for some of the things I worked on, there are very few other attendees who might have been able to do a better job than the one I actually did; more to the point, those who might've done these things better didn't actually volunteer to do so. Accordingly, I don't think that on balance I did harm to the event, which is a tremendous relief. However, I know that the things I did were consciously half-assed, anyone could see that they were in defecit to the tune of one buttock, and that I could've done a lot more good than I actually did. This makes me feel bad and makes me feel that I deserve to do so. This is just another of the things that I've gone into in my life with a demi-derrièred attitude and I really need to sort out the process of "how to sort things out". It's a major concern.
On top of this, I was slowly kicking off the tail end of my summer cold, which principally manifested itself by me needing to breathe through my mouth rather than through my nose while I was asleep. Conclusion: SSSSSNORE, SSSSSNORE. Couldn't be helped, but still not a desirable thing for one of your suitemates to do. (I do hope that I didn't pass on my crazy British germs to anyone else to create a wave of post-Nimbus colds like the wave of post-punt!t00bage ones.)
There's also the fact that I just, well, often don't know how to relax, don't feel confident about naturally being able to behave sociably and well and sometimes don't know how to feel comfortable even in the company of people I like, particularly when this only child is sharing a bedroom with other folks. (Again, I had previously written "On top of that, I know that people's lack of confidence and discomfort tends to be infectious to some extent; I hate to think that my discomfort and lack of confidence might spread to other folk and make their Nimbus less fun.") These are the stupidest things not to be comfortable doing, but that's just the way I am. By curious contrast, I found it much easier to get on with the people who I was working alongside than the people who I was relaxing alongside. I can make all the excuses and point to all the extenuating factors I like, but the end result is that I'm really not such an ideal suitemate.
While I believe that I didn't make any major behavioural cock-ups over the week (though I know there were a few smugnesses, unconstructive comments and snide remarks that I really ought to have avoided) I never escaped the feeling that I might have been offending or annoying either co-workers or co-resters in about fifty thousand ways and never knowing quite how I was doing so. People will tend not to tell you this to your face, though we all know, human nature being what it is, that people will tend to say what they really think behind people's backs - and people's real opinions are what matters at the end of the day. I appreciate it when people have the strength to tell me the things which are hard to hear; though it will make me feel bad for a time, in the long term, it's the only way that I'll ever learn the lessons that I know I need to learn.
None of this is anyone's fault but my own; please do not take this as a slight on any of you. It's just my general dissatisfaction with my own state of mind, my own lack of dedication (I never felt that I was on top of things over the year we spent preparing for the event) and my own abilities. I remind you that I really am glad I did go to Nimbus - 2003, despite everything. I hope that you feel that I am being honest in my overall assessment there rather than diplomatic and polite.
Thus concludes the own-personality-dissatisfaction wibbling. All wibbled out now.
The dissing.
I organised and co-organised the Game Room and three specific events. I'm going to try to grade how I felt about them on a A+-to-D-(-or-F) scale.
The Game Room itself featured one PC playing the Sorceror's (sic) Stone and Chamber of Secrets games; we eventually also had a TV delivered to the room, but unfortunately nobody brought a console and a console game to hook up to it. :-( We didn't feature all the licensed board and card games, but we did have a reasonably good selection. The Sorceror's Stone trivia game proved particularly popular. We also had zorac's Fandomopoly down there which attracted attention. (Supposedly someone else brought their own, different, set to the symposium, but I never found out about it.) Still in two minds about whether it should've been down there or not, but we haven't got into trouble about it so far and if we don't get into trouble in the future then I guess we've just about got away with it.
The Game Room was very variable in popularity; for long stretches almost empty, at some points (particularly after Gwen had just plugged it!) extremely busy. Huge credit must go to Sara and Mike who staffed the Game Room for a lot of time, which must've been a very boring job for long stretches. There was a sign-up sheet, but I suspect we ended up landing the two of them with far more hours in there than they had been planning, about which I feel somewhat sad. (Particularly because I ended up spending a lot less time there than I had originally planned to do, due to zipping off and doing Quest things and Fandom Squares things - which, again, I should've got done in advance.) The look of the room wasn't the most attractive; we did feature Mike's amazing Quidditch hoops and Sara's gorgeous Quidditch scoreboard, but it still looked somewhat bland. Perhaps shifting the Quidditch team pennants in there as well might've cheered things up. All told, the Game Room clearly could've been better, the Game Room clearly could've been more welcoming, but what we had was just about satisfactory. Without wanting to dismiss Mike and Sara's excellent efforts, I think perhaps a C would be a reasonable grade to award.
A much more important question is how the Game Room might be better next time. A major flaw was not getting the room opened early enough in the mornings, which was tied up with not organising sufficient manpower well in advance and not taking our "getting things out of the office in the morning" issues sorted out as well as they should've been done. Resolving that issue and getting a wider selection of games would take the grade up to a B. Any further than that would involve a better program of outreach, being more welcoming, offering properly scheduled introductions and so forth.
Fandom Squares... well. Setting this up took rather longer than planned, largely because we had difficulties in getting homestar's excellent software onto the PC we had planned to use for the job. It took about 25 minutes (and $3) to get such a thing as a simple single floppy disk, and even then that was only due to bumping into a business centre employee when the hotel next door's business centre was closed. Accordingly, I didn't have the time I wanted to brief the Squares in the way I'd like and we ended up missing a few important briefing points that would've speeded things up.
homestar's software worked perfectly and the mechanics of the gameplay were fine. In the end, we played four games over an hour, which is fine, but the first three of those games were X-correct/O-wrong/X-correct-for-the-win three-question sprints, so not illustrating the subtleties of which Fandom Squares was capable. By contrast, game four was a ten-or-eleven-question marathon; one person had two parallel threats at one point, but the opponent eventually blocked one and the threatener squandered the other so nothing came of it. Game four had a comical conclusion; the laptop on which we were running the game software popped up a "Warning: Low Battery!" notice over the top of the gameboard, which caused me to take another look at the clock and declare this to be an appropriate point to crown the game a 4-4 time-limit draw.
There was one comical incident in which one contestant (who, shall we say, made a name for herself over the weekend) crowned a pattern of being somewhat less than co-operative towards the progress of the game by refusing to accept one of our answers for which we had named our source. I could get the precise wording wrong here, and this may be a situation where the precise wording is important, but I recall the dialogue going something like
X: I think you should check your source right now!
Me: (imitating her slightly hysterical tone) I think you should kiss my ass!
To be fair, she did then proceed to do just that - or, at least, through my jeans - and then we got on with the rest of the game. I'm a bit ashamed because it was rude, crude and possibly crossing the boundaries of good taste to the point of being a poor reflection on the con and the board, but... hey, it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time and people seemed to get a laugh out of it.
The most important thing about Fandom Squares is that it must be funny - if it's not funny, it's a waste of time. Our Fandom Squares was occasionally funny, but the good laughs were few and far between. Largely, the unscripted, ad-libbed stuff went over pretty well; the scripted material tended to go down like a lead balloon. The biggest flaws were that I wrote wayyyyyyyy too much preamble and chat for each question, so that the jokes were very few and far between. Another big problem - and one that I should've known to do something about - was that we gave off the impression that people were reading their gags off paper instead of appearing to ad-lib them all by having more discreet palm-cards and the like. It all-too-frequently came across as being ponderously slow, unconfident and that we were (sings:) go-ing through the mo-tions. It was particularly annoying that we had some really good gags for some of the Squares which we didn't get round to using, largely because they depended on certain jokes having been told beforehand.
Let's be honest, there was a general consensus opinion of "I'm glad that's over" at the end; we died on our arses, folks, though we did at least keep going throughout. I don't blame the nine Fandom Squares themselves in any way for this. After all, you can only work with the material you're given - and the material I gave you was clearly not up to scratch. If history chooses to recall that the only thing that happened in Fandom Squares was that I told someone to kiss my ass and they actually did so then I think we'll have got away with it, but I have a nasty feeling that people will remember that there were lots of people there who were trying to be funny and failing - and it seldom gets more painful than that. Let's call it a C-. (Fandom Squares, I'm not giving you a C-; I'm giving the overall session a C- and taking the blame for it myself.)
[Location: easyInternetCafe, London Victoria; time: 3:30pm British, Wednesday 23rd]
Now that's a harsh grade, but let's be brutally honest here - some things at Nimbus were better than others, and Fandom Squares was one of those others. It's lousy when someone does something badly and claims they were doing it well after all; let's be completely honest and upfront here and say what people really will be saying to each other about it.
On the other hand, I feel confident that next time I could produce something worth at least a B with a few simple changes. 1) Write much less scripted material. 2) Use palm cards with hint words instead of reading fully pre-prepared answers from sheets. 3) Prepare the Squares much better than they were this time. 4) Keep things going much more quickly. 5) Get each of the Squares a cocktail before the show starts. (Yes, I'm serious here.) To get above a B, it's got to be really funny... and that'll take a little bit of comedy-writing magic. Much more thought required here.
The Quest. Yuck. We had effectively nine parts to the puzzle which went on over the weekend. Two of them were very cool and went as planned. Seven of them were cool in principle but their execution was significantly flawed. The major problem was that we were just behind the pace - we didn't have things prepared properly in time. Having cool stunts and puzzles (and we certainly did!) is all very well but you've got to execute them properly so that people can enjoy them to their full potential. We didn't.
We also had problems in terms of numbers of participants; many teams started, but the numbers dwindled over the weekend and only four teams completed the course. Starting with what was in practice one of the harder puzzles was a flaw which really should've been avoided. We can't really take much credit for some of the cool later puzzles and stunts when most people didn't get to see what they were.
Overall, the Quest gets a D+, largely because the playtesting was evidently vastly insufficient. If I had been a participant then I know I would've been far more frustrated by the timing glitches and screw-ups than I would've enjoyed the cool parts. Clearly the weakest Quest or Hunt of the three that I have run to date, so I feel competent to judge when things work well or badly and knowing just how badly this went.
Along the same lines, I have (co-)run what could reasonably be described as a B+ hunt in the past. If we had got everything in this Quest together and available in time as originally planned, this would definitely have been at least a B or a B+ hunt; as it stood, it was no better than "nice try but...". Again, I take the blame for not getting my act together in time and getting far more material in the right place at the right time in advance. It was my fault. This was particularly frustrating because it could so easily have been so much better if I had been doing my job properly.
Quidditch was incredibly cool. We had some remarkably nifty Quidditch hoops. We had a hugely smart Quidditch scoreboard. We had people commentating on the games like Lee Jordan. We had the most amazing-looking team banners, plus people shouting on their favourite team with hand-held pennants. People got really into it. This was a good thing.
[Location: notquiteaneasyInternetCafe, Chris' bedroom in Middlesbrough; time: 1am British, Thursday 24th]
However, it had lots of problems: it was very slow to begin with at the start, people had difficulty following the action (for instance, small details like "which teams the players were on"), there were long gaps between the games, the discovered-fake-Snitches aspect added a vast amount of interruptions and downtime... heck, I'm not sure that the Snitch aspect of things worked at all well. The Bludger aspect of the game definitely didn't work particularly well. At the risk of blasphemy, Quidditch is frankly not that good a game in the first place as games go (yes, we did have someone complain about the overvalued 150-point Snitch, and rightfully so) and difficult to bring to Muggle life. However, we can go through the parts of our adaptation of the game one by one and tweak them by way of improvement for future use.
Quidditch attracted far more compliments than any of the other things that I was involved with, but frankly it was so visual and so outlandish a concept that it would still have been popular if we had only had two balls and five players per side. If you add together points for the immense, ridiculous cool and deduct points for the problems, I think a grade of B is not unreasonable. There were possibly 150-300 from a symposium of 600 in attendance for the first game (aside: does this count towards my "Watch 50 sports at the top level" ambition?) but this number dropped over time; after all, you'd have to be a real fan to watch four games of it in a row.
The really exciting thing about Quidditch is that the ways to improve it are pretty obvious. I think next time a genuinely A-grade Quidditch session is well within our reach.
First of all, if at all possible, we try to split the Quidditch session in two; it would be far better to have the qualifying matches before an extended break and the big Grand Final after the break, thus making sure that the players are all fresh for the Grand Final and that we can have lots of instruction and gubbins when there are only a few people watching the qualifying matches rather than lots of people watching the Grand Final. Then when it comes to the final we can bring the fans in and get right down to the action without the extended preliminaries - show people one really good game of Quidditch and then get them out.
Second, I've got a convincing-looking theory about the Snitches. We still have Snitch-movers about the field carrying many (I now think a value for "many" of 12-16 looks right) Snitches, all but one of which are decoy. However, we don't stop the game for the grabbing of a decoy Snitch - we simply remove the decoy Snitch from the field of play and continue play. Once you know there are, say, 8 or 10 decoy Snitches off the pitch already, you know that the end of the game is pretty imminent, which ramps up the tension - yet there's always the possibility that the real Snitch could be the next one caught, right from the very start.
Third, Quidditch is always going to be so popular that we can afford to put a fairly serious barrier to entry in the way of potential players and we still won't have difficulty in filling the line-up. If we were to get every potential tournament team to pre-register and plunk down, say, $140 in advance in return for seven co-ordinated Quidditch jerseys (emblazoned with team logos, player names and so on) then following the game would be considerably easier and it would look incredibly spiffy. Admittedly there's always the possibility that your team will lose in 3'02" (as happened in the grand final) but at least you will have some very nifty shirts as a souvenir. I definitely want to keep the possibility of open-access pick-up Quidditch if at all possible, but taking the tournament to another level of dedication seems to be the logical progression.
Inevitably the Quidditch got a lot of the media attention. I, as token male Brit who has travelled 4,500 miles to get there (footprint distance - about 3,500 miles as the crow flies), got rather more mentions than I deserved; some of the press picked out my details from the programme so that the world can go "Here, what's this Oxford maths grad doing going on holiday to run Quidditch?". There were frequently enough of my personal details quoted to make me very recognisable, more so than I'd have liked. Meh; it's a risk of the profession.
The comical thing is that one Roger Highfield, who is Science Editor of the Daily Telegraph and so should know better even more than I should was present to give a talk and to plug his latest book, yet ended up playing on one of the teams. His turned out to be the winning team, thus giving him something to write about in his article that he really hadn't expected. He slightly muffed the punchline of the story, though; he didn't point out that his team's seeker in the Grand Final caught the Golden Snitch even faster than Harry Potter ever did, which is why his story had such a fairytale ending.
I really enjoyed being the Quidditch MC, doing the introductions and so on, though my attempt to commentate on the Grand Final proved abortive; live sports commentary is hard. There was one instance when I was momentarily (but possibly visibly) ticked off, when one of the commentators said "Let's get ready to rumble!" for four reasons: (a) I wanted to be the one to say it, (b) you save the Buffer for the main event, not the opening match, (c) there are probably legal implications involved with stealing the Buffer catchphrase so I had planned to change the final two words to "for Quidditch" and (d) by far the most irritating crime was that he didn't get nearly enough hang time on the "lllllllet's" or the "rrrrrrrrready". Le sulk.
So, all told, we have a B, a C, a C- and a D+; I think that that works out as an average of a C. Not bad as such, but definitely a lot of room for improvement and things which should have been done rather better with proper preparation. By comparison, I don't think many people would argue that the convention wasn't deserving of an A or at least an A-; by no means perfect (that's what the theoretical A+ is for) but it did so many things right that it's worthy of the highest accolades. gwendolyngrace should henceforth be referred to as Hobby Ghoddess gwendolyngrace, treated as Guest of Honour at the next Nimbus and so on and so forth. Fangirl this woman forthwith for she deserves it.
Hmm. Should we have been grading all these sessions on the OWL letter scale? I suppose I could say that my efforts were worthy of an A in that case - just that it's an A for Acceptable rather than a superior E for Exceeds Expectations or an ideal O for Oustanding...
The good stuff: the people!
The people at Nimbus - 2003 were incredibly lovely. I won't name LJ usernames because I'll be bound to forget someone really nice and cause offence, but I have very happy memories of:
two ladies who I have met before and whose company I always enjoy extremely much,
a number of ladies who I hadn't met before but who turned out to be extremely sweet, patient, supportive and very, very funny,
a number of ladies who I was really looking forward to meeting and who lived up to my highest hopes just through the strength of their delightful personalities which were everything I was looking forward to, even though they were rather distracted at times for the most understandable of reasons,
a number of people - not all at Nimbus! - who I was really looking forward to meeting for the first time and who turned out to be charming and tremendous company,
a suiteful of folk with whom it was really fun to share a room and share resting time,
a staffful and a boardful of officials who did a phenomenal job (many of whom are incredibly sweet) and with whom it is an honour to have been associated,
a New Yorkful of extremely fun folk, all far more hip than I could ever be, with whom it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon bathing in reflected coolness and general niftitude...
scads of people who I had very little or no concept of in advance but whom it was a tremendous pleasure to meet.
I think that covers everyone, some people more than once. Hopefully you all recognise yourselves. I'm very sorry that I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with you as I'd like to have done. (There were at least a couple of prominent fan writers who I'd dearly liked to have got to meet, but, alas, they didn't make it themselves.) Next time we'll have to make Nimbus much longer just for increased hanging out opportunities - or maybe that's what t00bage-style events are for?
All of a sudden, the end of the event came on Saturday lunchtime, the days having merged into one another and having rolled through far too quickly. The end of the auction was a tremendous climax, Hobby Ghoddess gwendolyngrace was crying tears of happiness and I was involuntarily driven to the same tears-of-happiness motions during the highly deserved standing o without liquid actually coming out. One trip up to Sanford to return art gallery stands later, only then did the magnitude of the convention's accomplishments fully dawn on me. The best bit was definitely the reflection once it was all over and the senses of longing and nostalgia that were built up so quickly.
This was compounded by a trip to the pool alongside tall_man and queerasjohn. The Swan has the most wonderful pools; one or two laned lap pools, a children's pool and a long, twisting grotto pool, accompanied by about three hot tubs. The grotto itself had a water slide (short, but in posession of a very good fun/distance ratio) and a waterfall. Water flowed over the fall at quite some rate and then fell some way into the pool below. There was some argument over how far the fall was, but I estimate it at about five metres or so. Certainly this was enough that when you lean forward underneath the point of contact, it gives you an extremely effective massage at the intensity level of your choice, falling with a remarkably high force if you know where to stand. As tall_man appropriately put it, it gave you "a real pounding". The pattern was obvious: take a gorgeous beating from the water, go and relax in the hot tub, slide down the slide a couple of times for fun. Repeat ad lib or until you run out of time. With the context of our past achievements, discovering just how much fun the pool could be was the single highlight of the trip.
So, yes, lots of reasons to be wibbly, disconcerted and dissatisfied with my own considerable shortcomings. However, none of them really matter very much in comparison to the extent to which the whole symposium was a tremendously positive experience, enjoyed in ideal company. Fine, fine memories indeed.
[Location: stillnotreallyaneasyInternetCafe, Chris' bedroom in Middlesbrough; time: 1pm British, Thursday 24th. Final edits.]
I've just added pots and pots of Nimbological folk to my Friends list, particularly those who I met for the first time and liked very much indeed. Hello and I hope you don't mind! The usual disclaimer applies that I don't read all the journals on my Friends list all the time (filters, filters, filters!) but I certainly met a lot of people who I would like to get to know rather better. :-)


Single-cell RNA-seq gives access to gene expression measurements for thousands of cells, allowing discovery and characterization of cell types. However, the data is noise-prone due to experimental errors and cell type-specific biases. Current computational approaches for analyzing single-cell data involve a global normalization step which introduces incorrect biases and spurious noise and does not resolve missing data (dropouts). This can lead to misleading conclusions in downstream analyses. Moreover, a single normalization removes important cell type-specific information. We propose a data-driven model, BISCUIT, that iteratively normalizes and clusters cells, thereby separating noise from interesting biological signals. BISCUIT is a Bayesian probabilistic model that learns cell-specific parameters to intelligently drive normalization. This approach displays superior performance to global normalization followed by clustering in both synthetic and real single-cell data compared with previous methods, and allows easy interpretation and recovery of the underlying structure and cell types.


text:
Q: What are the security risks/vulnerabilities every C programmer must be aware of? There are many security risks coming from having close contact to the hardware as opposed to using well-tested and proved APIs from high level programming languages. It is much easier to cause a buffer overflow in C than in a language such as Java.
What are the risks or vulnerabilities (e.g. buffer overflows) that every C programmer should be aware of (I.E. vulnerabilities relevant to C programmers)? What problems could these lead to? How to avoid them, and what are common mistakes causing these to occur in programs?

A: Some of the C-specific risks include: buffer overflows, formatting string attacks and integer overflows.

A: Here is an easy to miss risk that can cause problems which will take hours to fix.
Consider the following code, which will compile with no problems.
if(lpstr_current_state = CONST_EMERGENCY_STATE_HOLY_CRAP)
{
    do_warn_joint_chiefs_of_staff_of_nuclear_attack();
}

When you check to see if lpstr_current_state is in CONST_EMERGENCY_STATE_HOLY_CRAP you're actually assigning.  It is better to always put the constant variable on the left.  When you put the constant on the left, then the compiler will fail because you can't assign a value to a variable.
if(CONST_EMERGENCY_STATE_HOLY_CRAP = lpstr_current_state)
{
    do_warn_joint_chiefs_of_staff_of_nuclear_attack();
}

Then you can easily say to yourself, "Holy crap, that could have been bad", while fixing the code to read ...
if(CONST_EMERGENCY_STATE_HOLY_CRAP == lpstr_current_state)
{
    do_warn_joint_chiefs_of_staff_of_nuclear_attack();
}

A: Buffer overflows are a big one.  Nothing in C is range-checked by default, so it's very easy to overwrite a buffer.  There's a standard library function, gets(), that cannot be stopped from overflowing the buffer, and should almost never be used.
There are some implementation-level techniques to hinder exploitation, such as scrambling heap blocks, but that won't stop buffer overflows in local buffers, which can often do interesting things like change the address a function will return to.
There is no good general solution in C.  Many library functions have versions that will limit the amount they will write. although calculating that can be clumsy.  There's software that can detect heap buffer overflows in test, as long as the appropriate test is run, and stack overflow will often show up as a crash in testing.  Other than that, it's a matter of careful coding and code review.
A related issue is the problem of writing into a buffer too small by one character, forgetting that a C string that's n characters long requires n+1 characters in memory, because of the '\0' terminator.  If the attacker can manage to store a string without the terminator, any C function expecting a string will continue processing until it hits a zero byte, which could result in copying or outputting more information than is desired (or hitting protected memory for a DOS attack).  The solution, again, is awareness, care, and code reviews.
There's another risk with the printf() family.  If you ever write char * str; ... printf(str);, you're setting yourself up for problems if str contains a '%' when printed.  The %n format directive allows printf() to write into memory.  The solution is printf("%s", str); or puts(str);.  (Also, use the C99 snprintf() instead of sprintf().)
Using unsigned integers, particularly as loop indexes, can cause problems.  If you assign a small negative value to an unsigned, you get a large positive value.  That can undermine things like processing only N instances of something, or in limited functions like strncpy().  Examine all unsigned integers.  You might want to avoid unsigned short, since a large value in one of those will convert to a large positive value in an int.
Don't forget that a character constant, in C, is actually an int.  Writing something like char c; while((c = getchar()) != EOF) ... can easily fail, since EOF won't be representable in a char.
There's a lot more characteristic C mistakes I can think of, but these could cause security problems.

A: There is just one security risk: The fact that there are people outside who will do their best to catch any vulnerability in your software and to exploit it for their own gain. Everything else follows from there.
So when you think "nobody in their right mind would ... ", then you need to think immediately "except someone who wants to hack into other people's computers would do exactly that".
The biggest consequence is that whenever you react to events outside (for example, by processing data delivered from the outside), you must assume that this data was under control of your worst enemy.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


February 27, 2014 • If there's ever a stereotypical bunch of contenders for the Best Original Score Oscar, the class of 2014 definitely isn't it. Meet them — and see the haunting short that's a companion to Gravity.
February 24, 2014 • You've heard "Let It Go" sung by Tony Award-winning soprano Idina Menzel. But what if you wanted to hear the Frozen anthem in Cantonese, Portuguese, French, Japanese, German or Russian?
February 23, 2014 • Maria Von Trapp, the last of the seven-member Trapp Family Singers that inspired the play and film, died on Tuesday at her home in Vermont.
February 21, 2014 • "Radioactive," by Imagine Dragons, just set a chart record for the longest run on Billboard's Hot 100. It's just one of a few songs on the charts showing the influence of religious themes.
February 20, 2014 • When even the biggest stars in the world are relying on extramusical gimmicks to hype new albums, what's an unknown rapper supposed to do to get noticed? Maybe fake a profile in the paper of record?
February 19, 2014 • What does the champion ice dancer do after winning gold in Sochi? Play Vivaldi on the violin, of course.
February 18, 2014 • With so much pressure on schools to improve test scores, music and the arts sometimes fall off the list of priorities. That's led advocates for music education to point out its benefits in the classroom.
February 18, 2014 • The super-sized leading light of the new dance mainstream thrives at throwing the kind of one-off party that even a well-dressed, friendly audience in a regular-sized club can enjoy.
February 18, 2014 • On Sunday, the London Philharmonic debuted a new piece of music based on Roald Dahl's Dirty Beasts. With Matilda playing to sold-out crowds on Broadway and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory running in London's West End, this is just the latest work by the author to get a musical soundtrack.


Japanese people love doing everything they possibly can to abbreviate and contract their language. While I suppose you could argue the same thing about any language, I think that Japanese take it to a new extreme (like they often have a tendency to do with everything . . .) I'd go even as far as to call it a 略フェチ (ryaku-fechi, abbreviation fetish)?
So to keep this website in line with this Japanese tradition, I've decided to try something new. Japanese Level Up will now be abbreviated to JALUP. It rhymes with scallop and gallop, two words which have their merits. Expect to start seeing usage of this beautiful abbreviation in new posts to come.
To actually give meaning to this, I've purchased the domain name for JALUP.com, so you can now access the normal site by typing that in instead. This should be easier to input with its minor 5 letters as opposed to the long treacherous fifteen. Your enjoyment of the site may go up (or is that down…?) by 3x. And if you are wondering why I didn't go with JLU.com, I think every 3 letter domain name was bought up by smart internet bubble guys 15 years ago and now have hefty sale prices of around $20,000. So JALUP.com works just fine. And who knows, maybe one day JAL (Japan Airlines) will have a huge economic recovery and want to purchase my domain name from me for $50,000?
– Everything becomes shorter (novel idea. . .) meaning you have less to remember.
– The pronunciation is easier. This matters when you confront those painful and difficult to pronounce katakana loan words. Trust me, no one wants to have to say マクドナルド (makudonarudo, McDonald's) when マク (maku) exists.
– It takes away those unfathomably long kanji compounds that just seem to travel on forever. I'm talking about the 10-20 kanji strung together in a row for one long organization name, department, or technical term (e.g. 経済部投資審議委員会第一組).
– Japanese is a constantly changing language and you will keep up to pace with the rapid transition.
– Katakana loan words, which we as foreigners with native English should be absolute pros at, will often stumble because contractions of these words turn them into unrecognizable Frankenstein-like creations.
– If kanji is the key to gaining the best grasp of Japanese possible, what happens when you are constantly changing the shape of that key. Many abbreviations are long kanji phrases cut short by removing some of the middle kanji. Sometimes the remaining kanji are enough to easily understand the meaning, but other times it can be a complete and utter mess.
– They make listening to Japanese more difficult than it should be. What you study in textbooks, school, and even many native forms of media is often in a fairly proper form of the language. However, real live speaking and writing abbreviates and contracts the language more than you can imagine. This makes the progression from regular reading and listening practice to real life situations take that much longer. Many people face the dreaded fate of finally going from Japanese listening material to conversations and everything is so blurred together you wonder what language you are actually listening to.
Just like you need to get used to all the English loan words in the Japanese, you will just need to get used to the massive amount of abbreviations and shortening of words. And the only way to do this, which I've reinforced on too many posts to keep count, is to just keep listening, more and more. The more you know the proper language in its original form listening, the more your mind will make conclusions and deductions on how that original form is being abbreviated. While it will be helpful to hear these contracted conversations as well, you can still get plenty of practice from everything else. Think of it as a mini-game of trying to fill in the missing pieces of a conversation.
And who knows, maybe one day JAL (Japan Airlines) will have a huge economic recovery and want to purchase my domain name from me for $50,000?