text:
Scarcely a week goes by without a new spy novel, with secret agents ranging from a party-boy lawyer drawn into the anti-Hitler underground (Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe) to senile CIA officers who can no longer tell their real lives from their cover stories (Fred Rustmann's two Once a Spy books).
Some of the authors, like Charles McCarry, whose Cold War tales of a weary, damaged CIA officer have led some critics to label him the greatest American spy novelist, are publishing again after long absences. Others, like historical novelist Robert Harris, whose An Officer and a Spy offers a fictional account of the infamous Dreyfus scandal in 19th-century France, have been seduced away from their original genres by the possibilities of the espionage novel.
Even teenagers have their own spies. Forget vampires: Among the hottest recent young adult titles are Y.S. Lee's A Spy in the House, about the undercover adventures of an all-female investigative unit called the The Agency in 1850s London, and Gail Carriger's Etiquette & Espionage, set in roughly the same time period at a finishing school for girl spooks.
Spy mania is even more obvious in television, where half a dozen major series are winning prizes and viewers with their twisting tales of moles and mole-hunters. Showtime's Homeland, in which a half-mad CIA officer pursues a heroic American soldier who may be an al-Qaida sleeper agent, has been one TV's most acclaimed shows over the past three seasons, winning 30 major awards.
Homeland has one big fan in the White House — President Barack Obama has confessed it's one of his favorite shows — and a bunch of others in nearby Langley, Virginia, where CIA headquarters is located. "You hear a lot of CIA people talking about watching Homeland," says Joe Weisberg, a former agency officer who regularly lunches with his old spy buddies.
Weisberg produces his own highly praised spy show, FX's The Americans, about a pair of Soviet moles posing as a 2.5-kids-and-a-picket-fence suburban couple during the early years of the Reagan administration. He nonetheless expresses awe at Homeland. "That show has levels of realism that no Tom Clancy book or movie ever did," he says. "I see the characters walking into the show's CIA headquarters, and I think, 'My God, that's really it, that's where I used to work.'"
Novelist McCarry — who spent three decades as a CIA operative in Europe and Asia before taking up writing in retirement — isn't surprised that intelligence agents would watch Homeland. "Spies love thrillers because they're an antidote to the tedium of the life they actually lead," he observes.
Another spy show with apparent impact among officialdom is TNT's Legends, which chronicles the deep-cover operations of an FBI counterterrorism agent. A recent episode in which a terrorist, under torture, confesses that he's selling chemical weapons to Venezuela, drew a furious response from the country's information minister, who called it "lies and manipulations ... imperialist."
Spy stories have been around literally since the dawn of American culture. The first major American novel was James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, published in 1821. (It dealt with espionage during the Revolutionary War, which is also the subject of one of the newest espionage stories, the AMC television series Turn, a tale of George Washington's spy corps.)
"John LeCarre and McCarry have been turning out novels for years," says Otto Penzler, who publishes two imprints — The Mysterious Press and MysteriousPress.com — that specialize in mysteries and espionage. "So have Daniel Silva and Nelson DeMille. Spies have never gone away, at least in literature."
But even Penzler concedes that spies are acquiring a special fascination as their activities continue to touch everyday life.
"As the world has shrunk, we've learned that anybody is vulnerable to attack now," he says. "Americans used to rely on the Atlantic and the Pacific to keep us protected. We could be at war and still not be personally involved. The World Trade Center attack certainly made the idea of international terrorism something close to home. And that makes spies especially relevant."
Some works, like genre veteran LeCarre's novel A Delicate Truth, about the dangers of turning intelligence work over to private companies, confront the issues raised by the war on terror in contemporary settings. Others, like WGN America's television series Manhattan — set in the midst of America's World War II race with Hitler to build an atomic bomb — plumb history for lessons about the delicate balance between security and civil liberties.
Some are wildly speculative. Veteran genre novelist Robert Littell's Young Philby reimagines the greatest espionage fiasco of the Cold War — the penetration of British and American intelligence by Soviet mole Kim Philby — as a triumph of the Western powers, in which Philby is actually a triple agent spilling Russian secrets to the West.
Others are stunningly realistic. Jason Matthews, a three-decade veteran of the CIA, last year published Red Sparrow, a novel about a CIA officer matching wits, among other things, with a Soviet honey-trap specialist. Mused the New York Times on the book's authenticity: "Lord knows how he got the manuscript of Red Sparrow past the redacting committee at Langley."
Not that everyone's sold on the benefits of authenticity.
"Usually, reality doesn't convince," says McCarry, whose books have included fictionalized accounts of some great intelligence disasters and anticipated others. (As early as 1979, he predicted a wave of suicide bombers in the Middle East, and in 1991 he wrote of "enhanced debriefing" a decade before American spymasters began publicly discussing their use of "enhanced interrogation.") "When I have included an incident from life in a novel, that passage has been the one that readers and reviewers reject as improbable."
In the past, the themes of spy stories has varied with the political tenor of the times. In the 1950s and early 1960s, any fictional spy working for America or its allies was likely portrayed as unambiguously heroic, even when engaged in activities that might raise a civil libertarian's eyebrows, like those of Herbert Philbrick, the courageous FBI infiltrator in the U.S. Communist Party in television's I Led Three Lives. Cold War movie spies like James Bond and Matt Helm were downright glamorous, up to their steely eyeballs in luscious babes and hot little sports cars when they weren't killing Soviet agents.
But as the disillusion of Vietnam and the disclosure of CIA-Mafia assassination plots, secret agents turned into the cynical burnouts in LeCarre's novels like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, often inept and morally indistinguishable from their communist counterparts.
These days, the headlines from the world of espionage are so divergent, and the public reaction so polarized (polls show one-third of the American public thinks Edward Snowden is a hero for leaking word of U.S. electronic spying, another third thinks he's a traitor, and the rest aren't sure) that a screenwriter or novelist can pretty much go in any direction he wants.
"In the early years of the war in Afghanistan, you had all these horrendous stories of tortures inflicted by intelligence officers trying to get information," says The Americans' Weisberg. "Then you had them disabling nuclear centrifuges in Iran and getting bin Laden. There have been big success stories and terrible horrors, and you've got your choice about which way you want to go."
Weisberg has made perhaps the oddest choice of all. The Soviet moles of The Americans, winningly played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, remain enormously sympathetic even when they're stealing the secrets to the Stealth bomber or kidnapping escaped Soviet dissidents.
"That's one of the things I wanted to see if I could do, and how viewers would react," said Weisberg. "One of the interesting things about The Americans is that, in a way, all the spies are good guys. FBI, KGB, CIA, we're kind of in sympathy with all of them. They're all serving their countries."
Weisberg is not the only one mining the past for spy stories. WGN America's tense drama Manhattan takes place in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the dusty high-desert town where allied nuclear physicists gathered under tight security to put together the first atomic bomb.
The show's first seven episodes have concentrated on the tension between the sort of free-wheeling exchanges of information scientists were used to and the tight-lipped demands of wartime security. The scientists' bridling at monitoring of their phones and mail has obvious resonance with disclosures of NSA electronic surveillance during the war on terror.
But as heavy-handed as the security men at Los Alamos were, they were not mistaken: The nuclear labs there were laced with Soviet spies, stealing secrets and passing them to the country that would soon be embroiled in a half-century nuclear standoff with the United States.
"There are some spies on Manhattan's horizons, for sure," confirms Sam Shaw, the show's executive producer. "There were people in Los Alamos whose careers were unfairly destroyed because of the suspicion that there were spies. But there were other people who really were spying, and some who were spying and were never caught....
"The birth of the bomb wasn't just the birth of a different kind of military might. It was also the birth of military secrecy in its modern form. It's an origin story that speaks to Wikileaks and Snowden and [the NSA spying operation] Prism. The show may seem like a period piece, but it's really very modern."
Matthew Rhys stars with Keri Russell on "The Americans" on FX. (Craig Blankenhorn/FX/MCT) Craig Blankenhorn FX
Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, right, and Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson in a scene from Showtime's "Homeland," filmed in Israel. (AP Photo/Showtime, Ronen Akerman) Ronen Akerman Showtime
John Benjamin Hickey as Frank Winter and Daniel Stern as Glen Babbit in WGN America's series "Manhattan." Greg Peters WGN America
Richard Carlson as FBI counterspy Herbert Philbrick in the 1953-56 TV series "I Led Three Lives." File photo
1 Millionth Rider on Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in Disneyland Resort
A night to showcase the black arts community in Miami
By Dorothy Jenkins Fields Special to the Miami Herald
An Art of Black Miami event, "Creative Conversations Summer 2019," sponsored by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, showcased how the arts in Africa and the Caribbean played out in Miami.
Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows
'Queen of Saratoga' Marylou Whitney dies at 93


text:
Sweta Solai Lakshumanan Sanker
"'The Chettiar Dichotomy'"
Section MS1, Kamil Dalkir
Keywords: architecture, borders/boundaries, decolonising knowledge, domestic space, feminist methodologies
செட்டியார் வீட்டில் இல்லையா? Tamil pronunciation: Ceṭṭiyār vīṭṭil illaiya? Translation from Tamil: Is the Chettiyar not at home?
One of the most common sentences heard as one walks through the front door of a household in Chettinad. This sentence not only symbolises the dominance of male members in the Chettiar community (as the single most important figure of the household) but also indirectly acknowledges the anticipated absence of these men from their ancestral homes in Tamil Nadu. Culminating in the 19th century, the Chettiars were part of a wealthy merchant trading caste of the Vaishyas, who were famous for their pioneering efforts in the banking industry across Southeast Asia. Because of their continued success in expanding their businesses abroad, the Chettiyars would often leave their families and wealth in South India under the oversight of their wives – the Aachis – for several years at a time. With the absence of the patriarch, the Aachis instinctively resorted to their native intelligence of frugality and diligence in dealing with everyday trivial matters regarding their respective households. This project therefore aims to visually depict the architectural consequences of gender segregation and cultural heritage in Chettinad, by uncovering the role of the unassuming but independent and powerful Aachis that stood in as heads of the households in the absence of their seafaring husbands.
The Aachis were known for their exceptional frugality in saving and earning any little money they could, whilst their Chettiyar counterparts gained lavish earnings abroad. During their husband's lengthy absence, the Aachis would subconsciously take on the role of the head of the family. These women managed household finances on a daily basis, kept ancestral mansions in order, raised children, and maintained social statuses within the community. The Aachis however, were never explicitly given this space and power as the head of the household, but yet it developed out of dependency and necessity when their male counterparts were away for business. Unsurprisingly, when the Chettiyar men returned from abroad, the Aachis would be on the compromising end of this partnership – often retreating to their designated domestic spaces within these lavish mansions, whilst carrying out their daily tasks like fussing over the servants and cooks to ensure their husbands and families were well fed.
Despite the significant contributions of the Aachis, a large portion of the modern literature and archives on the Chettiar caste have chosen to focus primarily on the economic contributions of the Chettiyar men within South East Asia. This notion of selective representation has therefore not only managed to eradicate an entire portion of history with regards to this community and its upbringing but has also manifested the underlying issues present till this very day with regards to gender segregation and the patriarchy within this particular caste. There is a notable lack of information with regards to the social aspects of this caste and in particular, the women of this entire community.
'The Chettiar Dichotomy', therefore, chooses to focus on the underrepresented lives of the Aachis. The Aachis were an extraordinary group of women who essentially built and brought up an entire community of people on their own. Their resilience gave them the ability to seize power from whatever little space that was allotted to them in life – in a period of time in which gender equality held no meaning. Through the particular lens of my palatial home in Mithilaipatti in India, I utilise the final piece as a means of evidencing the physical and tangible influence these women had on specific areas of these mansions.
Through the process of compiling a series of personal interviews conducted with several instrumental Aachis within the community, the project uncovers and translates spatially – the strength and voices depicted by the experiences of these Aachis through a verbal account of their daily routine. This practice is in pursuit of portraying the dichotomy, that is to say, how these spaces were designed for specific gender roles of the community, and how they were actually used in the absence of the patriarch. The physical model therefore depicts and showcases specific spaces within these mansions where Aachis would normally spend most of their time caring, living, and working. The model utilises a similar construction method to that of the everyday practices of the Aachis by only using found material to reconstruct the defining portion of my ancestral home in Mithilaipatti.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


As an applicant, you understand how important your GPA and GRE scores are to the Admissions Committee. You know you must write an essay that tells your story and makes an impact on the reader, as well as shows how you are a good match with the program. Another critical component of your application are recommendation letters.
From the school's perspective, the purpose of the letters is to provide them with other individuals' perspective on your character and candidacy. The letters should complement the elements of your application and at the same time add to the reader's knowledge of you.
From your perspective, the purpose of the letter is to strengthen your application and give the engineering programs more reason to admit you.
Who Should the Recommenders Be?
Most graduate schools request letters from at least one if not two former professors who can attest to your ability to succeed in a graduate program, including your depth of knowledge of technical skills and/or research you have conducted or products you have developed. Another letter is usually from a work supervisor who can discuss examples of your work accomplishments, as well as how you collaborate with team members, clients and supervisors. If they can describe your leadership roles or how you handle conflict situations, and areas of weakness that they believe you will strengthen with time and further education, it will make a more effective letter.
1. The background and perspective that your target schools require. If they want academic recommendations, you need to talk to professors. If they want professional recommendations, you need to ask supervisors at work or from your internships.
2. The ability (AKA time) and willingness to write the letters.
3. Inclination to write a strong, positive letter.
When Should You Ask Your Recommenders? As you know, professors and employers do not have much free time. It is your responsibility to request their assistance with sufficient time for them to submit the letters. I recommend that you make your request at least six weeks in advance of your target school deadlines. Once you have agreements from three writers, it is important to provide them with the information they need to write a detailed letter.
How Can You Assist Your Recommenders in Writing Great Letters of Recommendation?
• Deadline by which it needs to be submitted with the appropriate website address.
It is important to send reminders as you get closer to the deadline or their good intention to help you out could get lost in the daily grind. Some of your contacts might ask you to draft the letter. This is not acceptable to schools. Instead, inform the writer that you will provide the information needed to make this as painless as possible.
For an application to be reviewed by your target schools, all information requested by them must be in their hands by the deadline, including letters of recommendation. Stay organized!
Follow these guidelines to ensure that the letters of recommendation for your graduate engineering application help you to gain acceptance to the program of your dreams.


text:
import os
CFG_DEFAULT_SELFDIR = os.path.normpath(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

##### START OF CONFIGURATION #####

### Paths ###

# Base directory for work files, will contain the builds and cache
# install.sh will change this folder to taskgrader's dir + 'files/'
CFG_BASEDIR = os.path.join(CFG_DEFAULT_SELFDIR, 'files/')
# Base directory for binaries, must contain the different binaries needed
# install.sh will change this folder to taskgrader's dir
CFG_BINDIR = CFG_DEFAULT_SELFDIR

# Internal folders for taskgrader operation
CFG_BUILDSDIR = os.path.join(CFG_BASEDIR, 'builds/')
CFG_CACHEDIR = os.path.join(CFG_BASEDIR, 'cache/')
CFG_CACHEDBPATH = os.path.join(CFG_CACHEDIR, 'taskgrader-cache.sqlite')
CFG_RESET_SCRIPT = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'cache_reset.py')

# Paths to binaries
CFG_ISOLATEBIN = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'isolate-bin')
CFG_RIGHTSBIN = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'box-rights')
CFG_JAVASCOOLBIN = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'jvs2java')
CFG_PYFRENCHERRORS = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'pyFrenchErrors/pyfe')
CFG_CPLEX = None # Binary for IBM CPLEX optimization engine

# jsonschema-related variables
CFG_JSONSCHEMA = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'jsonschema')
CFG_INPUTSCHEMA = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'schema_input.json')
CFG_OUTPUTSCHEMA = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'schema_output.json')

### Logging ###

# Log file (when not specified on command-line)
CFG_LOGFILE = None
# Log level, must be 'CRITICAL', 'ERROR', 'WARNING', 'INFO' or 'DEBUG'
CFG_LOGLEVEL = "WARNING"

### Execution ###

# Does the kernel support control groups?
CFG_CONTROLGROUPS = False

# Compile executables as static
# Possible values: 'auto', True, False
# 'auto' will be False on Mac OS X, True on other systems
CFG_STATIC = 'auto'

# Use only one isolated execution for all checker tests
# (improves performance as each isolate invocation is slow)
# If True, use a script inside isolate to do all checker invocations; it will
# not use the cache system. If False, use normal behavior of executing the
# checker in isolate for each test case.
CFG_MULTICHECK = True
# Do not use time; no execution statistics will be collected for checker
# executions.
# Possible values: 'auto', True, False
# 'auto' will be True on Mac OS X, False on other systems
CFG_MULTICHECK_LIGHT = 'auto'

# Folders available inside of the isolate box
# Isolated executions will have access to these folders, use with care.
CFG_ISOLATE_AVAILABLE = ['/etc/alternatives']

# Do not use isolate on these scripts
# This variable is a list of full paths to the source files of the scripts
# which should be executed without isolate
# Example: CFG_NOISOLATE = ["/home/taskgrader/myscripts/safecode.c"]
CFG_NOISOLATE = []

# Timeout for accessing the cache
CFG_CACHE_TIMEOUT = 60

### Time and memory limits ###

# Maximum time and memory limits; if input JSON defines limits higher than
# that, the tasgrader will return an error
CFG_MAX_TIMELIMIT = 60000       # in milliseconds
CFG_MAX_MEMORYLIMIT = 1024*1024 # in kilobytes
CFG_MAX_GETFILE = 1024*1024     # in bytes

# Wall time factor: if the cpu time limit is x, the wall time limit will be
# CFG_WALLTIME_FACTOR * x
CFG_WALLTIME_FACTOR = 3

# Time and memory parameter transformations for some languages
# For memory, we only transform the limit
# Example: CFG_TRANSFORM_MEM={'c': lambda x: 4096+x}
CFG_TRANSFORM_MEM  = {}
# For time, each dict entry is a tuple (transform_func, untransform_func)
# Example: CFG_TRANSFORM_TIME={'c': (lambda x: x * 0.9, lambda x: x / 0.9)}
CFG_TRANSFORM_TIME = {}
# If no transformation is given for a language, we use the default
CFG_TRANSFORM_MEM_DEFAULT  = (lambda x: x)
CFG_TRANSFORM_TIME_DEFAULT = (lambda x: x, lambda x: x)

### Miscellaneous ###

# Execute clean_cache at the end of the taskgrader (every hour)
# Disable this if you already execute it (in graderserver for instance)
CFG_CLEAN_AUTO = True
# Cleaning script path
CFG_CLEAN_SCRIPT = os.path.join(CFG_BINDIR, 'clean_cache.py')
# File to store the timestamp in
CFG_CLEAN_TIMESTAMP = '/tmp/.taskgrader-autoclean'

# clean_cache.py variables
# Max age (since creation) in seconds and total size in bytes for builds
CFG_BUILDS_MAXTIME = 7200         # Keep builds for 2 hours
CFG_BUILDS_MAXSIZE = 50*1024*1024 # Keep less than 50 MB of builds

# Max age (since last access) in seconds and total size for cache
CFG_CACHE_MAXTIME = 14*24*60*60   # Keep old cache for two weeks
CFG_CACHE_MAXSIZE = 250*1024*1024 # Keep less than 250 MB of cache

##### END OF CONFIGURATION #####

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Dispatch from the world of women in business: where were the men?
Last week, I watched the first fifteen minutes of the Republican presidential "debate." That's all I could stand, those ten men up there delivering their carefully rehearsed sound bites. And the rich white guy with the comb-over playing to the cheering, jeering crowd with his outrageous pronouncements. The next morning, I attended a business breakfast in a place called Martin's Valley Mansion. As I drove through the fully paved, suburban streetscape to a strip shopping center, I didn't see a valley or a mansion.


" ' I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears. Behold I am healing you…" - 2 Kings 20:5 (AMP).
"But Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, and hugged his neck and kissed him, and they wept [for joy]" - Genesis 33:4 (AMP).
"Jesus wept" - John 11:35.
"… He cried out with a loud and bitter cry … And in every province where the king's command and decree arrived, there was great mourning among the Jews with fasting, weeping and wailing" - Esther 4:1,3.
"I have held My peace a long time. / I have been still and restrained Myself. / Now I will cry like a woman in labor" - Isaiah 42:14.
With fasting and weeping and mourning [until every barrier is removed and the broken fellowship is restored]" - Joel 2:12 (AMP).
PRAYER: Dear Father, help me in my times of weeping to turn to You for ultimate help.


Revisiting the Phylogeny of the Animal Formins: Two New Subtypes, Relationships with Multiple Wing Hairs Proteins, and a Lost Human Formin.
PLoS One. 2016 Oct 3;11(10):e0164067. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0164067. eCollection 2016.
Probing the origins of metazoan formin diversity: Evidence for evolutionary relationships between metazoan and non-metazoan formin subtypes.
PLoS One. 2017 Oct 5;12(10):e0186081. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186081. eCollection 2017.
A comparative sequence analysis reveals a common GBD/FH3-FH1-FH2-DAD architecture in formins from Dictyostelium, fungi and metazoa.
Rivero F, Muramoto T, Meyer AK, Urushihara H, Uyeda TQ, Kitayama C.
BMC Genomics. 2005 Mar 1;6:28.
Fifteen formins for an actin filament: a molecular view on the regulation of human formins.
Biochim Biophys Acta. 2010 Feb;1803(2):152-63. doi: 10.1016/j.bbamcr.2010.01.014. Epub 2010 Jan 25. Review.
Bechtold M, Schultz J, Bogdan S.
Small GTPases. 2014;5(2):11. doi: 10.4161/21541248.2014.973765. Review.
The multiple-wing-hairs gene encodes a novel GBD-FH3 domain-containing protein that functions both prior to and after wing hair initiation.
Yan J, Huen D, Morely T, Johnson G, Gubb D, Roote J, Adler PN.
Genetics. 2008 Sep;180(1):219-28. doi: 10.1534/genetics.108.091314. Epub 2008 Aug 24.
Unique and Overlapping Functions of Formins Frl and DAAM During Ommatidial Rotation and Neuronal Development in Drosophila.
Dollar G, Gombos R, Barnett AA, Sanchez Hernandez D, Maung SM, Mihály J, Jenny A.
Genetics. 2016 Mar;202(3):1135-51. doi: 10.1534/genetics.115.181438. Epub 2016 Jan 22.
The role of formin tails in actin nucleation, processive elongation, and filament bundling.
Vizcarra CL, Bor B, Quinlan ME.
J Biol Chem. 2014 Oct 31;289(44):30602-13. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M114.588368. Epub 2014 Sep 22.
Formins as effector proteins of Rho GTPases.
Small GTPases. 2014;5:e29513. doi: 10.4161/sgtp.29513. Epub 2014 Jun 10. Review.
Roots of angiosperm formins: the evolutionary history of plant FH2 domain-containing proteins.
Grunt M, Zárský V, Cvrcková F.
BMC Evol Biol. 2008 Apr 22;8:115. doi: 10.1186/1471-2148-8-115.
Mol Biol Cell. 2005 Jan;16(1):1-13. Epub 2004 Oct 27.
Dutta P, Das S, Maiti S.
Exp Cell Res. 2017 Aug 15;357(2):163-169. doi: 10.1016/j.yexcr.2017.05.014. Epub 2017 May 17.
Drosophila and human FHOD family formin proteins nucleate actin filaments.
Patel AA, Oztug Durer ZA, van Loon AP, Bremer KV, Quinlan ME.
J Biol Chem. 2018 Jan 12;293(2):532-540. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M117.800888. Epub 2017 Nov 10.
Formin differentially utilizes profilin isoforms to rapidly assemble actin filaments.
Neidt EM, Scott BJ, Kovar DR.
J Biol Chem. 2009 Jan 2;284(1):673-84. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M804201200. Epub 2008 Oct 31.
The neuron-specific formin Delphilin nucleates nonmuscle actin but does not enhance elongation.
Silkworth WT, Kunes KL, Nickel GC, Phillips ML, Quinlan ME, Vizcarra CL.
Mol Biol Cell. 2018 Mar 1;29(5):610-621. doi: 10.1091/mbc.E17-06-0363. Epub 2017 Dec 27.
The Drosophila planar polarity gene multiple wing hairs directly regulates the actin cytoskeleton.
Lu Q, Schafer DA, Adler PN.
Development. 2015 Jul 15;142(14):2478-86. doi: 10.1242/dev.122119. Epub 2015 Jul 7.
Plant formins: diverse isoforms and unique molecular mechanism.
Biochim Biophys Acta. 2010 Feb;1803(2):201-6. doi: 10.1016/j.bbamcr.2008.09.015. Epub 2008 Oct 14. Review.
The diaphanous gene of Drosophila interacts antagonistically with multiple wing hairs and plays a key role in wing hair morphogenesis.
PLoS One. 2015 Mar 2;10(3):e0115623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115623. eCollection 2015.
Expression of multiple formins in adult tissues and during developmental stages of mouse brain.
Gene Expr Patterns. 2015 Sep-Nov;19(1-2):52-9. doi: 10.1016/j.gep.2015.07.003. Epub 2015 Aug 10.
Identification of a short Spir interaction sequence at the C-terminal end of formin subgroup proteins.
Pechlivanis M, Samol A, Kerkhoff E.
J Biol Chem. 2009 Sep 11;284(37):25324-33. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M109.030320. Epub 2009 Jul 15.


"Courage does not always roar. Valor does not always shine."
I know I'm like six months late to this party, but I'm here now! And boy am I glad I came. Despite the hype that surrounds Children of Blood and Bone, I was pleasantly surprised by how thoroughly I enjoyed this story. It's ingenious and riveting, and I can't wait for book two.
Most people have covered the best-selling points about this book, like the diversity and themes of racial inequality, justice, and stigma. I agree wholeheartedly with most of the reviewers who have talked about these aspects, so I won't speak too much on those.
What I found truly remarkable was Adeyemi's ability to create characters with such incredible, realistic moral compasses. She found a way to paint both sides of the story without taking away from her heroine's journey. I was most impressed by Inaan, and although I can't say why without including spoilers, I will say that Adeyemi blew me away with her character development.
Also, that ending? Phew. Imma need someone to get me an advanced copy of book two pronto because I'm not okay.
If you, like me, have been keeping this one at the bottom of your to-read stack, stop procrastinating and pick it up now. There's a reason people are going crazy for Zélie and the rest of her courageous crew.


text:
import time

from flask import current_app, request
from flask.ext.login import current_user
from functools import wraps

def retry(ExceptionToCheck, tries=4, delay=3, backoff=2, logger=None):
    """Retry calling the decorated function using an exponential backoff.

    http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2009/11/trying-out-retry-decorator-python/
    original from: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecoratorLibrary#Retry

    :param ExceptionToCheck: the exception to check. may be a tuple of
        excpetions to check
    :type ExceptionToCheck: Exception or tuple
    :param tries: number of times to try (not retry) before giving up
    :type tries: int
    :param delay: initial delay between retries in seconds
    :type delay: int
    :param backoff: backoff multiplier e.g. value of 2 will double the delay
        each retry
    :type backoff: int
    :param logger: logger to use. If None, print
    :type logger: logging.Logger instance
    """
    def deco_retry(f):
        def f_retry(*args, **kwargs):
            mtries, mdelay = tries, delay
            try_one_last_time = True
            while mtries > 1:
                try:
                    return f(*args, **kwargs)
                    try_one_last_time = False
                    break
                except ExceptionToCheck, e:
                    msg = "%s, Retrying in %d seconds..." % (str(e), mdelay)
                    if logger:
                        logger.warning(msg)
                    else:
                        print msg
                    time.sleep(mdelay)
                    mtries -= 1
                    mdelay *= backoff
            if try_one_last_time:
                return f(*args, **kwargs)
            return
        return f_retry  # true decorator
    return deco_retry

def logged_request(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def decorated_view(*args, **kwargs):
        current_app.logger.info('%s request on %s' % (request.method, request.path), extra={
            'method': request.method,
            'path': request.path,
            'ip': request.remote_addr,
            'agent_platform': request.user_agent.platform,
            'agent_browser': request.user_agent.browser,
            'agent_browser_version': request.user_agent.version,
            'agent': request.user_agent.string,
            'user': current_user.id if not current_user.is_anonymous() else '<anonymous>'
        })

        return func(*args, **kwargs)
    return decorated_view


text:
The Importance of Music in Advertising and Branding
By Luke Suggs, Account Support
For most people, music is an essential part of everyday life. Although people may have stylistic differences, music has the ability to connect people and has power to make us feel. Similar to smell, music can trigger memory. Just the other day my friend said whenever he heard the song "Mouthful of Diamonds" by Phantogram, all he could think of was the Gillette commercial. That speaks volumes of the importance music has in advertising and branding.
In films, soundtracks or pieces of music directly relate to how viewers will feel. Although the quality of the screenplay is important, music helps catapult a distinct emotional connection. Recall your favorite romantic comedy and think about the kiss at the end of the film. How did you feel? Do you remember the song that was playing when it happened? Probably. Would you have felt the same if no music was playing? Probably not. The music is what mainly made you feel a specific emotion. This is true in advertising as well. Incorporating music can deliver an emotional connection with consumers, and has the ability to create a relationship with the brand.
Music is important in advertising, but selecting the right music is even more important. Marketers need to understand their message and select music that conveys the same or similar message. A song about heartbreak in an advertisement for Dominos would not be an ideal choice and would confuse viewers. Ensure that the rhythm of both the song and the advertisement are in sync. The shots in the advertisement and the beat of the song should be parallel to enable a certain flow. Choosing a compelling song that is not particularly popular will help your advertisement stand out more compared to a top 40 song. Although it may seem like it would be the opposite, top 40 songs are overplayed on the radio, in retail stores, etc., which can make it annoying and forgettable. While choosing an unpopular, gripping song keeps the advertisement interesting, fresh, new, and memorable. "The Dreamers" advertisement by Honda is a great example of how music can positively affect the outcome.
The song gave the commercial life and consistently stayed with the theme of correct pace and message. We hear lyrics like "walking on a dream" and "running for the thrill of it" carrying the message that Honda is striving for, and the rhythm flowing smoothly with the crisp shots.
Sonos teamed with Apple Music and neuroscientist Daniel Livitin to find out just how important music is in people's lives. They found that couples that listen to music spend three more hours together at home when music is playing versus those who do not. This is such an important statistic for brands and how they implement their advertising and branding. While, this statistic pertains to personal relationships, it is vital to understand that brands need to build personal relationships with consumers and should recognize that it can happen. Brands must realize that the brand and the consumer are a couple. Whatever one does it effects the other. So, let the consumer spend three more hours with your brand by incorporating the right music in advertising and let the consumer feel your ad not just see it.
Whether it be TV ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, etc. music takes the consumer to another place that silence fails to do. Music contains the dynamic to help build and sustain relationships for a brand and its consumers though it may not seem like a huge input into advertising.
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/sonos-cmo-joy-howard-importance-music/303580/
Masterpiece in 30 Seconds: Music in Advertising
Advertising, Agency, Branding, Branding, Creative, Marketing, TGA Insight, TV, Uncategorized, Video, Video
Written by Goss
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Conversion Drivers


text:
Government, Public Sector
Leigh Day
UK: "Racism Is A US Problem – We Do Not Have Those Problems In The UK"
by Aya Jamal , Gene Matthews and Arooj Khan
After George Floyd's death at the hands of law enforcement in the US sparked protests in America and beyond, Black Lives Matter UK showed its solidarity by underlining the continuing racism and inequality against Black people in the UK and Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a cross-governmental commission to look at "all aspects of inequality – in employment, in health outcomes, in academia and all other walks of life".
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights report, published 11 November, 2020 addresses racial inequality and the government's continued failure to protect Black people's human rights within the criminal justice system, immigration, health, and the democratic process (specifically the voting system).
The report calls for a "comprehensive cross-Government race equality strategy", provides its own recommendations and urges the government to implement the recommendations of previous reports.
The Black community's perception of human rights
Based on an online polling sample of 515 individuals conducted by ClearView, the committee found that more than 75 per cent of Black people in the UK believe that their human rights aren't equally protected compared to White people. This amounted to over 82 per cent of women and 69 per cent of men. Participants said they had experienced "unequal treatment in education, employment and crime".
The survey revealed that more than 60 per cent of Black people believe their health is not equally protected by the NHS compared to White people. That was 78 per cent of women compared to 47 per cent of men.
Researchers said the gender disparities were because Black women were more likely to have caring responsibilities, making them more likely to interact with the NHS and thus have negative experiences. However this does little to acknowledge the levels of ingrained prejudice experienced by Black women (commonly termed as misogynoir).
The committee found that 85 per cent of Black people in the UK do not believe that they would be treated equally by the police, compared to White people. This amounted to 91 per cent of Black women and 77 per cent of Black men.
The report also highlighted that 25 per cent of Black voters in the UK are not registered to vote compared to 17 per cent across the population. Lord Woolley of Operation Black Vote believes this is due to hundreds of thousands of black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) young people viewing British institutions, particularly the police, as rigged against them.
The government's continued failure to protect Black people's human rights
The committee lists a significant number of reports published in recent years which have found racial inequalities across "state institutions and processes, from the Home Office to the Youth Justice System".
These include the Windrush Lessons Learned Review (2020), Race Disparity Audit (2017), The Lammy Review (2017), The McGregor-Smith Review (2017) and The Angiolini Review (2017.
The majority of their recommendations have not been implemented and where the government has acted, results have been superficial and have not had a lasting effect. A very recent example is that key recommendations from a Public Health England report into the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on BAME people have been buried.
The committee found that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) failed to "adequately provide leadership and gain trust in tackling racial inequality in the protection and promotion of human rights".
Since its formation in 2007 after the demise of the Commission for Racial Equality, the EHRC has had its annual budget slashed from £70m to £20m, making it harder for the organisation to support the laws that protect Black people's human rights.
The committee says its findings are a "damning indictment of our society and must be addressed as a matter of the highest political priority".
It recommends that the EHRC conducts an annual opinion survey addressing whether Black people believe that their human rights are equally protected and suggests it will routinely hear from "Black, Asian and minority ethnic people about their experiences in relation to human rights". It was also suggested that the police "regularly poll Black people to find out their levels of confidence in the police to protect their human rights", then publish these findings and work to increase the confidence that Black people have in the police.
The committee advises Parliamentary select committees to consider how they should tackle racism and inequality and "have a regular focus on race equality through their inquiry work", and thus "use best endeavours to facilitate the recruitment of Black and minority ethnic staff into senior roles and report annually on progress".
The government should consult on automatic voter registration to increase democratic participation amongst Black people and other ethnic minorities and reduce the registration gap between Black and White people.
With regards to deaths of Black people in custody, in order to ensure that responsibility of upholding Article 2 (of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to life) legal proceedings does not fall on the shoulders of the families of the deceased, it was suggested that a Commissioner or Office of Article 2 compliance be established to ensure that the correct processes are followed. This would ensure that lessons are learned, and that best practice is disseminated to prevent future unnecessary deaths.
Following the Windrush scandal, the Home Office urgently needs to rebuild trust with affected communities by fixing the compensation scheme (including by lowering the standard of proof for evidential requirements to "the balance of probabilities") and ensuring that those affected receive the compensation they are entitled to without further delay. Cultural changes must be targeted, to ensure that people are treated with humanity and not treated unfairly because of their race. Recommendations from the Windrush Lessons Learned Review must be implemented as a matter of urgency.
In healthcare, recent research into maternal deaths and morbidity showed that Black women are five times more likely than White women to die during childbirth. Given this startling figure, it was suggested that the government should "introduce a target to end the disparity in maternal mortality between Black women and White women". The report highlights institutional racism as a clear contributor to negligent pre-natal care experienced by Black and Asian mothers-to-be.
It is clear that these disparities have increased due to the COVID-19 outbreak, which in turn has exposed the long-standing failure of the government to combat these disparities and protect Black women's' human rights. The committee therefore welcomes the Chief Midwifery Officer's four-point action plan to better support women during the COVID-19 pandemic, which should be implemented "as a matter of urgency".
Ultimately it was suggested that any future public inquiry into the impact of COVID-19 should prioritise the consideration of why Black people have experienced higher mortality from the virus.
Room for Further Improvement?
Baroness Lawrence asked the committee "How many more lessons do we all need to learn?"
The 1999 Macpherson Report (from the inquiry set up after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993) found the UKs largest police authority to be a prime example of institutional racism. Despite this, over 20 years later Black children are still four times more likely to be arrested than their White counterparts. Additionally, despite the common assumption that racism fades with time, the percentage of Black children in custody has increased by 13 per cent within the last decade. Rather than being addressed, current racial inequalities are not just being sustained, but seem to be increasing.
The government and society at large appears to be enmeshed in a cycle, whereby racism and inequality leads to a national tragedy (eg. the Windrush Scandal): the government conducts an inquiry and releases a report whose recommendations are not actioned, thus allowing racism and inequalities in society to go unchecked. The government's continued failure to implement these recommendations "intensifies disaffection and lack of confidence in the Government on race issues".
These delays cost and shorten Black lives, they illustrate a woeful negligence on the government's part not to action what learned academics and professionals within the BAME community have urged them to do time and time again. The time has passed for further fact-finding, we now need to take action to reduce inequalities and secure Black people's human rights.
As Baroness Lawrence reminds us "the lessons are there already for us to implement. Until we start doing that, we will keep coming back in a year or two years repeating the same thing over and over again."
Originally Published by Leigh Day, November 2020
Aya Jamal
Arooj Khan
UK Employment and HR Discrimination, Disability & Sexual Harassment Government, Public Sector Human Rights
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Have you ever wanted to rotate an object to any angle and not just flip it or just rotate left/right? Well this is the tool for you.
Using this Developer's Exchange Tool you can easily rotate ToolBook objects.
line, angledline, curve, polygon and irregularPolygon.
This routine fully rotates the above list of objects. Also, it will allow you to select a group. If the group contains any of objects listed above then they are fully rotated, all other objects in the group are oriented along a 90 degree axis. This routine just moves these objects around the center without rotating their vertices.
I have used this sort of tool many times in the past and thought that you too may have a need for a simple easy to use tool. The OpenScript was originally developed by Joseph Brick, Oct 93. So thank you Joseph.
Select any ToolBook object that can be rotated.
Lines, angledLines, curves, polygons, irregularPolygons.
Have instant access to the tool through your local Developer's Exchange Tools.


A delegation of farmers from Sri Lanka on Friday visited the farm of natural farmer Ramesh Raju at Kurahatti in the taluk.
Raju has succeeded in reaping good yield by adopting natural farming. Instead of fertilisers and other stimulants, Raju uses cow urine, cow dung cakes and jaggery to increase productivity of crops like banana and sugarcane.
Sharing his success story with his Sri Lankan counterparts — led by Jayant Tilak on a study tour Raju said he cultivated 50 tonnes of sugarcane on one acre of land, spending Rs 30,000. He has already earned Rs 50,000 by growing sub-crops like brinjal, chilly and others. The sugarcane expected to be harvested in five months will help produce 50 quintals of jaggery. According to the prevailing price jaggery costs Rs 3,500.
He advised the delegates to adopt natural farming as propagated by Subhash Palekar — invest less and earn more without depending on fertilisers.
Tilak said the visit has been a shot in the arm and similar experiment to be undertaken in his country will definitely be a success. "Already five workshops have been conducted in Sri Lanka. It was the workshop that aroused the curiosity of farmers and hence we are on a study tour. We will also urge the government to adopt natural farming to increase food production to meet the growing demand," he said.
The delegation also included president of Sri Lanka Farmers Association Darshan De'Silva, Subramanya Pillai and Reverend Gunaratne.
They were accompanied by natural farmers Pratibha Nagavara and Anantaraj Keragodu.


Does anyone have any information about the History of the Melbourne Cup????
anyone use "FOLLOW THE MONEY"
anyone using the system "Follow The Money". Identifies horses where the money is down and the morning price is slashed by at least 3-4 points (reducing dependant on morning price).
She is great! She is fun! Do this Brooke Burke quiz. I played and scored 8 points. http://brooke.burke.tux.nu/quiz.game.jsp?id=4 How did you do?
Lou Diamonds Speed Formula? Horse scientology at its best!
Lou Diamonds Speed Figures, are they the answer?
Anyone: There is a system that relies totaly on the m l odds. If you have tried it and want to trade notes post it. I'm spending a lot of time with one system.


text:
Unmasked, Part 2/4
Looks like Thief's thieving has landed her in the slammer. Good thing our sticky-fingered tiefling has friends on the outside willing to come up with a brilliant escape plan. If it were me though, she might not be so lucky.
This might not be a popular opinion, but I don't care for in-depth heist-style Oceans Eleven planning. Not on the tabletop anyway. Murphy's Law is in effect every time your party puts a complex scheme into motion, meaning you're going to wind up improvising around unforeseen obstacles anyway. To my way of thinking, that makes anything more than a broad-strokes "here's their security system, here's how we're going to work around it" overkill. It's a GM's job to put complications in your way after all. That's why I appreciate the flashback mechanics in Blades in the Dark, Honey Heist, or (to a lesser extent) the brilliant planner feat. These mechanics simulate uncanny criminal foresight without demanding that players actually go full-on Xanatos Gambit.
A lot of my thinking on the subject came from my group's first Shadowrun campaign. We'd come over from our various dungeon-crawl games, and were ready for a change in setting. We got excited. We made deckers and riggers and adepts. I was a "cajun combat troll," and my accent was full-on ridiculous. (Beauregard Saucier Dupré remains my all-time favorite PC). In short, the mix of archetypes and personalities was amazing, our GM was enthusiastic, and everyone was on board for some Leverage–style shenanigans. Unfortunately however, there were nine PCs.
"What's your plan?" said our GM. "How will you intercept the van en route to its destination?"
"Drones! We'll laser-cut through the roof! We go through the sewers! We hack the local traffic grid! Come up from a manhole cover! Fake a heart attack in the crosswalk! Come out guns blazing! Ride up alongside on mopeds Mad Max style! Attack the van while it's still at its base!"
"Ok… Those are all ideas that could work. Which ones would you like to do?"
I shit you not, it was two full four-hour sessions of arguing. Every time we settled on a plan, someone would come up with another contingency that had to be addressed. The municipal traffic system might be too powerful to hack. The drones would be spotted. Attacking the base would draw too much heat from the gang of genetically engineered drug runners we were trying to rob. My troll would not fit on a moped.
Eventually we settled on the traffic / manhole cover plan. I believe we had to call a vote to make that happen. We wound up sticking the van at a never-ending red light, cut a hole through its undercarriage, and got the goods without triggering any alarms. Unfortunately, by that time everyone was thoroughly sick of heists. Our gang of shadowrunners were successful, but it wound up feeling like an anticlimax after all the bickering.
Now obviously there were too many cooks in that cyberpunk kitchen, so let's not waste time agreeing that 9 PCs is too many. Instead, I'd like to focus our collective attention on the notion that overthinking really and truly is the trap (NSFW). Executing a clever plan is a lot of fun, but not 10 IRL hours later and at the expense of your sanity. So for today's discussion question, let's figure out how to find a better balance. How much planning is too much? Tell us all about a time when you executed a complex heist-style plan. How did you cover all the contingencies without driving yourself nuts? Sound off in the comments with all your best machinations and schemes.
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the "Henchman" reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That's bragging rights right there!
We haven't done any heists in my group, but there was one time that our GM put in a lot of planning for a haunted house encounter that didn't quite pan out the way he thought it would. He forgot about our tank – Grimnar the dwarf. He walked right into the house, ignored everything by succeeding at every will save, grabbed the macguffin, and walked right back out. We had been told not to leave the path and run if we heard rattling chains. Grimnar basically said "F it, I'm taking a shortcut," and left the path. We followed because we didn't want him to be left alone. Then we heard chains and started running. Guess who didn't run? Guess who got attacked by a ghoul? By the time we realized in-character he had been left behind and to get back to him, it had been about 7 rounds of Grimnar and the ghoul. I actually felt sorry for the ghoul because it kept trying to wrap Grimnar in its chains but failed every time. And was getting whacked in the head by Grimnar's big old axe every round as well.
The GM didn't do a haunted style storyline the rest of the campaign. He only did one in the next campaign when we were all at low levels with bad saves.
Was Grimnar a cleric? Because that was our plan last time a haunted house came up: make the guy with the good saves walk in front.
No, he was pure Fighter. His Will save was 22. He just had super high AC and a Fort save of 31.
That is a seriously respectable saving throw for a Fighter!
+5 cloak… +6 Wisdom headband… Iron Will for +2… Assuming high level for a +6 base save… +2 from dwarf (assuming the haunting was spell-like)…
Did the dude have an unmodified Wisdom of 18!?
14, actually. Since the campaign is over, I can look at his character sheet in Roll20. I have no idea how he got his Will that high. It says 10 in Resist, but I don't see any feats, class features, or items to boost it.
I hope I have not awakened suspicion and distrust. :/
It's all good. It was just so funny watching it all go down. I don't think he actually had to roll that many Will saves, so he probably just rolled well. And I'm pretty sure the chains were going against his AC which had a LOT of feats and features going to it.
Alfa/Polaris
I have a major tendency to overthink and hesitate, even in trivial fights. I know the art of just picking something cool and/or generically helpful to do when I can't decide, but that doesn't mean it won't take me a long time to decide I won't be able to decide, sucking all of the potential spice out of my turn. Deciding ahead of time, and putting more energy into narrating what my character does than picking the absolute best course of action, is still something I'm working on.
This applied especially hard in the Pathfinder 1E game I'm in, since we're a small party (3) of people I'm very fond of that are all way better at going with the flow. Pathfinder being as mathy and easy to mess up as it is, and our party being as weird as we are (two delayed arcane Charisma casters and a Brawler!), I obsess a little in both character creation and play, fretting over every outcome and trying to keep us all safe. Our GM's generally handled this by giving info or advice on the bits of the system we forget or don't understand well, as well as having generally reasonable and informed people in the world, but one tactic he likes was instrumental to that time we needed to steal a hurricane-worthy ship: just kinda moving on with what we bring up after a certain point, without letting us (me) deliberate for too long. The ship-stealing hijinks were helped by him giving us one "I planned for this" each, but it definitely wouldn't have been as varied or as satisfying a heist as it was if we'd been allowed to spend another hour flipflopping from/fine-tuning the basic idea of "'accidentally' start a fire to get everyone to evacuate another ship, then steal the navy's when they come to reclaim it".
The ship-stealing hijinks were helped by him giving us one "I planned for this" each, but it definitely wouldn't have been as varied or as satisfying a heist as it was if we'd been allowed to spend another hour flipflopping from/fine-tuning the basic idea of "'accidentally' start a fire to get everyone to evacuate another ship, then steal the navy's when they come to reclaim it".
Is there an ideal amount of planning time in your group? When does it go from 'fine-tuning' to 'overthinking?'
A healthy number of minutes, from what I can tell, or until it's a back-and-forth that's not really going anywhere. That doesn't happen often, though, my friends being good at going with the flow means that solid RP or courses of action aren't too hard to come by for them. ~w~
And as a follow up: On those rare occasions when it does drag on, what is that breaks the stalemate? Does the GM intervene? Does a player decide to yield in the name of harmony?
On an unrelated note, cute that Wizard is putting every inch of that 8 STR to work breaking out Thief c:
It is this that gives me hope for their relationship. Even if they're not doing great in the other comic right now, I think they've got something special. <3
There was a complex heist plan once in a game I was running. It stalled out for two hours as the PCs' plan of turning invisible and riding giant eagles over the fortress they were trying to break into (flying so high up that the giant eagles wouldn't look giant to those on the ground), dropping into the fortress courtyard, and using feather fall to land safely, kept hitting the roadblock of "How do we cast feather fall on the way down without the guards in the courtyard noticing the spell's components?"
Potions of feather fall were discussed. Complex timing involving casting right when a church bell rang were laid out. Plans to buy fireworks were well underway, and decoys were being prepared to draw the attention of the guards to elsewhere, but they were hitting more and more snafus with each solution they came up with.
After two hours of this going nowhere, I broke my GM silence and reminded them that they could just use invisibility and fly to get into the courtyard. No feather fall timing necessary.
Truly, they were a group that knew how to overcomplicate things.
I know that GMs don't like dropping the curtain, but good on ya for getting involved. At some point, the game has to go on.
Fundamentally I think this is a "perfect pasta sauce" situation. It all boils down to how fun your group finds the process of planning to be in itself.
With the right group it can be loads of fun.
It does help if you (as a group) doesn't consider it the GM's job to screw your plan up, such as say by inventing and presenting complications just for the sake of complications. If the planning is just a nod to in-universe realism of your characters desires but the fun bit if flying by the seats of your pants of course the whole thing is going to feel boring. It makes the effort into work, instead of play.
If on the other hand a plan that goes off without a hitch is a perfectly valid result, the play and counter-play involved in figuring out which defenses the target is likely to have and ways to counter them can be quite entertaining in itself.
That said, it's easy for people to get stuck in a rut of analysis paralysis and fear of ever more unlikely "what if" scenarios. I find that it helps to focus on legwork, but that only goes so far, at some point you have to make a decision. Having an IC leader of the group helps, or a tradition of voting or something. Just have some way of reaching a decision which doesn't depend on a perfect consensus and which the group considers valid rather than a failure state to invoke.
Well that was more than I cared to know about pasta sauce marketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aGNqw0mDm8
I like the idea of "the plan goes off without a hitch" being possible, but I think it's weirdly unlikely. If the run involves dice rolls rather than a GM who concludes, "Te plan is clever enough to just work," you're probably going to fail at least one of those rolls. That means you'll have to adapt. And that means planning too many moves ahead is becomes more trouble than it's worth.
I'm talking generalities here, so help me out with the specifics. Do you have a step-by-step plan that worked well? What did it look like? How did you deal with failed checks?
Sadly it has been a few years since I was in a heist focused game and the more recent games have leaned more towards the "plannings for show and character moments" end of the spectrum, so specifics can be though, but my players
The problem of "roll until you fail-guarantees failure" is indeed a real one through, and since it's often applied to stealth and deception, it more often causes trouble for heists than for other adventure activities.
The solutions (for the games where it's a problem) are mostly GM-end.
One tactic is to not make a single failure cause the failure of the whole. For instance a missed bluff check could cause suspicion and scrutiny, rather than recognition as an infiltrator or a failed stealth check attract a guard who checks to see if the noise was something they should care about instead of being enough to spot the sneaking character. Similiar principle to how a failed attack roll in combat doesn't mean you lost the fight and now have to flee, or negotiate a surrender.
Another possibility is to just call very few rolls and letting them stand for the heist as a whole, so the singular bluff check you roll at the start to convince people you are a technician that's allowed to be here counts for all the "I'm allowed to be here" bluff checks for the entire run.
For forgeries and false keycards in particular it helps as a GM to remember that it's probably happens a lot more often to the guards that some technical/human error results in the keycard being rejected/the paper form being filled wrongly than they encounter forgeries. So a bluff check (possibly at a penalty depending on security level) which success meaning they let you in anyways and failure just meaning they tell you to get it fixed and come back later might be more appropriate than a full arrest.
On the player end, one thing one can do is try to layer plans in such a way that failure is OK as long as not all the layers fail at once. For instance you might see if you can take a penalty to sneaking in exchange for your sneaking just consisting of walking quietly without drawing attention while acting as through you are lost. That way if you get spotted it's just bluff check time instead of time to go loud.
Another possibility is to just call very few rolls and letting them stand for the heist as a whole
I think you're talking 'Let it Ride.'
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38313/roleplaying-games/the-art-of-rulings-part-8-let-it-ride
That is indeed the fancy, cool, easy-to-remember term for that which I couldn't remember when I was writing that longer explanation out.
I don't think I have actually read the article that birthed it before through, so thank you for sending that my way.
Oh, I love the complex planning. It's not usually productive in a game sense, since the usual rule about "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" applies — but it can be so much fun, everyone discussing, putting together an over-complicated plan… and then getting to see just how long the plan actually lasts…
…although last time we put together a plan for a heist, it ended with the party leaving town in a hurry as a civil war erupted around us. I think that holds the record for the biggest fiasco in this group's history… and I'm counting the actual Fiasco games.
How long do you typically spend on the planning phase? How do you know when you're done?
Half the session, sometimes… it depends on how long it takes before everyone gets tired of asking "but what about…?".
The point is that gaming is social, right? And it just happens that sometimes we're having so much fun out of character discussing what we're going to do, that half the evening has gone by before we actually start executing the plan. Whomever is GM is usually happy enough with this, since it's entertaining to watch the players overthinking everything, and it saves on prep…
TheStratovarian
If you are a tactical planner.. Get used to disappointment in most groups.
Most folks are going to fight you on ideas, or basically just want to hit things.
And plans are where I just simply don't bother anymore in party's. They'll do what they do.
And only when you are the leader can you basically follow the KISS method for keeping folks happy.
Otherwise, just don't bother or you get someone that wants to fight about it, and it devolves.
Coordinating tactis is hard, yo. Go too hard and you wind up pulling a quarterback:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/general-disarray
Go too soft and it's all cat herding all the time. That's why I like "very general plans." Sort out the buffs, decide on an opening gambit, and then just go for it.
Glorthindel
My WFRP parties standard fallback tactic was the 'reverse ambush', which basically amounted to walking headlong straight into whatever trap or ambush is waiting for them, triggering it, then just bashing whatever came along to kill them.
I think I know that party: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5d/46/2f/5d462f5465c553b9f6de44023fe2bd76.jpg
We usually go with slightly more sophisticated versions of 'reverse ambush'. One is that we send the rogue into the ambush — because the evasive rogue is the only one likely to survive when the casters start lobbing dex-saves into the battlefield.
The other is that the stealthy types go hunting… sneak around the perimeter of the ambush site, and quietly make some changes to the odds while the rest of the party walks into the killzone. As the player of the rogue, you can guess which of these variants I prefer.
Where's Cleric for this brilliant heist? Too lawful for him to be able to participate?
Off-screen casting atonement. Dude is pretty lawful.
Now that I think about it, I think I know what ele might be keeping him occupied – and perfectly details the problems of a heist plan as well. If only I could easily find the comic again… Oh well, might as well check up on all the alt text…
Huh, Cleric got a kitten for Christmas one time. What happened to it?
And there seems to be a recurring owl/owlbear child in the older comics…
Oh, there's the kitten. Shame Wiz has a phobia of it. Is he like that around Magus too?
Ah, there we go! The other probable reason he's not in on this plan.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dithering
It would appear that the phobia only extends to literal cats: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/behaving-intelligently
I feel like planning for a siege is good fun (if you are the besieged group), as you can set up physical traps and barricades (or guards and wards ) and then they are in place and will be reacted to. Can't say I've ever pulled off anything similar to heist planning.
I feel ya on the siege. I'd never had the opportunity though, which is why I wound up writing this thing.
https://adventureaweek.com/shop/pathfinder/pathfinder-adventures/b20-rent-lease-conquest/
It's set up to be full-on Home Alone for the climax.
tremor3258
Anatomy of a Shadowrun may be one of the best tools for planning, being a full breakdown in character and by mechanics for planning a trenchcoat run. Notably did their best to cover but was by working backwards seemed a great way to help contingency paralysis.
And when that all fails, geek the mage first.
I'm pretty sure that pausing to read a 32-page pamphlet would indeed have been a time savings.
But for serious though: that's a cool document. Thanks for the tip!
Where is Cleric in this scenario? Does Wizard have access to Telekinesis or Bigby's Hand?
Where is Cleric in this scenario?
Does Wizard have access to Telekinesis or Bigby's Hand?
Unfortunately, Fighter got to plan this one. That means a hard-labor-first policy.
Why did the guy who obviously dumped Intelligence the one doing the planning? Hell, just climb up there and slip some Thieves' tools through the bars, and Thief Rogue could let herself out. Stone Shape, and Knock could also work.
Because arguing with Fighter for 8 hours is less productive than playing tug of war with a wall.
I do really like how well the art conveys Wizard is giving her all to the 'roll percentile dice to Bend Bars/Lift Gates' plan and it is really not doing anything.
For the low, low cost of [student debt amounts redacted], you too can convey the struggles of wizards in the world of manual labor!
[student debt amounts redacted]
My pet-theory as to why so many Wizards adopt ridiculous names like "Mordenkainen" or "Elminster" is that they had to change their identity to avoid Wizard-school debt.
Headcanon accepted.
And now I want to run an adventure where, after 1000 years or however old those ultra-powerful wizards are, they've racked up interest the size of a large nation's economy, and are in need of help from the players in avoiding the flying air-breathing loan sharks.
New backstory: the tarrasque is really just a mage tower repo agent smeared unjustly by a magic-using class outrunning their debts.
So is "Wizard" the handbook Wizard's pseudonym?
I trialled a Firefly campaign some years back that ran into the same tar pit; too many ideas, no consensus, time just gradually sucking away, and very little fun had. I think it lasted four sessions.
Which is why for my Dark Heresy campaign I did things a little differently. By having an Inquisitor superior, I was able to take a lot of options off the table right at the beginning during the breif, and then by having the superior sit in on the planning phase (so they could straight up shoot down the more outlandish plans). It cut down planning time vastly, and encouraged the players to back each others plans up in the face of a doubtful (and killjoy) superior.
I always like putting at least one speech-capable NPC in the party for this reason. Of course, I tend to prefer snarky servants to scary bosses, just so that the players feel in control. All you really need is someone to point out the obvious flaws in a plan.
One of my favourite characters in the Girl Genius comic is Moloch… the born minion who's spent enough time around sparks to know exactly how a mad plan is going to go down… but also enough to know that nobody will listen to an underling until it's too late.
"And it's all the same if nothing of mine persuades you, of course: the future will come; and you will soon be at my side to pity and call me too true a prophet."
I'm in a dnd 5e campaign that's pretty much a series heists and rescues (We're a criminal gang in Sharn). We use the flashback mechanic drawn from Blades in the Dark and I'm enjoying its use. The game flows better, as we can feel like we're planning effectively without wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to plan for every scenario. I'd recommend trying something like flashbacks (or Brilliant Planner) in any campaign. I find it also helps offset the problem that communication between players and DM will always be imperfect.
I wonder if that kind of device could work along with the note-passing discussed last comic? I mean, my problem with note passing is that there's often a lack of foreshadowing. There's no way for the other players to know that something is going on in a private chat, meaning that the big reveals of PVP can come off as arbitrary rather than interesting.
Could the flashback mechanic be adapted to treachery…?
Loki, God of Mischief
As I recall, we were raiding a camp of demon-apes to rescue a lost paladin. We had already made friends with the local volcano god and promised to send him a signal when the time was ripe to strike.
We plotted for about.. 20 minutes? and settled on our strike-plan.
GM: "Your plan is fireball, fireball, fireball?"
The sorcerer and wizard in unison: "Yep!"
GM: "And then..?"
Wiz and sorc look at each other in confusion..: "More fireball?"
Now that's my kind of planning! Wish we had some players like you guys in that Shadowrun game. >_>
Where is the fun in a heist without get nuts from trying to plan for every contingency? 😛
But in truth we have not done too much heist-games. Too simple and common for us, i suppose 🙁
The Oglaf comic, i din't know you liked that kind of things wink wink, at least make me laugh. It remind me of a game i DMed a while ago 🙂
I just realized that I should approach the Oglaf guys about doing a crossover.
With the Handbook of heroes, or the erotic fantasy one? I approve both approach but i would prefer the heroes one. Mainly for economical reasons 😀
The Cure light wounds comic have always made me want to play a cleric 😛
Heh. Stabbing humor.
My group actually executed an extremely successful heist, so I'm going to say the key is coming up with the plan in between sessions and being willing to abandon the specifics of the plan at the drop of a hat. Or in other words, going for broad strokes rather than specifics.
After coming up with an elaborate plan involving timing teleporting, stealth, and grapples to take out the guards without causing a fuss, we were intercepted on the way to the location by a rival thief trying to slow us down/scare us off. Several injuries, chase sequences, and one psionic charm person later, we convinced her to ally with us and she told us that we were mistaken about where the goods were actually being kept. So we snuck in through the sewers to the actual location, bested the alchemists and guards while stopping errant fires from spreading, and made good on our original idea of using Tenser's Floating Disc to carry the loot out.
At this point, we split up. Half of us went to burn down the corrupt governor's mansion as a diversion to attract all the soldiers, the other half went to our ship's hiding place (running into the other groups rather miffed members along the way, but I was able to convince them their odds of taking advantage of the chaos we were causing were better than their odds of taking us on without casualties).
We reconvened at the docks, and boarded the ship the distracted soldiers had been using (which was much faster than ours) with the plan of either seizing it or destroying it so it couldn't just chase us down. After a particularly dangerous fight with the remaining soldiers (my character was one misremembered rule away from dropping to -20 hp in the surprise round and becoming a fine character shaped mist), we succeeded in seizing the ship, found out that our employer was actually its owner and on board, had an awkward conversation in which we worked things out, and sailed off with our new ship, leaving her to reestablish control over the island (we may have neglected to tell her that the rival group was actually an insurgency likely to take her hostage in order to negotiate for independence).
So yeah. I'm not the DM, so I can't know exactly what was going on behind the screen, but I imagine that he had a list of the factions/elements present in/around the town, and figured out as we acted what the most appropriate way for them to react based on logic and drama. As for our part, we rolled with the punches, took advantage of new information, abandoned aspects of the plan that were revealed to be unfeasible/unnecessary, and sowed chaos to keep the other groups confused as to our capabilities, our plans, and what the heck was actually going on at any given moment.
It probably helped that the island was essentially a relatively small closed system, with a limited number of factions and a limited number of resources they could draw on.
You know what's interesting to me about this approach? It almost exactly echoes DMing advice. Check out "The Invisible Railroad" on page 75:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/DM_Experience_2011.pdf
You make a plan, but you abandon it easily and adapt on the fly.
Played a bit of Karma in the Dark, which is effectively a heist-based RPG in a setting that's modified to match that of Shadowrun. Rules include being able to flashback and retcon events or preparation during the mission, and generally lets the heist's brilliance happen on the spot and avoiding having to accomodate for every contingency.
We needed to infiltrate a building full of security guards, cameras and security drones locked by a keycard, break into an office and nick some blackmail material from a celebrity's manager's safe.
Beforee the heist itself, my hacker got good luck hacking the cameras (learning of the drones and other details), one player managed to bribe some of the guards, another focused on safecracking practice, and a third used magic and klepto habits to nick a keycard.
The mission itself was fairly smooth – we sneaked in easily, unlocked the office with hacking a blank keycard (at the cost of my tools getting damaged), found the hidden safe thanks to my reviewing of camera footage, unlocked a safe (which our safecracker could talk to, thanks to their class ability) and stole the data with time to spare for an escape. My hacker, unwilling to leave a trail behind, lingered to wipe away all evidence of their entry, which gave one guard the time needed to investigate the disturbance in the office and catch us red-handed.
Luckily, said guard was already bribed by us! We tossed him his agreed-upon drugs and gained a new friendly contact before escaping into the night, with extra evidence of the celebrity's own misdeeds in tow as paydata. Overall, a near textbook heist.
Gotta love that "we already bribed the guard" trope. It's an extremely cinematic moment as the boots approach, the flashlight shines on the men in balaclavas rifling through files…
"Dammit Phillip. Would you get that thing out of my face?"
"Sorry. Do you fellows need anything? A coffee maybe?"
At one point, the very first group I was in was starting a session, and we absolutely for the life of us could not decide what it was we wanted to do. After like 20 minutes of dithering, the DM eventually stood up, said "Right. As you try to decide where to go, a storm sucks you up off your boat and spits you out in the middle of an orc fort on the other side of the continent. You are now behind enemy lines. What do you do?"
While it was heavy handed, it sure did settle the debate of where we were going. I took a lesson from that for my own DMing: when in doubt, hit somebody with an orc until they start moving.
There's a range of attitudes on this point. My GM waited for two sessions. Yours waited 20 minutes. A little further up the page Simon said, "Half the session, sometimes… it depends on how long it takes before everyone gets tired of asking "but what about…?".
Like so many things in the hobby, knowing when to step in as the GM is a matter of reading the room.
For my part, I think it's best to error on the side of giving the players time to argue, and to only step in when it's clear that they're frustrated. That's a judgement call though, and it's a tough one to nail 100% of the time.
Currently playing through Crimson Throne (finishing up Book 2 in the next couple of weeks) and the difficultly of just 3 players agree on a plan in a timely manner definitely makes this comic's comments hit home. I can't even imagine 9 players trying to agree on something. Shadowrun in particular is tricky since it is such a massively complicated system in terms of what you can do and what you have to prepare for. At least with 9 players you would have enough specialists to realistically deal with almost anything that might come up.
It was… not an easy group. Lots of my favorite gamers in that party, but there were just too many of us.
How are you handling 3 plaers in Crimson Throne? I'm running with two PCs in a gestalt game, and gave them a free cohort healer (not-gestalted) to try and make up the difference in action economy.
Our GM is running an Oracle specializing in raising skeletons to help out. I'm playing a Warpriest (Bulwark archetype), and the others are playing an archery focused Ranger with a pseudodragon companion, and a Bloodrager. We've also managed to grab a couple of NPC Korvosan guards and a priest of Abadar to help us out in the last dungeon that we're all individually running to avoid putting too much on the GM. As it is, we've nearly had TPKs at least five times prior to the final dungeon, most of which were completely avoidable. Additionally, almost all of our characters are rather dumb, so we miss out on a lot of the background information that could seriously help us out due to not being able to make the checks necessary (my character has the highest Intelligence at 10). We're fortunate to have a fairly balanced group, but it would really help to have a more skill focused character that could ensure that we can actually get the information that we need.
Oof. That necromancer must have gone over well with the Pharasmins.
"Excuse us good ladies. We are here to stop a corpse robber. Never mind the walking corpses."
Fortunately it hasn't come up yet, though it's only a matter of time, especially since his character lives in the graveyard as a gravedigger. Plus we've made sure not to have corpses marching down the street, so it's only been recently that he's been digging up mass graves to get more skeletons.
An NPC friend of the party had disappeared, and when we discovered her fate, she was kept prisoner in some sort of fleshy demonic demi-plane where the entrance was on an island magically covered in mind-numbing fog, populated by very nasty locals. Her essence was being slowly drained to empower a demon lord, like those sort of evil magical sarlacc.
After looking at various ways to stage a rescue, each time ending in a brick wall of "far too dangerous", our final plan was to cheese it as much as possible. See, in our campaign, the ethereal plane connects pretty much everything if you know how to walk through its mists: you only need to have a clear idea of your destination and you can reach its ethereal side. Then of course you also need to know how to enter and exit the ethereal plane, but we've got spells for that. So we traveled to her prison through the ethereal plane instead of geographically, yeeted her into the ethereal, and replaced her with her weight in alchemical high explosive and a holy delayed blast fireball. It was very satisfying.
After that we have started using ethereal raids more and more because it works, so the GM has introduced various side effects to discourage the cheese, including being scolded by ethereal spirits for the method we use to cross (if you've read The Subtle Knife from the Dark Materials series, it's kind of similar in concept). Still, sometimes, it's worth it.
Effyis Biblos
Archive binge complete. Nice webcomic you have here. Got linked from Rusty and co. a few days ago.
GreatWyrmGold
I, for one, enjoy overplanning. The planning itself is interesting (assuming you have enough tools and information to work with), and there's nothing quite like having one of the contingencies you thought of save your bacon.
…but I wouldn't subject my gaming companions to that if I wasn't fairly certain they also enjoyed it. But I am, so we do.
sodangtiredallthetime
I also am not a big fan of heists – if anything, I think I'm kinda like Paladin, most of all, bahaha – but I have run two, and I have something that's worked really well for them, in my experience. Keep in mind that it may be because of my style as a GM. Anyway.
With both cases, I had an NPC 'info-broker', who could have been a PC if a PC filled that niche! The party consulted them to 'case' the area of their heist, and on both sessions I closed with the info-broker promising to get floor plans, notable info, security, etc.
When they got back, I had the character go over the layout of the place, with a section suitable to several of each character's skills, and various 'recommended' plans of attack. The reason I had several skills per character was that so that it wasn't me arbitrarily making buildings that were a good challenge/target for the PCs, but…
"Keseslrig, it'd be a cinch for someone like you to drive up, you know, say you're one of the contestants. Or perhaps take a truck in, blending in with the mechanics for an in is more your style, eh? And of course you could try 'requisitioning' a chopper…
And Roberta, of course, I know you that cracking a vault doesn't mean anything when you've got such an explosive wit. But maybe blowing the door would be a bit busy, too busy for a night like this? There's an underground maintenance tunnel underneath the hedge maze that connects to the main building, and what's more, the storage shed – you could make an even more bomb-bastic entrance, that way…"
… It did two things.
One, each player got hyped about how they wanted to handle their 'segment', focusing solely on their plans for that. Two, it was up to them how they'd link their bits together, meaning they had a vested interest in doing that instead of just 'showing off.' Finally, since every option would take them where they needed to go regardless of how they go there, it didn't matter how needlessly complex their plans were – though they weren't too bad, in my examples.
Finally, in case one the info-broker was killed, and the in the second kidnapped for helping the PCs after their successful (I would've let them fail, too, of course!) heists, giving them something to focus on right after what was supposed to be a triumph for them.
I still don't like heists, I'm boring and not a big fan of them. But my little schema helps me help my players have fun, so!
Sounds like a lot of work coming up with multiple plans for the PCs to choose from a la carte. But by the same token, I can see how that kind of prompting would speed the process. So in short, I think this is a great technique, but I have theories about why you might not have much fun running such a thing.


text:
Nancy Ruth Morin (1948) es una botánica estadounidense; es profesora de botánica, y curadora de plantas vasculares. Ha realizado numerosas expediciones botánicas por el territorio estadounidense. Desarrolla actividades académicas en el Departamento de Botánica, de la Universidad de California en Berkeley.

Fue Directora Asistente en el Missouri Botanical Garden, y Directora Ejecutiva en el Arboretum de Flagstaff y del American Association of Botanical Gardens y Arboreta (hoy American Public Gardens Association).

Algunas publicaciones
 janice Busco, nancy ruth Morin. 2010. Native Plants for High-Elevation Western Gardens. 2ª edición, anotada de Fulcrum Publ. 368 pp. ISBN 1-55591-740-2
 nancy ruth Morin. 1989. Floristics for the 21st Century: Proceedings of the Workshop. Vol. 28 de Monographs in systematic botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden. Editor Missouri Botanical Garden, 163 pp.
 ---------------------------. 1984. Biogeographical Relationships Between Temperate Eastern Asia and Temperate Eastern North America. 329 pp.
 ---------------------------. 1980. Systematics of Githopsis (Campanulaceae). Editor Univ. of California, Berkeley, 356 pp.

Honores

Membresías
 Board of the Flora of North America Association (publicando los 30 vols. de la flora de EE.UU. y Canadá)
 State Board of the California Native Plant Society

Referencias

Botánicos de Estados Unidos
Curadores de Estados Unidos
Profesores de la Universidad de California en Berkeley

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
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Home » 2016 » July
HTDC Celebrates 5th Anniversary of Wetware Wednesday
Posted on Jul 29, 2016 in News
High Technology Development Corp. — HTDC monthly WetWare Wednesday hits a milestone in August as it celebrates five years of bringing together software designers, entrepreneurs, students, and educators to share ideas and spark new business opportunities.
Hawaii Foreign-Trade Zone No. 9 Donates New Items to The Institute for Human Services
The state Foreign-Trade Zone No. 9 (FTZ9), a division within the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT) donated a large truckload (31 boxes) full of new and unused items to The Institute for Human Services (IHS) today.
Direct Spending by International Students Reached $302 Million
DBEDT released a report today, which analyzes the impact of international students on Hawaii's economy. "The Economic Impact of International Students in Hawaii – 2016 Update" shows direct spending by foreign students in Hawaii was $301.9 million for the 2015/16 school year.
DBEDT's Creative Industries and Creative Lab Hawaii to Speak at Creative World Summit
DBEDT announced today that Georja Skinner, DBEDT's Creative Industries Division (CID) chief officer, will be speaking at a summit in Washington D.C., hosted by Creative World, an annual gathering of leaders in the creative industries from around the world to collaborate on global initiatives.
HTDC Awards More Than $3 Million in Grants to Hawaii Companies
High Technology Development Corp. — HTDC recently awarded $3,273,533 in funding from two grant programs to 13 Hawaii companies to help support development of new products to solve critical issues.