He headed off to see Zanjaras! Hopefully he wouldn't be directly in the middle of the Violet Bier of Sorrows.
As it turned out, tracing him passed through that particular bureau and ended deep beneath the Charnel Yards. That could be awkward – but at least he didn't have to poke around inside the Bureau itself. Still, a few extra wards against necromancy and such might be in order before he started any serious probing.
There was indeed an embassy from (to?) The Underworld there… one that none of the gods who were puttering about and maintaining the tombs of late mortals and animal companions could remember the construction of. It was a magnificent spire of obsidian, basalt, and starmetal, located at the geomantic center of the yards. Ribbons of some bandage-like material fluttered from its tip – and the trace led… straight down under it. Even the sound of his own footsteps was dulled… He'd heard that this silencing also existed within the walls of the Violet Bier of Sorrows.
He dropped a probe down and tried to say hello!
The probe dipped beneath that silence, feeling heavier than usual as it descend – and Charles did the occult equivalent of feeding it through a winch, just in case it got TOO heavy. There was a "thud" (or at least the sensation thereof), and a vibration that felt somehow similar to that of a funerary bell's ring (not that Charles had ever heard such a thing). Then the probe hurtled back up – or, at least, a rather similar-looking essence-construct hurtled back up… If that was the probe, then something had probably changed it a good deal!
Charles made sure that everyone was shielded against necromancy, negative energies, death magics, etc, etc, etc – and the "probe" detonated in a blast of Lethe-energies that felt… oddly comforting. It would be bothersome to any ghosts who wanted to continue being ghosts of course – and, without the shielding, laced with an effect that erased the memory of the past few hours, and of this being anything but an embassy in particular. Fortunately, there weren't any ghosts around… And it was… a fairly potent primordial shaping effect with a blast of… negative mental energy thrown in? Huh! THAT was weird! An… environmental effect that would cause a few moments of blankness and a loss of recent memories – and would bypass quite a few of the usual defenses – albeit not simple resistance. Still, the privacy manse covered mental backup, and he had plenty of other mental defenses and shaping defenses – and so did his (mostly for show) "bodyguards".
There was a slow descent yet again, a thud – and this time, a silent response: words in a cramped and ragged hand that formed in his head .
Hm! That seemed… vaguely familiar! Charles had to wonder if he/she did hot chocolate?
And there was some mental working of Charles's name into the form of Old Realm he was using.
Aden got a ping, which naturally flowed into the underworld communication Manse. It… offered all the ghosts there a smooth transition into Lethe. Some went with it, and quietly faded away. The manse was a nice place, and it was almost like being alive – but after a time that "almost" could become quite bittersweet.
Back in the Charnel Yards… A light breeze flared up, and caught the bandage-banners on the embassy.
That called for the updated powers-of-ten video again.
Hm. Simply making distance and the loss of the original links irrelevant was not exactly what Charles had had in mind – but evidently Zanjaras didn't WANT to be replaced… He really had tried hard to save Mardukth, even knowing he was likely to fail.
Well… it would do as a stopgap. It wouldn't make Creation entirely independent (although he might be able to figure out how to do that later) – but Charles suspected that Zanjaras either didn't want to or couldn't reveal too many details about Lethe. It was probably highly classified!
He did admit that making sure that the souls didn't wander off into the Wyld was one of the hardest things to do.
Charles thanked him – and moved on to Fayuandi! That… led deep down beneath the underground – close to where he'd encountered Xiang and her experiments with Unshaped.
The region was… a large cavern made of pure, almost flowing adamant, with a hundred human-shaped indentations in the ground. The air crackled with Essence – that of Yu-Shan and Autochthon's devas. As he spoke… the ground at his feet suddenly stopped flowing.
He got the sense that Xiang had been… annoyingly so.
Hm… Making humans? I would have thought that they'd just shape them!
Once again, he started providing the details as requested.
Charles… checked the details with the help of his own geomancy specialist… It looked like he could just link Dudael up with an avatar generation Manse, let Za'el know it was there… and Zael would be able to take control of Dudael more than he can now, since he'll automatically be attuned. That was easy! All it would take is another manse!
Hm… God-generation inputs should be relatively easy to handle; manses were good at generating and altering god-equivalents. Hm… it looked like Fayuandi was also involved in attaching new domains, although he didn't play a major role in it. He made sure that new domains made at least SOME sense.
There was more Wyld influence on that than Fayuandi would like – Fayuandi blamed Xiang!
There wasn't much room for compromise between "I want more chaos" and "I want less chaos".
Charles got out of the middle of THAT and headed for Gaofeng – another big spot of adamant, this one at the very pinnacle of the Sky Dome.
Meanwhile, not all that far away in Yu-Shan… A colossal (if, at the moment, of mere airplane size) moth was heading for a visit. At least some of the Deva's of Yu-Shan were interested in Wyld things and know about the Exalted. Perhaps Creation could FINALLY be made NOT harmful to Raksha if they could convince Yu-Shan's Devas that the two could coexist in the same body – or at least convince Yu-Shan to let them in with no need for sneaking.
Xiang… found a vastly powerful mix of essences above him – something quite exotic, wyld, and Solar… and a powerful probe was being sent her way! Attempting to make contact!
It was getting harder and harder for her to stay down, knowing that Aden was at work trying to fix things. She knew that Dumenza would complain if she answered – but he was the subordinate Deva of their pole.
It was Jurassic Park time!
She liked books, even if they weren't very interesting on the outside! Hmm… Must make changeable books when she gets free… Perhaps one of the captured raksha will take it on in one of these Assumptions?
Yu-Shan would be very interested in this, she knew!
Well, it would certainly be interesting to get to see such an ancient installation – and it wasn't as if even a Deva would be likely to be able to able to entrap an indestructible Kaiju Manse with a Solar pilot with perfect defenses to apply to it – and a crew of Raksha to provide backup. Mothra headed on in!
Xiang let them in just as far as she did Charles, since this is quite fascinating and they had clearly bypassed Dumenza already.
Xiang… was impressed! As humans were now… they could conceivably storm Yu-Shan and take over. Like all Yu-Shan's Devas, Xiang was no lover of the Incarnae and the Occupation – but such power… in the hands of HUMANS… who would have ever thought? And what all that extra power had been doing to the games of divinity was hard to say! The Calibration Gate was a formidable defender of Heaven to be sure, but he had always had too high an opinion of his own abilities. At least the defeat of the other Primordials had put a damper on it… Still, she might just have to impress on him that humanity as a whole had power these days – unless there was something she was missing. Raksha were tricky!
Although… in this case the truth served their purposes quite well. Of course, stopping calcification would probably require multiple Primordials working together… still, Yu-Shan would be a good start!
And Mothra went off to cause trouble elsewhere… It was time to start stirring up the humans – and pointing all that chaos at Toho Studios might be amusing too… Perhaps a crazy intercontinental flight-Los Angeles to Tokyo?


text:
Kazimierz Koniński (ur. 23 października 1896 w Gródku Jagiellońskim, zm. 10 września 1919 nad Dryssą) – żołnierz Legionów Polskich, oficer Wojska Polskiego w II Rzeczypospolitej, kawaler Orderu Virtuti Militari.

Życiorys
Urodził się w rodzinie Karola i Michaliny ze Skrzeszewskich. Absolwent gimnazjum w Krakowie, student filozofii na Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim. W sierpniu 1914 wstąpił do Legionów Polskich. Początkowo służył w 2 pułku piechoty, a następnie w 4 pułku piechoty. Skierowany do szkoły podchorążych w Opawie ukończył ją w marcu 1918.

W listopadzie 1918 wstąpił do odrodzonego Wojska Polskiego, a w grudniu mianowany został podporucznikiem. Bronił przed Ukraińcami Lwowa i Małopolski Wschodniej. W składzie 5 pułku piechoty Legionów walczył na frontach wojny polsko bolszewickiej. Zginął podczas ataku nad Dryssa, prowadząc swój pluton na bolszewickie okopy. Za czyn ten został odznaczony Krzyżem Srebrnym Orderu Virtuti Militari.

Ordery i odznaczenia
 Krzyż Srebrny Orderu Virtuti Militari (nr 7972)
 Krzyż Niepodległości – pośmiertnie 17 marca 1938 roku "za pracę w dziele odzyskania niepodległości"

Przypisy

Bibliografia

Ludzie urodzeni w Gródku (obwód lwowski)
Odznaczeni Krzyżem Srebrnym Orderu Virtuti Militari (II Rzeczpospolita)
Odznaczeni Krzyżem Niepodległości
Podporucznicy piechoty II Rzeczypospolitej
Polegli w wojnie polsko-bolszewickiej (strona polska)
Uczestnicy wojny polsko-ukraińskiej (strona polska)
Żołnierze Legionów Polskich 1914–1918 (Austro-Węgry)
Urodzeni w 1896
Zmarli w 1919
Oficerowie 5 Pułku Piechoty Legionów

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


A fine bottle of Champagne must be enjoyed with the stunning Gilded Age His & Hers Robes. Luxurious silk and French Jean Bracq lace make up this beautiful pair. The men's robe features pure silk, satin stripes, a breast pocket, two side pockets, and a shawl collar. A classic design fit for a king. While the queen adorns herself in intricate gold lace flowers and a silk sash.


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About Intercom
What we learned about product and design in 2018
Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Intercom
@destraynor
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As we've done in past years, I sat down with Paul Adams (VP of Product) and Emmet Connolly (Director of Product Design) to reflect on the things we've learned in the last 12 months.
Our conversation comes from the value we have at Intercom to continuously share the lessons we're learning about growing our product and our team.
Short on time? Here are five quick takeaways:
As our pace of shipping increases, it's important to take the time to understand the difference between output and outcome. Are people using the things you shipped?
As your team grows, invest in operations and design systems that will help you scale efficiently. You'll know they're effective if over time you have the absence of things slowing you down.
Don't ignore the voice of your unmet customer — the prospective customer who didn't become a user because of a product shortcoming. We built a process with the Sales team called "Problems To Be Solved" to capture this feedback.
The best product strategy is one where new features build upon previous launches to provide compounding value for the user. Case in point: our new Messenger, bots and App Store all work together to help businesses connect with their customers in new ways.
Hiring in the new year? Look for product managers who are open and collaborative instead of godlike. Think about the shape of your team and the gaps that you want to fill. Find people who understand it's a team sport.
If you enjoy our conversation, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes, stream on Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode.
Des Traynor: Welcome to the Inside Intercom podcast. I'm joined today by our VP of Product, Mr. Paul Adams.
Paul Adams: Hello. Nice to be here.
Des: And our Director of Product Design, Mr. Emmet Connolly.
Emmet Connolly: Happy 2019, lads.
Des: We're going to look back on last year, and we'll talk specifically about running the product org at the scale we're at today, in the hopes that our listeners can learn something from this. That's not to say that we have all the answers, but we certainly have a good list of questions at this point. How big is the R&D org today, Paul?
Paul: In total, we are over 200.
Des: And what's the breakdown there? About how many designers do we have?
Emmet: Seventeen product designers and three content designers.
Des: And then how big is the product org? If you add in all the PMs and all that, how does it break down?
Paul: We have product and engineering – which we call R&D – but it's a product and engineering org. And product is made up of design, product management, research and content design. It's about 50 people, and the rest are engineers, basically.
Des: And that covers, of course, not just product engineers, but everyone working on foundations, security, stability, infrastructure – you name it. We grew by nearly 100 people last year, so I'd say that's a significant lift. Nearly 50% growth. I presume everything worked smoothly.
Paul: Very easy, yeah. Just happened by itself.
Output vs. outcome
Des: In your eyes, have things slowed down at all? What's worked? What's broken?
Paul: It's an interesting question. We're being more thoughtful about different things, more deliberate. But shipping hasn't slowed. In fact, I think it's increased in pace, even when you take in to account all the additional people we have – which is actually something we're pretty proud of. Intercom has always held near and dear our ability to ship, and the thing that I've always kind of reacted against over the years is inefficiency. I think this obsession with efficiency comes from the startup days when being wasteful was a debt.
Des: I remember you were probably – without commenting too much on your former employer – somewhat scarred by previous teams where there was inefficiency or where projects got canned or whatever. Without mentioning specific logos, wouldn't it begin with an "F" or a "G"?
Paul: Yeah, companies that begin with "G." Most of my career, pre-Intercom, I worked on things that never shipped. I worked on products for more than a year that were then cancelled. When that happens to you a lot, you get burned, and you've deep scars that probably going to remain for life. I'm sure Emmet's got a few of those from the big "G" days too. So, I think we've always had this obsession that has continued to this day, and this year has been really good on that front. We've managed to ship a phenomenal amount of things, to our level and quality. We have an obsession with scaling process and efficiency and just being able to have something that people can understand that works.
That's very customer-centered, which means two things: new people can join the company and slot right in. They know what to do quickly, and so if they're an engineer, they're shipping code very fast. It also means things have a very low risk of failing. We think a lot about what we build, and we spend a lot of time on research and problem identification and prioritization, so the things we do end up building are solving problems our customers actually have.
Des: I have to push on this: has it all been one-way traffic? One doesn't simply grow by nearly 50% and not have a few fuck-ups along the way.
Paul: There are different ways to think about that. Something we've talked about internally this year — and a topic that has been talked about externally — is the difference between output and outcome.
"There is often a question: are people using things we shipped? Let's be honest with that"
We've shipped so much this year that I actually don't know how many things we've shipped. I think it's more than 140 user-facing changes, ranging from the lowest level of making a feature better all the way up to brand new products. And we've shipped multiple brand new products this year.
But we have talked about the difference between output and outcome, and certainly if we were to critique ourselves, it hasn't been all plain sailing. There is often a question: are people using things we shipped? Let's be honest with that. We have this very important principle here about shipping to learn, not ship and forget. You know, it's been a challenge to hold ourselves accountable to that because of the pace at which we work.
Investing in operations and design systems
Des: So in theory, 140 features or user-facing changes would mean 140 postmortems and 140 new roadmaps for all these things we've just released into the world. Emmet, how has your area of design grown substantially to match all of this? What have been the choke points or the things that worked?
Emmet: As you were talking, Paul, I was thinking about a chat I had recently with a well-respected design team at another company…
Des: Was it Google?
Emmet: It wasn't Google. I said well-respected. That's a joke for all my old friends.
Des: Haha, jokes.
Emmet: This person described to me a situation where a team was given huge latitude to invent what they wanted to work on. They would come in and drive their own projects for sixth months, only to have the CEO shit-can it a week before it was ready to launch. What that eventually leads to is a high degree of turnover. Because that really only needs to happen to you a couple of times for you to hit the point where you've been in your job a year and not shipped a single thing.
There's not a lot of flash in our approach. And a lot of the stuff within an environment like that has kind of been operational. We've had a lot to focus on quality and product strategy and all that kind of stuff. But really the scaling challenges have been around some of the operational stuff, so we really went quite heavy into design ops, which is a bit of a buzzword, I suppose. But often it's about taking those buzzwords and asking, "What does this mean for our company at our scale?"
"Things like design ops and design systems are a bit trickier because they are really successful if you have the absence of things slowing you down"
To define design ops, it's really just a process by which you improve the operations of how you do basic things like design crits and design process and so on. It's a structure whereby the people and the teams can bubble up the problems they're hitting on a daily basis. We really treat our process like a product that we iterate on constantly. So we get to use our designer brains, not just to iterate on the product we're building, but how we do it.
Des: I feel like amongst our listeners, a lot of people are fighting for budget for design ops and being told they don't know what the hell this is. Can you give me an example of a tangible output from having design ops that people could expect and be rewarded for?
Emmet: So, it's a tough one. Design systems falls into the same camp in that it's hard to point directly to a dollar value they create. As you scale, you orient your team toward demonstrating some kind of value for the work you do and justifying where you spend your energy. Things like design ops and design systems are a bit trickier because they are really successful if you have the absence of things slowing you down. It's still hard to measure, but a signifier of these things starting to work are when you realize that a lot of those annoying project resets we used to have – or those cases where we get far into something and have to ditch a bunch of work – start to go away. A lot of the stress or uncertainty for people who are actually working on projects starts to dissipate as well because they're just better set up. So, it's really oriented around quality and speed and the absence of those things not being there.
Des: That makes sense. Paul, do you have a question?
"Operations is actually the thing we've always been a little bit obsessed about"
Paul: I was going to add one other thing, and it's going back to your original question. One big difference is that we now have substantial product and engineering offices in Dublin, where we've always been based. But now we're also in London and in San Francisco. So, we have three. We just made this global team, so Emmet and I and other leaders have to really think about how do we continue to ship and grow and be successful in a world where we have people who are not even in the same time zone as we are. They're asleep when we're awake and vice versa. And operations, like design ops, is really cool in 2018 – as is research ops and product management ops, which will be coming next year.
Des: And VP of Product Ops.
Paul: Yeah, can't wait for that.
When you think about it, operations is actually the thing we've always been a little bit obsessed about. You know, program management falls into this category, too. This time last year, we were talking about how program management had really changed Intercom for the better in this regard. And we've continued to invest in that too. When it's properly understood, this whole idea of operations results in a world in which people are way less frustrated with, like Emmet said, things not shipping, course corrections, not knowing who to talk to. Maybe a year ago, people would wonder, "When should I be involved?" Now they don't.
Des: And you probably don't show up late in a project and throw it away, because if you needed to be involved, the process would've gotten you in at the right time.
Emmet: Exactly.
Des: Emmet, can we go back to design systems for a second? Was this a substantial investment for us in 2018? Help our listeners think about when and how to invest in it.
Emmet: Yes, we ramped up investment in it specifically. We had always had basically a skeleton team on this, where we were going from the standard pattern libraries and a set of UI components toward something more robust. To get the more robust thing, which I've written about in the past, we think of a full stack design system that touches all points of your product. We now have a design systems team that is basically fully staffed, with two designers, a PM, and an engineering manager and two or three engineers. It's a substantially staffed team, and that's a good investment. As to when to get there, I don't think it's a quota where you do it before you get to 20 designers; I think it's more a function of when shit is starting to break.
Des: What's a problem sign? If you find in your org you've got nine different implementations of roughly the same button, but they're all slightly different – maybe that's a facetious point, but is there a more general indicator?
"Something that seems like it shouldn't be a huge investment is difficult because there's some design debt or technical debt in order to rationalize what's there already"
Emmet: It's things like that. I think another warning sign is that you start to hear a loss, and it's difficult to do simple things right. Something that seems like it shouldn't be a huge investment is difficult because there's some design debt or technical debt in order to rationalize what's there already. So you realize you need to invest a bit more in having the right building blocks so that you can build a product out of them.
Des: You spoke before about the size of those building blocks, as well. Historically, when pattern libraries emerged, they were at the very atomic, component level, like showing how a dropdown looks. But when I look at our pattern library, it's much more about how we lay out a form or display a user list. They're big Lego pieces to play with.
Intercom's design system
Emmet: Yeah, and they're the big pieces of the Intercom products, like Messages and Articles and customers and things like that. Again, design systems can be kind of a trendy thing. You have to figure out what it means to you and your company. We're particularly well-suited to make the most of it, given that what we're building is a suite of products. If you have a large software footprint and you built them all somewhat independently, you'd have inconsistent products. That would be a shame. But also, you'd have people building the same things or very similar things again and again and so to Paul's point of shipping 140 things a year, that number is going to drop when a lot of people have to manually build the same thing again and again. For us, it certainly works well. But again, I think you need to figure out what it actually means to your org.
Listening to the unmet customer
Des: Paul, one area where I think I experienced a change in how our product engineering teams work is in our relationship with go-to-market teams – specifically how we deal with some of our larger customers or prospects. One thing that occurred to me very early on when I moved back to R&D (or to Product and Engineering land) was how we have a lot of inputs to our roadmap. But one customer whom it's fundamentally impossible to listen to is the voice of the customer who couldn't adopt to your product. I'm talking about someone who ultimately couldn't agree to buy it because of a shortcoming. Everything else has its way onto the roadmap with the exception of this, right? After multiple conversations with the folks in sales, you took point on this. Talk us through it what we changed there.
"But one customer whom it's fundamentally impossible to listen to is the voice of the customer who couldn't adopt to your product"
Paul: Yeah, it's interesting to try and track the journey over the years, because Intercom's changed a lot. There are lots of people listening to this, and you have companies of all different types and sizes. And when we were smaller, our self-serve channel was so dominant, at least in how we thought. You know, people just went to our website. They found about us by word of mouth, Twitter, talking to people they know in the industry. They went to our website and signed up themselves, and they were up and running. As we got bigger and bigger, and as people got to know Intercom, we got bigger companies knocking on door with more complex requirements. Often, I used to talk to someone because, as good as any marketing might be, they're just not going to answer every single question people have. I found that we started to have more and more companies who just wanted to talk to us about Intercom. So our sales team kind of grew out of that, and it's been really successful.
And as you said, there was definitely a lag between the sales team growing inside Intercom, and us in product engineering actually realizing that we needed to listen. You know, we're very open. It wasn't like it was a deliberate thing. It was just more that we were a little lagging. The hard lesson I learned was: "Oh, shit. There's a whole critical input here that we're just missing." And so we changed that. But you know what we didn't do, very explicitly, was whatever the respective customers were asking us for. That's obviously not a good path; it's a path to ruin over some period of time. If you just start building one-off features and changes, that just make your product a big mess. So like we've always done with operations and process, we sat down with the sales team over the course of weeks and months and together, very collaboratively, built a process. We iterated it over the year, gathered all the inputs we were hearing, synthesized them and pulled out the patterns.
"We directed the sales team to have the customers think in terms of the problems that they had"
One big change was that customers typically ask for very specific features. But we directed the sales team to have the customers think in terms of the problems that they had. It was kind of like a classic design thing; if you're in the world of design, it's a very common way to think so that you ensure you understand peoples' problems and figure out the best solution. But you know, if you live in the sales world, that's not common. So, it was awesome. We built this process together called "Problems To Be Solved," which is very self-explanatory.
Des: Borrowing from Jobs To Be Done.
Paul: Exactly, yeah. It's got an acronym too: PTBS. It's literally a list of prioritized problems to be solved. And it's taken from hundreds and hundreds of weekly and monthly sales conversations to create a new input around making Intercom better based on the things that prospective customers are looking for.
Des: And obviously they have to be traded off against the current customers, the things we have, the ideas we want to build and all the new shit we have to do in a given year. It's been quite a force of maturing for us, I'd say, to bring in the sort of voice of the unmet customer.
Paul: Very much so, yeah.
Emmet: It's just one of those things that's a no-brainer in retrospect, as well. It's something of a truism among designer/product people to "know your user." Nobody talks about knowing your prospective user: the person who isn't a user because you have already failed them.
"Nobody talks about knowing your prospective user: the person who isn't a user because you have already failed them"
Des: I think that's exactly it, especially where it's a blocker. These aren't people saying, "I'd use you if only you'd also add five more features so I could do face ID tracking." It's always, "I want to use you exactly the way you intend to be used, but I just need this extra piece of permissions or security or settings to actually unblock me and my team from adopting." They want you to unlock an extra piece so they can adopt a tool that meets their standards and criteria.
Emmet: Then I roll in and ask whether it's something that makes sense for the product holistically, rather than just responding to those sales blockers.
A product strategy that creates compounding value
Des: Absolutely. Speaking of new shit we wanted to build, last year, we rolled out Messenger 4, which is a whole new messenger, a new home screen, new design, new launches, new everything. We launched an App Store, where apps could exist inside the Messenger. We launched a public version of the Intercom App Store, where now you can actually search for these things on the web and find them. We launched Custom Bots, which was basically a way to start conversations and put a user down a certain bot-driven path. Then we launched Answer Bot (now called Resolution Bot), which is a way to understand and infer and automatically answer customers' questions.
None of those things were requests from our sales team, nor were they requests from our current customers. All of them were net new things we wanted to do at the start of the year. But I remember a tweet you had out ages ago, Paul, where you said that strategies that reveal themselves in hindsight are your favorite type of strategy.
I've always admired product strategies made up of launches that build on each other, each one making the prior ones better – creating compounding value for customers. Today @intercom we launched part 3 of such a strategy:
— Paul Adams (@Padday) August 8, 2018
Was this one of those things where you had all the key components in your mind's eye at the start of the year? Or was more of a we'll-ship-and-learn-and-adapt approach?
Paul: Yeah, it's a great question. It's definitely both. I think it's more the former, that there was a plan. Now that you asked the question, and we were kind of joking about the Google and Facebook days earlier, it does remind me of that time in my career – which is going back a long time now and those companies have radically changed since then – when I was at Google, working on social products, and Facebook was this company three miles away that was a big, giant mystery. And every time Facebook launched something, it was individually impressive. And then you'd wait and see something else a month later. They were very fast at shipping back then. Significant new things would start adding up and adding up, and it blew my mind.
It was a real career moment – an eye-opener for me, because I was still learning what strategy even was. And I was like: "Wow, the sum is greater than the parts, and these are all connected, and they're unlocking. There's literally a path of unlocking here. Someone had a plan; this isn't an accident." Every time Facebook announced another new thing that built on the prior ones, it was way harder for Google to compete. They were building up defensive moat after defensive moat. And it's never left me since then: the idea that you should design these ecosystems that are connected, where the sum is greater than the parts. For us this year, that was definitely playing out. As we said earlier, we also have this value of shipping to learn. So there's some humility on our part, knowing we have this value and being confident and humble in one ship. We should be confident in our decisions because we run a good process and yet humble in the fact that we don't know everything.
"It's never left me since then: the idea that you should design these ecosystems that are connected, where the sum is greater than the parts"
Des: If I had to put on my entry-level PM hat, I'd probably cry and chuck my toys out of the pram and say it sounds like you're trying to plan a roadmap upfront. That sounds crazy. Is that what happened?
Paul: That's called strategy.
Des: But is that what happened, where you said, "Hey, there are big components here, and all of these are happening unless we get significant alternative feedback from the market"?
Paul: Yeah, pretty much. Toward the end of the year we had an event called The Next Chapter, and our co-founder and CEO Eoghan got on stage and talked about our Messenger (which has always been core tenant of Intercom) and bots and apps. And so, what we did this year was effectively play out that vision and strategy piece by piece. And actually, it's still early days. We have so much more coming that will build on this.
But it was the case that the new Messenger had this thing called a home screen. And on this home screen, you could embed apps within the Messenger.
But where are the apps coming from? We realized we need to have people build them, build some ourselves and have an App Store. The more we grow the App Store, the more we'll learn from people using the apps or not using the apps. We'll iterate. So the apps will get better and better, and therefore the Messenger gets better and better. Then you've got bots, and bots can live in Messenger conversations. Bots can deliver apps. An app could pay a bill, or start a video call or whatever. And the more apps there are, the more the bots can deliver the apps. All these things just make each of the others better and better. So we did actually play that out, and we also launched Messenger 4 with no beta, which was risky, and so on.
Des: Yeah, that was scary for that exact reason: simply telling 30,000 people their favorite Messenger is changing is always risky. Emmet, from a designer point of view, when Paul does this strategic roadmapping of the year without telling anyone, how do you equip the designers to not have to redesign after we release new things? Because if there is some sort of grand plan, then ideally you'd design with one eye on the bigger picture the whole time, right?
Emmet: Well, it's a fairly collaborative process to come up with this at the beginning, so it's less an idea of taking the stone tablets down from Paul's office and presenting them to the company. People are voting because they're involved and feeding into this stuff from the start. The other thing is that the one-minute overview Paul gave was probably the extent of detail we had at the beginning. So a lot of what Custom Bots would actually look like and how the apps would work was completely unknown. Another advantage of doing this in individual parts that add up to something greater is, you get a greater sense of stability. By the time you're building that fourth piece of the puzzle, you already have the first three pieces, so you've got way more clarity on what a good solution is going to look like. By the time we got to Custom Bots, we already had the home screen in the new Messenger; we had the Intercom App Store; a lot of the constituent parts were vetted down; and so it's a kind of a narrowing-in process over the course of the year.
Hiring product managers and design leaders
Des: Paul, you mentioned earlier the need to be confident yet humble. I suppose you mean being assertive and deliberate in what we're trying to do, but humble enough to realize you might get it wrong, or you might not know the answer about certain things. I know you've said before that that's one of the most important traits in the PM world. For whatever reason over the past five years, PMs have – I'll say it so you don't have to – adopted maybe a type of god complex in a sense, where they think they're the center, and they're kind of expected to know everything up front. When you're interviewing for PMs these days, what's the trait you look for? How do you test for humility and yet at the same time make sure there's enough confidence there?
"They get the best results through a collaboration, not through a single-minded vision"
Paul: It's a pretty big question. I'll start by talking about product management more broadly. Product management on one level is an old discipline; I think Proctor and Gamble first invented it in the '40s. In tech these days, it's obviously a core part of any technology company's road for product manager. It's kind of exploded, and so still in some ways, even though it's old, it's relatively new. And as a result, it's not well defined.
You can go from company to company and see people doing wildly different things, some of which looks a lot like project management. They're actually driving forward a vision or strategy for a product; they don't own a product. Some of it is just taking orders from someone else who decides what the product is going to be, and they just execute the orders they get, and they're the product manager. In other companies, they're expected to be a mini CEO. If you're a young product manager early in your career, I'd be amazed if you're able to figure out what you're supposed to do. There are so many conflicting opinions and views.
We have our view, which is certainly not shared probably by some other companies. But for us, the road to product manager is similar to the bigger tech companies. Google, probably more than any other company, popularized the road of product manager going back maybe 20 years, where they're a core collaborator with engineering and, increasingly, design. At Intercom it's always kind of been that way, where the three functions collaborate with the help of content design, research, product analytics, etc. But it was always that kind of trifecta of PM, design and engineering. But depending on the company, each one of those three has different influence, and I think in a lot of companies, the god complex you talk about is because someone anointed the PM and said, "You're in charge."
Des: "You're the tie breaker."
Paul: Yeah, and "the buck stops with you." As a result, people then go around with this idea, a kind of inflated sense of being. Whereas, I've always found the best product managers absolutely need to have product drive and product taste and product sense. But also, they're incredibly open and collaborative, and they're not godlike at all. They get the best results through a collaboration, not through a single-minded vision.
Des: Emmet, you've been hiring design leaders for most of last year as well. Obviously all designers have some belief that they are a higher being, let's say.
Paul: Except for Emmet.
Des: Except for Emmet, who's Mr. Humble here, sitting in front of me. What are the traits you've been looking for in designers and design leaders?
"You need to think about the shape of your team overall and what your gaps are"
Emmet: You can probably imagine it is some kind of hierarchy-of-needs diagram. There's a lot of the table stakes stuff (like skills or technical ability), so you're screening for that stuff at the start. I think experience counts for a lot. There's a lot that is involved in the actual work we do that really you need to learn in some form of real-life scenario. And then beyond that, there's probably some stuff around aligning with our values as well and someone being an add to our culture rather than just fitting into it and so on. There's no hard and fast thing, because I think you need to think about the shape of your team overall and what your gaps are. Otherwise, you're just consistently hiring for the same type of person and you'll end up with a team that, where everyone shares the same maybe gaps, right, as well as strengths. It might change. A lot of the time, you're thinking about filling the gaps. You think about the team holistically in terms of seniority, and you don't want to be too top- or bottom-heavy in terms of experience. And as we scale, specialization is a thing. It's a blend of the stuff; imagine it's a pyramid. The stuff at the bottom of the pyramid is fairly stable, and then towards the top…
Des: It can tilt either way.
Emmet: It depends on the situation, where you are as a team and what specifically you're hiring.
Think you've got what Paul and Emmet are looking for? We're hiring.
The end of navel gazing
Des: Okay, the last question is one that I think both of you will have some familiarity with. Paul, you gave a talk at last year's UX London called The End of Navel Gazing, where you basically said that some of these roles spend far too long trying to figure out their place in the organization and their proverbial seat at the table. What motivated you to write that talk?
Paul: Oh yeah, it definitely is a big one.
Emmet: It was one huge subtweet aimed at me, I think. Is that it?
Paul: It was actually the biggest subtweet I've ever seen.
Emmet: Okay, I'm glad! On stage, in front of hundreds of people.
Paul: It was aimed at anyone who'd listen. It's definitely applicable outside of UX and design. I actually gave a version of the talk to test out the material a little bit at Mind the Product, which is a PM conference. It came from something that's been building for years and years inside me: some level of discomfort with the UX industry. We're feeling disconnected and disempowered, and there's a lot of complaining on Twitter.
Des: "Why won't they listen to me, we're so smart" type of stuff?
Paul: Yeah. People saying: "Where's my seat at the table, oh, I got a seat at the table, oh, this is a crap table, is there a better table around here, I'm not turning up at the table anymore because I don't like what you all are saying." That was the tipping point for me, of feeling like I should just write this talk and make the point heard. The lesson in it all was that the UX industry tends to say that it's the voice of the user. That's the kind of stick you get beaten with: "We're the voice of the customer. How can sales or marketing or the CEO…"
Des: Pretend to know anything about them?
Paul: Yeah, you know, "You're not the customer, I'm the customer."
Des: "I spoke with the user, and they presented this wireframe to me."
Paul: Yeah, and it's a stick they beat people with. Here's a timeout from the talk: there's about 400 or 500 people in the audience, and I ask them to put up their hand if they speak to at least one customer a week. And like three people put up their hands.
Des: That's the voice of the user.
"We're one spoke on the wheel, and sales and marketing and everyone else has an equal part to play"
Paul: I said: "Well, guess what? Your sales team talks to 10 customers a day, at least. Your support team talks to 40 people a day. Those other parts of your company are far more representative of the voice of the user than all of you, than all of us – I was in this group, too." And I told them that we need to wise up and realize it's a team sport. We're one spoke on the wheel, and sales and marketing and everyone else has an equal part to play. It's imperative, for the industry to move forward and mature, that people en masse realize that they are one of 10 or 12 spokes on the wheel, and therefore you've got one-tenth or one-twelfth of the influence.
Des: And not to be glib, but the subtweet-ish component of it was something like, "Stop spending so much time debating this with other people in the UX design community about the nuances of a persona, and go talk to your sales team or your support team or your marketing or anyone else who's closer to the business than you are," right?
Paul: Exactly. The reason it's called "The End of Navel Gazing" is because this frustration is born out of a really misunderstood view of one's place in the world. People tend to just start looking inward: they got the seat at the table, and now they don't like the seat, so they're not going to fight to understand what the seat even means. They're just going to complain and fight over the tools. There's a big, bad world out there of real people; go start talking to them. Stop pondering internally.
Des: Emmet, this doesn't apply to all designers, does it?
Emmet: No, not for personal company excluded, anyway. I think designers should have a throne at the table.
No, when you were talking there, I was thinking that design in the broadest sense has a very long history. Have you ever heard the story of when Steve Jobs was at NeXT, and he got Paul Rand to design a logo for him, and Paul Rand was like, "I will do one logo, and you can use it or you can not." There's this sense that a designer is a genius who delivers work from on high, and like it or lump it. Designers are special, and you can take the work or you not. That's just a different job to compare to the type of work that we're doing, which is so collaborative within a complicated organization that has so many required inputs that no one person could ever handle on their own.
I think the reason that it's this ongoing point of conversation for some people, perhaps, is that it triggers this existential crisis because they thought they were one thing, and then they do get the opportunity to have the seat at the table. But then what's being asked of them is completely different to what they thought they were. This is not helped by the fact that you look across the industry at all these other teams, and you see just the outputs they created. You don't see all the messy stuff that was happening – the rest of the iceberg below the surface that got them there – and so you tend to valorize things like the output into one single delivery, because that's the reference point you had going in. And maybe that goes back to what I was saying, which is that experience really counts for a lot here. When you get some of those lessons under your belt, you realize: "Wow, I need to do more. It's more than just headphones on, sitting at my desk, delivering design work." It's extremely collaborative.
Des: Okay, I think we best leave it there. Thank you both so much for your time. That was 2018 and running Intercom at the scale we're at now. Join us next time, when we'll talk about 2019 and all the new things that are coming.
Hubert Palan, CEO and founder of Productboard chats to Intercom's Rati Zvirawa about how to master your product strategy and achieve product excellence.
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Podcast Producer, Intercom
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
The Real Defense Budget Questions
Michael E. O'Hanlon and Peter W. Singer Friday, July 22, 2011
As Washington tries to get serious about the nation's crippling debt and deficits, defense spending has emerged as a major focus. Though the issue is important, the quality of the dialogue has been weak–the two parties offer dueling bumper stickers, with little solid analysis.
Much of the current talk about defense budget cuts sounds surreal. On one side, Democrats are pushing for $400 billion or more in cuts. But dig deeper, and you find little White House direction or Pentagon strategy on where that number came from, nor any serious plan for how to achieve it.
Indeed, the cuts sharply contrast with the resource requirements laid out in the recent quadrennial defense and diplomatic reviews, whose writers are now charged with chasing down a new strategy to match the new numbers.
On the Republican side, a confused claim often holds sway that defense cuts should never be on the table — even though GOP leaders already signed off on former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's earlier reductions.
This zero-cuts-now-and-forever plan is combined with a frequently stated goal of creating a 4 percent gross domestic product bottom line on defense spending. But, as with the Democrats, this approach of numbers before strategy is artificial, with no sense of what our defense goals are or should be.
Serious issues of long-term defense spending are being decided during a transition in Pentagon leadership, in the context of a budget drill off-cycle, in a compressed crisis-mode-like time frame, by negotiators skilled at playing a fiscal game of chicken but not at defense issues.
This underscores the risks of any too-hasty big budget deal, which disproportionately targets the military budget without being accompanied by broader fiscal reform needed in discretionary spending, tax and entitlement reform. Substantial defense budget cuts are possible, make no mistake. But they could mean loss of capability, and some may increase security risks.
So defense cuts only make sense if we can reduce other risks by strengthening our economy for the long haul — with broad deficit reductions. As President Barack Obama and congressional negotiators seek a deal, they need to remember this principle of "shared sacrifice" and comprehensive deficit reduction — or the downside of any budget deal could outweigh its benefits in national security terms.
Unfortunately, where they connect to defense, this summer's budget discussions have the flavor of an argument over arithmetic more than policy and could do harm if they go too far. Unless broad-based deficit reduction, including major tax and entitlement reform, proves possible, it may be better to make July's debate a more modest down payment on fiscal responsibility, rather than trying to make defense a bill payer with no underlying strategy. Then the two parties can spend the next 16 months framing subsequent choices for voters leading to the 2012 election.
The nation's problems of economic security are intertwined with national security. If we don't act on trillion-dollar deficits, we risk the underlying economic bedrock of our long-term defense capability. But defense cuts also add risk to the nation's security in a time of uncertainty.
National security policy has always been about weighing priorities to minimize dangers — getting everything we want and eliminating all dangers has never been an option. Yet we must avoid the delusion that the proposed cuts can be achieved just by rooting out inefficiencies or reducing waste.
These are the kind of difficult questions that need to be answered as we pare down military spending. The serious issues involved should help clarify the stakes in reducing planned defense spending by some $400 billion over the next 12 years:
Is there a way to avoid "salami slicing"? Cuts in Pentagon budgets are frequently apportioned by share. The military services, all the way down to individual program offices, each shave spending by the same amount. This is politically easiest, but cuts crucially needed components by the same percentage as wasteful parts.
The defense budget is not just another jobs program. Key areas of national economic policy, trade and science all draw from it. How do we maintain not just core strengths but also niche competencies in a time of austerity? Are there models of success or new ideas that merit examination? Most important, with a smaller manufacturing sector and fewer independent production and product design teams, how do we protect not just the big corporate players but also vital subcontractors?
Geopolitics in the 21st Century
By Michael E. O'Hanlon
Bending History
By Martin S. Indyk, Kenneth G. Lieberthal, and Michael E. O'Hanlon
A Skeptic's Case for Nuclear Disarmament
How do we promote innovation in a time of austerity? Defense research and development funds usually get targeted for deep cuts, though they are proportionally more important than other parts of the defense budget to the future of both economic growth and national security. Cut R&D too deeply, and you don't just risk the next jet fighter but also the next Internet or clean energy breakthrough. You could also lose the technological edge that has convinced countries like China that it is not worth challenging the U.S. armed forces.
Is there a way to assess the intelligence budget more effectively? It is often excluded in these debates, though its $80 billion annual spending is far larger than other national security agencies — like the FBI — now targeted for discretionary cuts.
These issues are not just for congressional negotiators to wrestle with. They must start to become part of the 2012 presidential campaign.
The debate will continue, as it should. Voters who care about U.S. economic and national security should look askance at any candidate, from the right or left, who has only the bumper sticker numbers, not his or her policy answer to the actual questions.
Michael E. O'Hanlon
Director of Research - Foreign Policy
Co-Director - Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, Africa Security Initiative
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
The Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair
Twitter MichaelEOHanlon
Peter W. Singer
Strategist and Senior Fellow - New America
U.S. Defense
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text:
Supply consistency vital: CPL
January 3, 2022 The National Business
THE consistent supply and quality of local produce will ensure that farmers benefit and the produce attracts customers, says City Pharmacy Ltd (CPL) project manager Ajay Patel.
He witnessed the first load of Santana potatoes on Friday supplied by farmers in the Kundiawa-Gembogl district of Chimbu now on sale at CPL's Stop N Shop outlets in Port Moresby. "The one thing that we keep telling farmers is that we are here for quality and consistency, and we are here for the long term," he said.
"We are not going anywhere.
"We will keep buying.
"So as long as we can fix up the issues with supply chains, which I think is the biggest risk in this entire programme, I think we can definitely make things work, and not just in Chimbu but throughout PNG."
CPL founder Sir Mahesh Patel said Stop N Shop was excited to support local farmers.
He thanked Kundiawa-Gembogl MP William Onglo for the partnership.
"A few months ago or even years back, we started on the Gembogl onions," he said. "I mean for 38 years in PNG, I have seen a lot of leaders.
"But we need leaders who actually go down, roll up his sleeves and works with the farmers, because the farmers alone can't do it."
"It is a great start to New Year.
"We got not only the Chimbu onions, but also the potatoes.
"Hopefully, it will keep growing. We have to keep finding things, not only in Chimbu but also around the country.
"There is a lot of excitement.
"What we want to do eventually as the quantities grow, is to do value-added products.
"Instead of getting imported chips, we can have roast potatoes served in our food bars as well. That will also create demand."
District partners with CPL to secure market for farmers
Six wards form cooperative to supply local produce


When this homeowner decided to update her Powder Bath, she wanted to incorporate wallpaper. Yea! She has a transitional design style so this wallpaper with topography motif was a perfect starting point. The pedestal sink was replaced with a standalone vanity, and we helped with finishing touches. The oversized artwork with metallic details makes a big impact in this small space. The plush rug really warms up the room.
I love the bold choices this homeowner made for her Powder Bath. For more inspiration, check out this and this Powder Bath. Enjoy!


For business or other inquiries, feel free to contact me by filling out the form below. Your message will go directly to my email, rachel@racheldelgado.com. Please note that I do not take commissions.
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2) The main why test-takers struggle with time in reading section.
3) How to identify which sections are eating up your time.
4) Tips on how much time to allocate for each task in the reading section.
5) Which section to spend less time on.
For the most part, people who struggle with time in the reading section are people who do not have a daily reading habit. This includes reading books, slightly complex articles, the newspapers or anything that has to do with reading English on a daily basis.
Let's look at what you can do to minimise the time impact and how you can do the best you can in the time given.
You get between 32 to 42 minutes to answer the PTE Academic reading section. This depends on the number of questions asked and the length of the passages. You only know how much time you have once you take the exam and the reading section begins. The first thing that you need to do once the reading section begins is to check how much time you have and to look at how many questions are being asked, so you get a sense of how much time you have. You can then work accordingly with the questions that have been given to you. By simply being aware of the time and keeping an eye on the timer regularly throughout the exam can help reduce instances where you're spending excessive time on a particular question.
Often, test-takers get stuck on a difficult question and end up overthinking it. By the time you know it, you spend five minutes on one single question and have very less time remaining for the following questions. Just by being aware of time and always keeping one eye on the time or you can avoid instances like this where you're spending too much time on one question.
2) How to identify which sections are eating up your time.
You also want to identify the one or two question types on which you are spending the maximum time. You can do this by tracking the time that you are taking to solve each question. If you are doing a practice session, you can take a timer and measure to see how much time were you spending in the multiple choice question, reorder paragraphs question and fill in the blanks for each question.
By doing this, you get a sense of which area are you spending too much time on and then you can take corrective actions to reduce the time in those sections. So giving a personal example, I used to take a lot of time on the reorder paragraph. I timed myself and realised, 'OK, I'm spending too much time on this one thing and am not working efficiently', so I then made a conscious effort to simply practice and reduce the amount of time I took to answer those questions. So by identifying the areas where you are spending more time on, you can reduce the time by taking corrective actions.
The multiple choice answer and choose single answer are the sections where test-takes tend to spend the most time. One PTE reading tip that can help you is to read the multiple choice question passages only once as far as possible.
If you are reading the passage in the multiple choice question multiple times, you going to be looking at the passage then looking at the question/options. Then you are again going to go back to the passage and then back to the question.
Switching between the question and the passage takes up time, and you'll end up spending more time than if you just read the passage once with full understanding and then attempted the answer.
As far as possible in the multiple choice question, part of the reading section just try to read the passage once with complete understanding instead of going through the passage multiple times because that can help you save the most time. Now you may need to refer to the passage but the goal is to keep this to the minimum or avoid it altogether if possible.
4) How much time to allocate for each task in the reading section.
In the image below, I'm going to give you a brief outline of how much time you should be spending on each section to do well. I've given a breakdown of per question type how much time you should be spending on each question.
For the multiple choice single answer, you can spend 2 minutes for each question that have been given.
For the choose multiple answer, you can take a little longer which is 2.5 minutes per question.
For reorder paragraph, 4 minutes is what I recommend you spending because it can take slightly longer time to identify which paragraphs comes after the other.
For the fill in the blanks drag-and-drop and select from list you can spend 1.5 minutes for each question.
If we add up average time given for each question that I've given and the average questions you are asked you get a total of thirty-two minutes.
Some other PTE reading tips that test-takers have said helps them in the is to spend less time on the fill in the blanks.
The Fill in the blanks is a question in the reading wherein more often than not you are not going to get the answer by over analysing things. You either know the answer, or you do not know the answer.
Spending more time on the fill in the blanks and over analysing usually does not yield any better results. This is a section where you may want to go with your instinct and select the correct answers as soon as possible.
Your comprehension speed is one of the key aspects of time management especially in the multiple choice and reorder paragraph. Comprehension speed is how quickly you understand a passage of text given to you. You improve you comprehension speed by reading articles on a daily basis and reading good quality books. The more that you immerse yourself in high-quality English on a consistent basis, the easier it will be for you to answer and understand the passages given to you in the exam.
You can check out sites like CNN and BBC. ScienceDaily.Com is another good website where you have topics that are similar to the PTE Academic exam. You can read through these articles when you have the time and try to increase you comprehension speed. This also adds to the practice that you're putting into the PTE Academic Reading section.
I hope you found the tips and strategies useful. Go ahead and try to implement them in your practice and in the exam. If you found this useful and feel that someone could benefit from it. Please share this with them.
Got these scores recently, all thanks to your book's strategies.
Hi Uday, You can use the following link to purchase the Ebook.
Email me at info@ptepreparation.com for any issues.
I need small advise from you. Reasently, I wrote PTE exam and got following results.
W-56, S-49, R-49, L-49 and overall 50.My target is 50 for all.If I get exam another 2 week will is be ok ?
Since you missed out by just 1 mark each, 2 weeks is fine.
I'm running a pte institute.
How I manage time of 4 models in a day . Because I'm giving full day classes. Like how much time for speaking, reading and listening etc.
And more tips for all modules.
I'm doing well . My student get excellent results. But I wanna more .
Ideally you would want to allocate time as per the areas individual students require improvement on. If more students are weak in Reading or speaking(which is what most people struggle with) then spend more time on that.
I mean to say that- if test taker want to attend multiple-choice multipe answer section later at the end of reading part and first complete remaining 4 items. Is it possible ?
You can't do that. If you skip a question, you can't reattempt it.
Thanks Steven for advise, one more query regarding it.
In case due to lack of time, we keep one task as unattended (Exmpl – Multi choice Multi Ans), then the unattended task will reward as wrong answer or negative marking or no impact on score ?
You will get 0 points for any question that you have missed.
Hi, I email to you.please reply me back.
Thanks for all your valuable tips here, I wish I would've gone through this earlier.
I just attempted the PTE today.
Due to shortage of time I missed the last 2 questions in Reading as well as the entire write from dictation task in listening. Plus the guys around me we're freakishly loud, scared if their voices might have got into my mic.
Hi steven, for multiple choice questions there is negative marking, i hear that if you give correct answer you will get 4 or 5 marks but if you give wrong there will be -1. so it is better to give answer rather leave a question. pls tell if this marking criteria is right..
As per the PTE score guide, you score +1 for each correct answer and -1 for an incorrect answer. While you should aim to select all correct answers if you are unsure it's better to select option(s) you are sure of and leave other unsure options blank.
In PTE is there any section where we have negative markings?
The MCQ multi answers in the reading section, MC (more than one answer) and Highlight incorrect words in the listening section has negative marking.


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1. Operational date. A regional school unit board of directors becomes operational on the date set by the state board as provided in this chapter.
2. Transfer of governing authority. The regional school unit board of directors, on the date established pursuant to subsection 1, shall assume responsibility for the management and control of the public schools and programs within the school administrative units in existence prior to the operational date of the new regional school unit that are within the regional school unit. Those school administrative units in existence prior to the operational date of the new regional school unit on the date established in subsection 1 have no further responsibility for the operation or control of the public schools and programs within the school administrative unit except those pursuant to section 1481.
3. Transfer of school accounts. Notwithstanding section 15004 or any charter of a municipal school unit, school administrative district, community school district or regional school unit, the balance remaining in the school accounts of the former municipal school unit, school administrative district, community school district or regional school unit within the new regional school unit must be paid to the treasurer of the new regional school unit and verified through the annual audit process pursuant to chapter 221, subchapter 2. The balance from each of the former municipal school unit, school administrative district, community school district or regional school unit must be used to reduce that unit's or district's local contribution to the regional school unit. Payment may be made in equal monthly installments during the implementation year.
4. Transfer of teachers and employees. Except as limited by paragraph A, all teachers and school employees who are employed by a participating school administrative unit on the day prior to the date established pursuant to subsection 1 must be transferred to and employed by the regional school unit as of the date established pursuant to subsection 1. Except as limited by subsection 2, the regional school unit shall assume all of the legal obligations and duties that the participating school administrative units owed to their employees, including but not limited to those obligations and duties arising under federal law, state law, collective bargaining agreements and individual employment contracts. It is the intent of this chapter to neither decrease nor increase the rights and benefits of transferred employees or the employer. The regional school unit shall also maintain and honor any agreements, contracts or policies regarding the rights and benefits of retirees and former employees created by a participating school administrative unit that is dissolved as a result of its inclusion within a regional school unit.
5. Superintendent contracts. The contracts between the superintendents and school administrative units within the regional school unit are transferred on the date established pursuant to subsection 1 to the regional school unit board of directors. The regional school unit board of directors shall determine the superintendents' duties within the regional school unit.


text:
Appeals / Capital Punishment / Due Process / Policy / Violent Crime
Supremes Punt, but Stevens AND Scalia Agree: It's Time to Clarify whether Feds Can Still Prosecute Old Civil Rights Crimes
Way back in May 1964, in the very small town of Meadville, Mississippi, two black teenagers were hitchhiking down the road when James Ford Seale drove up. Seale, a member of the KKK, told them he was a revenooer looking for moonshiners, and told the boys to get in his car. He then drove them off into the forest. A bunch of other Klansmen met up with them.
Seale pointed a sawed-off shotgun at the boys, while the other Klansmen tied them to a tree. Then the boys were whipped to within an inch of their lives with "bean sticks." The bloodied boys were hauled to a farm nearby, where Seale bound and gagged them with duct tape. The boys were wrapped in a tarp, shoved into a Klansman's trunk, and driven 100 miles to a secluded riverbank.
While the boys were still alive, they were chained to the engine block of an old Jeep, and to pieces of railroad track. Then the Klansmen dumped the boys in the river, where they drowned. One of the Klansmen later reported that Seale "would have shot them first, but didn't want to get blood all over the boat."
The boys were killed because they were black, and because Seale thought they might have been civil-rights workers.
-=-=-=-=-
In June 1964, three civil rights workers went to Longdale, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of a Methodist Church that had been a civil-rights meeting place. A sheriff's deputy, also a KKK member, recognized their car and locked all three up. The men were held incognito until an ambush could be prepared, and then were told to get out of the county. The deputy followed them to the edge of town, then pulled them over again. A KKK gang showed up, and the three workers were taken to an isolated place to be brutally beaten and shot to death. Their car was burned in a swamp, and their bodies were buried in a dam.
Their disappearance got national attention, and search parties went out.
In July, one of the search parties found the drowned bodies of the two boys Seale had killed in May.
Seale and several others were investigated for the murders, appearing before a House subcommittee on Un-American Activities in 1966. The Klansmen were asked about a number of kidnappings and murders, but nothing ever came of it. Seale just sat there smoking a cigar, and took the Fifth.
About forty years went by. The murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee were forgotten.
Then a Canadian filmmaker saw some old CBC footage of the boys' bodies being hauled out of the river, with the narration "it was the wrong body. The finding of a negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him. The search was for two white youths and their negro friend."
The filmmaker, David Ridgen, began working on what would become the documentary "Mississippi Cold Case." He tracked down the brother of one of the victims, a retired 30-year Army veteran named Thomas Moore, who helped work on the film.
The press had been told that Seale had died in the meantime. But it was discovered that he still lived, and his family had lied to protect him. Ridgen and Moore went to the local U.S. Attorney, who promised to re-open the case.
In early 2007, Seale was indicted on two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy. A fellow Klansman, after being given immunity, told the whole story. Seale was convicted of kidnapping after a jury trial in June 2007.
In August 2007, Seale was given three life sentences.
Seale appealed to the Fifth Circuit. He argued that the statute of limitations for kidnapping had run out. At the time of the crime, there was no limitations period; but in 1972 it changed to a 5-year period.
That's a pretty damn good argument. It was a capital kidnapping in 1964, which had no statute of limitations. But then in 1972 we got rid of capital punishment. So it reverted to an ordinary 5-year period.
The government pointed out that in 1994, after Furman v. Georgia, we brought back the death penalty. It was constitutional again. So this was a capital kidnapping again. And he was prosecuted and sentenced after it had been deemed a capital kidnapping again. So there was no statute of limitations.
The Fifth Circuit agreed with Seale, and reversed his conviction in September 2008.
The prosecution requested a rehearing en banc. The full panel vacated the appellate decision, so that it could reconsider the issue. They sort of have to do that.
The full panel then duly reconsidered the issue, and split evenly down the middle in June 2009. The effect was to leave the trial court's conviction and sentence intact. The original Fifth Circuit decision had been vacated.
So now there was no appellate decision at all! And Seale was left with no more avenues to fight his conviction.
Almost.
Seale took it to the Supreme Court. It wasn't a petition for certiorari, but the almost-forgotten "certified question."
How that works is, the Circuit "certifies" a question that it wants the Supremes to help out with. The Supreme Court is asked to instruct the Circuit court on how it ought to rule in the case.
That's permitted by Rule 19 of the Supreme Court rules, but it only happens once in a blue moon. The last time it happened was in 1981, when the Second Circuit asked for help with the President's authority to say claims before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal had no legal effect in U.S. courts (the Supremes said he can do it). There was another certified question in the 1970s on whether a retired judge gets to vote on whether to hear a case en banc (no). Before that, there was one in 1964 on whether there is a right to a jury in a criminal contempt case (no). And the only other one in living memory was in 1946, where the Supremes said the Circuit can't review by mandamus a district court's remand back to the state court after the case had been removed to the district court.
So here was a historic opportunity for the Supreme Court to not only decide a rare certified question, but also to decide an issue of great importance to a variety of civil-rights-era cases that are still kicking around the federal courts.
And the Court refused.
This isn't the first time the Roberts Court has punted on issues that it really ought to have decided. And the did it again here.
This is an issue that may seem hyper-technical, but it is critically important! There are a lot of old cases kicking around that were capital cases at the time, then weren't and now are again. There's lots of aging Klansmen out there, not to mention the number of cold-case murders being resuscitated by DNA evidence. Whether the feds can even prosecute these cases any more is at stake!
Not to mention the fact that Seale, horrible as his crimes were, seems now to have been denied due process. He can't appeal any more? Just because the Circuit (singular) split, and the Supreme Court punted? His legal argument is going to go undecided? How is that remotely right?
The Court doesn't write opinions from a denial of a certified question. But they sure got a dissenting opinion today, in United States v. James Ford Seale, by the strangest of bedfellows: Justices Stevens and Scalia.
The two, usually diametrically opposed in their jurisprudence and judicial philosophy, agreed wholeheartedly that the Court should have decided this case.
This certificate presents us with a pure question of law that may well determine the outcome of a number of cases of ugly racial violence remaining from the 1960s. The question is what statute of limitations applies to a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. §1201 commenced in 2007 for a kidnapping offense that occurred in 1964.
In 1964, a violation of §1201 was a capital offense [if] the victim was harmed, and since 1994 a violation of §1201 has been a capital offense when the kidnapping results in the loss of life. But for more than two decades in between, Seale's crime was not punishable by death.
The question is narrow, debatable, and important. … I see no benefit, and significant cost, to postponing the question's resolution. A prompt answer from this Court will expedite the termination of this litigation and determine whether other similar cases may be prosecuted.
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
Tags: Capital Punishmentcertified questioncivil rightsjames ford sealekidnapingkidnappingkkkku klux klanlynchingsupreme court
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